Webdesign

Channel 4, a UK television channel, has a new series called IT Crowd. As they are very modern and as the series is about an IT company, they may have thought:
»We've heard of this bleeding-edge thing called internet. Maybe we should do something about that.«

And here is what they did: They provided an obscure mix of javascript and flash to play an embedded wmv-file (which doesn't work in my konqueror, although I have the appropriate plugins installed). Julian wrote about it and was able to extract the download URL. WMV9, so no chance without win32codecs atm.

More and more tv stations provide some stuff online and this is really fine. It could be more, it could be better quality, there should be more free licensed stuff etc., but still, it's a step in the right direction. But hey, providing proprietary file formats embedded in proprietary is not how the web should look like in 2006. RSS-Feeds are made for stuff like that. Why can't they just use them? We have a bunch of formats that can at least be played on nearly every platform (and, not to forget that I'd always prefer an mpeg/patent-free format like ogg theora).

Sidenote: Recently I wrote to the german tv magazine Monitor, that provides it's files as real-streams, why they couldn't provide RSS with other formats. Their answer was that it's due to copyright reasons so people cannot download the files ...

... with their Internet Explorer. If you come over an rtsp/mms/whatever-stream and want to download it, mplayer is your friend. mplayer -dumpstream [url] fetched every stream I ever wanted to download.

As reported on several news-pages, Firefox is going to implement a »ping« that implements a new »feature« to the link-tag to send a ping out to some URL defined. This has a very bad taste to me.
What I always liked in the free software world was that not every app is sending »something« to »someone« in the net, as it's quite common in Windows apps. I remember on the last days I were using Windows (98) on a regular basis, I had some of those »personal firewalls« installed. Apps that had absolutely nothing to do with the net wanted to connect to their home-server, apps where I've selected »no internet connection« still tried to do »something« online (the last one for example was winamp).

Now, I know that the design of the world wide web is really privacy-unfriendly. Yes, you can filter out a lot of things with stuff like privoxy, but in the end, you have the only possibility to disable everything (javascript, image loading from foreign servers, cookies) and lose the possibility to use a bunch of web-services. The browser can't do much about this, as this is how the web is designed.
But still, I think this firefox »feature« is a big mistake. Especially free software applications should be much more precautious about their users privacy. I can't see a big use of it for the user. But I can think of a bunch of possibilities to misuse it.

We are always crying about the »evil ones«, the spyware-producers out there, just remember the recent buzz about the iTunes-spyware-functionality. That's perfectly right. But in the end, we need to do better in free software to provide an alternative. I hope that the firefox developers re-think about this and remove or at least disable-by-default these website-pings before their next release.