Google To Phase Out IE6 Support

As received by email: (emphasis is mine)

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

A subtle sucker-punch to Microsoft for not supporting their own products, while still supporting Firefox 3.0. I thought FF 3.0 would be phased out too!

As for Chrome, as far as I know the stable version is 3.x while 4.x is beta, but I could be wrong.

CakePHP: Initial Problems

I just started with CakePHP, a PHP framework, and have been having some problems going through the "15 minutes" blog tutorial. It took me about 2 days to dig my way out through openSUSE, Apache, Linux and CakePHP itself.

First issue I had was enabling mod_rewrite on openSUSE. To do that, edit the file: "/etc/sysconfig/apache2" (Assuming Apache2.2)

• Go to the line that starts with "APACHE_MODULES" and add "rewrite" at the end just before the closing quote.
• Save the file then run "sudo SuSEconfig" to update Apache's configuration files.

I'm not using virtual hosts. I have downloaded the latest stable CakePHP and extracted it in my "/srv/www/htdocs" directory and named it "blog"

mj@linux-mlvm:~$ ls -l /srv/www/htdocs
drwxr-xr-x  5 mj   users 4096 2010-01-23 02:28 blog

So I access the blog through: http://localhost/blog/

After configuring the database and the connection settings for CakePHP as instructed in the tutorial, I had to set permissions for the tmp directory: "/srv/www/htdocs/blog/app/tmp"

sudo chown wwwrun /srv/www/htdocs/blog/app/tmp

This will set ownership of the directory to the user running Apache. In my case, it's wwwrun. On a shared web host, it's often nobody. You can find out which username Apache uses by making a small PHP script:

<?php echo `whoami`; ?>

Visit the script in a web browser and voila!

Second issue: when reaching the step to create the posts view, I created the directory:

mkdir app/views/posts

But I got an error message in the browser when visiting the link: http://localhost/blog/posts:

Missing View
Error: The view for PostsController::index() was not found.
Error: Confirm you have created the file: /srv/www/htdocs/blog/app/views/posts/index.ctp
Notice: If you want to customize this error message, create app/views/errors/missing_view.ctp

After verifying that everything is properly spelled and whatnot, turns out it was a dumb mistake of not checking directory permissions:

mj@linux-mlvm:/srv/www/htdocs/blog/app$ ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 12 mj     users 4096 2010-01-23 02:03 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 mj     users 4096 2010-01-23 02:28 ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 mj     users 4096 2010-01-12 05:58 config
drwxr-xr-x  3 mj     users 4096 2010-01-21 22:32 controllers
-rw-------  1 mj     users   67 2010-01-23 02:03 .directory
-rw-r--r--  1 mj     users  169 2010-01-23 02:08 .htaccess
-rw-r--r--  1 mj     users  859 2010-01-12 01:47 index.php
drwxr-xr-x  3 mj     users 4096 2010-01-12 01:47 locale
drwxr-xr-x  4 mj     users 4096 2010-01-19 06:54 models
drwxr-xr-x  2 mj     users 4096 2010-01-12 01:47 plugins
drwxr-xr-x  5 mj     users 4096 2010-01-12 01:47 tests
drwxr-xr-x  6 wwwrun www   4096 2010-01-12 01:47 tmp
drwxr-xr-x  3 mj     users 4096 2010-01-12 01:47 vendors
drwxr--r--  8 mj     users 4096 2010-01-19 07:00 views
drwxr-xr-x  5 mj     users 4096 2010-01-19 07:36 webroot

Never mind the fact that I'm using my own username for the directories. It's just for quick editing.
Focus on the bold line which has "views" -- since I didn't assign the user wwwrun for that directory, the permissions prevented Apache from accessing the directory resulting in the above Missing error message.

You can either change directory ownership as done for tmp, or change permissions:

chmod 755 views

Note: If a directory is not executable, you can't change to it.

Google's Response to Chinese Attacks

Google has finally spoken officially on the attacks on its infrastructure and the theft of intellectual property in China.

It's not clear in their response what was stolen from Google itself, but it did state that some email accounts of Human Rights activists were accessed.

For now, as a response, Google has started providing uncensored search results, which the Chinese government had mandated at the time of business negotiations in 2006.

It's yet not clear whether Google will withdraw from China, but it's a possibility.

The link above contains links to detailed reports on the attacks and responses.

Blatant Movie Piracy in Kuwait

 This is the 2nd website that I see selling pirated movies including home delivery, without being obstructed by the police.

So why is it that shops and door-to-door sellers are shut down, but not the websites?

The image above shows the site, the movies he's selling, their prices, his name, bank account and bank name. It doesn't get more obvious!

Facebook Desperate For Love

After so many Facebook privacy breaches by Facebook itself, and the recent statement of its founder on how privacy is not important and everything should be publicly available, seems like Facebook is trying hard to get some back respect and love...

If privacy isn't that important, then why is its founder's profile private? The same person calling for public exposure of info... hmmm???

Note: Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) has 2 profiles: A public one (for stunts) and a private one (which got breached when they broke their own privacy rules!).

Try harder you snob.

Adding IPs to a Gateway

I've been using a VPN and I want only certain websites to go through the VPN, while the rest through my current connection.

On Linux, after connecting to the VPN, I can make it execute a shell script of my choice, by default named: ip-up.local -- below is my script:

#!/bin/bash
# add domain names to theHosts array -- don't edit anything else
# the script will have each site's IP pass through the gateway of the
# connection being established

theHosts=( pandora.com last.fm hulu.com youtube.com netflix.com )

ips=$(for host in ${theHosts[@]}; do host -4tA $host; done | awk '{print $4}')
for ip in $ips; do /sbin/route add -host $ip gw $4 dev $1; done

ip-up.local should be in /etc/ppp/

Make sure you check the option to tell your connection to not replace your existing default route.

Al-Ghanim X-Cite: Reported Attack Site

A friend sent me an email saying that Al-Ghanim's XCite website is being reported as a malicious website, by Firefox and Google.

Go to their website http://www.xcite.com.kw/, click on Search then "Search By Keyword"

Since they run .asp pages, they have a Windows web-server and it seems to be infected. Also, according to Google's report, the website has been reported for malicious activity 5 times in the past 90 days.

If you know anyone who works at Al-Ghanim, make sure you pass this to them so that they clean up their server! (My company sells and deploys Kaspersky for enterprises)




I tried contacting Al-Ghanim via their online web-form but it crashed...