I have decided to temporarily deny access to this site to about half the world’s population. Why have I done this? I grew tired of the constant cyber attack attempts by script kiddies sitting in their underwear surrounded by empty pizza boxes and dirty laundry looking to hone their “hacking skills”. This site has performed as a hackers playground for long enough. To paraphrase Peggy Lee: “You can no longer play in my yard“—please go and play somewhere else kiddos.

And no, I am not being “unfairly discriminatory” here: anybody who knows how to read a log file and do a little digging can find out where script kiddie attacks are coming from (I’m not talking about “real” hackers here—the kind that know how to conceal their activity by rerouting their page requests).

So from now on, anyone in China or the Russian Federation trying to directly access this site is now being blocked. Sorry folks, but enough is enough.

I got my IP range for China at www.okean.com and for the Russian Federation at www.countryipblocks.net. The downside is that it increases my .htaccess file to a whopping 150kb—which is a shame as this file is read by Apache with every request to the server.

Along with most of the web dev community I would really like to see IE6 go six feet under sooner rather than later. A fairly high percentage of users (around 16% at the time of this writing) is still using IE6. Why is that?

Meet Moe

One of the reasons could be that on large scale enterprise networks it takes a lot of effort, skill and funds to update the contents of a Managed Operating Environment (MOE). For me, this would be a prime reason to drop IE altogether in favour of a browser that does not tie into the heart of the OS the way Internet Explorer does. I dare say potential security issues would be much easier to deal with if users are not exposing the core of their OS by surfing with a browser that is entirely integrated. It certainly would facilitate updating the browser more frequently.

So, while I understand that MOE updates are difficult to roll out, system administrators (and especially the CEOs who manage the sys admins) should understand that keeping IE6 alive makes web development more cumbersome and therefore, more expensive. I am still working on intranet/extranet/public sites that are designed for IE6. It is a costly process which also holds back web development in general.

Dinosaur

And let’s face it, IE6 is a dinosaur these days: it was initially released on August 27, 2001. Which makes it, at the time of this post, nearly 8 years old. I shall repeat that: nearly 8 years old. To put that into perspective: while early history of the web can be traced back to the 1980s, initial mainstream adoption of the web (outside of university labs) did not take place until around 1993. That is 16 years ago. By that calculation, IE6 is as old as half the age of the WWW. Methinks it is time to drop IE6. What says you sys admins?

IE7 was released on October 18, 2006 (after Microsoft reluctantly continued development of IE after it saw its market share quickly lose ground to Firefox). And we’ve just seen the release of IE8 on March 19, 2009.

Further Reading

• History of the Web (Wikipedia)
• History of IE (Wikipedia)
• IE6 Death March
• Put IE6 out of its misery – A list of Anti IE6 Websites.

While an Antarctic ice bridge is causing concern among scientists here on earth, North Korea furthers its stellar aspirations by fiddling with some dangerous toys.

The nation reported launching a satellite into orbit for the “soul” purpose of broadcasting patriotic songs from space. This, of course, to make North Korea’s rice grow faster and feed an increasingly angry population. All those who believe in the beneficial effect of revolutionary songs on rice growth hailed the launch as a great success and considered it money well spent. Those on the other side of the fence were hardly exhilarated and much less able to conceptualise its merits and expressed their dismay over the selection of songs that made it into orbit: they were looking for something rather more upbeat.

Dang–these be interesting times for sure…