7th Week: Whoops...

So, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs have lost two discs containing records for every UK family claiming child benefit in the post. Sky News emphasises this point: "It means that the personal details of every family in the country with a child under 16 have gone missing."

And this is the Government that wants to create a central database containing personal and biometric data for every single person living in the UK.

The Government that claims such a central database will be "in the interest of national security".

Why were they even sending the records by post? Has nobody told them of "the Internet"?

So apparently the discs were "password-protected"... what on earth that means, nobody knows (certainly not the Government). Thank goodness the BBC know some computer 'experts': "Experts say such data should normally be sent in encrypted form." Oh really?

To close with an Internet nerd-ism: Epic fail.

7th Week: Why Is Firefox Blocked?

There seems to be a bit of a hoo-hah going on with some websites blocking Firefox due to the AdBlock Plus plugin. For the uninitiated, this is a plugin that will automatically prevent adverts from loading and displaying on websites you visit. PC Plus last month ran an article with the headline "Firefox killing web". The rather militant Why Firefox Is Blocked even goes so far as to say that "blanket ad blocking in general is still theft".

Woah, woah, back up there...

Since when has it become a crime to not display part of a web page - a page that is freely given out by a web server? Indeed, some web browsers are incapable of displaying some parts of a web page - try your phone's browser, for example, or the text-based browser Links. Is it, therefore, a crime to use such browsers?

WFIB also makes the claim that "Ad Block Plus... also prevents site owners from blocking people using it". Come again? I think what they mean is "it is non-trivial to identify users with this plugin enabled". To suggest it actively prevents such detection is plain wrong. Mind you, such detection is not exactly very complicated which suggests to me that the (anonymous) authors of WFIB simply don't know what they're talking about.

This point of view is reinforced when they claim that "Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending". Inexplicable capitalisation aside, no source (or even any concrete figures) for these mysterious "demographics" is cited. I'll cite my own here, then: in the last month 44.88% of visitors to www.oiccu.org.uk used Firefox compared to 48.96% using Internet Explorer. I'm not a statistician, but 45% doesn't seem "somewhat small", and certainly not in the context of the market leader having a 49% share. (Usual disclaimers apply: not representative, only one site, but no, they weren't all me - Google Analytics ignores requests from my (static) IP address). As for online spending, I certainly don't trust entering my card details into IE any more. Perhaps these demographics came from the same place as the BBC got their figures for Linux users?

Furthermore, if a web designer does not take reasonable steps to ensure his content is accessible to as many browser technologies as possible, then surely not displaying some of that content is a consequence of their actions, rather than a crime on behalf of the visitor? I would count "reasonable steps" to include making sure that your page is valid HTML; the very simple WFIB homepage fails validation on 15 counts. Perhaps that has something to do with it being knocked up in Microsoft FrontPage 4.0.

And I haven't heard anyone object to the small text adverts that Google adds to search results...