That cheat sheet is inspired by regex cheat sheet by ILoveJackDaniels.com that I used to use. Now that great site is known as and has a good collection of free Cheat Sheets, printable quick references for a variety of languages and web technologies.

Universal identification is portrayed by some as the holy grail of Internet security and that anonymity is bad. According to the blog this is not the case. The problem is that universal identification won’t work. Any design of the Internet must allow for anonymity. Universal identification is impossible. Even attribution is impossible. Attempting to build such a system is futile, and will only give criminals and hackers new ways to hide.

Imagine a magic world in which every Internet packet could be traced to its origin. Even in this world, our Internet security problems wouldn’t be solved. Mandating universal identity and attribution is the wrong goal. Accept that there will always be anonymous speech on the Internet. Accept that you’ll never truly know where a packet came from. Work on the problems you can solve:  software.

The whole attribution problem is very similar to the copy-protection/digital-rights-management problem. It’s impossible to make specific bits not copyable, it’s impossible to know where specific bits came from. Bits are bits. They don’t naturally come with restrictions on their use attached to them, and they don’t naturally come with author information attached to them. Any attempts to circumvent this limitation will fail. Business model developers and law enforcement and others need to learn understand this.

Information sharing should still be at the heart of any web site. But why some sites are making it so hard to get even the basic information? It happens too often that on some sites you just can’t get the information unless you have some specific right combination of web browser and all kinds of plug-ins. If the system I need to use at the moment to get the information does not have all of them, there are good chances are I am going to be looking for my information some where else and never come back to that “stupid” site again.

Are web sites today so complicated because they have to be or because they can be? For example, why do I need Flash, Silverlight, or Shockwave, to find where your restaurant is located? Why do I have to download megabytes of wrapper to read a couple of kilobytes of information? Where is the sense in many today’s web designs?

There are certainly place for those multimedia tools, but they should be used in sensible way. For example video sites like YouTube need to use a plugin to play video files (some sites are already experimenting with plug-in free video playback with HTML5 technology). Plug-ins are OK when you need to do things that you can’t do with HTML, but using those plug-ins for doing things that could be done better with just plain old HTML is just plain stupid web design.

Going back to that restaurant site example, if the main page that tells the location of the restaurant is just normal web page written with HTML, it could be read easily with home PC, web kiosk and a multimedia cellular phone. No problem there. If the same information happens to be hidden inside some huge Flash presentation, it is out of reach of the web kiosks, smart-phone browsers and web search engines. Is this good for the business that ordered the web site to promote their business? I think not very good. The Flash only site could be appeal to some people, but leaves out many potential customers not getting even the basic contact information they are looking for. It has happened to me that when I could not access the stupid multimedia web site of one restaurant to get their location information (I was already planned to go there because I had heard it was good), I selected another restaurant I could find.

So when doing a business advertising web site is is essential to think how to present the basic information of the company. A plain old HTML page (does not need to look boring or old fashioned, CSS can do design wonders) where you get basic information and other information you might need. This kind of web page can be viewed with a wide variation of web browsing devices, so all users can get the basic information they are looking for. In addition to that there can all kinds of multimedia presentation pages trying to show how awesome he company is for those who are interested in those (usually they are just waste of time and bandwidth on many sites). The basic information of the company on the web site should be easily accessible or otherwise you will loose business.

As the percentage of web users on non-Flash-capable platforms grows (many mobile platforms), developers who currently create Flash experiences with no fallbacks will have to rethink their strategy and start with the basics before adding a Flash layer. They will need to ensure that content and experience are delivered with or without Flash. Developers always should have done this, but some don’t. The growing percentage of users on non-Flash-capable platforms will be a wake-up call to get the basics right first. Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out. Most users simply don’t want or can’t install plug-ins to their favorite computer platform. And with HTML5 standard here, the tea leaves are easy to read.

This posting was inspired by web articles Wither the web (site) and Flash, iPad, Standards.

Microsoft says that the IE browsers’ increased security setting (security zone to “high”) would prevent any serious risk, but German authorities say that even this would not make IE fully safe. This is a vulnerability that was announced in the last couple of days. Microsoft said that all versions of Internet Explorer were affected and there is no patch yet and Microsoft has not given any details of how soon a fix will be released. The risk is lower with more recent releases of its browser, but it is still there. Google IE flaw issue was clearly a PR disaster for Microsoft. Microsoft is hoping that the knee-jerk reaction of France and Germany is not mirrored elsewhere.

So if you are still using IE 6, then it is finally time time to get rid of that very old insecure browser. Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice. If you use IE7 or IE8, you should consider to start using a safer web browser because independent research says that IE 7 and 8 can also be exploited.

When you do the change I would recommend to change to Firefox, Opera or Google Chrome. While every browser has its security issues, the alternatives I have given do not have this vulnerability and should be considerable safer alternatives to IE in many other ways as well.

I still find all the web-based forums to be too primitive. Too often the problems are both user interface and the content (too many forums and too few really good and active). No web-based forum holds a candle to real Usenet. If you only know Usenet through a web-based interface like Google Groups, then you don’t really know Usenet. All web-based forums are dramatically inferior to Usenet.

Likely many of us also use web-based forums for certain specialty topics, particularly forums that are chartered for the discussion of certain hardware and or software, etc. But the Usenet newsgroups continue to be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than any web-based forum I have seen in 20 years.

Web-based forums are generally HORRID. I avoid them unless absolutely necessary. If you have never used a real Usenet newsreader client and a proper Usenet NNTP server, then you are in no position to judge what is happening to this or any other Usenet newsgroup.