Rays of Light

Slime that Walks on Two Legs
I happen to be the Webmaster for my church, Wesley United Methodist in Naperville, Illinois (but being Methodists and opposed to dominant-type titles I am the "Webspinner" instead). We maintain a large directory of other Wesley Methodist churches in case someone ends up on our site when they were looking for another Wesley. We were recently contacted by another Wesley United Methodist Church to unlink their link in our Wesley directory because the address they previously had their Web pages at had been taken over by pornographers. This usually happens in one of two ways: 1) someone let the domain expire and it was registered by the porn folks since it already had steady traffic or 2) someone forgot to pay their bill to the Web hosting company and rather than just shutting down the site they redirected it to a porn site. The porn site in question is blue.sexer.com; it is a particularly vile site as they require you to load their certificate and have continuous pop-up dialog boxes prompting you to do so. The dialog boxes will not stop and will not allow you to shut down your browser. The third in the sequence of these pop-ups actually says:

I can't say I've seen too many threats like this--and of course it's a lie! Most people don't know how to use Task Manager to shut down their browser and just end up shutting down their computer, often through use of the reset button (not recommended). In any case, both the folks at blue.sexer.com and whoever is responsible for redirecting this church's Web site to this porn site are just slime that is imitating human life. I'm certainly not big into the "God will get you for this" school of theology, but I still hope there is a special place in hell reserved for these folks, along with the child abusers and suicide bombers.
Late Addendum: As soon as I notified the General Board of Global Ministry's Web hosting folks they removed the offending link; why it never occurred to the church that was the one affected to request this is a little beyond me. They even emailed me and said they didn't ask to have anything unlinked, which confuses me further...did they really want a link to go from the name of their church to a porn site from the denomination's central listing of churches? I guess there are still folks out there with a lot to learn about how this Web stuff works...(sigh).

Two Cool Tools..for free!
I read a lot of newsletters and online sources, and I just can't remember where I heard about these two "cool tools". I feel bad about that because I always like to give credit where credit is due. Anyway, here are my latest finds of things you should know about and why I like them...

Free Privacy and Security tests at AuditMyPC.com

AuditMyPC.com is a free online tool courtesy of Jim Maurer that will allow you to "audit your firewall with a free online Firewall Test, Port Scan and Privacy Test that provides immediate results designed to promote security awareness and help secure your firewall. Port Scan all 65,535 tcp ports or choose your port scan range!". It also has a Privacy Section that will check for popular spyware and browser vulnerabilities. You can see a sample of some output at right. This is a tool everyone should run, especially if you have a broadband connection. I ran this on my network at home (I have a cable modem) and found that my firewall was blocking everything. This gave me a nice warm feeling, even though I already knew that it was working correctly. http://www.auditmypc.com/

Google Alert is a free tool that uses the new Google Web Services API and "runs daily Google searches for you and emails you whenever new results appear. You can use Google Alert to automatically keep track of anything on the web." Gideon Greenspan, a PhD student at Israel's Technion, created Google Alert which is not affiliated in any way with Google, "but we like them a lot." Gideon wanted to create a genuine "Web Service" to demonstrate that the concept of Web Services is not just industry hype. "Google has always been a technology leader. By opening up their APIs, they have nurtured the growth of innovative web services that address the web's emerging needs," said Greenspan. "Google Alert is an essential application that realizes the potential of that technology for all the users of the Web." I have it doing searches for my name (whot an eeego that guy has, sheesh!), for "naval academy", and for "information technology". Now that I've tried it (and liked it!) I'll probably add more items as I think of them. http://www.googlealert.com/

The Eater of Meaning
OK, this one is is really a riot. I picked this one up from Brian Livingston's Newsletter, Brian's Buzz on Windows. Created by a 23-year-old UCLA grad, Leonard Richardson, The Eater of Meaning takes your Web site and mangles in in some very linguistically interesting ways; there are multiple modes of operation but best one is the "eat word endings" mode. Here's this site in "eat word endings" mode: "Raymond of Lightface" (the title of your version will vary). Try it on your site...
(BTW, Leonard's Crummy:The Site is a pretty funny blog, well worth a look!)
(BTW again: my wife is also a UCLA grad and I turned down an NROTC scholarship there; my daughter hopes to play softball there...)