Interesting links:

1. If you don’t know what a Gravatar is, find out at Keys Corner.  I haven’t activated them on this site (yet), but do use them on new sites that I install.
2. Swedish courts are going to decide whether it is an infringement of Copyright to tell other people where files that are in themselves infringements can be downloaded.  Will this have a knock-on effect for people who include YouTube videos on their site, that are also potentially copyrighted and have been uploaded illegally?
3. I new word in the world of IT vocabulary: Clickjacking.  Find out what that is at TheRegister.

Have you ever wondered which top-level domain another planet would have if it were to be collonised?  Or, for that matter, does the International Space Station have one?

Would all domain names get longer, to become eg. www.cymeradwyo.net.earth?

To be honest, that probably not the World’s biggest problem at the moment, but if it was there would be one problem that would have to be solved first.  How do you get the internet protocols to work over large distances?

With large, I mean L A R G E – light years, for example.

At the moment, if you send an e-mail around the globe, say from the UK to Australia, then it is broken up into small chunks called “packets” and routed between various internet nodes to get there.  Not all of the message necessary goes the same way, the packets are put back together in the right order when they arrive.

Of course, this all happens very fast and you probably don’t even notice it.  But with larger distances you might still be waiting for one part to arrive.

This problem has, apparently, now been solved – as the BBC News website reported.  It all sounds very simple, storing the data until the next node can be contacted.  But it does present us with two rather important questions:

- how much data is a node likely to have to store?

- if that is the future, what do internet nodes do at the moment if they cannot relay the data?  Do they just throw it away?

It’s always a shame when a great piece of software is discontinued, and this week whilst installation a new WordPress site I was shocked by a message on the Spam Karma screen – the “major announcement” was that development of the plug-in was being discontinued and the software would pass over to a GPL project.

I first discovered Spam Karma through a post on the Notes from Spain forum around the time I first started using WordPress. It’s a plug-in that really belongs in the software by default, as a popular blog gets spammed on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Spam Karma uses a clever set of rules to decide if a comment or trackback is spam, and I don’t think that any spam has ever got through on the installations that I support. There have have been some false positives – about 1 or 2 per year!

But I can understand the problem – the software is non-profit, so however passionately you develop it the time eventually comes where you decide to call time and move on to other projects.

The author’s blog gives one of the reasons as the current development of WordPress. I think WordPress is a great piece of software as well, but I do agree that the frequency at which the upgrades appear has recently become a little bit overwhelming. There have been times where I seem to be in a cycle of upgrading installations, and before I have finished the next version is released.

Let’s hope that this is not the end of the story for Spam Karma, and that some good programmers take over the project and keep the blogosphere free of spam.