The much-awaited Opera 9.5 was released on Thursday. There are several improvements that I’ve been waiting for, especially the optimized mail and RSS feed engine. Opera no longer freezes for a while when you have a lot of feeds subscribed - according to the devs this is due to better spreading of the load among CPU cores. It was pretty much the only beef I had with Opera. Took me about 15 minutes to convert my 70,000 email messages into the new format though.

9.5 also sees the addition of a live search which kicks in when you type a term into the address bar. It doesn’t only search through past URLs and page headers, it goes through the content of the pages in your history as well - in real-time!

There were other minor changes I found useful - after downloading a file, you can now open its destination folder directly in the Transfer menu. The image toggle, which lets you choose between showing all images, showing only cached images, or disable images, is now enabled by default in the status bar. There’s also a funky feature called “Create follower tab”, which creates an empty tab in the background. Any links you click on your current tab will then be opened in the follower tab, instead of the current page. The “Next/Previous” buttons, which automatically tries to detect if there are any next/previous links on the page, also have a higher success rate now.

The full list of changes is available in the changelog. There are other features that are great but I don’t use much (or rather, that I have never found an issue ): security updates, speed improvements (Opera was already fast anyway), fraud protection, etc.

It’s not all good though (this is to prove I’m not a blind fanboy). As many people over at the dev blog are saying, the release seems a bit rushed (probably to beat FF3 to the finish). As a result, Opera doesn’t seem as stable as before. It tends to crash if you leave it running for a few hours. The new default skin is pretty ugly as well, but that’s easily fixed by getting the classic skin here.

The dev blog does mention that the number of Opera users has doubled since the v9 series launched, which is good but still amounts to less than 1% of the market share :(. Opera users, evangelize more!

Three more days till the June 17 launch of Firefox 3, I’ll update then with any benchmarks I find.

Popularity: 43% [?]

For some reason, whenever Malaysia makes international headlines, it’s hardly for flattering reasons - last I checked, the first post on Google News under “Malaysia” is Beyonce cancelling her concert here because she’s too sexy for us.

In contrast, New Zealand recently turned heads for using wikis to gain feedback on the drafting of their new Police Act.

NZ Police Superintendent Hamish McCardle, the officer in charge of developing the new act, said the initiative had already been described as a “new frontier of democracy”.

“People are calling it ‘extreme democracy’ and perhaps it is,” he said.

“It’s a novel move but when it comes to the principles that go into policing, the person on the street has a good idea … as they are a customer,” he said.

…

“The wonderful thing about a wiki is we can open it up to people all around the world - other academics and constitutional commentators interested in legislation - and make the talent pool much wider,” he said.

This is exactly what a modern democracy should be like. The reference to the people as “customers” is just gold.

How about you? Can you think of any ways you would like to change our laws ? :)

Popularity: 36% [?]

Odex, the main distributor of anime in Singapore, has forced Starhub (a Singapore ISP) to give up names of people involved sharing anime titles which are licensed by them - even a 9-year-old was not exempt (a copy of the letter here). DarkMirage has some solid criticism of the issue.

Even blog posts regarding the issue are being frowned upon.

Someone pointed out on Lowyat though that since Malaysia doesn’t have official anime distributors, we’re unlikely to suffer the same fate - at least for now.

Popularity: 32% [?]

You may know I hate spam. The practice of selling emails is very common, and while definitely unethical, the number of verdicts actually being passed are few and far between - what more in Malaysia!

Which is why this auction from Lelong.com is disgusting:

Here are few smart reasons to purchase the Email Marketing CD from us today:

1. Our database is of over 50,000 Malaysian emails and growing daily!!!
2. You can run your own email marketing campaign - as frequent as you can - change your email content for different products / services - just relax, the software will send email automatically when setting is done - manual included in this CD
3. Our email list - 50, 000 active email list, user check their email daily - Malaysian email (email from all over Malaysia) - targetted group: Managing Director, General Manager, CEO, Executive…
4. Our bulk mail sender software - delivers emails at 50 times faster than the conventional SMTP server - filters out duplicate & invalid email - generates a report of successful delivery & undelivered mail - supports HTML format email
5. Pricing - RM399 per CD - you are allowed to resell to gain back your RM399 - we will never know if 2 or 3 or even 10 person sharing to buy this RM399 CD for 10 person use
6. SPECIAL BONUS: Additional 10, 000 email is giving away for FREE!!! for the order made within 7 days from today!

Popularity: 33% [?]

Ok, ok I’m a little late to the party. But for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, think Friendster except instead of sharing friends you share inane bookmarks.

Useful for me because I’ve been piling up a lot of bookmarks and need a place to organize them. Trying to decide between Del.icio.us and BlinkList atm.

Del.icio.us has a (much) larger userbase, useful for finding sites related to your interests. It was also acquired by Yahoo! recently so there’s no chance of it going under, and you can expect updates and features to come regularly.

I like BlinkList’s interface though - more personal. When you add a page to BlinkList, you don’t have to open a new window, and you can view the tags you already have. That’s a nice implementation of AJAX. It also lets you rate and “star” bookmarks so they stand out. If you’re looking for the Boleh spirit, MindValley, the company behind it, is partly based in Malaysia; could also be a reason why BlinkList feels faster for me. Drawback is the smaller userbase.

[Edit] If you want the stats, Del.icio.us has 1,000,000 US visitors and BlinkList about 200,000.

What’s impressive about both is they support Opera well. Kudos! What’s bad is that both don’t let you mass edit bookmarks to say, delete them or make them private. There are several other options that I didn’t try: Furl (ugly GUI), Magnolia (GUI too good, maybe if I had a better connection..), BlueDot (too MySpace-y), etc.

[Update] You can read a more detailed review here.

Surprisingly, Google Bookmarks is pretty lame.

[Update]I’ve settled on BlinkList. You can view my BlinkList here. I’ve also added it to the bottom of my sidebar.

On the subject of socializing, wth is wrong with the BN “bocor” clowns? You don’t need a PR agent to realize a simple, unconditional “sorry” is what’s needed here. Meanwhile, DAP and PKR are happily milking the issue for all it’s worth.

Popularity: 40% [?]

I read a blog today about Sitemeter installing “extra” stuff on the clients that load pages with the Sitemeter code.

Digging a little on the Net found more information: Apparently Statcounter, a competing website counter provider, was approached by an advertiser and offered $ to install data miners in all member sites. From their original post:

A few months back, StatCounter was approached by an advertiser, offered lots of $$$, and asked to include a spyware cookie on all of our member sites…we refused on the spot.

You install StatCounter to track visitors to your site NOT to open yourself and your visitors up to being spied upon by phantom advertising corporations.

It appears, however, that other players in the world of webstats were happy to take up this offer…

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

Although Statcounter didn’t name the “other well known stats provider”, it didn’t take long for people to realize that it was Sitemeter, which led to people migrating away in droves. You can read an explanation from Sitemeter here (in the comments section).

To make things more clear for those who aren’t tech-savvy, most stat counters work by putting a cookie in the browsers of everyone who visits your page. This is so that the stat counters can identify unique users. What Sitemeter does is to place nine additional cookies from advertisers in your visitors’ browsers, not to track their visits to your page, but to track their browsing habits, which is valuable to advertising companies.

Sure, you can opt-out from this data mining (which is ironically done by placing another cookie) if you visit a page that they’re not going to tell you about unless you ask, but the point is that in cyberspace, many people value their privacy. In their eyes, Sitemeter has sold them out.

Popularity: 20% [?]

I’ve been receiving a few of these in the mail:

My finely-tuned skeptic-sense started ringing as I noticed that when hovering over “Yes” or “No”, the linked address didn’t change - in short, I would be directed to the same address as long as I clicked on it.

Some digging later, my suspicions were confirmed. A closer look at their privacy policy reveals:

“If a registered user refers a friend who goes on to sign up on our site, then the registered user earns points. For more information about the point system, see http://www.tagged.com/huh.html. From time to time, Tagged may share the email address and/or other personally identifiable information of any registered user with third parties for marketing purposes. You may opt-out from receiving marketing messages from our partners at any time by using the following link: http://g.trackbot.com/dne?l=705f227&e. In addition, Tagged may share a registered user’s email address with third parties to target advertising and to improve user experience on Tagged’s pages in general.“

Improve my “experience”? No thanks.

While we’re talking about spam, I’d like to dispense some advice:

• Whenever a site asks you for your address, think twice before giving it. Those sites that ask you to take an IQ test and then “send it to your friends”, or tag this and that, or take a quiz - they want those addresses for a reason; that’s how they make money and this is a major source of spam.
• Never even open an email you think is spam. A common technique spammers use is to embed a 1×1 pixel transparent GIF image in an email, associating every image name to the email addresses that they spam. When you view the email, the image is “hit” - that is, loaded from their servers - and therefore confirming that your email address is active and a valid spam target.
• Never forward chain mail (not the armour) and “motivational” emails. Every time you forward an email saying “for every signature on this email Microsoft will save one soul”, you’re screwing over your friends if the email gets into the hands of a spammer.
• Same concept applies to real life. If you insist on dropping your business card in a basket every time you eat somewhere in hopes of winning a “lucky draw”, don’t be surprised if you get boatloads of SMS/email spam and calls from telemarketers
• Some countries require emailers to include an “opt-out” link, which unsubscribes them from their lists (which you sometimes didn’t manually subscribe to in the first place). Be wary. The more unscrupulous sites actually use this as a way of verifying that your email address is active!

Consider this post a public service :)

[Edit]
On a vaguely related note, a woman accused of murdering her husband had her Google and MSN search records used as evidence in her trial. Apparently she searched for “How to commit murder”.

If you don’t already know, if you are logged into Google while making a search (e.g. through GMail, or personalized Google News), all your searches are logged. You can view them through your account.

Popularity: 12% [?]

For Bittorrent users, if you’ve noticed your Streamyx slowing down lately, especially during office hours (and you haven’t been to Lowyat to rant about it), it’s not because another international line is down, it’s because TMNet is experimenting with traffic shaping. What this means is TMNet detects Bittorrent packets being sent and limits the bandwidth available to them. I’ve heard this also makes you unable to connect to trackers.

I’ll use another post to blast TM for their idiotic reasoning: “because a lot of bandwidth is used by P2P (peer to peer), the solution is NOT to improve infrastructure or stop overselling our lines, but to stop P2P instead”. There was a hilarious post at Lowyat.net about how silly TMNet’s numbers are though if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, some enterprising Malaysians have set up a local BT tracker at http://mytorrent.hopto.org. Because TMNet only shapes international traffic, you’ll be able to connect to local torrents without a problem - in fact, because all your peers will be local, your download speeds will pretty much max out.

You need to register and keep an acceptable DL/UL ratio though, no leeching.

[Update - May 2007]
This will no longer work as well because TMNet apparently throttles even local torrents. Welcome to the world of limited unlimited bandwidth; feel free to use your “broadband” to email and surf.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Spain is NOT the place to be right now if you’re the typical Internet user.

A drastic move, really, since as pointed out here, you could simply block P2P traffic.

Levying duty on storage media is an alternative often brought up to compensate the music and movie industries. I’m personally against it. The really big losers from piracy right now are the smaller artistes or gaming companies. There’s simply no way to track who’s burning what, making it impossible to reimburse the copyright owner.

Popularity: 23% [?]

I just happened to er, stumble across the Pirate Bay today and they've merged their pirate ship with a Phoenix:

For all the internet-newbies out there, TPB is one of the biggest BitTorrent sites, well-known for thumbing their noses at legal threats made against them. They took advantage of the fact that they were based in Sweden, where US copyright laws don't apply.

The US movie moguls put pressure on the Swedish government however, and TPB's offices got raided recently. Rather than go the way of Napster however, they simply moved to the Netherlands and continued their operations. From their blog:

The big plan is to spread the site on different locations all over the world, so it will be faster and harder to take down. People and companies from various countries have already offered servers, bandwidth and money. 

You can read more about what happened here. The development of intellectual copyright is and interesting debate but I don't have the time to expound on it right now.

Popularity: 22% [?]