Benjamin John

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that major web sites are supporting Internet Explorer 6 less and less. Google Mail's logo shows up with a gray background (not the usual PNG light blue; also strange — they could have flattened it to white easily enough.) Facebook is now telling people to switch from IE 6 to something else and gives some options.

Upgrade to Internet Explorer 8? Hey, it's better than 6.
Switch to Firefox? Even better.
Switch to Safari? … on a PC? Do people test sites for Safari on a PC?
Switch to Flock? Huh?

It turns out that Flock is a "social web browser," or a web browser with social media features built-in for Facebook and Twitter.

My first reaction — “Really? Do we need another minority browser to test for? Does this offer a substantial amount of people a practical benefit or is it just another nobody trying to take market share away from the big boys?”

At least it's based on Firefox. They claim that there aren't any rendering or interpretation differences.

Still, it seems like making random web browsers is the cool thing to do these days.

Internet Explorers 7 and 8 like to stretch the CSS background-image of a PNG when it's 1 pixel by 1 pixel and supposed to be background-repeat: repeat, and extrapolates it across the container into a gradient with transparent. Looks like a nice bicubic resize, too — something I wish they'd actually add to HTML. I first discovered this in Internet Explorer 8 and figured it was a new mistake but apparently also happens in 7.

What makes this browser bug even more difficult is that it's sporadic — showing up only part of the time.

The fix, for those of you whom come across this, is to make the image larger. You don't need to make the background-image match the size of the container, just larger than 1 pixel. I found 4 pixels by 4 pixels worked.

If you Google "Bing," before submitting your search, Google's Auto-Suggest feature will list various words that start with "bing" including several items for both "Bingo" and "Binghamton University" but not "Bing" itself. Type in "G" and many Google-related items come up.

Bing's will still bring up Google-related items for "G", but not as many. However, you need only type "Bi" to get two suggestions for "Bing".

I guess it's just one of the subtle ways that companies try to gain an edge over each other. And I am not the only person to notice. Still, this proves two significantly useful things:

• They probably both alter the results. Bing is too significant to have nothing, but not significant enough to come up for only typing the first two letters.
• I need a life. I said it, so you don't have to. ;-)

Wow, my first Aspirium weblog post is getting an unusual amount of attention from people Googling the name of the application "I know a secret about my friends."

Based on this alone, and that I'm sure that nowhere near everybody affected is smart enough to realise that something is up, I'd say that this thing is spreading fast.

I've never developed a Facebook application, but I am a programmer, and my guess (which also happens to be common sense) is that it gives Facebook the same instructions that most applications do when you click I Want to Share This (or whatever), only instead of attaching it to a button, it attaches it to the fact that you sign up. (In programming, these are known as "Events". Curious? Probably not? Well, if you are, Google "programming events".)

Therefore, even if you remove it immediately, it may have already sent requests on to your friends. Removing it is still probably a good idea, as it has access to your Facebook profile and information. My point is, if you accepted it, you may want to post notes or status updates warning your friends not to accept these invites from you.

One more note: this is, of course, all conjecture. If somebody has information as to prove that this application is not behaving maliciously, or if somebody has something to say in its defense, I would be more than willing to post links to other opinions.

Oh well. Kinda hard to keep folks honest nowadays.

I had a Facebook application-add request today for an application called "I Know a Secret About My Friends," claiming that a friend of mine knew a secret about me.

Almost entirely certain that she didn't, I added the app because - like many people - curiosity got the better of me.  When the control panel turned out to be useless and laden with fake application-add buttons (Did you know that two of my friends have crushes on me? Or was it four? In any case, I'm fairly certain that they don't.)

I let my friend know that the app had sent the request, likely completely behind her back.  These things propagate through our social curiosities and insecurities.  Of course people want to know if there are secrets about them floating around.

Why do people build these things?  Adding an application allows your information to be accessed by it.  As many sources in the media have been talking about, your information includes correlations that are incredibly valuable to companies trying to sell products.  These correlations help them get into your brain, figure out what you and people like you are likely to buy.

Of course, the motives could be more sinister.  Many people keep their cell phone numbers on Facebook.  The web site YoBusted allows for legal extortion (this has also been in the news) - what happens when programmers inevitably get into illegal extortion?  Those pictures of you drinking a beer in your underware that could hurt your job prospects with a socially conservative potential employer are in your control on Facebook, securely bolted down under your privacy settings, but lawbreaking Facebook application developers could probably harvest them.

Social engineering - often called “hacking the wetware” (as in, hacking via humans) isn't as easy to patch as digital hacking, which often exhibits specific signatures because of technological methodologies.  Rather, it is something that each individual needs to be aware of and on the look out for.

So. I know a secret, and the secret is this: if it looks like it's designed to tug at your curiosity, it very likely is.

Follow-up: A little advice.