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CAPTCHA is not working against all robots anymore but...

No Junk Mail written on the mailbox window of this door.

Also many reCAPTCHAs are being bypassed, it still work against many robots, although newer robots use Artificial Intelligence and they are quickly able to bypass most of the reCAPTCHAs.

At some point, the main reason for the bypass was the fact that some people were getting paid to resolve those reCAPTCHAs. In other words, some people were offered the job to do just that! They go to a computer, resolve many reCAPTCHAs and get paid something like 2 cents per successful resolutions. The result is that websites with reCAPTCHAs still receive a lot of spam!

In 2017, it looks like such ...

US Zip Code overlay on Google Maps

Today I had a need to find out a set of zip codes that would match a delivery area for one of my customers. I was wondering how could I find out all the zip codes over a given area...

Searching a little bit I found a website named zipmap which actually does just that. The entire US is covered and you can navigate it just like you navigate a regular Google Map view. Very practical!

You can easily move around, zoom in and out, and you even see the map with street names in the background.

Bad Google Indexing "Secure" Pages...

About a week ago I got a customer who started having their website appear in Google with HTTPS (the secure version of the site.) The pages are served securily, but it uses our website certificate so you get a big bad error saying that everything is broken and if you proceed you'll know what hell is like.

"This Connection is Untrusted" by FireFoxThe fact is that this customer never had a secure certificate. In other words, there is no reason for the site to have been referenced with HTTPS unless someone typed a link to their site and inadvertendly entered https://... instead of http://...

I checked a few of the pages where there ...

Google Panda Change Beneficial to Press Releases

Today, BusinessWire disclosed the fact that they and their customers were benefiting from the changes made by Google to improve the giant search engine results.

The news is not that surprising since the Panda change was to eliminate most of the so called farmer websites. Websites that would copy news, most often as is, and not themselves create any additional value (Except to the owner by having advertising and other products and services for sale on their otherwise fairly useless website.)

Of course, many people are not happy as this change affected 11.8% of the US websites. Yet, users will ...

XML Sitemap Setup

The XML Sitemap module allows you to submit your websites to several search engines:

  • Google
  • Bing (this includes Yahoo! which was bought by Microsoft)

You simply have to turn on the feature and the submissions will automatically happen. To do so, go to admin/settings/xmlsitemap/engines, open each search engine fieldset and select the checkbox, you are done.

Now you probably will notice other fields for the different search engines. Those are used to authenticate your site. It does not make any difference to the submission process. However, it can greatly help you when it ...

Your cell phone is hackable...

This is a quite interesting article which I thought I should share and keep a copy of!

Most of us, even if we can determine whether a piece of software (or hardware!) can be hacked, we just do not have the time to spend on testing each device we use to ensure that no hackers will be able to get it. We rely on the manufacturer to do that work for us.

This article shows that even though all manufacturers have protections, all are vulnerable! And that means your data is vulnerable on your cell phones... Hope this does not scare you too much!

Note by the way that those people who have plenty of ...

A new concept: Throwaway Software.

More and more, people are learning new software as they go. A few will stick to one software for a long time simply because it is easier, but changing is easy too, especially if the new system is easy to use.

But how do you produce throwaway software? And is it worth the trouble?

As we see things evolving, more and more, people want to use software anywhere they go. This means software that runs on the Internet in some ways. For instance, you can use Google Map anywhere you go, as long as you have a computer to access the Internet.

Amazon Checkout and Simple Pay

This week, Amazon published a brand new set of tools for merchants. We already had PayPal and Google Checkout, now we have the same with Amazon.

AJAX, CSS, HTML, XML, SOAP, LAMP… and now Web 2.0?

Dear reader,

Yes. With all these terms, it is quite easy to get lost.

As a developer, my skills are quite extensive. I started with Logo, learned assembly language, BASIC, C, C++… and all these other languages in between, those that most people pass by such as Ada, Eiffel, Icon… And the languages you kind of have to learn because you’re in it: Bourne Shell, configuration files for 100 different software, Makefile, etc.

And once you know all of these languages, you think you’re done. Well… Not quite!

The web has got it’s own set of languages! It