All digest formats support some method for referring to content that isn't delivered within the feed. Linked content falls into two categories: content to which the feed refers, and content intended to be displayed within the feed. When a feed reader loads a digest, it can pre-fetch the linked content. But is this desirable?

The...
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RSS (0.91+ and 2.0) and Info Bite List support the use of a "rating" element to rate a feed. The most common domain used in this element is PICS. I learned today that "PICS" does not refer to a particular rating system, but defines a method of specifying rating systems. Perhaps the most commonly used...
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Yesterday's English to Korean to English experience notwithstanding, an automated system to translate newsfeeds between languages could be extremely useful. Publishers and readers alike would benefit as the audience for newsfeeds expanded. I'm not aware of any existing service to translate newsfeeds, but another option, imperfect as it may be, does exist: the venerable, if...
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We all know that keeping computers up-to-date on security patches is important to fight computer viruses and worms, but did you know that it also helps reduce spam? For around a year now, spammers have been writing worms of their own (or paying someone else to do so) which infect vulnerable computers and use them...
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Today, video showing the gruesomely beheading of an American was posted on an al-Quaeda-linked website. The nominal justification for the murder was the abuses of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. Once again, terrorists have ceded the moral high ground by committing acts even worse than those they criticize other for.

The pathetic nature of...
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I noticed some traffic coming in from a Korean site to one of my blog entries today. I don't read Korean, so I popped the text into Sherlock for translation, and this is what I got:

This will be contradictory conduct of inside oneself? Yesterday

"against" ' a reflection or an expansion be ' as...
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Back in March, I wrote about using throwaway email addresses--addresses that you use in places you're afraid you might get spam from and then delete if spam starts coming in. Services are available online that offer throwaway addresses. But if you're mail server runs qmail (and probably if it runs other software--I just don't know...
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You know how I'm always harping on the need to minimize bandwidth consumption by feed readers? Here's an idea that could help: automatic refresh interval adjustment. Some feeds are updated daily. Some are updated every few minutes. Some are updated every few months. Those that are updated infrequently don't need to be refreshed as often,...
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One phenomenon seen in blogging is that when someone posts something that resonates with lots of people, lots of people link to it from their blogs, and if the original blog allows trackback pings, lots of trackbacks show up in the comments. While this does bring more attention to the original entry and to the...
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One spam solution I've often heard bandied about is to launch DDoS attacks against the perpetrators. This would be done by having spam filters automatically load and reload every web page linked to from email it identifies as spam, and perhaps crawl the websites pointed to. With enough spam filters responding this way, the spammers'...
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