Someone asked me today what I thought the most surprising thing about the internet today was. I was stumped, and the question has been rolling around in my head for hours.

Sure, it’s surprising that projects with poor performance, atrocious user-interface and horrific security records (programs, websites, even operating systems) consistently command more users than vastly superior competitors. But that’s more an unfortunate truth about market inertia.

I couldn’t come up with something surprising about the internet, because nothing has really surprised me for years. I know that sounds terrifically arrogant. Bear with me for a moment. The real surprising thing about the internet today is how slow things are moving. Movies on demand on my computer? Buying a single digital audio track for $1? I talked about that with friends back in ’98 (just not the DRM part). Social networking? Blogging? Can you say sixdegrees and slashdot? Geeks have been doing this stuff for years. An easy to use phone / PDA / music player? It’s about time. Geotagging? Posting photos online? Pervasive wi-fi? Video on webpages? It’s not just me… ask anyone in “the industry” and they’ll roll their eyes and say “Yeah, glad to see someone is finally doing that.”

When I was in junior high, I made a cardboard model of “the home entertainment center of the future” for the school science fair. It was a TV, a VCR, a radio, a phone, answering machine, fax, modem, computer for word processing, and a video game system, all in one. Now I have one, under my desk — the computer part has taken over the functions of everything else. The surprising thing is that it took more than fifteen years.

And the most surprising thing about the internet today is that all these hot new applications took so long to appear.

The question you should be asking is, “ok, what’s the next step, smarty pants?” There are lots. I’m working on one right now, and when I’m done with that I’ll pick one of the eight or so obvious next steps and start again.

A friend pointed out that a HTML email my company sent looked completely fucked in Hotmail. After painfully navigating Hotmail’s time-traveling account reactivation process, I found these layout problems was due to a combination of things:

1. Hotmail strips out the <style> tag that we put in our email.

2. Hotmail does not strip out the class=”foo” attributes that we put on HTML tags in the email.

3. The class names that we’re using collide with class names used by Hotmail – at least partly because – wait for it – they’re using tables to lay out their entire site.

This means that parts of the email we send end up looking – and behaving – like Hotmail GUI elements.

This is easy to fix – I’ll just inline the style and stop using classes (unfortunately tripling the size of the email in the process).

. . . but . . .

this means that an attacker could trivially send out an email with malicious links in it that were guaranteed to look like Hotmail UI elements. Have these people even *heard* of phishing? Dumb.

Somehow, I stumbled across furk.net. This site embodies the future of the internet! They used the now-defunct Web 2.0 logo generator to make their logo. They have “advansed” settings, and brag that files get dowloaded a few “thouthand” times a day. Their pages are full of erroneous capitalizations, like “select a File First.” They are still in beta, the site sports a copyright going back to 2004, but their featureset of uploading and hosting files could be implemented in about three lines of PHP (four if you were lazy). Their main page boasts of unlimited uploading and downloading, but the Terms of Service forbids “Files that are consuming large amounts of system resources or excessive bandwidth.” Nevermind that RAR format is completely obsolete, they will automatically RAR your files and “splitted” them into volumes. Hooray.

I sure hope this is a thirteen-year-old kid’s idea of a get rich quick scheme. And I hope he or she makes a buck off of it, somehow. But if today were April 1st, I’d be pretty suspicious.

Someone pointed out that MySpace is one of the highest traffic sites on the internet using Microsoft IIS. The IIS server error pages served up from time to time always make me scratch my head and wonder. So you’ll pardon my suprise today when I accidentally left off the “www” on the url, and got this: Continue reading →