Do not use this product!

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 13:28:30 +0000

Norton Personal Firewall / Internet Security is worst kind of software, which treats you as in “you’re a stupid looser and we will take your hand and guide you through that spam-infested hacking mayhem called Internet”.

Symantec deserves the worst possible kicking in the ass imaginable. No, there is no link to them, because they should be banned from the Internet, not linked to.

I have written before about the problems this thing can create for any web designer, but what I’m reading now is really pissing me off. Lets see…

Any graphic of standard banner or display ad size is removed from the source code of the page by NPFW/IS2004. So far we’ve identified that whenever the following sizes…

120x240

120x90 468x60

234x60 120x60

125x125

…appear within the image tags the image is removed.

Beautiful. If you happen to have any image of this size, even having nothing to do with ads, it will be removed from the page source code.

Hey Symantec: will you be answering my customers’ questions like “your site is not displaying properly on…?”, “I don’t see the illustrations; why?” and many other similar? I’m quite positive that you don’t care about those - they are not in your backyard. Toss the ball to content creators, while you keep boasting how you “increase online productivity”.

Further reading at the same page reveals that NPF/IS is removing links from Google’s AdWords but not from Overture’s service of the same kind. They forgot about it, maybe? Yeah, right. Sold-out suckers that deserve the eternal contempt.

Hey Symantec: I’m not a mindless creature. I know what an ad is. Give me an option to easily add it to my filters (as normal people do). Do not, and I mean NOT, decide this for me.

Amazingly stupid feature of ad-blocking sw

Thu, 26 Feb 2004 12:25:30 +0000

For weeks, one of our client was receiving customer complaints that some of them are not able to use the web site we built properly. Some features, that are dependent on page-onlaod script execution were simply not working.

Those were all IE/Win users. At same time, they reported that banners at the page top were not visible. We requested screen shots. Almost all of them contained this:

“1 item remaining” message means that page has not finished loading and that none of the scripts executed. This caused the behavior customers mentioned (feature did not work).

Problem was narrowed to Flash banners only and object tag used to display them. Apparently, if the .swf file does not exists, IE will forever try to fetch it, thus never reaching page complete status. Yet another object-related bug in IE. :(

I tried many things, even added the option on the home page to turn Flash off. And still some people complained.

Totally stumped.

And then, today, I saw this on web pages that suck. Ad-blocking software, by default, are not loading files with “banner.”, “ad”, “adclick” and many other in the directory or file name. Client banners are located in banners directory and the file called for them is “banner.asp”. I couldn’t believe it! Stupid, really stupid feature.

This software should be giving me the option to do this myself if I want to, not deliberately forbidding it. Hopefully, when we rename those in the next few days, my days will get brighter.

Misery on A+ programming moments

Do not use this product!

Amazingly stupid feature of ad-blocking sw