Coleman Web - Anthony Coleman’s Personal Website

Yet another link sent to me from my Dad that I thought was worthy of a note. The title is a good enough description for this so go ahead and give it a try.

Falling Sand Game - hosted by Chirag Mehta @ chir.ag

Tomorrow sees the first day of the UN small arms confenence in New York. Control Arms campaigners will hand over the Million Faces petition to Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN.

Here is an extract from the Control Arms Website detailing the petition:

Lack of controls on the arms trade is fuelling conflict, poverty and human rights abuses worldwide. Every government is responsible. The Control Arms campaign is asking governments to toughen up controls on the arms trade.

Add your face and join the million like me and demand a global arms trade treaty.

As I stopped running Seti@home on my computers in the past few weeks (due to numerous crashes caused by the new enhanced seti@home workunits) I decided to revisit some websites of other distributed projects I had bookmarked.

I am now running the Majestic-12 search engine client. I found out about this project throught a The Guardian Newspaper article. This project actually distributes the indexing of the Majestic-12 search engine to volunteer participants who install the client. Unlike the Seti@home project which utilised the unused CPU power of the computers it was installed on, the Majestic-12 client downloads a list of URL’s to visit from the Majestic-12 servers and then utilises the internet conections of volunteers to index the websites on the list by visithing them. Once the list is run through the information is compressed and then sent back to the Majestic-12 servers. This is then added to the search engine index. Of course, I have just briefly summarised the client here, so visit the Majestic-12 website for all the in-depth detail.

Running the client is makes intensive demands on an internet connection and should not be run without reading up at the website. Failure to do so could result in slow connections if you wish to run the client and use the internet at the same time for other things such as surfing the net. If you are on a capped internet connection this client may use up your capacity very quickly so be warned. I myself am on a capped service and will only use the client towards the end of the month, as my caps reset on the 1st of every month. I am also planning to only run the service at night after this month, so as to keep my ISP happy (they normally are!).

Here are some details on my contribution:

Number of URL’s crawled:

McAffe SiteAdvisor is a free Firefox extension which adds an additional layer of protection to the browser.
As described at the official website:

SiteAdvisor is a consumer software company dedicated to protecting Internet users from all kinds of Web-based security threats and annoyances including spyware, adware, unwanted software, spam, phishing, pop-ups, online fraud and identity theft.

We built a system of automated testers which continually patrol the Web to browse sites, download files, and enter information on sign-up forms. Our easy to use software for Internet Explorer and Firefox summarizes our safety results into intuitive red, yellow and green ratings to help Web users stay safe as they search, browse and transact online.

I have been using it for about a week now and have come across some sites which I often visit with a red or yellow warning indicator. This is often because the sites in question link to software downloads, some of which are classed adware. A version for Internet Explorer is also available.