This is another news that I missed while I was busy elsewhere. Developers have added a ping attribute to link elements in the latest builds of Firefox.

Ping attribute allows website producers to specify URLs that will get pinged when user clicks on a link with this attribute. Meaning, it makes user tracking easier.

Argument being that tracking was already going on using redirects and that this feature will allow users to control this and makes browsing faster (by avoiding redirects).

I can see the logic, but I’m not sure I agree with developer’s conclusion. Redirects were at least visible to a user and he had a choice of continuing to use such web site or going elsewhere. Pings can be turned off by those, who know this option exists, but tracking will certainly be less transparent to everybody else.

I’m still on the fence about this one. How about you?

The European Commission launched a new patent initiative that hasn’t received a universally warm welcome. I can hardly blame them, since I too remember how unscrupulous Commission was when pushing for software patents.

I wrote my thoughts on patents a while ago and they haven’t changed much since. But if we are going to have a patent system in Europe, and I honestly can’t see it going away anytime soon, then it’s probably better to have a common, unified one.

Which is what this initiative was supposed to be about and since they are asking for comments, it’s a great opportunity to present them your view. Don’t miss the deadline, which is 31 March 2006!

Update: It seems there are good reasons to be concerned.

Quite a lot has happened during time when I was away from this blog and I’ll probably talk about some of it in next few days, but I’d like to start with news from Google.

I wrote a badly written post when Google Talk was unveiled. What bothered me most was the fact that it didn’t communicate with anybody and was in fact another walled garden.

Well, they fixed it and Google Talk now actually talks to other jabber servers including ours.

There are some problems with presence notification, but it’s hard to say yet who’s fault it is and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was ours. Sad thing about jabber is that there are few if any open source server implementations that wouldn’t be just a notch above suck.

In short run this won’t change much. Most people will still be on competing services and it might be difficult to get them off. But as a newborn optimist I see a promise of an open, working IM, where you’re not tied to wishes and development of one company even when that company is mine. And that can only be good.