Ramblings

The Internet has just entered our daily lives and the what and what-nots are still not carved in stone. For instance this site about Stockholm (http://www.stockholmgamlastan.se) [1], a city in Sweden are concerned that Opera users have been stealing photographs from their site.

No worries, they quickly made a redirect on their page, sniffing out those pesky Opera users and sent them to a warning page.

Browser Opera
StockholmGamlaStan

The Site StockholmGamlaStan (StockholmOldTown) has a simpel protection against unauthorised downloading.

Opera Software ASA

Opera Software ASA is the name of the Norwegian company that develops the excellent Web browser Opera.

However, the stealing of images, text, software i.e. on the Internet is a problem for serious web publishers and others. We believe strongly in a open Internet without or with small limitations but we need to have som basic rules. Not stealing is one of these according to us.

Opera Software ASA is curently not working together with other major web browser producers in making it possible by programming the browser to disable the right click function on the mouse.

Because of this we can not allow the use of the otherwise excellent Opera web browser on StockholmGamlaStan site.

We sincerely apologise for this inconvenience

The Chief Editor
StockholmGamlaStan

NB: This is NOT a joke, the site says exactly that!

Unfortunately, that didn't quite help it seems, I'm guessing Opera users are of the criminal type and didn't stop stealing their pictures. So if you now try to enter their frontpage using Opera, they came up with a totally water-proof plan: They redirect people to http://www.opera.com. That should teach them! At least then they can only steal the Opera company's pictures!

All is well you think, people ought to be able to protect themselves, right? Fair enough, but then I realised, they are STEALING FROM ME!

When visiting the Stockholm site, they are actually stealing my User-Agent string and using it to spy on me and find out which browser, which operating system and which language I'm using! And not only that, they injected a cookie called PHPSESSID into my browser! Talk about Big Brother behaviour, this beats Google's "no evil" practices by far!

If anyone can help me with the details to the local police in Stockholm I'd like to report them for stealing and prying into my private life, plus hacking into my computer and placing possibly malware there.

[1] Stolen image from http://www.stockholmgamlastan.se:



NB: I was notified that also non-Opera users can steal images from http://stockholmgamlastan by going here: http://www.stockholmgamlastan.se/atttittapa.php?id=atttittapastart.

Of course, Opera users can circumvent this by going to the warning page, and set Opera to mask as Firefox or Internet Explorer with a couple of clicks too. So, I guess they need to secure their site a bit better. Oh well... security is not easy...

It seems I never posted this userjs publicly before. After using it for a while I can't live without it. It's excellent for dragging around big images without having to reach for the scrollbars, and also for pages.

To drag images around simply click, hold and drag. To drag around pages, either get hold of an image and drag that or use shift+click, hold and drag somewhere in the page that is not normally clickable.

I guess for you people surfing with the Wii, this behaviour is familiar.

Download it here: http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/userjs/dragscroll.js

A video of the userjs in use can be seen here:

Note: the video is a bit sketchy as the movement and click events didn't work 100% when capturing the desktop.

Actually wanting to add this feature for a long while, but it wasn't until today when I noticed someone wanted the feature that I decided to make a User Javascript to be able to pan any web page with the mouse. The following User Javascript allows you to click, hold and drag a web page around in the same way you are used to move a map around, just remember to hold the shift key when dragging. This so that regular text selection and drag-n-dropping of images and pages doesnt break.

Update: You can scroll in big images without modifier key, and the scrolling should time out if you havppen to release the button outside of the browser.

Update2: Script now only allows to use the left mouse button. Hold down shift to drag pages, and shift not needed when dragging an image alone. Only images without tags surrounding can be used to move page. Download Drag Scroll User Javascript

Ah, finally a new public release again, this time with speed dial, some important bugfixes for X11 systems, a link to developer tools and many general fixes and improvements.

Read the changelogs and download Opera here.

http://dev.opera.com has opened! It's supposed to be a resource for web developers, ranging from tutorials, libraries, examples, articles to discussion about web techonologies like SVG, AJAX, HTML, CSS, Voice, Canvas etc.

I even got my own article about making cross-platform AJAX applications on the front page. Make sure you visit it, and bookmark it, it will prove a useful resource if you are interested in web technologies.

NB! Don't forget the web chat today which is about dev.opera. More details here: A new developer site (#webapps)