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Curiously enough, the middle east was a place of relatively high tolerance and prosperity during the time of the European "Dark Ages". Though with most of Islam's, Christianity's, and Jadaism's religious cities in the mid-east, it does seem destined to be a place of conflict.

• $5.95 Digital Media Collection (PDF)
• 
  $5.95 Java vs .NET Security (PDF)
  $5.95 PHP Security Collection (PDF)
  $5.95 Web Services Collection (PDF)
  $7.95 Smileys
  $8.95 Oracle PL/SQL Built-ins Pocket Reference
  

Google Cache has always operated in at least a slightly gray area legally, in that there's undoubtedly unauthorized copyrighted material available via the cache that authors wouldn't want there if they knew about it. Google obviously is on the up-and-up, and will remove content from cache when specifically requested to. However, with a minimum jail sentance of six months, anything questionable like this may be deemed to risky. Is it possible that Google cache (and anything similarly risky) may be disabled for the .IT section of the internet?

As an alternative, if you're already handy with perl, there are several tiny-yet-still-readable TCP proxies that can be tweaked to do on-the-fly stream modification or anything else you dream up.

Anyway, in lieu of a better solution, what I do is described here... find a laptop with one built-in ethernet port... burn a knoppix CD (ethereal built-in)... buy a little bitty USB - ethernet adapter, and plug the laptop temporarily in between the cable modem and the switch. This has the side benefit that you can take the laptop + USB NIC elsewhere (eg. say, your favorite institution's network cabinet) and similarly sniff just about anything you want.

That's true as well, but there's a huge amount of information available through SNMP that may not be available elsewhere. These include: what ports are being blocked, the signal/noise ratio on the cable line, how many and what type of recieving errors the cable modem had, your external IP, your upload/download caps (this is THE value that gets used... so if your ISP forgot to update a webpage or send you an email, this is the only place you'll see the update), etc etc.

Mod up! Fravia is most famous for his previous work, tons of hard-core documents about reverse-engineering. Anyway, anything he writes is likely Really Deep Stuff, and deserves to be pored over.

Look, don't disable javascript. The W3 org has standardized javascript-browser functionality enough that web designers can create some truly useful things with javascript without [much] browser-specific wrangling. Granted, there may be a lot of useless/annoying stuff too, but Javascript is flexible enough that you should be able to block out most of those with javascript itself (eg. see proxomitron hacks, or "disable-popups" features within various javascript engines). As a web developer myself, I feel that javascript's time has come (one third of mozilla is written in Javascript), but users like you who view the world in only black and white are going to slow down its adoption and dampen the usefulness of javascript webpages. Certainly 1/3rd of Mozilla isn't gimmicky cruft...

Googling for pdf_sec.ps along with "Adobe" or whatnot should give you more info.

Besides being open source and having the C source availalbe, Mozilla contains approx 150,000 lines or 4.5mb (uncompressed) of javascript code. Its object hierarchy is very accessible and can be easily reconfigured. New modules can alter the existing set of javascript in infinite ways.

So, while it's likely harder to tweak Mozilla to exactly suit your needs, in the long run, it's much much more flexible than opera, and because it has a larger marketshare, its features will eventually easily surpass Opera's. Mozilla may always be a step behind in terms of speed, but in terms of features, it definitely won't.

Another reason that this may become more prevalent is that links have been declared to be possibly illegal, but search terms have not. For example, here are some quotes from several O'Reilly books...

I did a decent photoshop recreation of the eye recently, except blown up to 960x960. It's currently set as my background at work so I can discuss it when people ask what it is.

Ha. I had that at first too, until the neighbors started yearning for the cool new thing. Now my ssh connections drop at least twice a day because there are 30 second periods where 0 packets get through. It's so annoying that I was inspired to write a graphical ping so I can see in real-time just how much my connection sucks. For instance, the connection just decided to punish me with 8 seconds of silence for complaining about it here.

As the uni designed this hybrid as a lightweight car, it wouldn't surprise me if they borrowed some design cues from the Elise (1600 lbs).

However, I like the informal tone for a different reason altogher. It leads to "unique" quotes, which can be used in Robust Hyperlinks (re: the recent Google programming contest).

Here are some examples, from O'Reilly's "Programming Perl".

• "enumerating these weird, quote-like operators"
• "Perl variable lives in a symbol table and holds one hard reference to its underlying thingy"

Besides being useful in the longer run, hopefully these also get around the precedent set by the 2600 ruling, that links can be illegal.

For a more complete set of examples, see this page.

If you already own the book, then something like this should be a legal and free way to accomplish the same problem, right?