I must have accidentally read a story from 2009 when I Googled the finalists of the Eurovision. So it's on in Oslo, not Greece? And we made the final? 

If you want to have a sports-free weekend and summer on Twitter then the Tweetdeck global filter may come to the rescue. 

Oooh, I just noticed a change in the Android Marketplace. With my Vodafone Ireland SIM, I can now upgrade paid apps that I bought on my 3 UK SIM.

I also spotted a tweet earlier that Google Checkout now works here too.

Still can’t buy apps but I’m guessing we are very close.

Wahoo!

I emailed a potential client yesterday who replied that she couldn’t read my email as it had crashed her email client. She also said that the email was huge. I had sent the email using Zoho CRM and when I checked it, it looked fine. Only a few lines long. So I sent myself a test message which also looked fine.

Then I did view-source on the message. Holy Crap. Hundreds of lines of HTML with ads inserted all over it. Now wonder her email crashed.

The bit that had me really worried was the I sent it from an Ubuntu machine which “shouldn’t” suffer from such exploits.

I went into Zoho and couldn’t see where it could have happened. Then I had the aha moment (no, not Morten) and checked my Signature setting. Damn it looked fine. Wait, try view-source again. All the bastard HTML there in all it’s glory.

I was able to reliably replicate the problem. Paste text signature in Zoho field, save, re-open, view-source, see spam.

I then tried it on Firefox. It didn’t have the problem. Weird.

Then Windows 7. Chrome – bad. Firefox – good. And in a shocker, IE8 – good.

WTF?

So I went over to a netbook which I booted up with a clean Ubuntu USB stick and installed Chrome. And all was well, no problem. WTF x2? 

OK, so what is common amongst two machines but not a third, despite operating system differences? Aha, the browser extensions. Luckily I only have 3 installed so it was easy to test.

First I uninstalled AdBlock which I run mainly to block Flash ads since they cripple the CPU on netbooks and Ubuntu boxes.

Job done! Problem gone.

This is very very very serious. Something you install to block ads ends up causing the mailing of spam ads to your customers. Very very serious indeed.

I have reported it to Zoho in case they can block the problem at their end and ditto to the AdBlock people since it is more likely to be an exploit of them rather than dodgy behaviour. Here is a screen shot of some of what it was inserting:

1. Grab a nightly build of the Chromium Browser
2. Install it
3. Sign-up for HTML5 testing on YouTube (thanks GammaGoblin!)
4. Go watch the Prince of Persia Trailer here in that browser
5. If you see HTML5 and WebM in the footer of the video (as above), then you are watching a video in your browser without Flash and without the patent-riddled H.264
6. Click on 720p to get the best quality. 
7. I can’t see how to go full screen on it tho. Presumably that is coming soon.
8. It’s all done using HTML5 and the VP8 codec that Google fully open-sourced last week
9. Mightn’t mean much to you as a punter but as you can see, the quality is bloody good
10. The lack of patents or single-vendor lock-in is why HTML, http and other web standards were able to thrive and enable new businesses
11. The lack of a decent alternative to Flash as a delivery mechanism for video is why it thrived in the same period
12. Let’s hope we see VP8 and the WebM project enabling a whole new generation of video products and businesses.

I’m working on the best combination of words for a global filter in Tweetdeck to remove Tweets about stuff I don’t care about. 

Quick one on VP8. i'm thrilled Google have done this since the whole MPEG LA thing hanging over h.264 was worryin a lot of people.