Brian Yi

In my spare time, I have been contributing to the development of EasyList and EasyElement. The author of the filterset maintains a great relationship with the community. Once a lurker and anonymous poster in the forum, I have been granted access to the private development area of the forum where people are free to develop the filterset without fear that advertisers will simply visit the forum and cull their work to bypass the filters. It’s not a special privilege to work on development because the administrator will grant access to anyone who asks. But it is great to feel a sense of accomplishment that I’m making a contribution to the ad blocking community.

EasyList works best with Adblock Plus. They’re getting some impressive numbers these days. Now that the developer of Filterset.G has appeared to stop updating his filterset and Adblock (always) seems stagnant, Adblock Plus and EasyList are poised to become a dominant force in the ad blocking community. Even if that never quite happens, I think Adblock Plus and EasyList will be highly-praised and recommended because they are very polished and easier to use than their more popular counterparts.

I am learning some skills such as writing regular expessions and inspecting pages with FireBug, which increases my geek cred. The skills and tricks I learn are being put into the development of my own personal Filtersetb Corset. Check it out. You’ll see my recommendations for the best way to block advertisements if you use Mozilla Firefox.

Yay! A story that I submitted on Digg finally made it onto the front page. I’ve made a few submissions over the past year with one almost garnering enough diggs for it to make it onto the front page. This time, my submission made it.

The submission, titled “The six dumbest ways to secure a wireless network,” talked about methods that many people consider to be secure but have no merit whatsoever. These include MAC filtering and SSID hiding, which are easy to circumvent. While reading through some of the comments, I see that people are still reinforcing the misconception that these things are effective in anyway. Sure, it keeps the casual snoopers from accessing my network, but that doesn’t worry me. My properly configured computers are well-protected from snooping. The point these people are forgetting is that WPA is used to encrypt private data in addition to serving as an authentication mechanism. A snooper can’t see any usernames or passwords that fly through the air. WPA security provides privacy and authentication. Privacy compels me to use WPA, not authentication.

Welcome to the 5th 6th 7th reincarnation of my blog.

Let me get right to the meat of the matter. I’m going to heed Andy Baio’s philosophy on blogging. That means no journaling my every single pointless thought, no tired memes that get old quickly, and being original. Therefore each post will have a coherent point on some topic that is relevant to both you and me.

Let’s make this a successful (by my low expectations) website.