I just read about an interesting open source cryptography project I was going to write about here today, only it's web site doesn't work. When I try to load it I get a blank page. I'm seeing this more and more lately. It's sometimes but not always feels related to my refusal to accept cookies. It may also have something to do with JavaScript, or JavaScript not being allowed to read cookies. Either way, I don't care. It's the web site's responsibility to use standards conformant pages that work well across browsers, not mine to change my settings to expose myself to privacy invasions and denial of service attacks.
Attentive readers may have noticed I haven't linked to any stories from the San Jose Mercury or included any quotes from the usually astute Dan Gilmore for a while now. That's because a few months ago, the silcionvalley.com began exhibiting this problem so I can no longer read their newspaper. No big deal for me. There are plenty of other newspapers on the Web, but they no longer receive traffic from this site. One user group asked me to update the link to their group from my user groups page, but the new site wouldn't display so I deleted them instead. I do not know what causes this problem, whether it's JavaScript, cookies, browser sniffing, or something else; nor do I much care. I just know some sites are turning away a lot of readers because they can't bothered to serve standards conformant pages that actually work.
Dan Creswell has released Blitz JavaSpaces 2.0.3, an open source implementation of JavaSpaces that is Jini 2.0 enabled. It implements smart indexing, tuneable persistence, and active/passive lease cleanup. 2.0.3 adds a GUI installer, GUI tools for monitoring statistics and shutting down a Blitz instance, and expands the statistics API to include active transactions and instance counts.