BadPhorm - When good ISPs go bad!

A new release of Dephormation browser add on with compliments;

Dephormation 4.2

Release notes

Important; before using the Flash LSO feature, please read the latest release notes carefully for configuration instructions.

Note that Flash LSO regeneration may conflict with other add ons like 'Better Privacy' (which will detect and report LSOs being generated and/or erase the path to the LSOs when the browser is shutdown).

This version adds compatibility with FF8, better code quality, a reset to defaults feature, and more robust Dephormed cookie setting/deleting.

Ah - that would probably rule it out for most people then.

Personally I don't watch them, I just pop in and *read* the news (and I hate anything that moves while I'm reading, I find it an irritating distraction, so don't even allow the scripts that make the automatically changing pictures run), but I suspect that I'm very much in the minority there.

Most people seem to have some kind of sound system on the PC (I don't - my CD burner is puzzled by this and throws up a warning every time I decide to commit umpteen pages of saved parish registers, old newspapers, whatever, to CD to free up some space - could do with a bigger hard drive really) and I imagine that, even if it's only once in a while, they will make use of the video stuff from the BBC.

(Edited for dodgy English)

Just to be pedantic, I think the BBC must also try to read back what they have set in the LSOs before allowing the video content to play. I say this because (using linux) I have ~/.macromedia symlinked to /dev/null which will just disregard anything written there while returning a success result to whatever tried to write there (ie it will appear to be writeable!). Thus I conclude the code must also try to read back what it thinks it has written before it will show the video content. I don't remember that the BBC ever provided an explanation of what they were storing other than it was "technical" and temporary while they converted to a new version of software.

Well, while my own easy solution may suit me, I'd reckon yours is a better bet for 99.99% of the population.

Just out of interest, I popped into the BBC site, unblocked everything under the sun, and tried to persuade a video or two to function. Definitely no go - I just get a little whirly circle in either yellow or red that goes on forever, so "temporary", a nice elastic term, probably means "until we get conned into buying some other whizzo bit of software from the next bunch of wide boys (oops, sorry, that should read "entrepreneurs") who corner us in the pub".

(Edited for typo - my typing gets worse every day!)

AFAIK you can only do this (redirect to /dev/null via a symlink) on unix like OS (that might include Apple OSX - I don't know) so that probably excludes over 90% of the population.

I no longer visit the BBC website though I do occasionally use "get_iplayer" to download programs I've missed. "get_iplayer" seems to work quite happlily without needing LSOs. if interested see:
http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html