MaximumHoyt

The popular Firefox web browser has a few "hidden" features accessed by the " about: " URL. MozillaZine has an article about them and the actual code can be viewed here . The about:robots URL is an Easter Egg, or hidden joke. Another Easter Egg was attempted but was thwarted: someone wanted to include an about:kitchensink joke. There is a humorous discussion here (Comments #119 and #120 are the most important) and you can see a demonstration of the joke here . If you are interested, there are several about: extensions available for Firefox here .

From Brett Charbeneau of the Tidewater UNIX Users Group : Verizon was adjusting the M aximum T ransmission U nit of all packets on the fly on their routers - and they stopped doing that recently. Some sites, Microsoft Update in specific, demand that the MTU be between 1400 and 1536 or they simply won't interact with a browser. Any browser. At all. Packets that have a frame size larger or smaller than that are ignored or otherwise mangled beyond recognition by any browser I know of. So, if you are like me and have several locations sharing Verizon DSL circuits between lots of Windows users via an iptables -based firewall/router, Microsoft Update, mail.yahoo.com , and a bunch of other sites suddenly became inaccessible on February 9, 2009 for no apparent reason. The fix is to set a "clamp" on packet size via a variety of iptables commands, I like to do it in the FORWARD chain like so (all one line): # iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags SYN,...