Please Note: My personal journal is now fully independent of my main personal Web site, but I am still working on some things such as my new page designs and many improvements to PageDrive, my software that runs my journal site. If you encounter any technical problems, please either just try again a while later or let me know.
I am glad Microsoft has taken measures to improve the security of Internet Explorer (I'm sorry; make that "Windows Internet Explorer"—or is it "Windows Windows Internet Windows Explorer Windows" now?), but it is not reasonable to expect users to wait indefinitely for Internet Explorer 7's Phishing Filter to work. I have been trying to test one of my pages in IE 7 for several minutes now, but it is just sitting there partially loaded with a progress bar in its status bar just sitting there about half-way through and a nearby icon animating in a very progress-bar-like fashion and reporting that "Phishing Filter is checking this website" when I hover my mouse pointer over it.
Upon clicking IE's Phishing Filter icon, I was presented with four options, only one of which seemed likely to give me the opportunity to inform Microsoft of the absurdly long delay in its Phishing Filter's supposed check of my site: "Report This Website". OK, why not, I thought; I can report it as not being a phishing Web site and perhaps even report the delay problem. No such luck, though: the form on the reporting page includes only a language menu, a single checkbox next to "I think this is a phishing website", and a "Submit" button and clicking the button without checking the checkbox results in a "Please select an option" message, as though there is more than one.
It gets worse, though: contrary to what Internet Explorer reports, it is not checking the site, but merely the page. The delay does not happen on my front page or any of several other pages I tried—just, it seems, on that one page that includes an "object" element for a video blog. So what is so special about that page that IE 7's Phishing Filter gets stuck on it, but not on other pages on the same site? That it uses both valid HTML 4.01 Strict and Flash? No, because that is also true of pages at my Gravitas Games site upon which IE 7's Phishing Filter does not get stuck.
Fucking Microsoft! I don't know why Hugh MacLeod has such a hard-on for a company that makes terrible product after terrible product after terrible product.
