PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) and P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) are two really nice things to be aware of when developing web applications. If your website targets children, maybe you sell toys, you should know about products like NetNanny that blocks access to certain websites based upon a lot of parameters. It’s for the protection of children that parents install these website blockers to keep their youngsters from accessing websites containing violence, nudity etc.

That’s why the World Wide Web Consortium created PICS. You can then label your website with a set of codes that tell products like NetNanny about the content of your site. If you don’t label your website, you run the risk of being blocked by these kinds of products.

P3P is about securing the users privacy and for web developers it’s about the permission to set cookies on the user’s browser. Well, that and other things which are not important right now. Internet Explorer 6.0 supports it very well, which makes it a no-brainer to implement, since it’s the worlds most used browser. You could risk that a user does not accept your cookies and that could ruin his or hers experience on your site. If you are about to create third-party cookies, you definitely need a P3P policy.

It is normally quite cumbersome to creating P3P policy files and creating a PICS label from ICRA, but I’ve done it for your, so don’t look any longer. Just place this method in the global.asax file on your website and you're good to go.

Private Sub Global_BeginRequest(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.BeginRequest
  Response.AddHeader("P3P", "CP=""NOI DSP COR ADMa IVDa OUR NOR""")
  Response.AddHeader("Pics-Label", "(pics-1.1 ""http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html"" l gen true for ""http://" & Request.Url.Host & """ r (nz 1 vz 1 lz 1 oz 1 cz 1))")
End Sub

Remember, this is a quick fix – not the whole shebang, but it works. Enjoy.

Grid computing is a very efficient and cheap way of creating super computers. It works by connecting a lot of computers together to form a kind of a network or grid, hence the name. The more computers connected, the more power are available on the grid. IBM has created The World Community Grid to help find cures for AIDS and other sciences that would normally require super computers. All you have to do is download a little program and that’s all it takes for you to be a part of the world wide grid. You then donate your computers idle time for calculations that could lead to cures for various diseases.

The program you have to download works very well without any problems, but it’s got issues. It can only leverage 1 CPU and there is no 64bit edition. My computer is a 64bit Dell Precision with dual Xeon processors and 64bit Windows XP. 64bit processors are capable of processing much faster than the regular 32bit processors. It means that I only donate about a quarter of my total CPU power to The World Community Grid.

The whole idea with grid computing is to leverage the power of the individual machines or nodes as they are called on a grid, so why doesn’t IBM make a version that will, especially when the new dual core processors are becomming mainstream in laptops and in early 2007, Intel are launching quad core (4 cores) processor. 64bit processors are also slowly becoming popular and have been for some time on servers.

IBM, please make a version that leverage the power of my Dell, it’s for the greater good.