While I am waiting 20 minutes for the PNAS site to let me back in, I might as well explain why I have been barred: I use scrapbook. It is an extremely useful Firefox extension that grabs whole web pages or portions thereof and saves them offline for later sorting, study, and annotation. It was about 50% of the reason that I gave up on Opera, after ten years — the other big reason was that there are so many Ajaxy sites today that don’t work well with Opera either.
But it turns out that when it hits a site with lots of links, Scrapbook hits them all, too, and so when I went to save this very interesting paper on neurogenesis, I triggered their anti-bot. And now I am banned for twenty minutes. Moral: don’t use Scrapbook on that site. Use something like Evernote instead.
But Opera vs Firefox is interesting. I think I will write a piece about standards for next week’s Guardian tech column.