Ever wish you could go back in time and send that crucial email that could have changed everything — if only it hadn’t slipped your mind? Gmail can now help you with those missed deadlines, missed birthdays and missed opportunities.
A Google approach to email.
Gmail is a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient, and useful. And maybe even fun. After all, Gmail has:
Less spam
Mobile access http://gmail.com/app . Learn more
Lots of space 2757.272164 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.
Pre-date your messages Mark as read or unread Make them count Worry less
I can imagine so many uses…. Do be sure to note the various limits on functionality .
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March 26, 2008
Internet Considered Dangerous
Or maybe that should be, ‘Reliance on Internet Considered Dangerous’.
There’s this amazing, if somewhat mis-titled story Man scammed by Craigslist ad
A pair of hoax ads on Craigslist cost an Oregon man much of what he owned.
The ads popped up Saturday afternoon, saying the owner of a Jacksonville home was forced to leave the area suddenly and his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Colin Fagan.
But Robert Salisbury had no plans to leave. The independent contractor was at Emigrant Lake when he got a call from a woman who had stopped by his house to claim his horse.
On his way home he stopped a truck loaded down with his work ladders, lawn mower and weed eater.
“I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back,” Salisbury said. “They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did.”
The driver sped away after rebuking Salisbury. On his way home he spotted other cars filled with his belongings.
Once home he was greeted by close to 30 people rummaging through his barn and front porch.
The trespassers, armed with printouts of the ad, tried to brush him off. “They honestly thought that because it appeared on the Internet it was true,” Salisbury said. “It boggles the mind.”
The followup is slightly cheerful: Some items being returned to victim of Craigslist hoax
Apparently this sort of thing has happened before , perhaps as part of a family feud . Although neither story explains clearly if the vandals broke in or if the victim left the door unlocked.
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March 17, 2008
Check To See If Your ISP Is Diverting Your DNS
Lauren Weinstein’s Blog, Testing Your Internet Connection for ISP DNS Diversions
I passed, but then I’ve set my machines to use OpenDNS , which may take me out of the BellSouth default.
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Parody or Reality
Can you tell whether The scandal of Olivia Newton-John: 12 surprisingly controversial Wikipedia pages is parody or reality? And does it matter?
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March 05, 2008
To Really Foul Up Requires a Computer
You can’t make this stuff up.
Secret Airforce One flight data sent to Suffolk tourist web site :
SINCE 2001, the US air force has been sending highly confidential emails including the flight plan for the presidential jet, Air Force One, to an English factory worker who runs a Suffolk tourism website.
In the late 1990s, Gary Sinnott, of Mildenhall in Suffolk, near Cambridge, set up the website www.mildenhall.com, to promote his hometown. He soon became inundated with emails meant for airmen at the US airbase at RAF Mildenhall, where personnel email addresses end in mildenhall.af.mil.
It was all harmless enough when the emails were mundane messages to friends and silly videos, but soon Sinnott discovered that he was also getting battlefield strategies and military passwords sent straight to his inbox.Note: theinquirer.net, a mildly scurrilous but generally well-informed British technology e-rag is not to be confused with a supermarket tabloid of a similar name.
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February 19, 2008
Mozy Understands How to Write Warnings
Online backup provider Mozy.com offers 2GB of free storage to the home user.
You can use their encryption key — which means it’s recoverable: they have a backdoor if you loose lose it, or if someone else turns up with a subpoena — or you can grow your own.
I chose the latter. Which produced this great warning pop-up:
I understand that if I ever lose this key, that neither I nor MozyHome will be able to decrypt my data and I will be hosed.
I clicked “yes”.
(Only later did I find out that Mozy will only backup files resident on a fixed disk . I wanted to back up my USB drive. Oh well. At least I got a laugh.)
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January 31, 2008
More on How to Crash the Net
That the internet is fragile is not a new idea. (Remember USENET ? “Death of the Internet predicted. Film at 11”? )
Not surprisingly, Wendy Grossman long ago noted the discussion at CFP in 1998Buy ten backhoes , and Simson Garfinkel listed 50 Ways to Crash the Net .
Update : And how could I forget Staniford, Paxson & Weaver, How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time (2002)?
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The Internet is More Fragile Than You May Think
The internet may be a packet-switching network, but certain paths are in fact critical as they rely on fragile cables. Which break.
Today it’s a major Mediterranean cable that’s broken .
Egypt, it seems, has pretty much fallen off the Internet, and service to several other countries including Pakistan and India is impacted.
It’s an important reminder that while many routes between A and B may be possible, sometimes there are not so many; and sometimes there’s only one big pipe.
Which makes wiretaps — and full network monitoring — a lot easier.
I recall setting up a panel at CFP DNS
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December 26, 2007
If You Use Gmail, Check Your Settings
If you use Gmail, it might be worth a moment to check your settings to make sure that there are no malicious “forward” instructions there.
Although Google has now apparently patched the bug, it seems that for a time this vulnerability made it possible for hackers to insert instructions to forward some of your mail to them if you had the misfortune to visit a web page that had the right malicious code while you had gmail open in another tab or window..
Here’s an account of someone who says his business was sabotaged as a result.
Odds are high that you’re fine. But to confirm it, here’s what you do in after logging in to Gmail:
… click on the ’settings’ tab in the upper right of the screen. Then check both the ‘Filters’ and the ‘Forwarding and POP ’ sections.
Examine what’s listed there to make sure there’s no forwarding instruction you didn’t put there yourself.
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December 12, 2007
It's Del.icio.us But I'm Not Hungry
Jon Udell makes the best case I’ve seen yet for del.icio.us in Discovering versus teaching principles of social information management .
And I still don’t feel like I need it…
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December 11, 2007
ICANNWatch Listed Among ABA Journal Blawg 100
ICANNW atchABA Journal as one of the Top 100 top legal blogs .
ICANNW atch actually could use some fresh blood. If you’re a legal academic or law student with an interest in ICANN
[Link to “vote” fixed]
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November 28, 2007
Can Typosquatting Be Counterfeiting?
This seems to be media day. Brian Krebs quoted me in the Washingtonpost.com story Dell Takes Cybersquatters to Court .
The story there is about Dell bringing a very large and organized case against a bunch of domain tasters (people who register domain names for a very brief period then drop them, so they don’t have to pay for them) who were apparently typosquatting on a grand scale.
What makes the story interesting is that Dell’s lawyers threw in a counterfeiting claim into their complaint. It’s artfully worded, but the essence of it is that the counterfeits are the domain names, and/or the act of putting up web sites at the domain names that have popups or pop-under ads.
Tactically, this assertion has great value for Dell: it got the judge to treat the complaint the way that courts treat claims that there’s a warehouse of phony handbags somewhere; Dell got to file under seal, and to stage a raid before service to impound computers and other evidence. And the statutory damages for counterfeiting are higher than for cybersquatting.
But, and here’s the rub, it seems pretty clear to me that the trademark laws don’t contemplate this sort of cybersquatting/typosquatting, however heinous and massive, as being called counterfeiting. This isn’t like affixing a false mark to some good to make consumers buy it. And even if one were to say that consumers “buy” web sites by “paying” their attention, I don’t understand anyone to suggest that the defendants’ sites looked like Dell’s, just (some of) the domain names. Indeed some of the names, although they had “dell” in them, were so long and weird that you have to wonder how anyone could be confused, or how they could even be seen as diluting Dell’s marks. Even so, though, if the complaint’s facts are true, there were an awful lot of other names that were close enough to Dell’s be actionable.
Overall, it’s a very well-written complaint and makes the defendants sound very guilty of trademark infringement, cybersquatting, and various Florida state-law unfair competition claims and the like — but not of counterfeiting. The attempt to re-characterize typosquatting, even massive typosquatting, as counterfeiting seems to me to be an unusually far-fetched construction of the relevant law, but I’m open to correction from people who know counterfeiting law better than I do.
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November 20, 2007
Tech Snark
This is mean: What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? .
Unfortunately, there’s some truth in it too.
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November 19, 2007
Router Mapping Tables Near Breaking Point (Maybe)
Every few months, the people who know the most about the Internet’s architecture warn us that the Internet is doomed — address space is running out and we need to change to IPv6 as fast as we can. And other people call them Chicken Littles.
The best case for the version that says the sky is in fact going to fall isn’t simply IPv4 number address space even though there’s problems there — we keep inventing fixes of various degrees of ugliness that stave off the day of reckoning for that one, and there are huge allocated but unused blocks that could in theory be repurposed. No, The Internet’s real Achilles Heel may be routers.
Router mapping tables keep growing , and there are signs that (despite clever enhancements ) the BGP the cost of routing all the traffic may be growing too quickly . Which means we may soon all be singing The Day The Routers Died :
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November 13, 2007
Free Rice
FreeRice . They give you a word, often quite obscure, and four definitions, even the best of which is sometimes not all that perfect:
For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program
The annoying and addictive thing is that I can almost never seem to get past level 48.
I gather there about 2,000 grains of rice in a quarter of a cup, so it will take a lot of games to feed anyone…..
I think this must be one of the most brilliant publicity stunts ever. Let’s pull out the back of the envelope: Even if they did promise to give away 136,236,930 grains on Nov. 11 , that’s only about 68,118 cups, or circa 457 bushels. A rice bushel weighs 45 pounds . It appears that US rice currently trades for about $10.50 per cwt (hundredweight) on the wholesale market.
So we take our 457 bushels, multiply by $10.50, and then by .45, and we get about $2160 worth of rice being donated on their record day — which must be the lowest cost-per-eyeball going when you consider how many people had to be playing for how long to get to that total. (After all, wrong answers don’t count.)
Now, if they are paying retail prices, this is going to cost them a lot more, but I doubt they are.
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November 12, 2007
I Can Haz Translation?
LOLC at Bible Translation Project Wiki
Hai! Teh blessigs of teh Ceiling Cat b pwn u, lol! This is a new translation wiki to get the entire Bible translated into kitty pidgin (the language of lolcats). Zotnix saw a link to a picture with this done to Genesis and thought, “Why not the whole darned book?”
I can think of several reasons…. (and other people will think this is a reason ).
(Image via PHP LOL Cats Generator
Wikipedia on what is a LOL Cat , for those fortunate enough to have been spared.
Obligatory cite to pedantic analysis .
Icanhascheezburger.com .
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November 09, 2007
Wikipedia Edit Voyeurism
WikipediaVision (beta) . Anonymous edits to English Wikipedia (almost) in real-time.
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October 15, 2007
E-mail Version of "ping"
Via Lifehacker , a link to Verify Email Address .
If, for whatever reason, you need to verify someone’s email address, try Verify-Email.org, a free email address verifier. Just enter in the email addy, click “verify”,and go. The format, domain, and user are all checked by actually connecting to the mail server to see if everything is kopasetic. Somewhat disconcerting, but sure to come in handy in some way.
Seems the like email equivalent of pinging a web site to see if it’s there. I guess we need this now that so many sites block finger .
Lifehacker is a funny site. So much of what they say strikes me as obvious or irrelevant to my life; but then there’s that very useful 5-10%. Then again, maybe I should aspire to that signal-to-noise ratio…
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October 02, 2007
Slashdot Turns 10; Users To Throw Distributed Parties
Slashdot Turns 10 But You Get The Presents . Well, sorta.
Mostly, Slashdot is asking users to throw their own parties , with users from Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station - South Pole, AQ to University of Miami responding.
I hope they have beer.
Other notable venues:
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September 18, 2007
Hot Downloads
Open Office 2.3 , latest version, released this week.
Ventus by Karl Schroeder a novel, released under a Creative Commons license.
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August 31, 2007
Virtual Confession Isn't
Edward N. Peters, an authority on canon law, states unequivocally on his blog that On-line confessions are absolutely null and utterly void . Even if there’s a real priest on the line, he writes, “the confessions themselves are of absolutely zero sacramental value .”
Not to mention that you don’t know who’s on the other end of the line — and if it’s someone pretending to be a priest then this could be the best blackmail wheeze since the cleartext-only anonymous remailer that secretly kept logs.
Why are modem-mediated confessions worthless? Apparently a key reason is Canons 960 & 961 , although how they prove it is … I confess … lost on me. (I would get it if the reason were Canon 964.)
Let me, by the way, say that to this non-Catholic, Edward N. Peters’s blog In the Light of the Law: a canon lawyer’s blog on current issues makes very interesting reading. Often I’m following right along, whether or not I agree with the assumptions — lots of legal analysis has similar properties — and then every so often there’s stuff that shows such a very different mindset and instincts from mine at work…
Incidentally, I don’t in fact know of an cleartext-only anonymous remailer that secretly kept logs, but I always thought it would make a fine idea for a novel if the money-making blackmail thing didn’t work out.
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August 22, 2007
Jargon Watch: Bacn
The Kool Kids are all aTwitter about Bacn , which means non-spam email you don’t want right now,
Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.
Bah. Procmail is your friend. If you use ‘nix email, anyway. My procmail rules are rather long and complex, but they do sort the Bacn and Sausage pretty well. It’s the spam that bugs me, even with SpamAssassin working at full tilt.
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August 08, 2007
People With Time On Their Hands
An important lawyer who you would think has better things to do appends the following to an otherwise serious discussion:
In other Most Excellent news, this totally pwns your boring old Flash clock:http://pageoftext.com/wikiclock
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August 03, 2007
What Does the ICANN Board Do?
As part of my now nearly complete service on the ICANN NomcomICANN Board of Directorswished the Board did; but that another way to think about it was that that skills should be defined by what the Board actually does.
But what does the ICANN ICANNW atch, under the title What Does the ICANN Board Do? .
Here’s the first paragraph:
In an effort to identify the skill set that would best serve future Board members, we conducted a quick and crude analysis of the most visible evidence available of what the ICANN ICANN ICANN
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July 30, 2007
Yahoo!'s Veracity Challenged
Does Yahoo! have more in common with Gonzales than is good for them? You may recall the cause celbre of Yahoo! giving up email records to the Chinese government which were then used to jail a dissident. According to Yahoo! at the time the issue hit the fan, the story was that when Yahoo! had been asked for the email records Yahoo! didn’t know this was a political rather than ordinary criminal matter.
Now, however, there’s evidence that at all relevant times Yahoo! knew or should have known that this was a political case. The case is made out by Rebecca MacKinnon at RConversation: Shi Tao’s case: Yahoo! knew more than they claimed .
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July 20, 2007
I Get The Oddest Emails
In addition to the hundreds of spams with foreign character sets and/or random texts designed to overwhelm spam filters, in addition to the phishing and the pills and the various ads, I also get a lot of mail from PR and advertising lists I never subscribed to. Much of it is political, created by people trying to push info to bloggers. Some of it, the more welcome part, is academic — calls for papers or conference announcements. But some of it is inexplicable. Take this example from today’s inbox:
Attached, please find CAPWIP’ s Invitation and Information Sheet for the forthcoming 8th Training on “Making Governance Gender Responsive (MGGR)”, which will be held on November 12-19, 2007 in Manila, Philippines.
How, I wonder, did I get on that list? It’s a good cause, I’m sure, but I’m not going to Manila for a week of it.
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Internet Radio Hangs by a Thread
Copyfight: the politics of IP has the gory details at When is a Reprieve Not a Reprieve. .
The music didn’t die last week. But now it’s being subject to carefully calibrated extortion.
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July 18, 2007
Short and Sweet
Sentenc.es - A Disciplined Way To Deal With Email
The Problem
E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it. The Solution
Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead. five.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be five sentences or less. It’s that simple.
- See also: two.sentenc.es , three.sentenc.es , and four.sentenc.es .
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July 16, 2007
Sports Tipsters (and Future Cabinet Members) Use the Internet Pseudonymously
Many hands dept: Internet tipsters are much better at discovering college sports violations than the myopic NCAA.
It was well past midnight in January 2006 when a user named aggiegrant06 dashed off a thread on TexAgs.com that detailed how his girlfriend handed out payroll checks for a car dealer in Norman, Okla. “She didn’t recognize several of the names,” aggiegrant06 wrote. “She thought it was fishy and asked me.”
The boyfriend knew the names in the blink of an instant message: They were football players at Oklahoma. Gotcha
Plus, in same story, we learn that SecDef Gates used to post anonymously on a sports blog,
Before Robert Gates took office as the nation’s secretary of defense in 2006, he was the president at Texas A&M. People knew exactly who he was — or did they? On TexAgs.com, he blended into the fan forum with a secret identity: ranger65, according to The Dallas Morning News. Gates often began his posts with “I’m told” as he went into different issues with Aggies devotees.
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July 12, 2007
ICANN NomCom Group Photo
Photo credit: Russ Mundy
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Internet User Counter
AMD has a cute page at its 50×15 project, which has counters with estimated counts of the world population and the estimated number of Internet users. The user number grows a lot faster than the population number.
50×15’s purpose is to draw attention to the hope that half the planet will be connected by 2015 — a status that AMD says on current trends won’t happen until 2030 unless someone ramps things up.
As of this posting, world population is about 6,607,372,000; internet usage about 1,140,247,000; and penetration at 17.2 5%. [corrected]
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July 11, 2007
Wonderful Question
Bret Fausett has a great question at Lextext.com ,
Someone came up with a new list of the seven man-made wonders of the world . Now, really, what’s more wondrous? Some old buildings and statutes...or the Internet? The Internet wasn’t even a finalist.
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July 07, 2007
Why is Spam of Such Low Quality?
W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al. — and under “et al.” asks why is there no attention to detail by spammers?
This is something I wonder about every day while I hold down the delete key to kill off several hundred spams. I can see the argument that some foreign spammers can’t do better as their English is too poor (but can’t they find something to copy?). I can see the argument that even cheap spam makes a buck, so that there’s a quality/effort sweet spot. What I can’t understand is why that’s the only point or why it so dominates the (mythical) quality-spam solution point.
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June 29, 2007
Automobile IPv6 Considered Harmful
I read far too many mailing lists. But once in a while you see something that makes you sit up. Like this exchange on Nanog in a thread entitled "An IPv6 address for new cars in 3 years":
>> ... Looks like someone, somewhere intends to be live with Pv6
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June 02, 2007
Zimmer On Google's Purchase of Feedburner
If you aren’t reading Dr. Michael Zimmer ’s thoughts “on the intersections of technology & values, privacy & surveillance, the Web & new media, culture & communication,” then you are missing out.
He’s become one of the most reliably thoughtful voices in my newsreader.
Today’s offering — just a routinely aha! comment — concerns Google & FeedBurner :
I haven’t had a chance to think long and hard yet about Google’s recent decision to acquire FeedBurner, and I’m sure most reactions will center on how this provides Google yet another medium to deliver contextual ads.
I think this must be right. More generally, as one of the first adopters of feedburner, I have mixed feelings about this acquisition. I’m happy that the founders are being rewarded, I’m glad feedburner’s long-term stability is assured, but I’m beginning to feel that there’s going to be Google in everything I touch online.
PS. Congratulations on the new Ph.D , Dr. Zimmer.
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May 21, 2007
Things You Learn Online
Did you know that E-Mail is for Old People ?
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April 24, 2007
Time to Apply for ICANN Appointments is Running Out
The deadline for the 2007 ICANN ICANN GNSO Council, ccNSO Council and At-Large Advisory Committee is 1 May 2007 23:59 UTC. Potential candidates have two one weeks to submit completed Statements of Interest to nomcom2007@icann.org .
The 2007 Nominating Committee will select:
3 seats on the ICANN
2 members to Generic Names Supporting Organization Council (GNSO)
3 members of the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) (from Africa, Latin America and Caribbean and Asia/Australia/Pacific regions)
1 Country Code Names Support Organization Council (ccNSO) member
Information about the 2007 Nominating Committee is available at http://nomcom.icann.org . Information on the formal call for Statements of Interest is available at http://nomcom.icann.org/formal-call-2007.html .
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April 16, 2007
I Think This is VERY Cool
Sounds like it wants to be an open-source public-spirited distributed YouTube on steroids.
Joho the Blog: Podcorps Nation The Conversations Network (a non-profit from the same folks who bring you IT Conversations ) has just launched Podcorps , an all-volunteer team of “stringers” who will record the audio and sometimes the video of public events that matter to people. FAQ OurMedia.org and the Internet Archive where they are freely available to anyone.
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March 19, 2007
Interesting Widget
Got this interesting TV widget from Google:
Dog on hind legs, for sure. But do I have a use for it?
Update : By popular demand, I’ve changed the code so that the TV doesn’t go on by default. You’ll have to click the arrow to make something happen. Should have figured that my readers like TV about as little as I do. (Although I am seriously thinking of getting one before the next election.)
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March 17, 2007
Discourse is OK, But Beware of Law
Great Firewall of China lets you test if your website is blocked by the Chinese government.
This blog is not blocked, but my homepage, law.tm is blocked. Go figure.
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March 14, 2007
Carl Malamud Deserves a Medal
If he didn’t deserve one already for all the great stuff he’s done, Carl Malamud surely deserves a medal for trying to make quality video of every congressional hearing easily available to the public — in a technology-neutral manner.
See Malamud’s Report to the Honorable Nancy Pelosi ; if you want even more info there’s the Internet Archive’s US Congress page .
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March 10, 2007
Trendspotting
Is John Edwards (or a staff droid) really using Twitter ?
Ross Masyfield, who thinks about this stuff in a much more organized way than I do, says Twitter is tipping the tuna which is his code for a network good tipping into importance (but something less than hitting the bigtime).
Myself, I don’t think twitter would improve my life. The last thing I need is more distractions and interruptions.
But it’s an interesting phenomenon. “Only connect” morphed into “always connect”.
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February 20, 2007
'Internet Hunting' Ban Gains Ground
As Miami’s own Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.
More States Move To Ban Internet Hunting : A Texas businessman who wanted to allow computer users to hunt from the comfort of their homes has instead spawned dozens of state laws banning the practice. Texas lawmakers shut down San Antonio businessman John Lockwood’s operationOn the one hand, this seems like a barbaric practice, and I’m perfectly happy to see it banned. On the other hand…is this our most pressing social problem?
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February 18, 2007
An Ethics Question
Crooked Timber,
You Can be The Ethicist :
Graduate Admissions Committee for the department in question is deciding whom to admit. For said discipline, as for several others, there is a website on which potential students gossip share information about the departments to which they are applying, and many do so anonymously. However, many such students say enough about themselves that if you are in possession of their file (as graduate admissions committee is) you can identify them with near, and in some cases absolute, certainty. One applicant to said department behaves on the website (under the supposed cloak of anonymity) like… well, very badly, saying malicious things about departments he has visited, raising doubts about whether he is honest and the kind of person it would be reasonable to want other students to deal with, and generally revealing himself to be utterly unpleasant.GAC
My knee-jerk reaction was that one better be pretty darn sure one has the right person before making a major decision about them based on something posted on a web site.
This reaction was reinforced by one of the many very interesting comments at Crooked Timber, which asks how the committee can be sure that this wasn’t a joe-job . Indeed, if it became known that this sort of attack was possible, what a way to do down one’s rivals and ex-inamoratas!
I can imagine a world in which a committee might ask for further information in light of something like this, but depending on what amounts to hearsay without some sort of confirmation is, I think, a dangerous road to tread. It might even be a denial of due process in a public process.
Here’s a slightly different hypothetical that may serve to test my intuition: suppose instead of a web posting that seems to be by the applicant, the committee received an unsigned letter accusing the applicant of the same bad behavior. What result, and why?
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February 13, 2007
February 09, 2007
The War Against TOR
Via the Chronicle of Higher Education, Caught in the Network — how campus cops tried to pressure Prof. Paul Cesarini to stop using TOR
(I tried TOR a while back and found it a bit clunky.)
Prof. Cesarini did not give in to their suggestion that he avoid teaching about TOR in his classroom, although he expressed some sympathy for the campus IT folks’ worry about what it might do to their network.
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January 29, 2007
Unfortunate Domain Names
Picking a domain name is an art. Some people are bad artists .
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January 26, 2007
Registrar Deletes Domain Name Based on 3rd Party Complaint
Declan McCullagh has a story about a stealth practice that apparently has been going on for some time, but blew up spectacularly the other day. GoDaddy pulls security site after MySpace complaints . (I’m quoted in the story.)
It seems a registrar has been deleting domain names in response to abuse complaints — mostly spam and child porn — for a long time. But this week their policy took down a legitimate internet security site on the theory it was a hacker haven — and did it with a minute’s warning (or maybe an hour’s warning, accounts differ).
If GoDaddy is your registrar, you might want to consider how you feel about that.
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January 14, 2007
Pandora's Peculiarities
I love Pandora , but it has done two strange things recently.
I recently took the Secunia Software Inspector out for a spin, and it in addition to finding all sorts of obscure software that it thought needed updating, and I thought needed deleting, it also found multiple outdated copies of Java and the flash player. So I deleted them all except the newest. Alas, now that I had only the newest version of the Flash player, Pandora stopped working -- it was convinced I was blocking the flash player from storing its data locally, even when I wasn't. I laboriously followed the directions in Pandora's FAQ and went through the flash privacy panel (I hate that obscure thing) and gave Pandora the rights to everything short of my first-born, but no dice. I eventually had to uninstall version 9.x of the flash player and downgrade to 7.x to make Pandora work again. This is odd.
And then there's the station I created with Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy". That's one weird station.
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January 12, 2007
Pirate Bay Wants to Buy Sealand
Pirate Bay launches bid to buy country
NEFARIOUS file-sharing site The Pirate Bay says it is planning to buy its own country and turn it into a copyright-free piracy paradise.£100 million ???
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December 29, 2006
Still More on Net Neutrality 'Victory' - Not?
Susan Crawford has a disturbingly convincing argument about why the AT&T concession is so much less than it seems .
Key point: DSL as we know it is so yesterday.
Earlier posts: More on Net Neutrality 'Victory' and Incredible Victory for Net Neutrality .
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More on Net Neutrality 'Victory'
Is the seeming victory for net neutrality all a sham? That's what I would have expected. Now, via Dave Farber's mailing list, comes a suggestion that maybe it is all smoke and mirrors:
Dave Burstein, who knows more about DSL than probably just about anyone, lets us know that the fine print in the deal actually may negate the network neutrality premise. The wording is a little tricky, but while they agree not to remove network neutrality from their standard network, hidden in the middle of a later paragraph is this sentence: "This commitment also does not apply to AT&T/BellSouth's Internet Protocol television (IPTV) service." At first that might seem innocuous, but Burstein has pointed out that AT&T's always planned on using the IPTV network as that high-speed toll lane it wants Google, Vonage and others to pay extra for. Burstein notes that AT&T isn't even set up to put quality of service on their existing network -- so the agreement not to violate network neutrality on that network is effectively meaningless. It is, he claims, a sleight of hand that successfully fooled a bunch of people into supporting the deal, and will probably help it get approval. AT&T promises not to violate network neutrality on a network they never intended to use that way, and carves out permission to use it on their new network, where they had planned all along to set up additional tollbooths.
On the other hand, Harold Feld remains the optimist :
It's not over until we get it into law. But we now have a strong definition for network neutrality and a clear acknowledgment of why we need it and how it will work.
And, Columbia's Tim Wu also thinks this is a big win . And he suggests that the exceptions are not necessarily that serious.
And, indeed, one of the shibboleths of the anti-neutrality crowd has been that the concept itself is too amorphous. Well, they can't say that any more.
I still think this debate mires us deep in the second or third best because, as I've said before , we are now stuck in a position where we can't trust the market to sort this one out, as we might usually want to do. The core problem is regulatory choices by the current administration. We used to have a rule which required the owners of the last mile of wire/fiber to give access on fair terms to competing providers.
This administration reversed that rule, so now there isn't true competition for the provision of household broadband. Instead most consumers face a monopolist or at best a DSL /Cable duopoly. If we had true competition at the consumer endpoint we at least have some hope that the outcome would preserve the public goods aspects have interoperability and a place for the small and quirky.
So for me the real issue isn't regulation to achieve "net neutrality". The real issue is keeping the consumer from being made captive in the first place. But that's not on the policy menu at present given the power of the (ever bigger) telcos.
For the record, here's some of the text of AT&T's letter, with some of the key exclusions,
This commitment does not apply to AT&T/BellSouth's enterprise managed IP services, defined as services available only to enterprise customers [16] that are separate services from, and can be purchased without, AT&T/BellSouth's wireline broadband Internet access service, including, but not limited to, virtual private network (VPN) services provided to enterprise customers. This commitment also does not apply to AT&T/BellSouth's Internet Protocol television (IPTV) service. These exclusions shall not result in the privileging, degradation, or prioritization of packets transmitted or received by AT&T/BellSouth's non-enterprise customers' wireline broadband Internet access service from the network side of the customer premise equipment up to and including the Internet Exchange Point closest to the customer's premise, as defined above.
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December 28, 2006
Incredible Victory for Net Neutrality
Amazing news this evening about an incredible victory for net neutrality. According to Harold Feld's Tales of the Sausage Factory , AT&T has submitted a new 20-page letter outlining the conditions it will accept in order to secure FCC approval of its merger with BellSouth. And they amount to a wholesale acceptance of the principle of net neutrality for both broadband and wireless.
If you've followed the merger issue, or the net neutrality issue at all, you really have to go read this. I'm stunned by how big a victory this is. If I didn't know Harold to be a stand-up guy, I'd think this was a hoax.
Update: Oh dear. They only last for two years . That's not so good. Although it does take us into the next administration...
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December 18, 2006
The GAO Has an RSS Feed
The GAO enters web 2.0 with the GAO Reports RSS feed .
This is good.
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December 07, 2006
The Internet Weighs Two Ounces
This guy estimated the weight of all the electrons in circulation that make up the internet. It adds up to two ounces: ADAMANT: Weighing the Web
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November 30, 2006
Fake Friends for Online Spaces
Via Slashdot | Who Says Money Can't Buy Friends? , I find a link to the amazing Fake Your Space , a service that for just 99 cents per month will provide users of MySpace and Facebook with all the fake friends they want two messages from a fake friend (all the fake friends you want costs lots more). Yes, impress the other kids with...no, lets let them tell it in their own words :
FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall. FakeYourSpace makes it easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend. Model for a lover. FakeYourSpace can make this happen! The possibilities are endless. You can have our Models leave you any type of customized message you may wish. Want to make an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend jealous? Models personally flirt with you MySpace or FaceBook? Then FakeYourSpace is just what you need. You never need to worry about people finding out about your fake friends because all of our Models profiles are set to private. You may be asking yourself why should you pay for something like this? Our answer to you is because it's dirt cheap $.99 2 messages per week for 4 weeks. So for only $.99 8 messages that will be there forever, not to mention our Models picture which will show up on your friends list. A pretty small price to pay for online popularity Amazing.
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November 28, 2006
It Seems There is a 'Great Firewall of Canada' Too
Slashdot has the info on The Great Firewall of Canada .
I smell a trend.
(Related item on The Great Firewall of Britain )
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November 27, 2006
Private Proxies for Everyone!
I guess there will be demand for these in the UK too:
Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor : Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking activists, or "hactivists," have created the latest, and some say most advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government censorship of the Web.
The program, called psiphon (pronounced "SY-fon"), will be released on Dec. 1 in response to growing Internet censorship that is pushing citizens in restrictive countries to pursue more elaborate and sophisticated programs to gain access to Western news sites, blogs and other censored material.
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Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country (psiphon.civisec.org), turning that person's computer into an access point. Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that computer through an encrypted connection and using it as a proxy, gain access to censored sites.
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Instead of publicly advertising the required login and password information, psiphon is designed to be shared within trusted social circles of friends, family and co-workers. This feature is meant to keep the program away from censors but is also the largest drawback because it limits efforts to get the program to as many people as possible.
So who will be the trusted third party, introducing the censored to the free?
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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished ($100 Laptop Dept.)
Oh joy. John Quartermain points to an all-too-convincing account by Charles Arthur in the Guardian, The price of humans who'll spam blogs is falling to zero .
All those $100 laptops that will be flooding the poorest parts of the third world...know what many of them will be used for? That's right: filling in captcha 's and defeating other Turning tests designed to block spam. After all, the places the laptops are going are the places where hourly wages are at the lowest.
It may be that the graphics on those machines aren't good enough for gold farming and other related activities in MMORPGs. Or they might be.
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UK to Firewall Inhabitants. Continet to Be Isolated
The most interesting blog post you missed last week is The Great Firewall of Britain , by Wendy Grossman,
We may joke about the "Great Firewall of China", but by the end of 2007 content blocking will be a fact of Internet life in the UK. In June, Vernon Coaker, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Home Department told Parliament, "I have recently set the UK Internet industry a target to ensure that by the end of 2007 all Internet service providers offering broadband Internet connectivity to the UK public prevent their customers from accesssing those Web sites." By "those", he means Web sites carrying pornographic images of children.
How on earth are they going to do this? BT's current practices provide one model,
Since 2004, BT's retail service is filtered by its Cleanfeed system, which last February the company reported was blocking about 35,000 attempts to access child pornography sites per day. The list of sites to block comes from the Internet Watch Foundation , and is compiled from reports submitted by the public.
But wait, how about a public Internet content regulator?
[IWF] was set up in 1996 as a way for the industry to regulate itself; the meeting where it was proposed came after threats of external regulation. If all ISPs are required to implement content blocking, and all content blocking is based on the IWF's list, the IWF will have considerable power to decide what content should be blocked. So far, the IWF has done a respectable job of sticking to clearly illegal pornography involving children. But its ten years have been marked by occasional suggestions that it should broaden its remit to include hate speech and even copyright infringement. Proposals are circulating now that the organisation should become an independent regulator rather than an industry-owned self-regulator.
Go read the whole thing.
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November 26, 2006
Today's Silly Quiz Question
Question: What do these people have (somewhat) in common?
William Hurt (74%)Robert H. Grubbs (64%)
Answer below...
The MyHertage facial recognition site thinks they look a bit like me:
I am glad to see that facial recognition technology still has a long way to go.
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November 01, 2006
Too Much of a Good Thing
The guys with the Mentos and Cokes are back with a new video Experiment #214 .
I thought the first set of videos were pretty funny; this one left me utterly cold.
I don't know if it's me, if the joke got old, if it's the much stronger marketing tie-ins to Coke, Mentos and iTunes, or if there's something about watching more than 500 liters of soda get splashed about that made me think of ancient Rome, but I didn't chortle even once.
Pity, as I like the unique revenue deal the video's authors struck with Google.
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October 31, 2006
The Wayback Machine Is Elsewhere
I'm a big fan of Archive.org and especially of the web-indexing project it calls the Wayback Machine.
How odd, though, to find that the Wayback Machine hasn't visited discourse.net since March 26, 2005 .
Do you suppose I offended it?
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October 06, 2006
US Falling Behind, Doesn't Even Know It
Susan Crawford had a visit from a Taiwanese legislator:
In Taiwan, internet access is virtually free.
At one point, he noted that Taiwan watches Japan and Korea very closely and tries to compete with them in making low-cost broadband access available. They're going great guns, so Taiwan is too.
He asked me whether the US was watching Europe closely to see what they were doing -- we talked about northern Europe, and the UK, and I told him about the European Commission's rejection of Deutsche Telekom's plans. "Aren't they your competitors?" he said.
I said that as far as I could tell the US doesn't care what Europe is doing with broadband access policy. We don't feel that they're competitors of ours. We're content to slide farther and farther behind, while feeling confident that we're leading the world.
Actually, this could be said about a lot more than just
DSL and telecommunications policy....
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October 05, 2006
Why Has Google Gone Laconic On Me?
UPDATE It turns out the problem was the Googlepedia extension that was running wild. (It replaces the right half of your search results with the wikipedia entry it thinks is most relevant to your search.) As the author of the extension put it, "Recent changes to Google meant my AdWords removal code also removed website descriptions." And he kindly provided a fix .Where oh where have my snippets gone?
All of a sudden, my Google search results have gone all laconic. Instead of the rich snippets and the offer of a cached copy, all I get are one-line links from page titles. I have reproduced this on three computers, attached to two different networks. Search results on the main google, but not on blog search, now look like this:
In contrast, the blog search still works like it used to:
This is disconcerting and much less useful than what I have become all too accustomed to. Is this an evil beta? A move to force me to sign in and personalize (and be tracked!)? Was there some copyright-based injunction no one told me about? Or is it just a bad day down at the server farm?
Or... is The End of Google as We Know It?
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October 04, 2006
DreamHost Unveils un-DRM Storage & File Store
DreamHost Blog » iTunes Music Sore ,
today, October 3rd, 2006, The Day Against DRM , we’re announcing a new (beta!) product:Files Forever! What is it? DreamHost Customers ) that allows you to sell your own digital files, a la iTMS.. but with a few key differences: No DRM Once you upload your file to sell, you pay a tiny one-time storage fee, and we serve it FOREVER URL . Anybody who buys a file somebody offers via Files Forever get an online backup of it included.. that is, they may re-download the file as many times as they want, FOREVER ! Any file you buy from Files Forever you can also “loan” to your friends via the service! They are then allowed to download the file as much as they want until you ask for it “back.” (This is awesome, trust me.) We handle all the payment processing / shopping cart stuff, and take just 5% + 50c for credit card fees. (We combine purchases to minimize these costs too.) You can even offer an “affiliate cut” for people who re-sell your files! That’s it pretty much!
You can also keep the files you upload private.. so Files Forever also doubles as a very cost-effective permanent online archive solution, as well as an easy way to email big files to your friends.
I think this is pretty clever.
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September 22, 2006
One Web Day
Susan Crawford of the Cardozo Law School has been tirelessly organizing One Web Day (see also the One Web Day Wiki ), a sort of Earth Day for the Internet.
And today is the day.
I feel like such a lout for not getting more excited. But then Earth Day never did that much for me either...
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September 19, 2006
Miami Cross Blogination: The Morality and Legality of the Craigslist Sex Baiting Prank
[This Miami Cross Blogination posting is by Gus Moore of Miami Beach 411 .]
Good afternoon ladies and gentleman. Class is now in session. I am very happy to be with you today, substituting for Professor Froomkin. The subject of today's session is:
Did the Craigslist Sex Baiting Prank Break the Law? By now I am sure many of you are familiar with Jason Fortuny's sex baiting prank at Craiglsit. For those who are not, I brought along
the cliff notes (
warning: not safe for work):
"Last Monday Seattle resident Jason Fortuny carried out a thought experiment into reality -- one I think anyone who has surfed Craigslist sex ads has entertained. He took a hardcore Women Seeking Men ad from another city and reposted it to see how many replies he could get in 24 hours. Then he published every single response -- photos, emails, IM info, phone numbers, names, everything, to a public wiki. Then they went public on Jason's LiveJournal page calling it The Craigslist Experiment, inviting readers to identify the CL ad's responders. "(...) Since then Jason has had *his* private info published to CL and been threatened physically, threatened with lawsuits, and has been hated on by everyone from online BDSM communities to Wired. Wired called him "sociopathic" while commenters are saying things like "Disclosing an email to the public is indeed a violation of privacy, and if anyone has a spine, they will take you down with a massive lawsuit that will make you regret ever doing this. You are a liar, a xenophobe, and deserve to have your ass beaten to within an inch of your life."
The story went viral, getting posted all over the web.some cheer Mr. Fortuny for outing these sexual deviants, while others want to tar and feather him .My questions for the class are: 1. Did Jason Fortuny break the law? 2257 violation ? A commenter at Threadwatch.org thinks it might be:
"But the biggest issue he could fall into is the fact that posting nude images online without proper 2257 documentation is illegal. You can’t post nude images online in the US without proof that the individual is 18 years of age or older. A single offense could be a fine of $25,000 and up to 5 years in jail." In summation, after carefully reviewing the statute, it looks to me like this prank fits the criteria for a privacy tort claim.dumbasses victims be awarded civil damages? Could there be a criminal indictment against Mr. Fortuny for posting nude images? Morally speaking, was the Craigslist sex baiting prank right or wrong?Sources: 4 Common Law Privacy Torts 2257. Record keeping requirements Are Accounts of Consensual Sex a Violation of Privacy Rights? Encyclopedia Dramatica - RFJason CL Experiment (warning: not safe for work)
Gus Moore is the Miami travel expert who founded the community website Miami Beach 411 . If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?
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September 08, 2006
Two From BoingBoing
Item one (really funny):
Ze Frank's nerdcore standup routine at TED : Here's a Google Video of Ze Frank doing a stupendously funny geeky standup routine at the TED Conference -- don't miss the dramatic reading of a Nigerian Letter! Link Item two (not surprising, but will I suspect be experienced as a betrayal by people who for some reason got invested in this Internet happening):
LonelyGirl15 is a filmmakers' project? : post from the LonelyGirl15 website's "creators." Danah Boyd has more. Link
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June 28, 2006
Banned from IRC Chat!
It takes you back to the old days.
Only I never did IRC (Internet Relay Chat) in the old days. (And don’t IM or text today — signs of fogeydom I suppose.)
But Tuesday, for the first time in my life, I seem to have be banned from an IRC
About three times a year I go onto slashnet, to the #slash channel to get some help/support with occasional problems I have with a slashcode-based web site I more or less run called ICANNW atch
I posted a three line query. Didn’t get an answer. There was basically no traffic at all — looks like people had better things to do on a Sunday. Late that day my research assistant solved the problem. I logged off.
Today I logged on thinking to ask how I might enhance
ICANNW atch’s
RSS feed so it carries full text instead of just headlines. But lo and behold:
slashnet
[INFO] Network view for “slashnet” opened.GECOS (real name) is not allowed on this server (Invalid real name) Please change it and reconnectGECOS (real name) is banned from this server)
I duly attempted to follow the FAQ DSL
Update : well, banned in the sense that if you don’t change the default user name in the Chatzilla plugin it gets banned…
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June 27, 2006
Blame Google
Emergent Chaos pokes deserved fun at the CYA tactics -- or simple ignorance -- of the Catawba County (NC) Public School System's explanation of how student social security numbers ended up being searchable.
Sadly, this is so far from unique...
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June 24, 2006
Sealand RIP?
Would-be data-haven and self-styled independent nation Sealand suffered a major fire , burning a substantial fraction of the nation's territory and requiring the evacuation of the entire resident population (one person).
Posted by Michael at
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June 15, 2006
More on Hedgehog Sexing
The other day I mentioned Robert Waldmann's troubles getting Google to show him an image of a hedgehog genital . This subject won't die. In Infothought: "Zen and the art of sexing hedgehogs" , Seth Finkelstein says it shows that searching images is harder than text, but that the information is there if you know how to find it via text searches.
Meanwhile Robert has extensively updated his original post and posted a small followup ...that suggests to me Seth is right...
Posted by Michael at
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June 13, 2006
Net Neutrality Song
A new, downloadable song by Kay Hanley, Jill Sobule, and Michelle Lewis in favor of net neutrality . Nice, but the chorus sounds too much like it's going to be "Hey Mr. Tambourine Man."
And coming on the heels of this gloomy analysis of the congressional vote -- heck, they even got Alcee Hastings to vote against it! -- it does put one in mind of Tom Lehrer's Folk Song Army (they "may have won all battles, but we had all the good songs").
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June 02, 2006
Links We Wish We Hadn't Followed Dept.
One of the dangers of spending a lot of time online is that sometimes you will follow a link to something that you really wish you hadn't.
So don't say I didn't warn you, that only two clicks away (I'm not linking to it, I'm just linking to a page that links to it ), is one of the most evil mind-rotting videos I've had the misfortune to see ... well, since whenever I last saw Bush speak, and possibly much longer. You really don't want to view this, and if you do you will be sorry.
Don't click. Really, don't click. It will upset you.
And if you do, don't blame me.
Update : Youtube.com, which hosts this video, appears to be down. Karma! [further update: the problem seems to be in the Bellsouth DSL network]
Posted by Michael at
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June 01, 2006
One More Reason I Should Switch to Wordpress
Six Apart, creators of Movable Type and, more recently, owners of LiveJournal, have decided to harrass LiveJournal users whose default icons depict breastfeeding .
Private censorship is a pain, but we can vote with our pocketbooks. Public censorship is much worse -- voting with your feet is much harder (and meanwhile they cart you off to jail ).
Posted by Michael at
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May 19, 2006
Hosting Review Payola
This is funny. Dreamhost, the cheap but imperfect hosts of this blog, have a blog of their own. And in a recent entry, DreamHost Blog | Web Hosting's Dirty Laundry , they describe their correspondence with a supposedly neutral and objective service that offers consumers reviews of hosting companies.
This is how hosting-reviews.com describes itself:
Hosting-Review is an independent provider of web hosting reviews. We base our reviews on knowledge, personal experience with webhosts and user feedback.
What emerges from their correspondence with Dreamhost, is a little different: if you want to be listed in their top 10, you pay them.
As an encore, Dreamhost offers a defense of their sales policies . It's written with a certain panache, and convincing as far as bandwidth and disk space go. But I can testify that there's nothing in the sales literature that I read which put me on notice as to their quite restrictive CPU throttling policies.
Basically, if this blog gets hit with a wave of spam, they threaten to pull the plug. And I've had to disable a number of PHP -intensive things to keep CPU usage down. DH's b
