The Daily Whim
All The News That Fits My Whim
Sun
Mar
16
2008
Curate Yourself Before The Media Does
The recent scandal involving Eliot “Ho No” Spitzer and a prostitute has brought a rather interesting aspect of copyright and our web personas to the legal forefront:
Since her identity was disclosed, newspapers and Web sites have splashed photos of Ashley Alexandra Dupre in suggestive poses on front and inside pages. Dupre was known as “Kristen” in court documents accusing Spitzer of paying thousands for prostitutes’ services.
Tue
Feb
19
2008
Don't Believe Every Email You Read, Especially Election Year
This feels a little like making a post to be certain that “you do know the sky is blue, don’t you?” But it has come to my attention that not everyone pays attention to the things that seem obvious to me.
For example, if you get a poorly formatted mass email sent to you and dozens of others, that claims things like “Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim” ... “ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into Office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran” and other seemingly scandalous claims, consider this: Hillary Clinton is seeking any half-assed angle she can scrounge to get back in the race, and if those things were true, don’t you think she’d be hammering on that daily? Yes, you know she would. The fact she isn’t ought to be one clue.
Tue
Nov
13
2007
An Open Email to Gmail
Dear Gmail,
I’m sorry to have to write you publicly like this, but you have left me little choice, and I have a couple of bones to pick with you.
1. Look in the bottom right corner of your logo. It says “BETA.” We won’t get into the argument that being in “BETA” since April of 2004 represents an underlying fear of commitment. We’ll just say that an app that presents itself as in “BETA,” even for 3.5 years, ought to have clear and simple ways for their “BETA” users to provide feedback about problems with the “BETA” application. You do not. I looked and looked, clicked and clicked. The closest thing I could find was a form for “Got a feature suggestion for Gmail?” So I suggested several things, including get out of “BETA” in less than one presidential term, or have an “easy to find” form for submitting problems.
Sat
Jul
14
2007
The Illusion of Security
The other day I set up a “need it now” domain for a client, and they also wanted the email to be separate from their current workload. So I forwarded the domain mail to a Gmail account I created for them.
The question comes, “is this secure?” While the tempered response is along the lines of “it’s as secure and your current email,” it’s not really the correct answer.
Sun
Jun
17
2007
Digital Ageism Part Two: No New Paradigms for Old Fogies
Fred Wilson apparently decided to spend part of his weekend making old people sputter.
I’ve been reluctant because I don’t want to pick at this scab of a meme. I really don’t want to be the guy who made it harder for anyone older than 30 to get funded in the web services market.
Who is developing this “clearer idea”? Who is developing the set of “design patterns”? It’s the younger generation. And its important to understand why.
Thu
May
17
2007
OMG 1'M ON TW1TTER!
I don’t exactly know why (yet), but I finally succumbed to the Twittering masses. Because I simply don’t have enough time-sucking vortexes, I suppose, as you can tell by the vast number of posts on this site recently.
Sat
Mar
17
2007
Spymac Spam, One Bad Netizen
You may have gotten an email stating “photodude” wanted you to signup at spymac.com. My apologies. Don’t sign up. Here’s what happened. I got an invitation from a friend that I had not heard from in a while. So I checked it out.
As part of the sign up, “Step One” asks you if you’d like to check and see if any of your Gmail contacts are already members. In my case, it found none. So I click on “Step Two” (note, I did not click “Invite” or “Spam Everyone,” I clicked “Step Two”).
Wed
Dec
20
2006
Lost In The Yahoo Desert
Dear Yahoo,
I know I don’t visit you very much. Not like some others. But you have this one page I like to visit, the “Most Viewed” News page. No, I’m not going to link it. Because it is virtually guaranteed that you’ll just change the link.
You see, today is the third time I’ve woken up to do a little morning news surfing and found that page gone. Poof. No redirect or forward to the page’s new location. No 404. Just an ugly dead end, redirected to a broken page.
Thu
Nov
30
2006
Regards, Later, Or Nothing At All
There’s an article in the NY Times that I found interesting, “‘Yours Truly, the E-Variations.” It’s about the various ways that people “sign off” in their emails, and how those variations are sometimes perceived by others.
Wed
Sep
27
2006
Taxing Questions
Late Monday night, I published an article reiterating my disdain for Donald Rumsfeld (among others), and re-using the phrase “unconscionable malpractice.”
About 12 hours later, at roughly 1pm EDT Tuesday, someone came to visit from IP 152.216.3.5:
Sun
Sep
17
2006
Earthlink, Come In From The Rain
You might recall me whining about Earthlink overcharging me by a factor of 100 for something called “USF Fee Recovery.” Thus, I read the following with interest last month:
Under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, BellSouth said Friday that it will stop collecting a $2.97 per month regulatory fee from its high-speed Internet customers.
Mon
Feb
20
2006
I Finally Bought My Name
12:40am Sunday night, er, Monday morning. I decided to check off something that’s been on my “to do” list for a while: buy reidstott.com. In case I run for office some day. I’d hate for a partisan squatter to grab it up.
Yeah, right. Anyway. Email shows the purchase transaction between PayPal and Godaddy was completed at 12:53am. Afterwards I log in at TextDrive and add a new virtual server to my account, as well as a new email user, via ugly geek magic called Webmin.
Thu
Feb
02
2006
A Decade of Internet Logins
In this afternoon’s email: “It’s your anniversary with EarthLink — and we wanted to say thanks for being a valued EarthLink member!”
Well, that’s not exactly the whole truth. It was indeed ten years ago that I signed up for an account with a company that had a three legged dog for a mascot and a dress code that said “if you are going to be in a meeting with folks wearing suits, it’s recommended that you wear some form of footwear.”
Thu
Jun
30
2005
Google Ooze
It sounds a bit clichéd to ask “what did we do before Google?” But recent events caused me to pause and wonder … how did they ooze into my life as much as they have?
Fri
May
20
2005
E-mail from an Arafat
I get e-mails from the downtrodden relatives of deposed leaders in Africa … all the time (and the occasional former Baathist). There’s apparently a stunning amount of money just floating around out there, waiting for some soul like me to offer my checking account number so it will have a place to land. And then I get my money for nothin’ and the chicks for free!
Thu
May
19
2005
Pay the Gray Lady, Part Two
“The New York Times announced today that it will start charging for some online content, beginning in September” [...] To me, this is a complete inversion of the pyramid, an application of meat world values to a digital environment. Bassackwards.
Mon
Feb
28
2005
Digital Priorities
E-mail has been on my mind a lot lately, for more than one reason (reason two is down below). I got an odd one this week. At least, I thought it was odd. Until I saw on Atrios’ site the kind of e-mail he gets: “You have one last #@%!ing chance to realize that you are making a mistake by being a #@%ing elitist douchebag … and start giving links to smaller blogs like me … and responding to your emails … or I am going to blog about this.”
Thu
Jan
20
2005
Verio and Comment Spam
Last month, I wrote an article entitled “MT + Comment Spam = Dead Site,” which drew attention to the issue of spammers taking down entire web servers with their digital assaults. Part of the problem was a bug in Moveable Type, and it soon got fixed. Another problem was that Google’s indexing of these spammers on our sites gave the scumbags the Page Rank boost they sought, and we just got some help there.
That leaves the spammers themselves. Almost every provider has a published Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) which bans customers from sending spam via their network. Including Verio, one of the web’s largest providers and hosts. But they’ve also currently got one of the web’s largest spammers on their network, and so far appear to have done nothing about it. Their published AUP is violated by this customer most every minute of every day, yet abuse@verio.net has been completely unresponsive.
In fact, it can be said that the spammer has been more responsive to complaints than Verio has.
» Read the Full Article (1620 words) »
Sat
Jan
08
2005
Pay the Gray Lady
Business Week has a long and detailed article on “The Future Of The New York Times.” It covers quite a bit of ground (the recent past, as well as the future), but there’s one aspect of the article that has the web a’bubblin’. It seems the New York Times is considering moving to an entirely subscription-based model, with no free access to their site. And there are those who think if that happened (and other newspapers followed their lead) “there are very few bloggers who would have anything left to say.”
» Read the Full Article (2252 words) »
reidstott: Feeling burned out today. Too much Independence, I guess.
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Quotes & Links
“You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country … John McCain is aware of the Internet.” Mark SooHoo, McCain’s “deputy e-campaign manager”
“For whatever reason, Real Life seems more pressing and important now. There’s yardwork to be done, house maintenance to perform, paying work to be attended to, computer languages to learn, etc., and they all seem far more important now than the urge to Find Someone On The Internet Who Is Wrong, And Correct Them, delightful as that often is.” David Fleck
“Internet fame is like regular fame only without all the annoying ‘money’ and ‘power.’” Michael Ian Black
Blogging Kills? — “Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.” If you are experiencing “nonstop strain,” I’d say you’re not blogging. You’re working. And it sounds like a bad gig. You should quit. Because typing your thoughts does not cause heart attacks, but other things do.
The Connection Has Been Reset — “In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of China’s electronic control but its new refinement—and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay. According to engineers I have spoken with at two tech organizations in China, the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—certain Internet cafés, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games.”
Gmail: Report Bug — Just today, using the older version of the Gmail interface, I noticed a prominent new link at the top of the page, “report bug” (it does not seem to appear in the newer version). Perhaps my message got through.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Monkey Boy’s three-legged race — “Ballmer said he loved when his rivals merged, because whenever the also-rans in any market start teaming up they might as well be waving a white flag. Because it’s over. You’ve beaten them. You’ve driven them to despair. They haven’t been able to beat you on their own; there’s no way they’ll do it together.”
Joyent switches to Dell servers solely because Sun makes theirs so hard to buy — “We’ve talked with all sorts of Sun sales people. They put us into a special group for internet companies. We have made personal appeals to senior executives at Sun (that generally are answered … thanks for that). We’ve passed out bottles of 18-year old scotch. But the fact remains: every time Joyent engages Sun sales, they can’t really sell me something.”
This is the Future of the Internet — A Stupidity Filter for YouTube comment threads. Someday Bayesian/AI filters like this will be standard procedure, built in to browsers by default, and the only way to manage the corpus of idiocy that user-generated content can become at such popular sites.
Why Would Anyone Use Comcast? — We’ve heard they have bandwidth limits, and though they won’t tell you what they are, lots of people have been cut off. Now, we read they are combining with Symantec to filter email, including political content, in a manner that is apparently ripe for exploitation by political opponents.
20×200 — “Great Art. $20. Really.” I love this idea, it has a lot of potential.
“That’s the rational premise behind my spending hours of billable time adjusting my Facebook preferences. The real reason, of course, for all this stuff, is that it provides a way to blow off work you should be doing, while creating the illusion that you are achieving something.” Jeffrey Zeldman
NY Times to End Charges on Web Site — “What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to gain access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.” Um, yeah, that’s what I said nearly three years ago.
Are You Getting Quechup Spammed? — “Enter the password, however, and it will proceed to mail all your contacts without asking permission.” It sounds like “Quechup” is the new Spymac. If you get an invite (and it won’t be from me), ignore it.
“we used to gaze deep into our own navels and find something of substance. now it’s just pictures of food, rss feeds and aggregated links, in 140 characters or less.” alison
Google: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet — “They’re looking to come in and completely usurp the telcos at both the business level and the consumer level.”
The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer — “While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.”
“We’re all just driving in our cars, flipping each other off and cussing each other out when we get cut off. Imagine doing that to someone in the grocery store, or at work. The Internet hides us just like our cars, and it helps keep us detached from the fact that there are real people on the other end, not the morons or villains it’s convenient for us in our outrage to invent.” Wilson Miner
For Pornographers, Internet’s Virtues Turn to Vices — Perhaps the ultimate evidence of how the Internet can be disruptive to established businesses, even those who first profited from it.
LOL Feeds — Combine two pointless but fun web trends, (LOL Cats and Twitter), and you can end up with something like this.
