enormous iNCoNgrUiTieS|A Beacon of Intermittence

Look how good Google treats their employees. It’s enough to make you go Goo googly goo goo.

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The Internet is dangerous:

Eleanor Coner, the SPTC’s information officer, said: “Children are very IT-savvy, but they are rubbish at researching. The sad fact is most children these days use libraries for computers, not the books. We accept that as a sign of the times, but schools must teach pupils not to believe everything they read.

“It’s dangerous when the internet is littered with opinion and inaccurate information which could be taken as fact.

Dangerous? Oh my freaking god, it’s dangerous to use Wikipedia.

At one college in Vermont in the US, a history professor found several students repeated the same error in exam papers. On discovering the information came from Wikipedia, the college outlawed its future use.

How about educational institutions adapt and improvise. Instead of banning Wikipedia, how about teaching students how to do research in the information age, you know, using the Internet. How about teaching how to corroborate information from different sources; teaching the different technologies used to ferret out plagiarism; teaching how to ensure that they are not falling for a bunch of bullshit. This is what today’s students need. What they don’t need is for some dumbass professor banning portions of the Internet because they failed a history question. What a fucking moron. I think it might be time for some educators to consider retirement or a change of profession if they can not get with the new paradigm of the information age.

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If these guys are so smart, how can they be so wrong? A leading psychiatrist, Dr Jerald Block on Internet addiction:

“The relationship is with the computer. It becomes a significant other to them. They exhaust emotions that they could experience in the real world on the computer through any number of mechanisms: emailing, gaming, porn.”

I can hear in my mind the German psychiatrist played by Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels explaining this phenomena.

But with all due respect, no one is having a relationship with a computer. A lot of smart people still dont “get” the Internet. The Internet is not abstract; it’s real. All these sufferers of “Internet addiction” are not suffering alone with their computer, as it might appear to the outside, untrained eye. People who are spending their lives on the Net are spending it with other people; other people playing games; other people emailing; other people looking at porn. There is a whole other world through the portal of the computer, a world not restricted by physical limitations. A psychiatrist of all people should understand this.

“But there’s not any dancing, is there?” asks the Church Lady.

Oh yeah, there is lots of dancing.

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I haven’t heard anything about this case for a while. I didn’t even know there was a case until reading this story but I am certainly glad to see some bad stuff happening to Lori Drew. Los Angeles US Attorney Thomas O’Brien:

“Any adult who uses the Internet or a social networking website to bully another person, particularly a vulnerable teenage girl, should realize this has serious consequences.”

But using the word “bully” to paint this sick psycho bitch, Lori Drew is unfortunate. Psychological abuse I suppose is what bullying is all about but what Lori Drew did is on a whole different level and labeling Drew as a bully confuses the distinction. In the schoolyard case of the bully, which I believe is a natural phenomena that has to to identified and corrected at some point before junior high before it becomes a problem, the combatants are all children who are at least on the same playground. Furthermore, when an adult bullies a child it’s called abuse and when abuse leads to death it’s called homicide.

Lori Drew is no better than a pervert who would lurk around the school zone looking to abduct, torture and murder a young schoolgirl. I mean, that is fundamentally exactly what she did. Lori Drew abducted Megan Meier’s attention online by impersonating Josh Evans, a fake identity, then tortured her mind with false promises of acceptance and affection using said fake identity, and then Lori Drew, with intent and malice aforethought, murdered Megan’s soul.

Guilty as charged!

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The very nerve of some people:

If convicted [of insulting Justice Belinda Ang Saw Ean,] Nair, a former Singaporean lawyer now based in California, faces up to one year in prison and a 5,000 dollar (3,630 US) fine.

Last Thursday, another charge accused him of calling Singapore judges “corrupt.”

I just can’t imagine the audacity of some of these “bloggers.”

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Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, has written a book called The Dumbest Generation that to me demonstrates how a misguided education system is failing to capitalize on the biggest technological boon since the dawn of mankind.

The dawn of the digital age once aroused our hopes: the Internet, e-mail, blogs, and interactive and ultra-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children. The terms “information superhighway” and “knowledge economy” entered the lexicon, and we assumed that teens would use their know-how and understanding of technology to form the vanguard of this new, hyper-informed era.

That was the promise. But the enlightenment didn’t happen.

According to recent reports from government agencies, foundations, survey firms, and scholarly institutions, most young people in the United States neither read literature (or fully know how), work reliably (just ask employers), visit cultural institutions (of any sort), nor vote (most can’t even understand a simple ballot). They cannot explain basic scientific methods, recount foundations of American history, or name any of their local political representatives. What do they happen to excel at is – each other. They spend unbelievable amounts of time electronically passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, savoring the thrill of peer attention and dwelling in a world of puerile banter and coarse images.

While fifty million screwed up kids is a major problem and could have dire implications well into the future, the root cause is not the technology. The root cause is that “we assumed that teens would use their know-how and understanding of technology to form the vanguard of this new, hyper-informed era.” Well, having faster and easier access to pizza and immediate knowledge of when any one in the circle jerk, aka “Fave 5″, wanks in the shower is not exactly what was in mind with “more aware”.

Our public education system is still trying to come up to spec with a basic curriculum that hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. For thirty years the public school system has been striving to crank out a kid with basic math and basic literacy when we need to be cranking out kids with basic technological skills, like reading and understanding complicated information, fundamentals of network connectivity and security, identity protection, resource planning, data modeling, programming, etc.

Using technology and understanding technology are two completely different things. The use of technology should allow capable students to complete current primary and secondary curriculum by the end of junior high. Understanding technology allows someone to build such learning systems.

The kids haven’t failed society, society has failed the kids. I know that is cliche, but there ya go. I don’t mean in general like when the liberals say society creates serial killers, I mean specifically the boondoggle money scam that is public education. The government monopoly on education has to come to end or we will continue to fail each successive younger generation. In the end we are failing ourselves.

This rambling piece by Susan Greenfield at The Daily Mail would also seem to think we are doomed but throws pharmacology into the mix with technology.

Human identity, the idea that defines each and every one of us, could be facing an unprecedented crisis.

It is a crisis that would threaten long-held notions of who we are, what we do and how we behave.

It goes right to the heart - or the head - of us all. This crisis could reshape how we interact with each other, alter what makes us happy, and modify our capacity for reaching our full potential as individuals.

And it’s caused by one simple fact: the human brain, that most sensitive of organs, is under threat from the modern world.
Unless we wake up to the damage that the gadget-filled, pharmaceutically-enhanced 21st century is doing to our brains, we could be sleepwalking towards a future in which neuro-chip technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, and between our bodies and the outside world.

I wonder if Professor Greenfield just finished reading Neuromancer or something. I hope this isn’t her worst case example:

Already, an electronic chip is being developed that could allow a paralysed patient to move a robotic limb just by thinking about it.

Oh my, we wouldn’t want that. I bet if Ms Greenfield lost an arm she wouldn’t be such an alarmist about such capabilities. I’m sure there were some people alarmed way back when someone first used a stick to get ants from out of the ground.

Of course there are always ethical considerations to any issue:

What would such aspirations to be “perfect” or “better” do to our notions of identity, and what would it do to those who could not get their hands on the pills? Would some finally have become more equal than others, as George Orwell always feared?

To think that there is not already a group who are more equal than everybody else is naive. Even in the less equal group there are those who are still more equal than others in that subgroup. And so it goes on down to the bottom of the barrel. That is simply the nature of things.

Hopefully, the technological advances for a longer, healthier, and more rewarding life wont come down to swallowing a handful of pills everyday. State-of-the-art pharmacology is not the best long-term solution; there is too much risk with unknown long-term side-effects. The known side-effects are bad enough. But whatever the ultimate smart, healthy and fit technology evolves I think the hope should be that many of those who are now less equal than others can someday be as equal as some.

Although Greenfield doesn’t feel too happy about the widespread prescription of feel happy drugs, with which I tend to agree, her primary target appears to be violent video games. Arguing against technological advancement in support of an anti-videogame thesis is a tough road to hoe and futile at best.

What worries me is that if something as innocuous as imagining a piano lesson can bring about a visible physical change in brain structure, and therefore some presumably minor change in the way the aspiring player performs, what changes might long stints playing violent computer games bring about?

These seriously screwed up kids we continuously see paraded on the news are a result of parenting problems, not an over abundance of violent video games. And I don’t mean bad parents either– though there are plethora of those — I mean absent parents. Most middle-class homes require two workers to meet their obligations. Holding down a full-time job, keeping a house, and raising kids is a lot of hard work. Kids are getting the short shrift.

Call me old-fashioned but I firmly believe that if one parent could stay home and keep an eye on the little darlings and teach them right from wrong and direct their minds away from the video game console there probably wouldn’t be near the concern about violent video games resulting in nefarious teen activities.

We could be raising a hedonistic generation who live only in the thrill of the computer-generated moment, and are in distinct danger of detaching themselves from what the rest of us would consider the real world.

Considering how many people today spend most of their time with faces glued to tiny little cell phone screens, I think this detachment has largley come to pass and not just with the younger generation. Few things rile me more than to be trying to have a conversation with someone who is constantly fidgeting with a cell phone.

Heck, for all we know, we might be the ones on the outside of reality. Someone on the other end of the little screen might be saying, “Dammit I hate it when she is talking to other people when I am trying to text her.” In the future maybe the world will exist primarily through the portal of a gadget. Even when face to face we will still interface through the gadgetry. When you walk up to a group a people in the mall you will have to introduce them to the people you’re connected with on the net and you all stand around together chatting. Maybe the mall isn’t even really there.

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Oh my fucking god and it couldn’t come a moment too soon…

Some Internet experts believe the next generation of the Web — Web 3.0 — will make tasks like your search for movies and food faster and easier. (Link)

Maybe by Web 7.0 we will see some truly ungodly technology and we will able to search for movies and food way, way faster and easier.

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When was the last time anything good came from giving someone the password to your email account? Amazingly Elaine Schmidt had the audacity to publicize her stupidity to the LA Times:

“I thought I was just signing up to read my friend’s message,” Schmidt said. “At no time did I think I was authorizing [Reunion.com] to access my online address book.”

Hello, you gave them your email password. That’s about as close to authorization as you can get without sending a certified letter and power of attorney. My God woman! When was the last time you had to give out the password to your email to read a friend’s message? You don’t need to give out your PIN when you use you debit card, do you?

Schmidt’s cohort in confusion, Vera Eck, a Santa Monica psychotherapist, also received an email from Reunion.com and, you guessed it, she also went to Reunion.com and gave her email password.

I wonder how many e-cards these mo’s opened before figuring out no one was thinking about them except for some spammers in a basement in some faraway place. I am thinking the majority of people in the world might be too stupid to use the Internets seriously.

One simple rule for using the Internets: Never, ever, ever, never give out any passwords or other personally identifiable information over the Internets. Don’t do it. No matter what.

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The first rule of Fight Club, you DO NOT talk about Fight Club.

La Vernia police say a group of teens would meet in a school bathroom and then start fighting. They got caught because they used the internet to let everybody know what they were doing.

Posting the fights on the Internet definitely falls under rule number one.

If society, meaning the public schools in this case, refuses to let boys be boys, this is the kind of crap you get. You can’t sissify half a species because some do-gooder liberals say so. You can’t undo God given genetics with stupid social policies.

Take these boys outside during PE and let them put on some boxing gloves or spar with pugil sticks.

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Like having access to all human knowledge is an addiction.

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From Slashdot:

“The editorial section of the American Journal of Psychiatry for March offers the opinion that Internet addiction is a ‘compulsive-impulsive’ disorder, and should be added to the official guidebook of disorders. The editorial characterizes net addiction as including ‘excessive gaming, [online] sexual pre-occupations and e-mail/text messaging’. From the article: ‘Like other addicts, users experience cravings, urges, withdrawal and tolerance, requiring more and better equipment and software, or more and more hours online, according to Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Dr. Block says people can lose all track of time or neglect “basic drives,” like eating or sleeping. Relapse rates are high, he writes, and some people may need psychoactive medications or hospitalization.”

If you really want to know what is addictive I’ll tell you: The psychoactive medications prescribed by psychiatrists for anti-depression and OCD are very addictive. And what’s more, these are all relatively new medications and the doctors a) don’t really know how they work and, b) don’t know what the long-term effects of the drugs will be.

Seeing a psychiatrist for treatment of a made up disorder like “Internet Addiction” will likely cause more harm than good if there is not something else already the matter with you. I recommend to anyone considering a shrink for compulsive Internet habits to first try simply cutting off Internet service and see if the problem doesn’t clear up. If there is still a problem, turning off the Internet wont help and the problem will manifest in some other harmful behaviors.

I mean, certainly sex can be an obsession/compulsion/addiction but getting sex from the Internet seems to be just a means to an end and sex is still the root addiction. How can Internet sex addiction be a different addiction that just plain ol’ sex addiction? How can an obsession/compulsion for pornography be different from an obsession/compulsion for Internet pornography?

I’ve been there and done that and the Internet is nothing at all like an addiction to Cocaine, or Effexor for that matter. My online experiences predate the WWW going back to the early eighties with bulletin board systems (a la CompuServe) accessed over 300 baud dial up modems. The only times I’ve hunkered down over the Internet for unhealthy victim-like periods was with the advent of high-speed Internet at home. Ooooh all that free porn. If anything, the Internet cured me as if with aversion therapy since after only a short while I didn’t care for watching non-stop porn from any and every walk of life. On the other hand Cocaine addiction never wears off.

Today I spend almost all my time on the Internet either for work, research, or entertainment and I hardly ever look at porn. Knowing that it’s always there for immediate consumption is a turn-off I guess, yet the Internet is always there for consumption and is only sometimes a tun-off. Therefor I conclude that the Internet is not addictive, it’s the stuff that people do that is addictive.

Take driving for example. Looking at the highways and byways one might conclude that driving is addictive when in reality we are addicted to going where we want when we want. With respect to Occam, many times the obvious is not the case.

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Cult of the Dead Cow has released Goolag, an automated “Google Hacking” or data mining tool.

[T]hanks to a program that automates what has typically been painstaking manual labor. The program’s authors say they hope it will “screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place.”

Google hacking doesn’t mean anyone’s hacking Google’s Web site. Rather, it refers to a sophisticated searching technique used to uncover flaws in the way Web sites handle confidential details, such as public files containing password and credit card numbers and clues about the vulnerability of the site’s own servers.

The Cult of the Dead Cow is probably one guy, or gal I suppose. Maybe a Vegan making fun of meat eaters with the name.

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DEMOCRACY PREVAILS IN PAKISTAN: An inter-ministerial committee has proclaimed “The filthy, rotten, YouTube has been banned in Pakistan. The People have spoken. Thank You. That is all.”

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I downloaded a DiggNation podcast and gave it a listen on the way home from work this evening. The hosts, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, sit around and crack wise about the most popular/peculiar stuff “Dugg” on Digg. I realize I dissed Digg just the other day but they are getting a plug now because I navigated over there in search of podcasts and Digg delivered podcasts.

The radio has been out in the Suburban for quite some time now and the fix was at first a portable FM Stereo, which was okay after not having any sounds at all but grew into a hassle in short order so I gradually drifted back to riding in silence. Every now and then when the prospect of the long silent commute became too much to overcome with a normal mindfuck exercise I would retrieve the ancient and unwieldy bit of technology from the backseat foot well from under the jackets, pillows, books and other various and sundry stuff that inevitably accumulates there over any brief amount of time. After several minutes of trying to dial in a non-Hispanic station and fiddling with the coat hanger to gain optimal reception I could momentarily drown out a bad case of commuter’s tedium with a dose of frequency modulated bliss.

Under the best circumstances the portable stereo was a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency type solution due to the incessant barking from car dealership commercials which effectively counteracted any benefit of distraction provided by the programming. Besides I figured eventually I was going to brain myself by driving into a culvert while trying to adjust the damn thing so I needed a better solution, other than having the radio fixed.

Now I have acquired a digital voice recorder that can also play mp3s. I didn’t intend to use the DVR as a music device when I bought it (I got a pretty nice one, as far as recorders go, an Olympus WS-320M) but I have since found it can hold the entire unabridged audio book of Episode I: The Phantom Menace with a few hundred megabytes of storage to spare.

Well, friend let me tell ya, after just one week of hi-fidelity, commercial-free, self-selected audio instead of silence filled with the rattletrap sounds of an eleven-year-old Suburban in the final throes of it’s life commingled with the rattletrap sounds ricocheting inside my idle mind, I’m hooked on podcasts and audio books. I recommend it highly. I’ll be starting Star Wars: Shadow Hunter this evening. It is a prequel to Episode One and Darth Mal is one of the main characters according to the synopsis I received from the donor of the audio “tapes.”

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JILLS GOT IT FIGURED OUT: Jill’s Next Record. And check out the tote board.

Here is another One Artist, One Label post I made several years ago.

UPDATE: As a matter of fact, any artist who follows such a business plan, I offer my Internet Web 2.0 dot net flashy Technical Services for a small piece of the action.

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Time Warner has a new idea to cap the Internet:

“According to a leaked internal memo, Time Warner Cable is testing out tiered bandwidth caps in their Beaumont, TX division as a way to fairly balance the needs of heavy users against the limited amount of shared bandwidth cable can provide. The plan is to offer various service tiers with bandwidth fees for overuse, as well as a bandwidth meter customers can use to help them stay within their allotment. If it works out, they will consider a nation-wide rollout. Interestingly, the memo also claims that 5% of subscribers use over 50% of the total network bandwidth.”

I don’t know, but instead of punishing your best customers, it seems to me that the better business strategy would be to get the rest of the subscribers to use the service more.

—————

(Via Slashdot)

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Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on free data sharing:

Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an “information economy”. The vision of an economy based on information seized the imaginations of the world’s governments. For decades now, they have been creating policies to “protect” information — stronger copyright laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect anti-copying technology.

The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you’ve paid for it.

…

The world’s governments might have bought into the old myth of the information economy, but not so much that they’re willing to ban the PC and the internet.

Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

It’s a good article explaining why the Internet was no bubble for a lot of people but I think his premise is off. It’s not so much that the government bought into the “old myth” of how information needs to be secured instead of shared, it’s that they need it to be that way.

The old myth is not a myth. In a spice economy, he who controls the spice controls the universe. In an information economy, he who controls the information controls the universe.

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A FIELD GUIDE TO HIRING PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS - Joel Spolsky lays it out.

Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna come work for you. So this section will serve as a kind of field guide to [recruiting]developers: what they’re looking for, what they like and dislike in a workplace, and what it’s going to take to be a top choice for top developers.

I can confirm that after having worked on two side-by-side 20″ inch plasma displays at my previous job, the little 15″ LCD I now labor over seems like torture.

But what the heck, I’m just a contractor so the advice doesn’t really apply to me anyway. Even this tech tip from Computer Geeks TechTips leaves programmers off the list of those who can most benefit from the increasingly more economical configuration, citing the typical user, gamers, engineers, and business people like stock brokers and such. But not the lowly computer programmer who makes all that stuff possible.

Is that typical? Would a real computer geek leave himself off the list of those who would most benefit from a cool display ugrade. The CEO probably works in a cube over there Computer Geeks.

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Whoever is in charge of the Surf Cam at Surfside, which has been featured in my sidebar since the inception of EI, is really letting the place go to hell. The site is pretty much static for the most part so does not really require much maintenance, or creativity for that matter; the main attraction being regurlarly updated still shots of the beach conditions and a semi-regurlarly updated surf outlook.

The surf cam photo up right now is eleven days old. Pathetic. I bet Gary Koerner is rolling in his grave, unless of course he was cremated. Then that would be pretty much impossible.

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I don’t think I mentioned this before but this past spring I taught beginning and advanced Flash animation, as well as some other computer courses, at the Brazosport College CE center. I am scheduled to teach the Flash advanced course this August. As an intro to the course I will definitely be using this clever piece of Flash animation creayed by Alan Becker as a demonstration of what someone with a bit of imagination and a lot of extra time on their hands can do with Flash.

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Microsoft Launches Security for Windows

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I NEVER COULD QUITE UDERSTAND the mentality of people who fall for the fake emails requesting private information, aka phishing. Well, here is some insight to why that technique is so successful.

I came across this story at F-Secure. If you run Windows or get on the internet at all, you should check out F-Secure. Currently, at the top of their blog page they have a poll for what anti-virus is being used most. You will probably be surprised by the results.

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I tell you what, something is phishy in Denmark.

I don’t understand the mentality of enforcing dope pushing laws in one place but not in another. Same with fraud and deception laws. My private email box, which I own and pay the costs to run, is like the worst corner in the the worst neighborhood you can imagine–minus the violence. The point being, they are pushing dope and running scams in both places.

At the least, spamming my email box with offers of ten different kinds of dope from ten different outfits is malicious mishchief. But to me, it amounts to pushing dope. And then you have the eBay and CitiBank security verification requests or the fucking Nigerian who needs my help getting some money in country.

It’s not me I am so worried about, I can take care of myself. It’s the children. I am worried for the children. I demand the police, local state and federal, put a stop to it all. I want my streets, and my email box, cleaned up. And I want them cleaned up now.

Anywhere else and the narcotics teams and vice squads would be all over it. RICO and all that. Serious charges and serious jail time.

On the internet, the perps operate with impunity. Why? Because the respective police powers can’t stop them, that’s why. That’s how much we rely on police power to make people act right.

It is for the same reason that some neighborhoods in the real world are runnng rampant with crime and others aren’t. If the people refuse to obey the laws and the police aren;t willing to go in with violent police force, the laws are ignored. Laws are only for the suckers who obey laws.

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[Editor’s note: To limit the hateful comments and the hate mail, the victim’s name has been elided from this post.]

I was Googling to see if there has been any new information on [a certain] murder case I wrote about involving the young pregnant woman who was shot in the head while riding a motorcycle last Sunday. So I start with the simplest search using the victim’s name. On that search, my friend Trench over at News of Doom is #1.

After clicking through several pages of results, I notice first that only a couple of the entries on the first page had anything to do with story. But then I notice that my site is not included in the fist five pages. That is not a good sign for my PageRank. So I do a little more checking. I do a search for ‘[Victim’s name] shot’, no quotes.

Pretty much the same results. Trench is at the top, then ABC news, then the random combinations of the victims first name and last name begin. Hmm. I’ll try the “[victim’s name] shot”, using the quotes to limit results to only the victim. Only five listings and my site is not among them. Now I’m pissed.

I click on the Google message at the bottom saying some similar sites were left out but by clicking you can see the omitted results. There I am at number three. I was culled by Google. Rastards.

And, by the way, there has been no recent coverage of the investigation into this tragic case, if there even is an investigation.

Previous stories on this site about [the certain murder case]:

• Update: Woman motorcyclist shot
• No motive, No suspect!”

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You heard it here a two years ago and several times since. It has been slow in coming but check out this article about a rock band making it big without backing from a big record company.

What makes Arctic Monkeys remarkable is that they are an indie band on an independent label, and that they achieved their sudden success almost entirely through grassroots promotion on the web.

The foursome got together in 2002. They started playing shows around Sheffield and passing out free CDs at gigs. They encouraged their fans to trade the tunes online and to post them to websites and P2P networks. Yes, they encouraged file trading. Eventually, more and more people found them on MySpace or on their website via word-of-mouth, and their reach started to widen. Fans started booking them in venues farther and farther away from their hometown. Wherever they played, everyone in the crowd knew the words to the songs. This is all before they even signed to a record label.

Curiously, after achieving phenomenal success on their own, they contracted with a record company. A better deal, I think, would have been cut with Wal-Mart. Heh, a distribution deal with Wal-Mart is better than a deal with one of the powerful RIAA members. The kicker is that all it cost Wal-Mart to provide the service is some disk space and a few minutes of a webmaster’s time. Maybe $150 bucks.

I wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Wal-Mart open low-cost, state-of-the-art recording facilitiesLocated in regions like Austin, Memphis, L.A., New York–wherever this is a robust music scene–for use by artists with whom they have distribution deals.

The main reason the RIAA are so vicious in protecting their copyrights is because they know that in the very near future that music is all they will have the rights to sell. They are not worried about the future because they rightly figure they are not in it. The musicians will finally wake up and small the java realizing that the web is the only place they need to be. Then they will realize that they don’t need a big record company with expensive production equipment and media contacts to do it. They just need a good web strategy and a good web development team.

My previous articles on the demise of the big recording companies and RIAA :

• One Artist, One label
• Recording industry boo boo
• SCO suffers setbacks, retreats
• EZ-Jackster

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I am sitting here on Sunday morning sipping a cup of joe, surfing through the channels, and on Bravo I find a television show called Outrageous and Contageous Viral Videos that has a narrator running the audience through clips that you can find at any number of sites on the internet. Here are a few of the viral video clips featured:

• Cheney’s Got a Gun
• John Ashcroft singing
• Buzz Aldrich punching a guy
• Brittney’s baby riding in the lap gaffe
• Cartoon of Bill O’Riley talking dirty on the phone
• Howard Dean’s infamous Yeearrgh!!!
• A big fat guy got a running start and hurled himself into snack machine, vertical belly-flop style, smashing the front glass to smithereens.
• The Trunk Monkey vehicle security system, for when just getting your car back isn’t enough
• And finally, The Mercury Mistress

Bet you’ve seen some of ‘em. As a matter of fact, I bet that half of everyone with broadband has seen at least one of the clips featured. But I bet very few people with dial-up connections has seen any of them at all. Curiously, I don’t recall any high-speed internet commercials during the show.

They teased the video clip of the week over at Bravo.com. Gotta spread the traffic around. Pretty smart application of media convergence. Soon the blurring lines between the wired net and the broadcast net will not exist at all.

Outrageous and Contageous Viral Videos would have been way better than surfing for the clips if it weren’t for all the same stupid commercials that viewers are constantly bombarded with on television. But the show was still pretty good relative to everything else on the dial because I didn’t have to look at a lot of bad clips to find the few really good ones. It doesn’t take a lot of time to download just a few clips, but it does take a lot of time to download a dozen or two, most of which are not worth the effort.

The people programming the television channels don’t “get it” and therefore bombard their customer’s with repetitive, asinine commercial interruptions. Maybe the majority of people aren’t bothered by the interruptions but I will rarely endure them, preferring to watch my entertainment uninterrupted.

The networks are in desperate need of a better way to present advertisement. Until they figure that out, the network’s will continue to bleed customers and television bandwidth will be all about delivering the best of the internet to their remaining customers who do not yet have access to high-speed internet.

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It has been several weeks now since getting any major referral spam. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve deleted a single blatant Texas-hold-em referral in two weeks. It’s weird actually. Not that I am complaining.

Not to worry, I just trashed about half a dozen. I had no illusions that the spammers were gone for good. But, still, I like to see the spam patterns change every now and then so I’ll have some bit of comfort knowing that someone is dishing it back to the spammers. Nothing like a full dose of the FBI to fuckin ruin your day.

I hope somebody’s on it. The same technology used to pump out spam can be used to clog the entire Internet, literally bringing the WWW down.

If spam can be stopped then it should be. If spam can not be stopped, there may be a security problem.

The Russians seem to be on to something with their anti-spam measures.

• Our government at work: The Can Spam Act
• Progress in fighting spam
• Cookies, anyone?
• We are at war with the spammers
• Sentence handed down in spam case
• Whose Cookies Are In My Cookie Jar?
• UPDATED: PSA- Beware unscrupulous cyber-marketers

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Some crazy kid had an idea for an internet ad gimmick called Million dollar website. It paid off.

Here is the million dollar site. Here is a site of a wannabe who is trying the same gimmick.

Who knows, maybe lightening can strike twice. But I doubt it.

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Ever since I rolled an old company 401K plan over into a Fidelity IRA a couple of months ago, my inbox has been loaded down with investment spam. I am pretty pissed about it too.

I know, I know. Spam is a fact of life. Everybody should be used to it by now. Well here is what really burns my ass. I used my personal email address that I host at my domain, doncallaway.org, when I performed the rollover transaction. You know which account I am talking baout. It’s the special email address that you rarely give out. The one you give to your friends and such. The one you never use for purposes like free newsletters, myspace, jmeeting, job bulletin boards, chat, and all the other online crap that requires an email account.

For all the online crap, I use a throw-away email account. When a throw away account is to the point that I have to delete 100 messages for every one I read, I consider that account burned and I throw it away and replace it with another throw-away account. The nice thing about gmail is that I can forward the throwaways to my personal account. When the throwaway is burned, I just create another one and forward it to my real account.

Several years ago when I owned Overnight Recovery, a financial services company, I went through a dozen variations of Overnight##@hotmail.com, where ## was 20, 40, 60, 80, etc. Then the spammers got clever and for every base word, like ‘overnight’, for example, they would just stick on infinite suffix and prefixes. Maybe one out of a thousand variations would hit a valid email. What did the spammers care, they weren’t uing their computers to do the work.

Anyway, with the spam filters that hotmail and the other outfits have implemented over the years the problem is not near as bad as it used to be. The majority of spam ends up filtered out and then deleted, never to be seen by human eyes. Now you can go years with just a few throwaway email accounts. But still, an account can get burned if it winds up on the wrong spammer’s list.

This is where I think don at doncallaway dot org is at with the fucking investment scam spammers. Thanks a lot Fidelity. Obviously I expected more from such a supposedly prestigious organization. If I had known Fidelity was in league with the spammers, I would have given them a throw down email address. Or more likely, I would have chosen a different investment company with whom to do business.

Oh, and Fidelity, don’t try to deny you sold my email address and don’t say I agreed to it. The coincidence is too great and I am suspicious of even tiny ones. Furthermore, I have never, ever knowingly agreed to having my email address shared so other affiliated companies can send me ‘valuable’ information. So if I did agree it was because you scammed me.

Other stories on this site related to spam:

• Sentence handed down in spam case
• Our government at work: The Can Spam Act
• Progress in fighting spam
• Cookies, anyone?
• We are at war with the spammers
• Whose Cookies Are In My Cookie Jar?
• UPDATED: PSA- Beware unscrupulous cyber-marketers

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From the Web 2.0 article written by Tim O’Reilly that I mentioned in an earlier post, the author makes the following point:

A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. For example, Amazon lays claim to any reviews submitted to the site, but in the absence of enforcement, people may repost the same review elsewhere. However, as companies begin to realize that control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage, we may see heightened attempts at control.

On the other hand, as “participants”, aka, consumers, begin to realize the value of having control over content they create in the form of comments and reviews, we may see heightened attempts by the consumer to recieve reciprocal remuneration for supplying valuable content.

Maybe thinking such as that will not be widespread until Web 3.0, but I’m already there.

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