Archive for the 'Internet/Geekery' Category

You don’t need the Internet Cool Guide. You’ve got me.

Someone’s finally created a site dedicated to translating the Sabbath gas bags. Here’s a taste:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here I am, working on the Big Truck

Not long ago, I joked that a bunch of ASU students duped President Bush into flashing an obscene hand gesture called “the shocker”. Clearly, Bush and the students were really flashing “the pitchfork“, which is a non-obscene gesture that people in Phoenix use to show their support for the ASU Sun Devils. I would have loved for the story about “the shocker” to be true, but life’s just not that generous.

Then things got interesting. A LOT of bloggers assumed that Bush had been taken in by a bunch of college students who were trying to make a fool of him, including Amandagon, who linked to my post on her uber-popular blog. This prompted a discussion, in which one of Amandagon’s readers linked to this recent photo:

Ha! That’s Staff Sgt. Earl Granville, wounded Iraq War veteran. And it’s highly unlikely that he’s doing the pitchfork. Sgt. Granville is from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, which is about as far from Phoenix as you can get and still be within the continental United States. A flagrant diss of the Dubster, and by a wounded vet! Life IS generous after all! Thank you, Internets, for making me so very happy!

But you know what they say: the Internets giveth, and the Internets taketh away. The photo is accompanied by a news story about Sgt. Granville and one of his fellow veterans. And when several readers commented on Granville’s gesture (some approvingly, some not), reporter Charles Schillinger felt the need to clarify the situation (Nov. 11, 3:55 PM):

Staff Sgt. Earl Granville, 25, of Carbondale, met with President Bush in Washington, D.C., this summer after being injured in combat in Afghanistan. Despite the many celebrities Sgt. Granville met, he really enjoyed meeting the president the most. “People say a lot about President Bush, but I tell you what, he truly likes his troops and appreciates what we’re doing. He’s a down-to-earth guy,” Sgt. Granville said.

Also in the interview, Sgt. Granville mentioned he and the other soldiers felt really relaxed with the president because of his demeanor with them. “I honestly pictured him being a little different, but he’s a great guy.”

Crap.

(hat tip to Czaiye)

A major source of spam bites the dust

Have you noticed less spam in your inbox during the last couple of days? If so, it’s probably because the web hosting firm favored by most major spammers was taken offline:

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide dropped drastically today after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations allegedy engaged in spam activity was taken offline, according to security firms that monitor spam distribution online.

Security experts have found that a relatively small firm is home to servers that serve as a gateway for a significant portion of the world’s junk e-mail. The servers are operated by McColo Corp., which these experts say has emerged as a major U.S. hosting service for international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email.

two Internet providers cut off MoColo’s connectivity to the Internet, security experts said. Immediately after McColo was unplugged, security companies charted a precipitous drop in spam volumes worldwide. E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening.

Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second.

It’s about time.

This is what we need to start doing to spammers

A new study shows that the response rate to spam email is less than 1 in 12 million. Despite that, large spam networks can bring millions of dollars every year. Do the math, and you’ll see that individual networks are sending out trillions of emails annually.

But there’s a cost associated with their ill-gotten gains. Consumers and businesses waste time and resources filtering and deleting spam, and the spam networks hurt productivity by damaging computers and slowing Internet connections.

Since the world’s economy is now dependent on efficiencies made possible by the Internet, I think it’s time to start protecting the Internet as we would any other vital resource. That means making more of an effort to toss spammers behind bars, and imposing sanctions on countries that refuse to crack down on the spammers within their own borders.

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Did you know too?

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

Acne

Acne constantly whines about how, like… his life and everything really sucks and stuff. Usually a middle class teenager with an allowance, unlimited access to a computer and WAY too much time on his hands. Acne’s vague existential arguments about the meaningless of life and emptiness of existence are culled from the lyrics of the 20 gigs of MP3s he has squirreled away on his hard drive.

–from Flame Warriors

By now, both of my readers have noticed that there is a kid who keeps posting nonsensical lyrics to heavy metal songs in the comment section. In the past, I’ve dealt with pests like this by simply banning their IP addresses. It hasn’t been any trouble to ban the addresses as quickly as they can make them up, but now there’s a new factor: I’m taking my fiancee (unlike the kid who posts the lyrics, I actually have human relationships) to Australia to meet my brother, and I’m not going to be able to check in every day.

So for the immediate future, all comments will go to the moderation queue, unless the commenter has a previously-approved comment. I’m don’t like to do that, because it can discourage first-time commenters, but I really don’t have a choice.

The Liberal Avenger site is back up and running. Woo!

Who here hasn’t, at one time or another, watched something on “YouTube”?

Can you believe this? Can you? Can you comprehend it? Can you?

Google must divulge YouTube log.

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

The ruling comes as part of Google’s legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.

Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a “set-back to privacy rights”.

The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

Read the rest at the Beeb’s site … but remember … beware of BIG BROTHER.


( Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It )

My internet connection is spotty and slow today, and I’ve got a lot of stuff to get done today. So until things are straightened out sometime tomorrow or Wednesday, my posting is going to be a bit sporadic.

Of all the entries that have appeared about Obama on the biggest conservative blogs, less than 1/4 dealt with policy issues.