My CPU would freeze periodically. And it's all Google's fault...
When I installed Google's Chrome browser, Google snuck onto my hard drive
and installed a stealth program that runs in the background and calls
back to the "mother ship."
Seriously! Without me knowing it!
The program is called "Google Update," and it's only checking for updates
to the
software. "This is becoming standard fare with much software these days,"
wrote a C|Net
reporter, warning that it's "worth noting." If you've installed
Google's Chrome browser, you've agreed to let it run a secret second
"updater" program on your hard drive on their own schedule.
I finally got a check from Google AdSense -- after three and a
half years.
See, Google has a minimum payout of $100. So until your blog reaches
that magical threshhold, Google keeps all the money. (Unless you close
your account in frustration -- in which case Google gives you what you've
earned.) I'm talking about my other blog, which has never been hugely
popular. But one geek estimates Google has amassed $400
million in unpaid Google AdSense money.
If his assumptions are
correct, that's nearly half a billion dollars in advertising money from
bloggers that still sitting cozily at Google's headquarters.
How did I do it?
By adding my AdSense code to another site that's
even more popular...
OurSignal.com is a really cool
"aggregator" for the top URLs on voting sites. (Digg, Reddit, and
del.icio.us)
It measures the "velocity" of
their popularity (which you can see when
mousing over the headlines). And they display this visually, with
both the
size of the headlines and the background color for each box.
The bigger the box, the more relative votes a story has.
The warmer the color, the quicker the story is on the rise. Cooler colors
denote negative velocity.
"Comcast was delaying subscribers' downloads and blocking their uploads. It
was doing so 24/7, regardless of the amount of congestion on the network or
how small the file might be...
"Even worse, Comcast was
hiding that fact by making affected users think there was a problem with
their Internet connection or the application.
For those of you who don't speak geek,
today Cuil sent it's robots to ping one site 72 times today. (The second
line shows that filtering out the robot leaves no organic traffic
from the actual Cuil search engine.)
That's the log for my friends at 10 Zen Monkeys. But here at AOL Watch,
the logs tell a similar story.
So what was the one (and only) page that actually came up in a real Cuil
search?
It's a 2002 web quiz I wrote comparing Aimee Mann's lyrics to
Annette Funicello's. It's one of Cuil's top matches for the phrase Aimee
Mann.
And what's this?
I hope they're not selling their automatic "suggestions" off to the
highest
bidder. (And considering that it's the internet's most popular search term --
I'm
surprised they only had one suggestion!)
AOL remained an albatross around the neck of Time Warner during the first
quarter as profits from the Internet-access business plummeted a
ghastly
73 percent versus the same quarter a year ago
The company's decision to drop its subscription model and provide AOL free
in the hope of expanding the user base and thereby attract more advertiser
dollars appeared doomed. AOL's advertising dollars did rise in the
quarter -- but by only one percent, while much of its subscription revenue
disappeared.
A fierce comment at Webmaster
World. Google AdSense began displaying a new screen that urges users
to switch to
a new Google-owned ID instead.
"I see it, I hate it, and I always skip it.
I'll merge my accounts when
I'm forced to..."
And this user was even angrier.
"If you understood how inconvenient it was you wouldn't put me through it.
Don't for a moment believe you can assuage me with corporate style
platitudes."
"Anger, greed, laziness, impulsivity, as well as jealousy, lust, anguish,
and so on, are simply part of the human predicament. They are not medical
conditions."
So says
Charles Barber, author of "Comfortably Numb," arguing that mood
medications are over-prescribed in the February issue of Wired.
I didn't know the DSM classified "social anxiety" as a medical disorder.
Jason Fortuny did the same thing with his
bank that he did to
Craigslist
-- he pretended to be something he wasn't, and then published the results.
In an earlier post, he points
out that banks make an astonishing $50 billion a year by whacking their
customers with overdraft fees.
But he also seems to have uncovered a
little-known provision in U.S. banking law -- that you can opt out of this
automatic "overdraft protection," avoiding the threat of these fees
altogether!
I was getting a haircut to look nice for my job interview at a popular
geek web site. As I
scooch into the chair, I'm all excited about the interview, and
try to make conversation about web sites with the woman cutting my hair.
(I'm
hoping to find out if she's ever heard of the sites I'd be writing
for). Our conversation goes like this.
ME: So, do you ever look at any web sites on the
internet? HAIRCUTTER: No.
"Like many baby boomers, the general-purpose computer was born
in the years following World War II, grew up in a restrictive environment
and went
batty as a young adult."
Steven Levy has always been my favorite technology writer...
Eyargh!!! Firefox 2.0 is drawing little red lines under misspelled
words!
How can you stop this?
layout.spellcheckDefault
After typing about:config into the URL bar, double-click on the
value at
the end of the layoutspellcheckDefault line, and enter 0 in the pop-up
window.
I can proofread my own speling, thak you very much!
For years every time I'd try to copy something cool from Wikipedia, it
would mistake the keyboard shortcuts (Alt-E C)
for an attempt to edit the page myself.
Firefox 2.0 eliminates this behavior. Now typing Alt-E C will copy the
text, just like it's supposed to.
I bought a Samson C01U microphone. It's ideal for podcasting. (You can
tell, because on the microphone there's a sticker that says "Ideal for
podcasting.")
The instruction manual advises users to install the
driver-and-applet combination from Samson's web site - but I wish I
hadn't. This sets the volume levels so low that recording is impossible.
And even worse, the driver
cannot then be easily uninstalled.
There's an article in the latest Business 2.0 called
"Blogging for
Dollars." It talks about the insane amounts of money that the top
blogs like
BoingBoing and Fark are earning.
The son of novelist Norman Mailer describes Generation Y as "the last
generation to begin discovering what the world was all about before we got
hit by the technological revolution and the age of terror." After the
advent of the internet , "The world was suddenly faster and smaller and
filled with near-infinite possibilities."
"It was also a great deal more confusing. After my generation is gone, no
one will remember what the world was like before the technological
revolution. [This] makes me feel the responsibility to preserve what I
can of the old world, and pass that on to the generation beginning to come
up now."
It's an interesting
set-up for his book of interviews with his father.
"[T]he chance of history being rewritten to serve the powers that be
increases exponentially. What advice would you give us in trying to hold
on to the positive elements of the twentieth century?"
Mailer senior replies that he can't even turn on a PC. He argues that
handwriting is "perversely elegant" - and when it is then typed up, "you
are able to read your stuff as if someone else wrote it." (Working on a
computer, in contrast, conflates the writing and editing processes into
one.)
Mailer's son says writing on a computer is too sterile, and mourns the
fact that his generation doesn't understand the pleasures of holding a
newspaper.
Jon Stewart mocks the chairman of the Senate commerce committee,
saying Ted Steven's
critique of internet neutrality sounds like a "crazy
old man in an airport bar at 3 a.m."
"But that's okay," Stewart ads sardonically. "You're just....the guy in
charge of regulating it."
I enjoyed this summary
of debate over the telecommunications bill in the Senate Commerce
Committee.
"If we include net neutrality in the bill, we won't have 60 votes to pass
the bill", [Ted Stevens] said, to which
John Kerry responded with something along the lines of "If you don't put
net neutrality in the bill, you won't have 60 votes to pass the
bill either." Ouch.
A guy walks into the BBC for a job interview.
The BBC mistakes him for a pundit, and puts him on
the air.
BBC:
Hello good morning to you.
GUY: Good morning.
BBC: Were you surprised by this verdict today?
GUY: I'm very surprised to see this verdict to come on me.
Because I was not
expecting that! When I came, they told me something else. And I'm
coming,
and you've got an interview so - a big surprise anyway.
BBC: A big surprise?
GUY: Exactly.
That's close enough to an actual answer. The BBC pushes ahead with the
interview...
BBC: Yes, yes. Um, with regards to the cost that's involved,
do you think
now more people will be downloading online?
GUY: Actually, if you can go everywhere, you're gonna see
lot of people downloading through internet and
web site, everything they want. But I think, uh, is, is much better for
the
development and to import people what they want to get, an easy way and so
faster
if they looking for.
It amazes me that the BBC doesn't miss a beat. They just keep
acting
like useful
information is being conveyed.
BBC: This does really seem to be the way the music industry is
progressing now
that people want to go onto the web site and download music.
GUY: Exactly. You can go everywhere on
and you can check, you can go easy - is going to be easy way for everyone
to get something through the internet.
It was all a mix up. His name was Guy Goma, and his accent apparently
confused the
receptionist into thinking he was Guy Kewney. The real Guy Kewney records
his surprise
on his
weblog.
"[L]et's admit it: of all the things you can say about me, one word
that really has to be deleted from the list is this one: 'Black.'"
The poor Congolese graduate student told a
British newspaper that
he's "still waiting for the result" of his interview. One insider
claims
that, truthfully, he's "a little upset that nobody asked him about his
data cleansing expertise."
"Is there anyone else you would like to impersonate?" a TV interviewer
asks him.
"Misunderstanding the question, Mr Goma replied: 'Yes, I really want to
work at the BBC.'"
The Wall Street Journal ran an article about how the internet has
been portrayed in movies over the last two decades.
My favorite part of their online gallery of clips was this close-up of Tom
Hanks' mailbox in You've Got Mail. Besides that fateful email from
future
love Meg Ryan, there's also two
messages in Hanks' inbox which are clearly
spam!
When I tried to create a new account, their site gave me a blank web page.
When I tried to contact them - the site gave me another blank web page.
Since this is the site where I order prescriptions through my company
health plan, I was disturbed that it wasn't supporting Firefox. I emailed
them that "Firefox development is considered a very important
cause for many people who work in the technology industry - so your lack
of support is upsetting."
Here's their reply back.
PrecisionRX Website does not except FireFox , we apolizie for any
inconvinence please use Internet Explorer.
It wasn't playing the movie trailers at the Internet Movie Database.
RealPlayer left Firefox showing the green jigsaw puzzle piece over the
message
"Click here to download the plugin" - even though I'd already installed
(and re-installed) the latest version (10.5).
A web search
found a MozillaZine article about
embedded media and problems with poorly-coded web pages. It gave me
the idea of un-installing RealPlayer altogether, and instead using
Real
Alternative.
Steven Levy wrote Hackers and Insanely Great - two of the
best books about the early days of the internet.
He just co-wrote a
great
article for Newsweek, arguing excitedly that the web "has
finally matured to the point
where it can fulfill some of the outlandish promises that we heard in
the '90s."
Levy finds different ways to explain
the positive effects of "Web 2.0" applications,
calling it a "live web"
that takes advantage of the large number of connected
web surfers. The people he talks to cite "the wisdom of crowds" and
call Flickr "the eyes of the world."
"The smartest guy in the room is everybody," Levy writes.
"What makes the Web alive is, quite simply, us. "
I didn't know Craig's List was the 7th-largest site in the world.
Via Waxy
"And here I thought that traffic congestion was my biggest problem," Steve
posted wrly.
"I can hear you," he rallied the citizens of Stefangrad
through a bull horn. "The whole world can hear you! And pretty soon
the people who attacked this sports stadium are going to...."
Er, okay, that part didn't happen.
Instead, Steve watched
in horror as the citizenry recoiled from the staggering reconstruction
costs.
"Soon, the
city's population abandoned Stefangrad, taking it from a city of
45,000 down to 20,000..." The tax base evaporated,
drastically cutting the
money needed for road maintenance, fire departments, and police.
"Crime
became rampant and even more of the good citizens migrated out."
As bridges crumbled and railways collapsed,
Steve looked at his namesake - a lawless, ruined city. He must
have felt a moment of sad, stunned silence.
"Stefangrad now stands a ghost town, a shell of its former self."
A 20-year-old living in Downey, California raked in nearly $60,000 in
payments from adware
firms - for surreptitiously
installing their products into unsuspecting
computers.
At one time he'd commanded an army of over 100,000 "bots" -
computers he'd compromised and could command to install the
software. He'd also rent them out for denial-of-service attacks.
By July of 2004, he'd created an IRC channel called "botz4sale -
making a $400 sale to a woman named "circa", selling a worm to "KiD"...
He sold 8,500 bots to zxpL for denial-of-service attacks against King
Pao Electronic Co., Ltd. in Tapei and Sanyo Electric Software Co, in
Osaka, Japan. He warned client "o_2riginal" to filter out .mil and .gov
domains, then
sold another 5,000 bots.
By August he had 100,000 bots, picking up 10,000 more per week, and he
was now
focussing on installing the adware. The paychecks kept coming.
His unindicted co-conspirator replied "i just hope this stuff
lasts so I don't have to get a job right away."
When told the army of bots now included some .gov and .mil domains, he
replied "rofl."
His mistake was infecting
military computers at the China Lake Naval Air
Facility in California and the Defense Information System Agency in Falls
Church Virgina.
("A combat support agency" offering network solutions for
"the President, Vice President, the Secretary of Defense and various
other DOD components.") The United States attorney did not appear amused
when she
wrote in his
indictment that "On or about January 9, 2005, Ancheta caused
a computer on the computer
network of the Defense Information Security Agency to attempt to connect
to #syzt3m#, an IRC channel he controlled..."
Yes, it was all illegal. Yes, he's facing time in prison. Yes, he had to
forfeit the $60,000.
(And his BMW, and his three computers)
I got that dreaded message when I tried viewing this page's RSS feed in
the
new Firefox 1.5. The syntax in my XML had a bug which slipped past
earlier versions of Firefox - but not version 1.5.
I finally figured out what the problem was. My file started with these
two lines...
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
Firefox wanted the complete version of the RSS version identifier.
A-way back in 1997, AOL visited shopping malls, state fairs and baseball
games with a custom-painted 18 wheeler. Their presenters were instructed
to answer the question: "Will the internet kill AOL?" by answering...
"AOL is the internet. And a whole lot more."
In a conference call, Steve Case repeated the
claim, then added "A lot
of this is a semantics argument that will get clarified over time."
Today we find a
mind-boggling
essay by Robert Cringeley about Google's plans for a recent purchase
of fiber optic
cable.
...in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping
container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping
container is a prototype data center...3.5 petabytes of disk
storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig."
Placing Google data center's at the internet's 300 peering points would
create a parallel Google internet, Cringley notes - and one that's faster
and cheaper. Even at $1
million apiece, "That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the
Internet."
