raving lunacy - oxymorons for the 21st century

Privacy or Not
The internet is not a friendly place. What you do in the privacy of your own home vaporizes the moment you go online. Imagine walking out of your house naked, having a flashing billboard over your head spewing out every private thought you have. You get tracked, sliced, diced, spun dry, and become a demographic, that anybody with a checkbook and an ad campaign can pick up for a song.

Every site, click, comment, posting and purchase gets sucked up into someone’s data bucket. Without notice, discussion, or acknowledgment. Websites value your privacy right up to the point there is a buck in selling this information. They are called ‘partners’ and ‘third party managers’. They like to say they serve you, like a kindly domestic bringing you a drink at the end of the day, when in reality, they are more like a group of home invaders, force feeding you with a fire hose.

Blocking Ads, rejecting cookies, using an anonymiser, are steps you need to take to try to take your privacy back. Understand that these are active steps you must take. The default is walking around naked with a billboard.

Behavioral Targeting
BT is the catch phrase used by marketeers that all of the above mentioned privacy stripping activities are lumped in an attempt to obscure its purpose. Not unlike tying a brick to your penis, as a Natural Male Enhancement Method. Both of which hold an almost fatal attraction for segments of the population. Never mind, people do weird shit.

From a marketing standpoint the internet is a target rich environment.
The invention and expansion of the internet is really the best thing that has happened to companies since the first advertisement rolled off a printing press. Global Reach, extremely low publication and distribution, open 24/7, and qualified sales leads, when done properly.

The number of companies that do it well is extremely small in relationship to the number of commercial sites out here. Companies realizing that their websites suck, turn to what they know, which is plastering ads on other sites, driven by the evangelists and fundamentalists of Marketing. They in turn do what they know, which is to place ads on sites and with companies who live by advertiser support. The first casualties are the newspapers and magazines, whose dead tree publications are being decimated by the online world.

VRM
VRM aka Vendor Relationship Management is the latest attempt by Doc Searls to bitchslap companies into realizing what Peer to Peer means. The problem that I have been wrestling with for months is that VRM has at its core, the idea that we have to be receptive to companies and their advertisers. Without this principle there is no management required. This is just as disingenuous as the Opt Out method, which is the new black in privacy, or so they would have you believe.

The US Congress is learning about Behavioral Targeting from the companies that are doing it. Letting the inmates run the asylum comes to mind.

No surprise as having a Presidential candidate who doesn’t use computers, a congress critter who describes the web as tubes, and others who don’t answer email, and think that the internet is something that kids use.

From this article Legislators Apparently Unaware of Adblock Plus, TrackMeNot, comes this Money Shot;

Google wrote in its letter to the Committee. “To ensure the continuation and proliferation of responsible behavioral targeting practices, we are supportive of efforts to establish strong self-regulatory principles for online advertising that involves the collection of user data for the purpose of creating behavioral and demographic profiles.”
Source: Google’s Letter to the Energy Committee[PDF]

Think about that.

Updated another blog from 2.5 to 2.6 and the ‘Pages’ do not work.
They show up in the control panel, can be seen in the control panel, but can’t be found on the site.

Probably should have waited the rest of the month for a little more testing.
Word Count? who the fuck cares about word count. Keyboard fetishists or punctuation nazi’s most likely.

A much more useful feature would be a post comment word counter. We could call it the HMTCYBADH How Many Times Can You Beat A Dead Horse contest.
we could separate the twitters to the askimet file, and dump folks who have forgotten what vowels are.

Oh yeah, turn off that fucking WordPress is available Update Now Nag screen. Everytime I update I spend more time getting things working again.

Data Data Data….
Folks want it, folks want to hide it, Folks get shocked other folks have it.

One of the inconvenient truths about internet life is to get data from point A to point B, both of them have to be defined. Your computer needs an address to receive it, their computer needs an address to send it. How it gets from A to B is another story, involving other computers, routers, and wires. Folks count this stuff.

In the beginning these things were counted strictly to be sure that you got what you were looking for, and the computers that were pitching and catching were working. Then folks discovered that you could add things to web pages(cookies, clear gifs, webbugs) to get more data that you could sell to other folks, who are waiting with checkbooks and engorged flesh.

Data Data Data….
Some folks were not content with merely using other folks data, but began to build whole sites under various guises(friends networks, social networks, ‘blah’ spaces and ‘brrt’ books, Sharecroppers and Social Gillnetters) to deliberately mine this information, under the meme of User Generated Content, to sell things. !!Connect with your Friends while we shove ads up your nose!!

Google is the latest data baron to have the villagers with their pitchforks and torches storming the gates, screaming about their data. It is not yours, get over it. Because if you are crying about it, your vision is too blurry to do anything about it.

A large part of the perception problem is that the majority of us are self funded, by spending our own money and time to put out our thoughts, and are happy when folks stop by, whereas there are lot of sites that are built strictly with other peoples money, who understand what whoredom is about, or are refugees from ad supported media companies and have been institutionalized by it, and willingly flash their wares.

There are whole categories of sites dedicated to becoming pixel bitches, usually revolving around buying the “Secrets” guidebooks from the pimps of these sites. (note:I am a whore too, not a very good one however, the sidebars contain ads and other things, neither of them producing enough revenue to buy that gold lame’ frock that you are desperately waiting for me to model:) Plus I try not to talk about stuff I know nothing about. It irritates my 5 readers)

Data Data Data….
The past few weeks has had folks crying for data from various government organizations. Some are beating the transparency drum, some have been bleating about the legislative process needing a sunlight bath, and some just want to wallow in the underbelly of the data sewers.
As if government information is anymore reliable despite the fact we are footing the bill.

But in the interest of promoting the availability of data for all those folks, I present;
The Federal Reserve Board News Feeds Page
You can watch the US Banking System crash and burn from the convenience of your computer.
hat tip to Paul Kedrosky for finding this jewel.

Jonnie Moore is a facilitator and marketing consultant. I have no idea what that means.
Some sort of PR nonsense.

But he does have a sense of humor.

With the Google Viacom lawsuit requiring a massive data give away, folks are beginning to wake up to the lack of privacy and the lengths that companies and websites are using to track your online activity.

Here is a list of a few programs that cost you nothing more than the download time.

Firefox for browsing. Much better and faster than IE. An order of magnatude better privacy settings. Thunderbird for email. It is your email. If you want to have some other company reading your mail and inserting advertising and clear gifs and tracking cookies, by all means get your ass sold down the river to every advertiser with a checkbook. AVG for anti virus. AdBlock Plus to eliminate website ads, third party tracking cookies, and other tracking. Easylist for AdBlock Plus Tor for anonymous surfing. This slows down your surfing as bit but it is worth the wait if you want to have any sort of privacy.

It is almost impossible to control your entire internet footprint. but you can decide who you want to share with.

In yet another Main Stream Media Meltdown is the story of the AP filing DMCA takedown notices against Rogers Cadenhead and his community site Drudge Retort.

The Associated Press is an news organization whose function in life was to take original reporting from its members, homogenize it, (not unlike the production of Kopi Luwak, a coffee bean that is processed by running it through the digestive tract of an Indonisian marsupial, harvested from the resulting dung, and then offered for sale at a premium price as being unique) and offer it back to its members to fill in the spaces in local newspapers, whose own management think that news from elsewhere, having been stripped of origination credits, and ‘claimed’ to be accurate because it is the AP, is a good idea. I say ‘claimed’ as there is no link or credits to the original reports, which on the internet is silly, and is at the heart of this nonsense.

At one time back in the dark ages before the Internet, this was a good idea, as it gave local newspapers access to world events and reporting it could otherwise not afford. However with the Internet, the plethora of publishing tools, worldwide availability and the hyperlink, the AP is another business whose foundation is crumbling in the flood waters of websites, personal publishing, and the hyperlink.

According to this posting Rogers received this nugget:

AP feels otherwise. In a June 3 letter, AP’s Intellectual Property Governance Coordinator Irene Keselman told me:

… you purport that the Drudge Retort’s users reproduce and display AP headlines and leads under a fair use defense. Please note that contrary to your assertion, AP considers that the Drudge Retort users’ use of AP content does not fall within the parameters of fair use. The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of "fair use." AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes "hot news" misappropriation.

There are a couple of things wrong here. First this is an opinion by AP, (opinions being like assholes, everyone has one and some of them stink, you decide) based on the theory that Fair Use does not apply to the AP. Everything that is published in the United States is covered by copyright, and is also available for Fair Use. There is still no definite answer as to which percentage of an item consists of Fair Use, as some items cannot be easily chopped up into discrete bits such a photos, but a portion of a textual piece has been for many years even before the internet, has been used for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

“hot news misappropriation”

The second thing that AP asserts is “hot news misappropriation” What the fuck is that? Is this like calling a shopping mall a Regional Lifestyle Center?
My opinion, is that this is a bullshit semantic device to try to prop up the argument that the AP is not subject to the same Fair Use rules as every other organization or person in the United States. The French news agency AFP tried this with Google some time back, and it didn’t work.

Quoting a portion of a work is explicitly covered under the Section 107 Fair Use Provision of US Copyright Law. The bonus of the Internet is the ability to hyperlink to the original work. This lets you know that someone has done their homework, allowing you to decide whether or not the criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research, is true in as much as can be presented.
Let me give you an example. Here is US Copyright website Fair Use Statement.

Section 107 Fair Use Provision of US Copyright Law.

One of the rights accorded to the owner of copyright is the right to reproduce or to authorize others to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. This right is subject to certain limitations found in sections 107 through 118 of the Copyright Act (title 17, U. S. Code). One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of “fair use.” Although fair use was not mentioned in the previous copyright law, the doctrine has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years. This doctrine has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

1.

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2.

the nature of the copyrighted work;
3.

amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The distinction between “fair use” and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.
Source: US Copyright Office Website

News by its very nature is nothing more than a record of events, as told by people who have experienced it on site. News used to be the bailiwick of journalists, whose desire to report events was their calling. With the rise of aggregating news organizations like the AP, UPI, Reuters and even AFP, there was a period of trust in these organizations in giving us the whole story.

The internet has changed this. We are not confined to single sources for news and information. Here are some other thoughts on this
Jeff Jarvis, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Scott Rosenburg, Mathew Ingram

Organizations like the Associated Press need to change, or they will become a quaint exhibit in the Newseum
(Update Hot News Misappropriation is a legal concept) Hat tip to Matt Ingram. I still think is is a bullshit term.

Here is a peek at Google Health. . The same clean interface that is a hallmark of Google. The other thing is that this is not Microsoft Health Vault. That was the good news.

Here is the bad news. Using a Google account for accessing and keeping this information ’safe’. Google has consistently hammered individuality from their offerings and services. It doesn’t matter how many different services or toys you use that Google offers, they are all kept in the same bucket which is your Google Identity, which is your email or Gmail address.

Think about that for a moment. Google News, Alerts, Piccasa, Google office products, Gmail, and any other number of things, including any ads you click on, all go into the bucket with your name on it. Now Google does have a reputation for using computers to do the work, such as the algorithms for things like Page Rank, and serving ads on websites. So in one sense there is security in obscurity, just in the sheer volume of information. If you do not think that Google will not leverage this information, I have 300 miles of white sand beach here in Phoenix, Arizona that I will gladly sell you.
However, that obscurity will vaporize in a heartbeat, with a username and some password cracking software.

The funny thing about some health care information, is that it is not important. You get the clap, you take antibotics, and you move on. You may be embarrassed, but for the most part you will live. The unfunny part of health care information is the bits where you develop something serious. Currently this information is being used by Health Insurance Companies to deny claims or to cancel your ass. As long as there is not Universal Health Care, this information will eventually kill you.

Where Google Health is unclear and therefore incomplete is in the depth and completeness of health records. For example, a couple of years ago I had chest pains, which required a hospital stay and some tests. Had blood work, temp, respiration, heartbeat monitoring, which consumed a few hundred K of space. Had a Cardiac Stress test lasting about 30 mins, which consumed 40GB of harddrive space. The MRI sucked up over 100GB of space. Two tests which sucked up more harddrive space than most computers have. Is Google gonna store all that? Somebody has to, or your records are not going to be complete.

There are a lot of things that can be done with health records for improving health, but not as long as we allow private insurance companies to cherry pick patients, and then when something does happen, cancel us.

Being able to assert your identity online is problematical on good days and impossible on most. Having the ability to create and confirm your online identity is a subject close to what little heart I have. Getting your computer hacked and having someone using your identity from your email server to cause pain to you and others is not a thing you want to have happen. Believe me, it is next to impossible to track these folks down. Just check your spam folder.

There are a lot of really bright folks working on online ID projects to create a framework that will allow you to create, confirm, and manage your online identity. There is a new player on the horizon that may provide a method for a secure verifiable online identity system.
DomainKeys Identified Mail DKIM
While this is an email project, when you think about it, email is probably the most significant communication used. Having folks I communicate with able to confirm that it is me, and conversely being able to confirm your identity, is a very good thing. This is something to keep your eyes on.

Killing annoying advertising online has never been easier.
Ad Block Plus
Minimal requirements: Firefox 1.5, Thunderbird 1.5, SeaMonkey 1.0, Flock 0.5, Songbird 0.2.
Still using Internet Explorer? Switch Now!

The latest WEB 2.0 lunacy is the case of Coupons.com suing a guy in California for violating the DMCA by deleting registry entries on his personal computer to save a few cents on coupons. The Inquirer has a good overview

From the UCLA Online Institute for Cyberspace Law and Policy is this:

Highlights Generally:
Makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software.
Outlaws the manufacture, sale, or distribution of code-cracking devices used to illegally copy software.

The quick and dirty overview of this lunacy is you download a piece of software from coupons.com and you are offered money saving coupons from companies who want to sell you stuff. Limit 2. However to Print the coupons, you have to download a piece of software that begins to track your activity. Because it is an installation, it writes writes stuff to your windows computer registry, going far beyond the cookies that just about every marketeer loads you up with, to track you across the internet.

This software creates coupons with a unique ID for tracking and I am assuming payment, (my assumption is based on the idea that no matter how desperate a company is, they would have the common sense to only pay on coupons that were actually used. Of course as I write this, I realize how stupid it sounds and will look when I post this, as companies do not have that sort of intelligence, if the stack of mailers, valpacks and crap from my meatspace mailbox is any indication..)

At issue is the theory that by deleting the registry keys, which is a windows thing, he was able to download the coupons.com software again and print more money saving coupons. A lot of work for a few cents off, but I am not telling this guy how to spend his time. Based on that theory Coupons, Inc is saying that this guy is circumventing the DCMA.

Here is our problem in a nutshell. If this theory is upheld, every lunatic marketeer and software maker will be suing every windows computer owner for doing what they please with their own computers. Folks download, install and uninstall software all the time.

Delete a registry key? Go to Jail!
This guys alleged crime, was not reverse engineering the software, or stripping out copy protection, he just completely uninstalled it, by deleting the registry keys. If stuff worked and uninstalled completely, we wouldn’t having this discussion. you can google for registry cleaners (Results 1 - 10 of about 2,520,000)to see just what a mess some software creates. That he posted this information, is a free speech issue, and not in my view a DMCA issue.
Laugh now, buckwheat, but this is a fundamental case to determine whether or not you have any rights to the ownership and operation of your personal computer in your house on an internet connection you are paying for.

you have been warned….