This is a Red Pill Zone. This site also contains language and opinions that may consign you to the 9th Circle of Hell for reading.
You Have Been Warned
Wordpress uses Askimet as a spam fighting tool. Works pretty good. In your Discussion Settings you can list IP addresses as spam.
This is the WordPress version of Lipstick on a Pig. The spam still shows up and must be deleted manually.
I currently have 2 IP addresses that account for 99% of all the spam that shows up here.
Here is what I would like to have happen. When spam arrives with the blacklisted IP addresses, I would like it to be forwarded to the CAN SPAM folks and bounce it right back to where it came from so that I do not see it, nor do I have to deal with it.
Ideally, after say 100 bounces and forwards, removing the DNS for the IP’s in question, might wake up the network administrators and get them to close off these holes.
Yes I know that the IP header can be spoofed, but you start shutting these assholes down, then we can all go back to bitching about everything else.
In another smoke and mirrors announcement from the Googleplex is the new alleged privacy enhancement. Google said it would keep IP addresses on its server logs for 9 months before anonymizing them, down from the 18 months it currently stores it.
This is bullshit.
To get a clear idea of what this really means Chris Soghoian deconstructs it.
Long Story Short
Google has now revealed that they will change “some” of the bits of the IP address after 9 months, but less than the eight bits that they mask after the full 18 months. Thus, instead of Google’s customers being able to hide amongst 254 other Internet users, perhaps they’ll be able to hide amongst 64, or 127 other possible IP addresses.
By itself, this is a laughable level of anonymity. However, it gets worse.
First, remember that Google will not delete or anonymize user cookies from the logs when it slightly smudges IP addresses after 9-months. Second, remember that as long as you use a Google web property at least once every two years, the company will maintain a unique identifiable cookie value within your web browser. [emphasis mine.]
Source Chris Soghoian
Cookies are and have been the major privacy problem since the beginning of browsing. What started out as an enhancement “blah, Welcome Back Kotter!” has evolved into the date rape gang bang of the electronic age. Fully 99.999995 of websites you visit set at least one cookie, and in some cases dozens. This information gets sold to anybody with a checkbook and a PR stalker mentality.
Google’s entry into the Browser Battle is just that, another entry. It will not enlarge your penis, make your breasts perkier, bring whirled peas, or cause the heat death of the universe. It does however bitchslap Microsoft right between the Active X controls.
As Paul Kedrosky puts it:
“Google’s new Chrome browser - is finally reducing Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers.”
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.
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.
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]
H.R. 4137 amends the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to direct the attorney general to assume the obligation to repay student loans for borrowers who agree to remain employed, for at least three years, as state or local criminal prosecutors; or state, local, or federal public defenders in criminal cases.
Source: National Law Journal
Yeah that’s right, and we get hooked for the bill. If you believe that they will be even handed between prosecutors and defenders, I will shit in your hand now.
What about Teachers? Nurses? Child Protection Investigators? You know, folks that are semi useful. Are they fucking kidding? LAWYERS? Like we need more lawyers.
Peer to Peer
A lot of companies never got the memo that the Internet is a Peer to Peer medium, meaning that anybody with a keyboard, internet access, and a bad attitude has just as much power as a multi million dollar, multi national organization out here. Our cost to publish is less than a round of Golf, and is a hell of a lot faster. Even News organizations haven’t figured out that the 24 hour news cycle has been replaced by the 24 second news cycle. Strictly Commercial
How and what we buy today, is not the result of multi million dollarad campaigns, or clown suit marketing on street corners, but is more likely to be decided by somebody on the web, who posts their opinions about stuff they bought. Just see what happened to the Kryptonite Lock folks.
5 Monkeys Ken Camp has re posted a bit he did back in 05 about Institutional Memory. It illustrates very well the problem of conditioning and ‘We do it this way because we’ve “always done it this way.” ‘, sinkhole of current commercial presentation on the web. This sinkhole is lined with the desperate PR Firms, clutching at the carcass of diminishing ad budgets, re branding themselves as Social Media Life Coaches, Conversational Marketing Guru’s and my personal Favorite, the Social Media Release.
Asumming that you have more brains than a gerbil, understand the difference between Evangelism and Fundamentalism, and haven’t swallowed the Blue Pill, a caveat. Before you pat yourselves on the back so hard you require surgery to repair a torn labrum, remember that we are monkeys too. Think Feldman vs Israel, AP vs Bloggers. What’s a internaut to do?
Fight Back with Doc Searls!
VRM aka Vendor Relationship Management is the latest attempt by Doc Searls to bitchslap companies into realizing what Peer to Peer means. Rather than telling you what I think he is saying, and what I think about it (this will require much more time than I have today) here is Doc his ownself.
In english this means that Google is getting pressure from it’s ad buyers, the stockholders are whining and they can get new employees.
Today’s head lemur tech tip:
Anytime a company makes a statement like this, putting the employees dead last , is a company who has become internally bankrupt. Customers will always try for a better deal, especially if they are not being served, and the company employees cannot show value. Think cell phone and cable companies for the worst of these traits.
Stakeholders/stockholders do not give a shit about either the company or the employees, but are folks leading the management around by the dick, hoping to squeeze a few more pennies out of the stock, before they sell it off.
Any company who does not put their employees first, will fuck them raw and dispose of them at the first sign of independent thought.
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.
Rodgers did not win. Rodgers conformance, compliance, or capitulation, is his alone. It does not apply to you or I. It is not a victory in any real sense. The closest description is a cease fire. Hostilities will resume.
In every case it was an excerpt, which is ‘Fair Use’ and does not require the author’s permission, regardless of how much they wish to the contrary.
AP did not win because they attempted to legislate “Fair Use” by intimidation. The AP saying ‘quoting a headline and the lede paragraph of a story’ is infringement is crap. It is AP’s attempt to maintain control over it’s ‘product’, the hook and the summary, (also known as the AP Style) with a headline and first paragraph, with the rest of the story explaining the first ‘graf’. They would really like to make this Infringement, because if you quote that, the story is basically over, you have the sizzle and the steak, the rest is fat and bone.
AP will need a bunch more lawyers to file DMCA notices, because unless they go back to the teletype, and have their owner-members erect paywalls, it will be quoted.
Robert Cox gets an atta boy for his work in resolving this specific issue, Back Story on How AP and Drudge Retort Come to Terms especially in the speed of getting a large organization like the AP to make a decision without months of meetings, focus groups, and balloting, but gets a big aw shit for trying to sell us insurance, regardless of his statement of no commission.
We didn’t win, as what we think about excerpting and Fair Use is no clearer today than it was last week.
Dear Jim,
Let me call you Jim as we are kind of informal out here. You can call me alan. We are just folks out here.
(Be advised that my comments and opinions are here are mine, and are directed to you as the Vice President; Director of Strategic Planning, and are not personal attacks.)
The internet lives by the hyperlink. Think about that for a moment. Every bit of information available on the web in any format that you can see on your computer or hand held device has a hyperlinkable address. Without the hyperlink, we would not be having this discussion. That fact alone should let you know that once information hits the web, you no longer have any sort of control over its usage..
I am one of the many people who feel that you are wrong in your use of the DMCA. I thought that I had covered my thoughts sufficiently in my two previous postings.
However a story at the New York Times website has compelled my to write again. We will get to that in a few moments. First some background.
Recent events have catapulted you and the organization you work for, the Associated Press, into a highly visible position on the world wide web. Right now this is not a good thing. You have become the news. As your members will tell you, becoming the news compromises your ability to represent the news.
At issue is your organization’s filing a DMCA notice against Rodgers Cadenhead and the Drudge Retort website for Copyright Infringement. This is like using a thermonuclear weapon to clean leaves off your driveway.
The funniest thing here is the way it was done. They cut and pasted, (which may be either scrupulous attention to detail, lazy, or a gigantic infringment as most corporations, most notably in the news and entertainment industries would have the world believe) headlines and excerpts of the articles, providing a Hyperlink to the original story, which gives credit to the source, does provide an accurate, true, and correct quote of the source material. You should be happy. Everybody else likes links.
These conventions such as Quote, Attribution, Credit and Byline, have been adopted from the news business because they are an elegant and fair method of establishing authorship, exchanging information, giving credit, and work to eliminate confusion between what was said, and what is being debated, or commented upon. So not every thing the news business is doing is bad.
This is pretty much the way most folks point to material for commentary. Also, in the case of weblogs, allows readers to read the materials we used to form our opinions and either agree with us or tell us we are full of crap.There really is no malice or a gigantic conspiracy on the part of the millions of folks who publish on the web. It is hard to get any group of any size moving in the same direction. Herding cats is easier. You have succeeded however.
As you are discovering, folks out here are opposed to your action. The backlash that you are currently feeling is only the tip of the electronic iceberg. What the folks on the Drudge Retort site did was Fair Use as I have come to understand and use it.
Attempting to tell millions of bloggers how and what they can do especially regarding Fair Use and Freedom of Speech is doomed.
I don’t feel that you are fully understanding the arena that you are playing in. While you were using teletypes to broadcast your ‘content’ to your 1500 members, we were building a network unlike anything the world has seen, with over 100 Million members worldwide. I may be low on the figure on our end. Maybe you should have stuck with the teletypes.
The internet is an expanding series of computers, using open protocols, to exchange information. The visible portion you are seeing is the world wide web. It is a messy place filled with words, sounds, pictures and video. We are no longer passive consumers of filtered, homogenized, spoonfed, broadcasted information. We are creators, producers, and commenter’s of information, news, and opinion.
The internet is not just a cheap pipe for you to service your membership with your output.
You have two problems to overcome.
The first problem is your business model. You collect news and information, from individual reporters, homogenize it, stripping individual credit, rewriting it, and then sell it back to your members requiring your AP byline. Which in the days before the web was a cost effective model for smaller newspapers to inform their readers about world and local events.
However with the vast amount of individual reporting on events that can be uploaded to the web in moments, the ability to hyperlink that information, so that reader/viewership numbers far outstrip any dead tree or broadcast numbers you could possibly hope for, makes your relevance problematical. The most significant fact to understand is the vast majority is created on those computers by individuals. This material is known in the news industry by the pejorative term “user generated content.”
It is not a question of veracity or professionalism, it is a question of speed, and depth.
The second problem is attempting to control its dissemination once it shows up on the web. The current boycottpostings shouldgive you an inkling of just how fast folks can spread the word.
As you can see by the postings that are the subject of this lunacy, the speed at which things can be linked and discussed should make your nose bleed and your head hurt. Right now these folks are just boycotting AP Bylined stories. What should strike terror into your heart is when they expand it to include your 1500 members. Your members are already gasping for air, as their revenue streams are drying up, circulation is diminishing, and folks are getting their news from thousand of alternative news outlets. As more and more newspapers on the web open themselves up to reader contributions, your role will diminish.
Cheaper too, as most of us do not count ‘value’ in dollars and cents.
After that, however, the news association convened a meeting of its executives at which it decided to suspend its efforts to challenge blogs until it creates a more thoughtful standard.
“We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Gee Jim! that horse has not only left the barn but has traveled around the world. Any ’standard’ you create is going to be problematic as your organization has no business or right to define Fair Use, for anyone you do not have a contractual relationship with, whom if I am close to correct, has the ability to post the entire thing, which is what you are selling. That being said, your thinking that you are going to release ‘thoughtful standards’ that will apply to the individuals on the web is disengeous, arrogant, and doomed to failure.
Right now like the movie Untraceable, you are hanging upside down above the roto tiller, but there is no pole to save you as more and more folks log on and the cable continues its inexorable downward path.
You then went on to say:
“As content creators, we firmly believe that everything we create, from video footage all the way down to a structured headline, is creative content that has value,” he said.
Since you are charging for it, it had better. Your job depends on that. And getting your members to believe that and keep those checks coming. However, that value is not measured in dollars and cents
out here. Today it may be ‘hot news’, but tomorrow it will line bird cages or wrap fish.
Also from the story is this:
One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner.
You have already been paid for it at least once. It will be real hard to make a case for financial harm on that basis alone, irregardless of what percentage of a piece turns out to cross the Fair Use threshold, which at this point in time is decided on a case by case basis, requiring court action. Good Luck with that.
The final comment in the story attributed to you:
“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Mr. Kennedy said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”
Actually, Jim you are. At the very least you are implying that we are thieves with your current interpretation of Fair Use, just like the RIAA and the MPAA.
So you can either step back and re-examine your policy, or you can hire a bunch of lawyers. Because we will hold bake sales, yard sales and tip jars, to fight this.
Your electronic pen pal
alan herrell - the head lemur
P.S. You need to double Irene Keselman’s salary, because anybody who can pull a rabbit like “Hot News Missapropriation” out of a hat, will get snatched up by some Intellectual Property Law Firm inside of 6 months tops.
