Wednesday - December 06, 2006

More Spam?

There is a solution to the flood of spam. Hunt the f**kers down and shoot them on sight. Anything less is just not going to work. Spam filters work for a while and then the spammers find a way around them and on and on and on. Network administrators are fighting a losing battle because they are on the defensive. Somebody needs to form a rapid-insertion force that can go into Germany, Russia, Romania and Nigeria and take these asshats out.

My mail server filters out about 5,000 spam messages every freaking day. I manually kill about a hundred more. As I’ve stated here before, I pre-screen all incoming e-mails using Mailwasher Pro. For $37 you can’t beat it. It allows me to pre-screen all incoming e-mail. It shows me what is on my e-mail server waiting to be delivered and I get a preview of what’s in the e-mail.

If the e-mail contains an attachment and is from someone I don’t know ... BAM! ... bounce it back to the sender’s e-mail inbox. If it’s just more garbage about some hot stock ... BAM! ... bounce it back. You see, I don’t just delete the crap coming in - I send it back to the creep who sent it. If everyone did this, the spammer’s inbox would quickly fill up and our problems might be solved. It’s too bad we can’t do that with the junk mail that the USPS drops on me every day.

In addition to shoving the crap back in the face of the spammers, Mailwasher allows me to define rules for automatic junk removal. Every time I receive a bogus spam e-mail, I add the sender to the blacklist. Once they’re in there, any future e-mails are automatically bounced back and I never even see the crap at all.

I even have entire internet domains in the blacklist because the bastard spammers congregate on one mail service now and then. Spammers have rendered two of my Yahoo accounts virtually unusable. The problem with some e-mail services like Yahoo and GMail is that the spammers manage to get addresses from them somehow. If you create a Yahoo e-mail account today you will have a dozen spam e-mails tomorrow. I’m beginning to think Yahoo and Google are in cahoots with the spammers.

Even worse are the stupid jerks (and I’m not naming names) who open the attachment in the e-mail from the First Nigerian Bank. Those attachments plant spyware on their computers and sometimes worms that hijack their computer into sending out more spam. Spam is fast becoming the “cholesterol” of the internet. It is clogging up everything. So wise up people. Get aggressive and get a tool like Mailwasher and fight back!

Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself
_{(NY TIMES) - December 6, 2006}

Hearing from a lot of new friends lately? You know, the ones that write “It’s me, Esmeralda,” and tip you off to an obscure stock that is “poised to explode” or a great deal on prescription drugs.

You’re not the only one. Spam is back — in e-mail in-boxes and on everyone’s minds. In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.

Much of that flood is made up of a nettlesome new breed of junk e-mail called image spam, in which the words of the advertisement are part of a picture, often fooling traditional spam detectors that look for telltale phrases. Image spam increased fourfold from last year and now represents 25 to 45 percent of all junk e-mail, depending on the day, Ironport says.

The antispam industry is struggling to keep up with the surge. It is adding computer power and developing new techniques in an effort to avoid losing the battle with the most sophisticated spammers.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Three years ago, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, made an audacious prediction: the problem of junk e-mail, he said, “will be solved by 2006.” And for a time, there were signs that he was going to be proved right.

Antispam software for companies and individuals became increasingly effective, and many computer users were given hope by the federal Can-Spam Act of 2003, which required spam senders to allow recipients to opt out of receiving future messages and prescribed prison terms for violators.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, the volume of spam declined in the first eight months of last year. But as many technology administrators will testify, the respite was short-lived. “At the beginning of the year spam was off our radar,” said Franklin Warlick, senior messaging systems administrator at Cox Communications in Atlanta. “Now employees are stopping us in the halls to ask us if we turned off our spam filter,” Mr. Warlick said.

Mehran Sabbaghian, a network engineer at the Sacramento Web hosting company Lanset America, said that last month a sudden Internet-wide increase in spam clogged his firm’s servers so badly that the delivery of regular e-mail to customers was delayed by hours.

To relieve the pressure, the company took the drastic step of blocking all messages from several countries in Europe, Latin America and Africa, where much of the spam was originating. This week, Lanset America plans to start accepting incoming mail from those countries again, but Mr. Sabbaghian said the problem of junk e-mail was “now out of control.”

Antispam companies fought the scourge successfully, for a time, with a blend of three filtering strategies. Their software scanned each e-mail and looked at whom the message was coming from, what words it contained and which Web sites it linked to. The new breed of spam — call it Spam 2.0 — poses a serious challenge to each of those three approaches.

Spammers have effectively foiled the first strategy — analyzing the reputation of the sender — by conscripting vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs. The infected computers begin sending out spam without the knowledge of their owners. Secure Computing, an antispam company in San Jose, Calif., reports that 250,000 new computers are captured and added to these spam “botnets” each day.

The sudden appearance of new sources of spam makes it more difficult for companies to rely on blacklists of known junk e-mail distributors. Also, by using other people’s computers to scatter their e-mail across the Internet, spammers vastly increase the number of messages they can send out, without having to pay for the data traffic they generate.

“Because they are stealing other people’s computers to send out the bad stuff, their marginal costs are zero,” said Daniel Drucker, a vice president at the antispam company Postini. “The scary part is that the economics are now tilted in their favor.”

The use of botnets to send spam would not matter as much if e-mail filters could still make effective use of the second spam-fighting strategy: analyzing the content of an incoming message. Traditional antispam software examines the words in a text message and, using statistical techniques, determines if the words are more likely to make up a legitimate message or a piece of spam.

- More ...

   Sunday - October 29, 2006

Hell No!

Who On Earth Would Pay $1 Million For Hell?
_{LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Fri Oct 27, 7:35 PM ET}

No one was buying hell on Friday—or at least its red-hot Web address. HELL.com was among hundreds of Internet domain names up for auction in Hollywood, Florida, by domain asset management provider Moniker.com, a unit of marketing services firm Seevast Corp.

The owner put a minimum price of $1 million on the underworld’s domain, confident of high interest after the salacious address, Sex.com, sold for about $12 million earlier this year. But there were no takers with bids failing to reach the reserve price.

“The world is still alive and well. Nobody is going to hell right now,” Seevast Chief Executive Lance Podell told Reuters, adding that the domain would now be part of a silent auction.

Moniker was selling HELL.com on behalf of a group called BAT Flli LLC, whose founder Kenneth Aronson registered the name in 1995. It’s not the first time that Aronson has tried to sell HELL.com. He put the address on the auction block in April 2000, at a starting bid of $8 million.

In an interview with Reuters in 2000, Aronson said members of The Final.org, an enigmatic collective of digital artists and creative visionaries, were using HELL.com as a private destination for their work. According to the site, HELL.com is a “private parallel web” not accessible with a Web browser.

The auction on Friday included a list of domain names such as cameras.com, which pulled in $1.5 million. Sexeducation.com that sold for $120,000 and babies.net which went for $26,000.

Flowers.mobi, an address with the new extension for mobile devices, went for $200,000, while fun.mobi pulled in $100,000. A boom in Internet advertising driven by companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) have sent prices for sought-after domain names soaring.

   Saturday - October 28, 2006

Saturday Silliness

How To Tell If You’re An Information Systems Professional

• It’s dark when you drive to and from work.


• You see a good looking person and know it is a visitor.


• You sat at the same desk for 4 years and worked for three different companies.


• Your resume is on a diskette in your pocket.


• You learn about your layoff on CNN.


• Your biggest loss from a system crash is that you lose your best jokes.


• Your supervisor hasn’t the ability to do your job assignment.


• You sit in a cubicle smaller than your bedroom closet.


• Salaries of the members on the Executive Board are higher than all the Third World countries’ annual budgets combined.


• Weekends are those days your spouse makes you stay home.


• Being sick is defined as can’t walk or you’re in the hospital.


• All real work gets started after 5pm or on weekends.


• 10% of the people you work with (boss included)—knows what they do.


• Vacation is something you rollover to next year.


• Your relatives and family describe your job as “works with computers” or “does something with satellites”


• You read this entire list and understood it.

_{Skipper says: Yes, I understand this @#*&$% list. Too well.}

   Tuesday - October 10, 2006

Prepare To Be Assimilated!

Forget North Korea. The fourth member of the Axis Of Evil, the Evil Borg Empire - Micro$oft, is preparing to take over your computer this month whether you like it or not. Internet Exploder 7 will be installed on our Windoze computer during the monthly automatic security updates.

If you have automatic updates turned on (and most of you do) then the evil deed will be done while you sleep. The Borgmaster, Bill Gates, has decreed it and you have no choice. Look not to the United Nations for help. The Borg Empire bought them years ago ....

IE7 Is Coming This Month...Are you Ready?

The final release of IE7 is fast approaching … and I mean really fast … and will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download. We want to ensure that you are ready and the information below will help get you there.

Compatibility with sites, extensions and applications has been a very high priority for us as we develop new features, enhance the existing features and move the platform forward to be more secure and standards compliant.  We are continually listening to feedback from our customers, partners and leaders in the industry to resolve major compatibility issues to ensure our common customers have a great experience with IE7.

As we make key improvements in areas such as layout and security, some changes need to be made by site owners to work smoothly with IE7.  We have produced detailed documentation, tools and other resources to assist site, extension and application owners in their testing and development efforts to ensure they are compatible with IE7.  We have also proactively worked with hundreds of companies to resolve issues that were reported through our beta testing to ensure those issues were resolved before IE7 is released.

   Sunday - September 03, 2006

The Nanny State, British Version

Guess what? If you live in Britain and are about to turn 70, you will soon be a lot stupider. So says one internet provider across the pond. Seems to me the stupid loon in this story is not the old lady but the ratbag company that decides old people are mentally incompetent as a rule. That’s hogwash and we all know it. There are millions of people right now on the internet who can’t chew bubble gum and walk at the same time - and age has nothing to do with it.

Maybe this company thought they were actually trying to protect our elders from being hornswaggled into signing up for AOL and getting billed even after they die - which AO-Hell has probably done on occasion. Personally, I think a better idea would be to have every computer equipped with a simple “idiot-tester” that would test your level of stupidity and if you’re too damn dumb to be on the web, it will refuse to connect. Something simple would be nice, like asking you to type in any 3-digit prime number or list the first four Presidents of the US (or Kings of England if you’re over there). We need to keep the lunatics and people with bad manners off the web, not the old people. The older folks are mostly cool. Mostly.

Sorry, You Can’t Have The Internet…
You’re Over 70
_{(DAILY MAIL-UK) - 2nd September 2006 - 10:00pm GMT}

After walking the Great Wall of China and making plans for a trip to Russia, Shirley Greening-Jackson thought signing up for a new internet service would be a doddle. But the young man behind the counter had other ideas. He said she was barred - because she was too old. The 75-year-old would only be allowed to sign the forms for the Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk phone and broadband package if she was accompanied by a younger member of her family who could explain the small print to her.

Mrs Greening-Jackson, who sits on the board of several charities, said: “I was absolutely furious. The young man said, ‘Sorry, you’re over 70. It’s company policy. We don’t sign anyone up who is over 70.’ “Later a young lady said company policy is that anyone over 70 might not understand the contract. She said, ‘If you would be prepared to go to the shop in town and take a younger member of your family we might give you a contract.’

“I have just completed a visa form to go to Russia. Last year we did one for walking the Wall in China and here is this person saying I would not be able to understand a basic form - and it was basic. It is pure ageism. “Somebody has decided when you turn 70 you lose a lot of your mind. I find this is ridiculous.” When her case came to light on Radio 4’s You And Yours last week, Carphone Warehouse admitted it had adopted an over-70 rule.

But the firm insisted it was not a blanket policy and claimed the guidance was to protect the elderly. A spokeswoman said: “It is not our policy to refuse business from adult customers of any age group. However, we do ask our agents to use their discretion when dealing with older customers.” She added that the discretionary rule had been introduced in response to complaints that staff had mis-sold products last year. Liberal Democrat MP Paul Burstow, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on older people, described the practice as ‘deeply offensive’.

He said: “It is nonsense to assume those over the age of 70 cannot understand this sort of package, especially with the huge explosion of ‘silver surfers’ using the net.” New laws next month will outlaw ageism in the workplace. But Help the Aged wants the rules extended to protect consumers. “We see companies putting in place arbitrary age rules all the time,’ a spokeswoman said. “To deny people services because of their age is just crazy. There needs to be legislation to address this.”

   Saturday - August 26, 2006

Yo-Ho-Ho And A Bottle Of Rum

I’m glad they caught this guy and stopped his operation ... and not because of what you might think. I’m against software piracy but I’m even more against spam and this cat and others of his ilk have been spamming me for years to buy their cheap ripoffs. Personally, I also think it’s a crime for Microsoft and others to sell their buggy software at the high prices they charge also.

This guy doesn’t sound like a very smart pirate mainly because he chose to operate inside the US. The FBI was bound to nab him sooner or later. Most software pirating is done in China, Singapore and the Far East. Russia is fast becoming the leader in software pirating though. All of these pirates are safely out of reach of the FBI so they continue to operate.

My feeling is that if Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, etc. would just do more thorough testing on their software and ship it to stores with fewer bugs and security holes - at a reasonable price, there would be no market for pirates. As it is, consumers are forced to pay outrageous prices for software that must be continuously patched and upgraded (sometimes for an extra fee - but that’s another story for another post) to keep it functioning. That is a crime.

Software piracy is illegal and rightly so. Bad business practices on the part of software manufacturers should also be a crime. Bill Gates became a gazillionaire selling the shoddiest merchandise ever invented and continues to do so. There are others in the computer software industry just as guilty. Perhaps a little jail time for them might encourage them to mend their ways ... and eliminate piracy at the source.

Florida Man Gets Six Years in Prison For Software Piracy
_{(WASHINGTON POST) - Saturday, August 26, 2006}

The owner of a major software piracy Web site was sentenced to six years in prison yesterday, one of the longest jail terms ever imposed for the growing crime of stealing copyrighted computer products, prosecutors said.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria also ordered Danny Ferrer, 37, to pay restitution of more than $4.1 million and to forfeit a wide variety of luxury goods he bought with millions of dollars in proceeds. They included three airplanes; a helicopter; and numerous cars, including a 1992 Lamborghini, a 2005 Hummer and two 2005 Chevrolet Corvettes.

Starting in 2002, Ferrer and a number of co-conspirators operated http://www.buysusa.com/ , which sold at huge discounts copies of software products copyrighted by such companies as Adobe Systems Inc., Autodesk Inc. and Macromedia Inc. The total loss to owners of the computer products was nearly $20 million, prosecutors said.

The sentencing in U.S. District Court was the latest step in a Justice Department crackdown against Internet pirates who distribute copyrighted software, movies, games and other products. “Modern-day pirates ought to expect modern-day penalties,” said U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg, who added that the sentence “sends a strong message to those who pilfer the intellectual property of others.”

Nina Ginsburg, a lawyer for Ferrer, said the scheme started because he couldn’t pay the medical bills from his wife’s long-term illness. “That’s not an excuse,” said Ginsburg, who said Ferrer has a “huge amount of remorse” and has agreed to appear in business-group-sponsored public service announcements condemning software piracy.

One such group, the Business Software Alliance, brought the case to the FBI’s attention. An undercover agent then purchased software from Ferrer’s Web site. Ferrer lives in Lakeland, Fla., but the software was mailed to Northern Virginia, which is why the case was prosecuted there. Ferrer pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement.

- More on the story at WAPO ...

How Things Work

Did you ever wonder how this internet crap works? Well, Professor Skipper is here to help. You see, everything is sent and received from your computer to and from the World Wide Web (WWW) in packets of information. Every packet contains a header which helps it get to where it’s going and a data block which contains the nonsense you typed in your e-mail or browser. Pictured below is the header section and a brief explanation.

Now when you’re at a party you can wow all the girls with your geek knowledge and if Al Gore (inventor of the internet) is there, you can perhaps engage him in a discussion of the relevant pros and cons of the CSMA/CD ptotocols like Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) versus deterministic transmission protocols like Token Ring (IEEE 802.5).

The Internet protocols are the world’s most popular open-system (nonproprietary) protocol suite because they can be used to communicate across any set of interconnected networks and are equally well suited for LAN and WAN communications. The Internet protocols consist of a suite of communication protocols, of which the two best known are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). The Internet protocol suite not only includes lower-layer protocols (such as TCP and IP), but it also specifies common applications such as electronic mail, terminal emulation, and file transfer.

Internet protocols were first developed in the mid-1970s, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) became interested in establishing a packet-switched network that would facilitate communication between dissimilar computer systems at research institutions. With the goal of heterogeneous connectivity in mind, DARPA funded research by Stanford University and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN). The result of this development effort was the Internet protocol suite, completed in the late 1970s. TCP/IP later was included with Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX and has since become the foundation on which the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are based.

• Source Port and Destination Port—Identifies points at which upper-layer source and destination processes receive TCP services.

• Sequence Number—Usually specifies the number assigned to the first byte of data in the current message. In the connection-establishment phase, this field also can be used to identify an initial sequence number to be used in an upcoming transmission.

• Acknowledgment Number—Contains the sequence number of the next byte of data the sender of the packet expects to receive.

• Data Offset—Indicates the number of 32-bit words in the TCP header.

• Reserved—Remains reserved for future use.

• Flags—Carries a variety of control information, including the SYN and ACK bits used for connection establishment, and the FIN bit used for connection termination.

• Window—Specifies the size of the sender’s receive window (that is, the buffer space available for incoming data).

• Checksum—Indicates whether the header was damaged in transit.

• Urgent Pointer—Points to the first urgent data byte in the packet.

• Options—Specifies various TCP options.

• Data—Contains upper-layer information.

   Thursday - August 24, 2006

You’ve Got … WOOF!

This has to be Sign Of The End Times #4,967. Freaking “Teddy Dawgs” that hook up to your computer through a USB port and read your e-mail or even web sites to you. Gaaaaaaah! I’m going back to bed, pull the covers over my head and pray no one buys me one of these critters. I couldn’t bear to have some cute, cuddly little dawg reading the comments from Bulldog or Rudebadger here to me out loud. If I had a mind, I’d probably lose it ....

The e-Puppy (from AXT Unlimited) will read you your email and word documents! It also allows you to hear internet radio and music!

The built in microphone allows you to record messages and notes. The e-Puppy also has a LED on its stomach for E-Mail notification.

The e-Puppy is easy to operate, with its simple buttons and user interface.

Price: $9.97 ea.

- Easy installation and easy to use
- Converts text from E-mail/Word file/Web Site to voice
- Clear and realistic voice
- No need to use Mouse
- Reads your e-mail or Web Site text
- Supports word (*.doc) files
- Provides sound recording and playing email
- Play music or sound-stories CD-ROM drive
- Listen to internet-radio
- Compatible with Outlook or Outlook Express
- LED for new e-mail notification

- Every body part controls a function

   Wednesday - August 16, 2006

The Incredible Shrinking Hard Drive

September 18, 1956

 
 
The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit

This is the very first hard drive, manufactured by IBM in the mid-1950’s. The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit was rolled out on September 18, 1956 to be used with the IBM 305 RAMAC to provide a storage capacity of 5 MegaBytes.

The 350 Disk Storage Unit consisted of the magnetic disk memory unit with its access mechanism, the electronic and pneumatic controls for the access mechanism, and a small air compressor.

Assembled with covers, the 350 was 60 inches long, 68 inches high and 29 inches deep. It was configured with 50 magnetic disks containing 50,000 sectors, each of which held 100 alphanumeric characters, for a capacity of 5 million characters.

The IBM 305 RAMAC was a monster of a beast taking up an entire air-conditioned room. It had to be kept cooled because it consisted of thousands of vacuum tubes. No transistors or semiconductors.

---

Fast-Forward Fifty Years

What you are looking at below is a modern one-inch wide hard drive from Hitachi that powers the iPod Mini. It holds 4 GigaBytes (4,000 MB) of music. In addition to Hitachi, both Toshiba and Seagate also manufacture 2, 4 and 6 GigaByte hard drives for iPods and cellphones.

If you think that’s a lot of storage in a small space, just wait. Hitachi just accounced that it will start selling 1 TeraByte (1,000,000 MB) ATA drives for PC’s (3.5” wide form-factor) in the Fall to celebrate the anniversary of the hard drive. It still won’t be big enough to hold some people’s pictures, videos and music files ... not to mention all those pictures of nekkid people you don’t want your spouse to find out about. Mheh-heh ...

   Saturday - August 12, 2006

Happy Birthday

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY

August 12, 1981

IBM PRESS RELEASE (ARMONK, NY) - IBM Corporation today announced its smallest, lowest-priced computer system—the IBM Personal Computer. Designed for business, school and home, the easy-to-use system sells for as little as $1,565. It offers many advanced features and, with optional software, may use hundreds of popular application programs.

The IBM Personal Computer will be sold through participating ComputerLand dealers and Sears, Roebuck and Co.’s new business machine stores beginning this fall. It will also be sold through IBM Product Centers and a special sales unit in the company’s Data Processing Division.

“This is the computer for just about everyone who has ever wanted a personal system at the office, on the university campus or at home,” said C. B. Rogers, Jr., IBM vice president and group executive, General Business Group. “We believe its performance, reliability and ease of use make it the most advanced, affordable personal computer in the marketplace.”

IBM has designed its Personal Computer for the first-time or advanced user, whether a businessperson in need of accounting help or a student preparing a term paper. An enhanced version of the popular Microsoft BASIC programming language and easily understood operation manuals are included with every system. They make it possible to begin using the computer within hours and to develop personalized programs quite easily.

IBM, in conjunction with Microsoft, Inc., has adapted an advanced disk operating system to support IBM Personal Computer programs and software development. It has also contracted with Digital Research, Inc. and SofTech Microsystems, Inc. to adapt the popular CP/M-86* and UCSD p-System* to the Personal Computer. These two systems should provide users with the opportunity to transfer hundreds of widely used applications to the IBM Personal Computer with minimal modifications.

The IBM Personal Computer can be tailored to fit the user’s needs. A basic system for home use attached to an audio tape cassette player and a television set would sell for approximately $1,565, in IBM Product Centers, while a more typical system for home or school with a memory of 64,000 bytes, a single diskette drive and its own display would be priced around $3,005. An expanded system for business with color graphics, two diskette drives and a printer would cost about $4,500. The IBM Personal Computer was developed at the Information Systems Division’s Boca Raton, Fla, facility and first deliveries will be scheduled for October.

   Sunday - July 09, 2006

Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago, in the November 1956 issue of Scientific American magazine, IBM announced a new computer peripheral ... the hard drive. IBM called it the RAMAC drive (Random Access Memory Accounting) and it was capable of storing a whopping FIVE MEGABYTES (5MB) of data.

Now, they say innovation drives technology (or something like that) but in this case it’s probably true that pornography drives technology - because everyone knows 5MB will only hold a small portion of the average web surfer’s library of nekkid women (or nekkid men, depending on your preferences). Thanks to IBM we have the hard drive. Thanks to a gazillion porn sites we have terabyte sized drives today. Ain’t science lovely ...

- Source: Modern Mechanix ...

   Saturday - July 01, 2006

Blogs Study May Provide Credible Information

The Air Force is beginning a

3-year project entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.”

Anyone know what that is in English? Whatever it is, it’s automated so that means software searching blogs for;

“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,” Ulicny said.

Patterns include the content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the blog.

Within blogs, hyperlinks act like reference citations in research papers thereby allowing someone to discover the most important events bloggers are writing about in just the same way that one can discover the most important papers in a field by finding which ones are the most cited in research papers.

So watch who and what you link to. Somebody’ll be watching.

“We are developing an automated tool to tell analysts what bloggers are most interested in at a point in time,” Ulicny said.
…To some degree blog interpretation, he said, involves understanding a different form of communication.

“Blog entries have a different structure,” Ulicny said. “They are typically short and are about something external to the blog posting itself , such as a news event.  It’s not uncommon for a blogger to simply state, ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ and then link to a news story.”

In this example, Ulicny said, there might not be much of interest in the blog posting, yet the fact that the blogger called attention to this story can be significant to understanding what matters.

A good example, he said, is the recent furor in the Muslim world over the publication of cartoons of Mohammad in a Danish newspaper. The original publication wasn’t much noticed in the West, but bloggers discussed this event that possibly contributed to riots worldwide.

Blame the bloggers for rioting muslims? Next the bloggers will be blamed for dethroning Dan Rather… uh, yeah

How much is this costing? A cool $450,000. 

   Monday - June 19, 2006

Cancelling AO-HELL

How many of you use AOL (a.k.a. “AO-HELL")? If you do, I don’t want to know about it, OK? Only idiots use AO-HELL ... and people who just don’t know better. I have to admit I signed up for the service several years ago when I was in transit between jobs and needed a dial-up connection during the move. It took me one month to get moved and get hooked back up to broadband again. It took two months to get AO-HELL to close the account and, most importantly, leave my credit card alone. F**KING JERKS!

This is a recorded session with a “helpful” AO-HELL representative by a guy who wanted to cancel his account. Pay attention to what happens and learn from this poor slob’s mistake. Listen as the cunning AOL-Qaeda representative tries every trick in the book to keep the schmuck from cancelling. Listen and learn ...

<sub>As seen on Break.com

(-- Hat Tip to Dave Barry for digging this one up - and for enduring the agony of AO-HELL himself in the process --)</sub>

   Monday - June 05, 2006

Tech Support

---

… Meanwhile back in Redmond, Washington ...

Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 Available

Windows Vista Beta 2 is now available for IT professionals and developers with MSDN and TechNet subscriptions. In the coming weeks, Microsoft will start the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program (CPP) for developers and IT professionals who are not members of the subscription services.

The Windows Vista CPP will also be available to technology enthusiasts that want to install and test a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2. You can get a head start on your Windows Vista CPP preparation by visiting the Get Ready section of this site and downloading the Windows Vista Product Guide.

Getting ready for Windows Vista, available in early 2007, means choosing the edition that’s right for you and ensuring that you have the right PC to enjoy the experiences you want.

_{Disclaimer: The cartoon and news announcement above are totally unrelated. They just appear to have something in common. Appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes.}

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DISCLAIMER

THE SERVICES AND MATERIALS ON THIS WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE HOSTS OF THIS SITE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE OR ANY MATERIALS.

Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
2. Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
3. Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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