Jennlog

Dear Jennifer Williams of 6235 bears bluff road Wadmalaw Island, SC:

Get! Rich! Quick! Free!

Please stop forging my email address. I spoke with someone at the phone number you left all over the Internet (along with my email address) (843)442-9481, but he hung up after I asked him to ask you to stop forging my email address.

I’ve had my email address for well over 10 years. I like my email address. It is a pain in the ass when you and people like you forge my email address for the flood of get rich schemes you always seem to leave in your wakes.

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The following is a list of emails I started to receive after you thought it would be a good idea to submit my email addresses to the scams that entertained you this morning:

There were probably more pieces of spam, but I added the scammer’s address blocks to my anti-spam appliance when they started to repeat after 15 minutes — and also suggested that they be added to a global spammer list.

You may also receive a call from Bellsouth.net, because you left your IP address (70.144.38.63) with all of these scammers, conveniently enabling me to identify your ISP.

Who is this Jennifer Williams and why is she forging my email address for all these scams?

Please stop signing up for get rich scams with my email address and get a job or something.

A few months ago I was excited to learn that Denver Airport’s WiFi was free.

On my second visit to this service, they appear to break the Web by encapsulating websites within a Sub-frame so they can display persistent text ads from Google.

This framing not only obfuscates the actual location of a web page (It seems stuck on the initial request location and never varies from that page address), but it destroys almost every webpage dashboard layout I attempted to view.

Denver WiFi forced frame breaks Yallery

Even the Yallery pop-up window was corrupted. This negated the only solution we could find that would allow people with 1024×768 sized displays, but on browsers crowded with toolbars and sidebars to display Yallery.

Cookie? What Cookie?

This “man in the middle” encapsulation also kills IP-based identification as a result of proxying the request and removing all state.

Blah.

Lifelock,

No. I did not provide an “affiliate” with permission to sell you my email address.

Neither you or your “affiliate” bothered to authenticate the ownership of my email address after it was provided to you or them through fraudulent means. I dare you to prove that you or your “affiliate” acquired my email address from me.

This is the second time you have spammed me with this weak “You are receiving this email because you opted to receive messages from us or one of our affiliates” scam.

Stop.

Edited to add:

It appears as if some of their website “contact us” email addresses that I emailed with a request to stop spamming me the first time (and never received a reply or obviously any action) have added my email address to their personal “email deny” lists.

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–
<tami@lifelock.com>
(reason: 553 Sender is on user denylist (Mode: normal))
<member.services@lifelock.com>
(reason: 553 Sender is on user denylist (Mode: normal))

Irony.

If you read a lot of blogs, you have been inundated by pixel-to-pixel coverage of the annual gadgetfest happening right now in overpriced and highly annoying Las Vegas.

A couple my CES badges from years past

When I started attending CES, a show created and managed by the consumers electronics manufacturers association (CEA), it was largely a “Buyer’s Show” produced so retailers and integrators could hang out near shouts of “WHEEL OF FORTUNE” and do some deals that would affect what the general public would find in their local stores for the next calendar year.

As the years went on, the number of retailers shrank as Walmart square footage grew — and in 2008, the majority of electronics are purchased in “Big Box” stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. The content industry changed too — as the digital and Internet-delivered media avalanche landed quicker than you could say “ubiquity”.

There will always be a room full of neon tube lit Ferraris and their 400 speakers at CES but virtually every other consumer electronic category has evolved to the point where you wouldn’t recognize them as they are now, fifteen years ago — let alone four decades ago when CES began.

The CES of today attracts a very different crowd than the CES I remember. The quickest growing classes of attendee fall within the prosumer and fanboy group. (the bleeding edge of early adopters who want to own or “review” the latest and greatest toys).

Is CES at the crossroads of turning into a direct-market show, where the retailer and integrator filters are removed from the value chain? Is it morphing into a new entity all together like Comdex evolved from PCs to Internet (before imploding) and NAB has survived and stayed relevant from RF through the inclusion of Cable and now IP.

I don’t think CES or NAB or any of the other shows quite represent what I’d like to see in a Media-Communications-Content-Electronics show today — looking forward to a “Whole Communications Show and Conference” sometime in the future.

Update: My next post will share some ideas I have on what the “Whole Communications Show and Conference” would be like.

During the last few months, I’ve read about various advertising companies that have popped up that promise other companies that they can drive customers to their door through the exploitation of various social media services.

Whether this exploitation is done by Hyping Corporate Videos to viral status, creating Fake Blogs attributed to fake consumers or through making shill comments to blog posts it is at best really needy and at worst deceptive and fraudulent.

I’m not an important person, a D-list blogger or even really cogent in my thoughts most of the time, but why someone named Luke Saunders from an advertising company named 46 Productions would bother to visit my blog and make a shill comment to one of my posts on behalf of his client Validas (”a cool new service I found”), I have no clue.

If you are a company looking to advertise your products and services to me, at least do it transparently and with feeling.

Seven reasons why the world should not feel sorry for the owners of bricked and/or broken modified iPhones.

1. If they didn’t like the applications provided on the iPhone they shouldn’t own an iphone. They should have bought another phone.
2. If they didn’t think the applications provided on the iPhone were worth $599/$499/$399/$299 they shouldn’t own an iPhone. They should have bought another phone.
3. If they didn’t like a two year contract with AT&T they shouldn’t own an iphone. They should have bought another phone.
4. If they wanted a portable, unlocked phone — the iPhone was never marketed as an open, portable device. They should have bought another phone.
5. If they “unlocked” their iPhone by installing “unauthorized” firmware, it is not Apple’s responsibility to reverse-engineer compatibility with this firmware in later firmware updates. They should not be surprised if their phone is now bricked due to a hung/incomplete firmware flash — this is the cost of playing “Hackerboy”
6. If they tweaked the iPhone’s OS to create a “user land” to install “third party” applications, they should not be upset when Apple releases a new OS update without the file descriptors linked to the unauthorized “user land”. They should not be surprised if their phone no longer has a “user land” — this is the cost of playing “Hackerboy”
7. Apple told everyone that the iPhone was “closed” and would only be compatible with web-based web browser-delivered applications. If they wanted non-apple native applications, they should have bought another phone

I decided not to buy the iPhone due to more than one of the above reasons. It’s bizarre to read all the stories about “Evil Apple” knowing that Apple has no responsibility to preserve “hacks” to their consumer devices. Some devices are released as “hacker toys” with the pseudo-approval of their manufacturer (the Tivo is such a device). The iPhone was never assumed to be such a device.

I will continue to dream about using my ideal portable communications device some time in the future.

Web comment spammers discovered my Honorary Canadian Citizenship Certificate Generator last summer. So I hacked together a little 4-line dictionary-based perl filter and added it to my code to divert these attempts to a file that would list each prevented attempt.

I last rotated that file on August 1, 2006 so as of today, I have exactly one year’s worth of spam attempts (give or take a number of false triggers). The total number of attempts is: 11616.

It’s kind of scary to think about what 11616 webspams looks like across 12 months in comparison to the legitimate traffic I host through that site. I deleted my Movable Type blog in 2003 after only 500 spams and that was just over the top.

I’m convinced that if Google Ad Words didn’t encourage “domainers” to camp on domain names featuring fake portals, there would be no web comment spam trying to drive up the Google “Page Rank” of those fake portals. Google is perpetuating this evil.

The above statement was said by Mark Cuban at the CTAM (Cable Television Association for Marketing) Summit. Multichannel News reports he also declared, “The Internet’s dead. It’s over” and states that the only “new application” to emerge is YouTube.

Now, I realize that Mark was in a room full of cable industry execs and it would seem a likely place for him (or anyone) to announce that the Internet is dead and cable supreme, but what was he thinking?

There are dozens of new services using peer-to-peer technologies — like Joost, Grid Networks and Vuze to name just three. Pre-Internet, these services would not have been allowed to exist in a cable environment unless:

1. the peer points existed on closed cable-owned and operated boxes
2. used software owned and installed by the cable company
3. only transfered media content that the cable company allowed subscribers to see (i.e. was compensated by media owners to deliver to subscribers)

There are dozens of new services that enable interactivity in the television-like world of broadband video distribution, for example:

1. viddler (timeline tags — your own personal MST3K)
2. brightcove (create a “channel”, monetize the channel and analyze statistics)
3. Digg Video (influence the video zeitgeist)
4. podcasting (be the tv)

Cable has done a really poor job of growing beyond their passive media delivery roots (of replicating the original passive over-the-air public broadcast in a private wire-bound spectrum).

It’s not coincidental that the number of “Interactive Television” startups exploded simultaneously to the acceptance and popularization of IP, the Internet and WWW as a communications and interactive media. The cable industry facilitated the creation of ITV Hype 2.0 (in the early 90s, ITV Hype 1.0 didn’t go so well) because if they didn’t they would have lost even more ad dollars and eyeballs to the Internet.

We’ve seen ten years since the mainstreaming of the Internet (and ITV Hype 2.0) and the open Internet is well into “Web 2.0″ while cable is still struggling with delivering the promise of “Interactivity 1.0″ (beyond pointing and clicking a remote to select a PPV on-demand movie — yay interactive tv!).

On the other hand, if Multichannel News misquoted Mark and his statement was restricted to the distribution and use of passive high definition television — he is correct, the Internet doesn’t enable the sustained distribution of 19.2mbps MPEG2 transport streams to the home in 99.99% of the world’s cities.

But the number and quality of pixels displayed on a television set does not equate to the sum total of the visual media experience. At the 1999 National Association of Broadcasters show, my team proved the acceptable visual media experience is flexible and will adapt to low quality if the subject matter is exclusive, informative and/or compelling.

The Internet allows for a much wider variety of exclusive, informative and compelling media. The Internet delivers this media to an ever increasing number of devices and network architectures.

Cable offers… Pay Per View… to your television.

I’ve been watching quite a lot of television on the web since I put my DirecTV service on hiatus for the summer.

Thus far, I think the winning implementation for delivering on-demand television to the web is Move Networks. The shows (sometimes) available from my local Fox station are next to flawless and really enjoyable experience.

In contrast, the worst experience by a wide margin can be found on CBS’s “innertube”. The CBS television experience features hundreds of “Buffering… Buffering… Buffering…” waits between random akamai/doubleclick errors* and dozens of CBS web server-based “slow script”** errors. When did Akamai and Real Networks begin to suck so much?

And what is up with the web television commercials that have the audio cranked to 11? One word for you web television services: “NORMALIZATION”. Seriously, the audio on some of these commercials is at least three times louder than your programming content. Computer users should not have to leap to their volume controls in an attempt to prevent their speakers from being destroyed every time a commercial starts streaming.

I can’t wait until web television/IPTV content aggregators decide to apply some quality control to their products. This industry technology left the experimental stage more than ten years ago.

Peer-to-peer television holds great promise, but the most popular solutions all seem to require Microsoft Windows or Intel CPUs at this time. I wonder if Broadcast TV would have been as popular if NBC programming was limited to General Electric TV sets and shows on ABC were only compatible with RCA sets?

Web Television has a long way to go.

* “RealPlayer: Connection to server has timed out. You may be experiencing network problems. rtsp://a1770.v219276.c21927.g.vr.akamaistream,net/ondemand/7/1770/21827/v7201400/
cmscomstor.download.akamai.com/8605/_!/g2demand/entertainment/primetime/bigbrother8/
rebroadcast/ep05/bigbro805d.rm?auth=daEcObMbEb.dwbkaWb1cLbncHaadMcsddai-bgOq2X-buy-EaEncVlg&aifp=v07201400”

** “A script on the page CBS.com - Innertube http://www.cbs.com/innertube/player.php?cat=140205&vid=&format=&auto=1 is making Safari unresponsive. Do you want to continue running the script, or stop it?“

The Domaintools blog has a post dated July 1st, lamenting the potential income that various banks and finance companies are losing by not resolving their generic names.

They provide homeloans.com and retire.com as examples of addresses that could “generate several thousands of dollars” if they were “parked” (aka place website advertising billboards designed to appear like webportals on the addresses and generate ad revenue from every “stumble view”). Alternately, they suggest redirecting the sites to the owner’s primary sites which would provide millions of dollars in lost referral revenue.

As a web user and 13-year domain name owner, the fact that 99% of domain names registered today are returned within a 5-day refund window by domain tasters because they learn the site can’t earn enough ad revenue from stumble views to recoup the registration fee ($6 or so) pisses me off.

Of the remaining one percent, I’m guessing that 99% of those completed registrations are by these ad portal “domainers” who are betting that they can make a better return on the name than $6.

Chances are, if you owned a website in the last 10 years and let the domain registration lapse, one of these parasitic ad portals now greets visitors at your old address. The “domainer” is collecting ad revenue from stumble views generated by visitors who thought your website was still there based upon the lingering links from other sites.

I think “domainers” should be paying for the significant resources they waste while testing if a domain can attract more than $6 worth of ad revenue from “stumble views”. Tens of millions of spurious registrations and deletions are happening every month and the cost of this infrastructure is paid for by all domain registrants — the majority of whom feel lucky enough to have been able to register a name that approximates their business name, product, service, personal name or some aspect of their personality.

I wish the Web wasn’t being clear cut only to be replaced with millions of ad billboards, but with Google, Yahoo and other opportunistic ad services feeding the ad billboard and “stumble view revenue” business models and mentality, we’re going to end up with one nasty noisy web full of meaningless ad portals.

What does this have to do with the banks and finance companies with the “wasted great generic domains”? There is no such thing as a wasted domain.

The silence of a 404 is much more comforting to me than ad billboards that waste my time with crap. Hopefully, one day someone will develop a tool to engineer all of this web pollution out and away from the browsing experience.