Just a brief note.

I read about this story linked off of a Slashdot article. It happened yesterday, Sept 2nd, in Cleveland, Ohio. Here’s the full story.

Basically, what happened is this:

1. Mike goes into a Circuit city to buy a couple items, pays, and heads towards the exit.
2. At the exit of the Circuit City, an attendant says “Sir, may I please look into your bag and see your receipt?”
3. Mike replies “No, thank you,” and continues walking.
4. Some hullabaloo ensues involving the manager, the entrance-guy, and Mike. The entrance-attendant had said he is allowed to look at the bag by law but was unable to cite the specific law that allowed him to violate Mike’s 6th amendment rights.
5. Unable to leave, Mike gets out of the back passenger seat (this becomes important in a minute) and calls 911. An officer arrives and gets the low-down on what happens.
6. The officer requests to look inside the bag and Mike complies.
7. Then the officer asks to see Mike’s license, and Mike declines, citing the Ohio law that says he is only required to provide his name [and his birthdate and address, if requested]. Mike gives his name, but again declines to show his license.
8. Mike is arrested by the officer, and eventually charged with “Obstruction of Justice”

A few things of note here, and you should really read the full article. The officer was asking to see his license, but Mike was clearly not driving. Consider if Mike had never learned how to drive, what would have happened then? Mike co-operated with the law completely, so how was he obstructing justice? He wasn’t required to provide any information beyond his name, address and birthdate, and on top of that, he was not read his Miranda rights.

Personally, I sent him $10 towards his legal fund — mostly as a thank-you for reminding us of all of our rights as free men and women. What happened here is exactly what will happen if / when (and it’s looking more and more like “when” than “if”) a National ID system is adopted. Historically, driver’s licenses were only intended to show that a person is allowed to operate a motor vehicle. And social-security numbers were intended, when the program was created, to be given when a person is of legal age to work (so they can be taxed into the SS program). Nowadays, newborn babies (such as my son) are given SSN’s when they’re born!

Pass the word around about this. Tell as many people as possible. If you can, give him a few bucks towards his legal fund.

Categories: Rants
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I suppose I may be a little late joining in on this chorus, but I’ve been reflecting on some things lately; Specifically, some stuff related to the war. (you know which war)

Melissa and I were watching some youtube videos of Roy Zimmerman. If you’ve never seen his work, you must check it out. He’s a guitarist/singer who plays hilarious satires set to folksy music. One of the songs was entitled “That is the war on terror” (viewable here). The last verse he mentions a rather long quote, originally spoken by Herman Göring. The name and the quote both sounded very familiar, and on a hunch, I searched for him on Wikipedia. But before I post the link, read the quote first:

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

I would hope that Herman’s affiliation should be plainly obvious after reading that quote. If not, check out the wikipedia entry (hint - he said it in the early 1940’s).

Yes indeed, he was a rather outstanding member of the Nazi party. I liken him to Karl Rove, but with a more prolific military background.

But what I find interesting about the quote is that it seems to be a distilled concentration of much of the propaganda purported by the President’s political pundits. Particularly the “denounce the pacifists for being unpatriotic” and the “announce that we are being attacked.”

I totally agree with Göring that it’s a highly effective method. From a psychological perspective, the issues of personal safety / security are at the lowest (and thus most primal) levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. Appealing to the lower levels tends to bypass the critical mind (i.e. morality becomes a bit fuzzy when the you perceive the safety of your family to be in jeopardy) and is a classic rhetorical method of rallying the masses. But in spite of agreeing with him, I still think it’s a rather dispicable and reproachable way to rule.

I think we can all agree that the government played up the “We are under attack” issue. (September 11th anyone?) I seem to vaguely recall a number of newspaper headlines, television news coverage headlines, and talking-head official statements saying that in one way or another. And as of late, the administration has a rather sordid history with throwing around the adjective “unpatriotic.” In fact, I remember a time back in 2002 where Bush actually said “if you aren’t with us, you’re against us.” (A false dichotomy, for those of you keeping score at home)

Now, I’m not implying that Bush = Hitler; Nor am I implying that Republicans = Nazis. I’m simply pointing out the similarities in their rhetoric. The administration is intentionally engineering and manipulating the public in order to keep us in a constant state of acquiesence.

Quite honestly, I’m not really sure what needs to be done. I also don’t think that I’m the only person who feels uncertain and a little lost about what to do (Democratic Congress, for example). And this temporary uncertainty / apathy is an implied green light for the administration to basically run amok and do whatever they see fit to do. It’s like we’re being hypnotized by over-stimulus and we stand their dazed while someone robs us blind.

Anyone? What’s a good way that we can snap out of it and start taking action? (Preferably legal, but feel free to think outside the proverbial box)

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Back again with more prosetylization, but this time the stakes are higher.

I direct you to an article written in CNN money online. It profiles a man named Kevin Hamm: businessman, self-taught low-level programmer, devout Christian, and the world’s most profitable domainer. His portfolio is currently worth approximately 300M, he makes about 70M per year in click-thru advertising, and runs the site “agoga.com”, which if you’ve ever typed a misspelled or generic url into your url bar, there’s a good chance you’ve seen it.

His latest deal? A bargain with the COUNTRY OF CAMEROON.

Cameroon owns the “.cm” top-level domain (TLD). For example: “www.widgets.cm” would be the Cameroonian equivalent of “www.widgets.us” (the United States TLD). However “www.widgets.cm” is remarkably close, in fact, only a typo away from “www.widgets.com”. Do you see where this is going?

The deal that Hamm struck up with the Cameroonian government is that every time someone goes to an unregistered “.cm” address, their servers automatically redirect the traffic to his agoga.com website. So if you type in “www.alskjlakweranleka.cm”, it should (and I believe, DOES) redirect you to agoga.com. But so would legitimate misspellings, like “www.microsoft.cm” or “www.wordpress.cm.” Cameroon gets a small cut of any profits from redirection, of course, but that’s a small price to pay given that this deal virtually registers a near-infinite amount of domains, BY DEFAULT, with Cameroon.

Hamm is also pursuing similar deals with Colombia (.co — also a .com misspelling), Nigeria and Ethiopia (.ne and .et, respectively; Both misspellings of .net). To continue my analogy from my last post: This situation is like if you had a town (with the people with sandwich signs standing around on sidewalk tiles) and if you went looking for something that no one had heard of or something where you aren’t pronouncing the name correctly, they direct you to Hamm’s sidewalk tile.

This isn’t what the Internet is about. People hoarding domains and controlling traffic in this way is an unfair, unnecessary practice that leeches from the experience. As the number of these domaining-ad-aggregates increases, there will be more junk websites, clogging up search engine results and interjecting themselves into the path to your information destination.

There was a similar recent case with some alleged spyware companies such as Zango.com, Roundads.com, etc. The case I read went like this:

1. You install their third-party software (either in the form of a toolbar, “cool email smileys”, a cute puppy screensaver, etc.) and it runs in the background as you search the web.
2. You go to a website, such as blockbuster.com, and decide you want to register with one of their subscription programs, so you click the link to go to the registration form.
3. The spyware, running in the background, identifies this click and hijacks it — instead of taking you to the normal registration form for blockbuster, it takes you to the same registration form, but with the referral information crediting the spyware’s company with the referral as if you had “found” Blockbuster while looking at Advertisements placed by the Spyware company
4. Blockbuster then sees the referrall information, and must then pay the Spyware company a sum of money, around 10-20 DOLLARS each time. And the company did NOTHING to benefit Blockbuster.

See how this is a problem?

This is the type of capitalizing and profiteering that serves only the self-interest of the person doing it, but affects us all. It’s like a Tragedy of the Commons; Everyone knows that this will eventually die out on its own, so they’re all jumping aboard as fast as possible to get a piece before it croaks.

My clarion call to you, fair reader: Don’t load toolbars, advertisement software (and scan regularly!), and don’t click on Domaineer’ed sites! Only by ceasing to reinforce this business model can we force them to stop polluting our Internet.

Categories: Geekery, Rants
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This morning, I woke up at about 7:30am, a little later than usual. Did the usual morning routine. As I walked into the kitchen, though, I noticed that the sound of construction work seemed a little bit louder than it should be. Glancing over at the backdoor, I found that it was half-way open!

At first, I thought that it may have been Frank-the-ass-cat. Sometimes, if the door isn’t completely shut tight, and he wants out, he’ll paw at the underside of the door until he pulls it open. He’s quite innovative. But as I went to shut the door, I noticed the dead-bolt was extended. Jutting-out. As-in: “with the dead-bolt in the position it was in, the door cannot be opened or closed.”

This got my brain crunching a bit: “If the deadbolt was extended, the simplest explanation is that someone opened the door and then extended the deadbolt.” but I knew it wasn’t Melissa or myself. There were a number of other possibilities, all equally unlikely, including sleepwalking, gnomes, and our pets having telekinesis. What I settled on was “The door wasn’t completely closed and the deadbolt wasn’t completely extended, and Frank-the-ass-cat pulled the door open. When he did, the deadbolt slipped the rest of the way out.” I’m still not totally settled on that though. Before I left for work this morning, I went down into the basement and looked all around to check for signs of intruders (or intruders themselves)

Tonight, while laying in bed with my wife and infant son, I saw the back-porch light click on. This wasn’t TOTALLY unheard of — it’s motion activated, and a bit sensitive. But what would trigger it? The back door was closed and locked, and the back screen-door is spring-loaded to close by itself. The simple explanation is that something/someone was on the back porch (it’s completely barren except for some garden tools). What else could there be though? Did the wind blow through the screen-door and cause one of the curtains to move? Were there very large moths? I didn’t open the door and look, but I did listen. No reason to let whatever is out there into our house.

I suppose the paranoia is mostly rooted in the wave of recent crimes we’ve had that are uncharacteristic to this community. Within the past month we’ve had two bank robberies (a couple guys from Dayton robbed two local banks in the same week), our very close friend Joe Augustin was assaulted, robbed, and left nearly dead in plain sight downtown (the assailants are currently released on bond, trial in October), there’s someone being charged with attempted murder for shooting at a car that was passing by (he’s released on bond), a Kentucky man was found trying to lure an 8-year old boy into his van, and the police found human remains down in southwest Wayne county (middle-aged male, tattoo on one arm, unidentified otherwise).

What is going on around here? Is there some cosmological event that is make people more aggressive/desperate than usual? All of these things happening makes me a bit uncomfortable to be living in this town! It also makes me want to invest in ADT home security or something. It’s really unsettling to realize how vulnerable you are. We shouldn’t have to fear walking the streets at night, and we shouldn’t have to think about people toting guns around.

I’m open to suggestions about this — What can we do as a community?

Categories: Rants
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The latest craze among the money-mongers and their ilk is Domaineering. Domaineering is the business of buying up many domains with specific names (such as “cellphones.com” or “eatingdisorders.com”), relying on the fact that 15% (or more!) of browsers use “Direct Navigation” (typing a search term or web address in directly) in order to get to their destination.

Imagine two people, both wanting to find information about a Nokia cellphone
Person A goes to Google and types “cellphones” and gets a list of sites.
Person B just types “cellphones” into the URL bar, and the browser automatically tries appending “.net”, “.com”, etc. until it gets a successful hit.

These domains that the domaineers purchase are used as revenue generators by having paid advertisements on them. When you go to one of these sites and click on one of their links, they get paid a stipend EVERY TIME someone clicks, anywhere from a few pennies to a few dollars!

But why is this bad?
The bottom line here is that by supporting these individuals, you’re supporting their business practice. But what’s so bad about it? They’re just entrepreneurs, right?
Sort of. There can only ever be one “cellphones.com” or “eatingdisorders.com”, which means that in order for anyone else to acquire that domain, they have to pay the current owner (if it’s already registered) a very large sum of money to get the owner to part with it. But the current owner isn’t contributing anything worthwhile to the internet at large by having these sites!

Imagine that you lived in a town where there were a bunch of businesses of all kinds: Mom and pop stores, corporate stores, chain stores, franchises, etc. Normally, when we want to locate a particular business to meet a particular need, we look in the yellow pages (google), ask friends we may have (email), or just go browsing around.

But in this fictitious town, there are people all over the streets, wearing large signs that hawk certain product lines or items. If you approach them and ask about their Nike sneakers, they’ll point you over to one of several shoe stores nearby. When you walk into the store, the store immediately pays the person on the street for the reference.

Sounds helpful, right?

Now imagine that the streets are becoming more and more crowded with people pointing other people around, because everyone wants to get a piece of this action. And the sidewalk tiles (domain names) that people are standing on is coveted — if you want to stand there, even if it’s just to stand in the shade or to stand around and talk to your friends, you have to pay them a lot of money to leave.

Are you starting to see why this is a problem?

What’s worse is that more and more people are jumping on this bandwagon, which means that more and more people are putting up useless sites with ONLY ADVERTISING LINKS!!! The CEO of MySpace has started talking about integrating more “Web 2.0″ content (social networking, aggregate news services, etc.) into these domaineering projects, which means that the wolf is just donning a different outfit. Those sites will appear useful at first, but then you’ll realize that all the sites are all sharing the same news items, the same social networking tools, etc.

I may sound like I’m being apocalyptic, but it’s already happening! Some individuals make millions of dollars a year, own HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of domain names, and contribute useful content to NONE of them. (unless you count advertisements as useful)

So what can I do?
» Use search engines. Don’t type stuff directly into the URL bar unless you are typing a URL. (i.e. type “nokia.com” not “cellphones” into your URL bar)
» If you get to one of those “ad-only” pages, don’t click on the ads. I rarely click on ads at all because they always like to popup new windows.
» Don’t participate. As much as the lure of money may attract you, the ethics of this industry are very questionable. (These people are in the same boat as Spammers and Telemarketers in my book)
» Don’t buy domains from Domainers. If you’re registering a domain, do it through a proper registrar, don’t do a domain transfer.

If you’re feeling more devious, here are some other things you could consider doing to disrupt the model a bit more (This is more for the geeky-types):
Write a script that sends a deluge of clicks through a particular ad click. “But Wait!”, you may ask “Didn’t you just say to not click on these links, because it was supporting them?”. Yes indeed I did. However many advertising Pay-per-click services get really mad when people try to drum up extra cash by falsely generating clicks. So why not help them along their way to frauding? Send 10,000 or so clicks to each ad on a given page, and do that for many different pages. As far as I know, there isn’t a law saying you aren’t allowed to click a whole bunch of times. Since you don’t directly work for the person getting paid, you aren’t really acting in conflict of interest, but I really doubt the ad people will feel comfortable paying out all that much.

Bottom line: Stop Domaineering and Cyber-Squatting

Categories: Geekery, Rants
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This is simultaneously frustrating and hilarious:
Verizon Cant’ Count (Youtube)
Verizon Still Can’t Count (Youtube)
The VerizonMath blog

The issue here is a very simple one of UNITS. Remember in your science classes (probably chemistry?) where you were told to keep your units? Here’s the situation:

1. Verizon quotes a price of 0.002 CENTS per kilobyte
2. Man goes to Canada and uses approximately 33,000 kilobytes.
3. Man receives bill for approximately $70.00

Do you see the problem?

1. 0.002 CENTS = $0.00002
2. 33,000 x 0.002 CENTS = 66 CENTS
or, in dollars: 33,000 x $0.00002 = $0.66

Verizon kept arguing that: 33,000 x 0.002 CENTS = 66.00 DOLLARS.

The issue here is clear: The result came up with the format xx.xx which causes the people to immediately think “oh! dollars!” and forget that the original equation is in CENTS. Verizon’s ACTUAL rate is $0.002, but the operators were quoting it as CENTS. Why would the operators do this? Probably because people subconsciously associate anything after the decimal point as being cents.

Tell your friends. Link to these pages. The more people that link to it the higher it’s google ranking!

Categories: Geekery, Humor, Rants
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