by Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky,
author of The Pebble and The Avalanche: How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions
Sun, 2010-Apr-04, 16:06
Today's email inbox includes spam from an outfit that calls itself "OptionAlarm," which offers some financial service or other that I of course would not touch with a ten-foot pole.
This particular piece of spam arrived on an email address that I gave only to the financial information web site Motley Fool. Two possibilites exist: either Motley Fool sold my name to spammers, or spammers hacked into Motley Fool to obtain the information. Neither alternative does Motley Fool any credit.
Sun, 2010-Apr-04, 07:56
Now I know why American Express wanted my email address: to send me spam.
Each and every time I log into the Amex web site, the site begged me for my email address. I finally gave them one just see what would happen, and I even carefully set my preferences to make certain I would receive only the most essential communications such as messages about potential fraud in my account.
Overnight — Saturday night, the time when in Internet tradition spammers would emerge while system administrators had some time off — Amex sent me spam about one of their marketing programs. I've disabled the email address they're using, and no doubt they'll whine about it next time I log in.
I do have to marvel: what type of fool deliberately sends spam from to a customer who has taken the time and trouble to warn in advance that he doesn't want any? I'll think about this while I consider the move to a new credit card provider, one that respects my privacy.
Wed, 2010-Mar-24, 21:14
Insight into automated services that send your location to your social network:
Too bad. I wanted to stay in touch with my friends, not their software.Once again, we face the challenge of sorting the wheat from the chaff in a world that can generate chaff without limit.
Topics: · internet · social+media
Mon, 2010-Mar-22, 09:14
I continue to marvel at the patience people have with the torrent of unsolicited commercial email (better known as "spam") that arrives in their inboxes daily. Each and every one is a distraction from other tasks — it's a tiny bit of theft by someone in a marketing department. I don't ever do business with spammers, and I work hard to keep spam out of my inboxes.
As part of the effort, I welcome two companies to the list of servers that can't send me email: iContact and Resultsmail. Both companies allowed others to sign me up for mailing lists without my permission; while the two companies might adhere to the appropriately named "CAN-SPAM" act, it's absurd to think that I have to spend time unsubscribing from lists that I didn't want to be on in the first place. If they ever decide to adhere to Internet etiquette and require confirmed opt-in to add someone to a mailing list, I'll unblock their servers; in the meantime, everything from them will silently vanish into the "bitbucket."
Topics: · internet
Tue, 2010-Mar-02, 14:29
The Wall Street Journal blogs that somone filed a lawsuit against Yelp alleging extortion. The lawsuit alleges that Yelp will take down negative reviews in return for money; others allege that Yelp will take down positive reviews if you do not purchase an advertising package.
Let's say that someone is collecting money for removing negative reviews from Yelp. Is it really Yelp?
I expect it's easy enough for a criminal ring to target business owners. They crooks put up several negative reviews; instead of waiting for the business to complain to Yelp, the crooks contact the business directly and offer their "package." The business owner, convinced that he's doing business with Yelp, pays up; the negative reviews disappear; maybe the crooks are smart even smart enough to pay some of the ill-gotten gains for promised advertising.
When I want to prove I own a web page, the person I'm doing business with will ask me to put a comment into the web page's source code, a token that only the web page editor can insert. That's a level of sophisticated identity authentication that I expect most business owners do not have.
Now I admit I'm curious... even if this lawsuit does not involve crooks, does a ring such as the one I describe exist on Yelp or elsewhere?
P.S. The most damage to Yelp would not be to their reputation, or even the proceeds from the lawsuit. I will guess that the most damage would be to their loss of Section 230 safe harbor protection — a smart lawyer could easily (and very profitably) argue that Yelp loses that protection if they manipulate positive and negative reviews to force businesses to subscribe to their services.
Wed, 2010-Feb-03, 08:46
Does everyone in the world need to know that I had quail eggs for lunch on Monday? I think so, so I'll broadcast that on Twitter in a few minutes. But sometimes the most surprising people read Twitter.
Early Tuesday morning I mentioned on Twitter that I was not going to vote in the Illinois primary election. Although I almost always vote in the primaries (and I never miss a general election), this year I was too thoroughly disgusted with the choices on tap and decided to protest by staying at home.
And then I got a telephone call from a reporter at The Chicago Tribune, who interviewed me about the reasons for my refusal to vote. The reporter had noticed my comment on Twitter and was curious enough to ask me.
I do admit that I'm curious about what tool he uses to scan Twitter so effectively, but that's not the point. The point is that the most innocuous short remark can provide information to someone, perhaps not very efficiently but in real time. Twitter has accomplished something profound and I think we don't quite understand the implications just yet.
Topics: · internet · social+media
Tue, 2010-Feb-02, 08:59
Comments are turned off on this blog because I had trouble with the software that runs this blog; the base software is rather old and quirky. I hope to have time this week to repair it.
I am giving due consideration to new software, but there's a spot of bother. A modern blog is really a database: the web page you see is constructed from a lot of data in a database. In fact many web sites are buil that way &mdsah; they're really databases and the web pages you see are constructed from that database. (Trust me: Amazon doesn't create a new web page from scratch for each of the millions of books it has on file, it creates web pages automatically from a database of all its books.) That's actually quite nice in lots of ways, but not so nice in another, namely that if you don't understand how to extract your files from the database you're at the mercy of the web site software. Migrating to a new database system is no easy task.
My current web site is fairly straightforward and stores all its input in ordinary files, and the blog software simply does formatting for me. I don't feel at the mercy of the software and my inforamtion is always available. But I'm afraid it's time to overcome my fears and place all the data into a real database — and make certain I can pull the data out one day by using an open-source version of the software.
Topics: · internet
Fri, 2010-Jan-29, 09:23
A friend just sent an email message to my email address to ask "Is this still you?" I added in a few more details about how to find me:
Topics: · internet · social+media · society
Fri, 2009-Mar-27, 16:26
A few weeks back I signed up for a monthly reminder of my payment due date from Citi Bank — but not for "special offers" three times a week. (You have to wonder if the water coolers at certain companies are filled with vodka when they come up with ideas like that one.
After I had trouble with their "security" system I gave in and called Citi Bank to ask them to please stop sending me a barrage of email. Today I received — you guessed it — email asking me about my customer service experience. Who says corporations don't have a sense of humor?
Thu, 2009-Mar-12, 08:48
Most technical conferences use a "back-channel" for attendees to message each other during the conference. If the speaker makes a reference to a company, someone will post the URL; if an attendee doesn't like one of the speaker's arguments he can say so. I expect some people find this disconcerting, but smart conference organizers monitor the back-channel to see what's been said to take the pulse of the audience.
At the recent Emerging Communications Conference (eComm), for example, a stream of comments in the back-channel prompted the conference organizer to stand up and demand that the attendees who disagreed with the speaker give the speaker a chance to respond by asking their questions publically.
The most common tool for a back-channel used to be IRC: simple and cheap, with some bells and whistles for advanced users — IRC is in fact designed for discussions. Instead, eComm asked us to use Twitter, and we did, with the "#eComm" tag (you can still find the entire conference and post-conference discussion if you like). This meant our back-channel was public; no great worry. It also meant that eComm rapidly became one of the most ten popular topics on Twitter during the span of the conference.
But it also meant that we carried on a two-way conversation via a micro-blogging service that's meant for short broadcasts to the world. Twitter simply doesn't support that very well, and at least one of my subscribers temporarily unsubscribed from my feed because of the number of tweets I made. One fellow attendee solved this "flooding" problem by creating a temporary Twitter account just for duration of the conference.
My conclusion: eComm certainly received decent publicity for the conference; as for myself, I found a number of new people to follow on Twitter and they found me. The public at large learned some interesting facts. But in practice Twitter isn't really meant for conversations, and the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. We need to figure out how to combine IRC's conversational nature with Twitter's public presence.
Topics: · internet · social+media
