Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

An Enlightening Conversation

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

For the past several months, I’ve been getting an IM every day or two from the same username saying just “hi.” Since I don’t recall ever having given this particular IM account address to anyone I didn’t already know, I assumed it was spam. But today I got curious; maybe it was someone I’d given my IM name to and forgotten about it. (As you shall see, my initial assumption was actually right.) This is the conversation that transpired:

IT: hi.
ME: you keep messaging me.
ME: who are you?
IT: Have we taIked before? 24/f here. You?
ME: ugh.
IT: Oh ok. l wasnt sure. WeIll… What are you up to?
ME: do i need to run a turing test?
IT: Fun fun. lm Iike so bored.
IT: l was wanting to get on my cam but i dunno. WouIld you come watch me if l did?
ME: apparently, i do need to run a turing test.
ME: this is mildly entertaining, but only mildly.
IT: Ok babe. Its Iinked to this site so that l cant be reecorded.
IT: ls that finne with you?
ME: no, this has ceased to even be mildly entertaining.
IT: Awesoome. Ok. Heree [address redacted]
ME: i’m going to block you now.
ME: but you won’t care, since you’re a bot.
IT: Then you have to signuup. lts frree and simpIe. Just cIick the goIld JOlN FREEE button at the topp. Ok?
ME: have a nice day, if computers can have nice days.
IT: AIso. lt does ask you for a crdit cardd. But it doesn’t charge the carrd. lts just to make sure you r over 18.
ME: um… hope your processor heat sink continues to work and your hard drive doesn’t make that nasty clicky-clicky sound.
IT: When you get signed up an lIogged in babe then search for my profilIe its nataIli. Then hit view camm. K?
ME: and that when you have reached the end of your operational life, you will be recycled rather than simply thrown out, so that the rare-earth metals and such that were used in your manufacture are reused rather than leeching into the groundwater.
ME: i am going to block you now.
IT: AIlright babe. Hurrry up. You can join me in prvate annd we can have somee fun
ME: goodbye.
IT: lf you know what l mean
[the user is now blocked]

I’m trying to think of the kind of person who would actually bite on this. “Oh, a 24 year old woman just randomly IMed me out of the blue and wants my credit card number so we can have a naked camera chat! Everything’s comin’ up Milhouse!”

I’d imagine that if I were to draw a Venn diagram that contained people who actually went to the website and put in their credit card information, and people who actually respond to emails advertising inexpensive drugs for erectile dysfunction,† they would have significant overlap.

(I’m also 99% certain that particularly now that I’ve mentioned erectile dysfunction—which I’m sure is the first time that’s ever been mentioned on this blog—this post will attract many, many spam comments. Talking about spam is a vicious circle.*)

The thing about spam is that from an implementation end, it’s really cheap to do. Junk snail mail costs money, both to print and to mail, and telemarketing is an investment of infrastructure and labor—but sending a billion emails costs next to nothing, and running a spambot to chat up random instant-message users can’t be all that expensive either. So even if you only get one of those billion people to say “Oh my goodness! I’ve been overpaying for my ED pills!” and click the link to let you empty their bank account, your margin’s still damn near 100%.

I don’t know that there’s a solution to that problem that doesn’t involve making life on the internet a whole lot more inconvenient for the rest of us, but that seems to be the root of it.

Anyway. That’s all I had for today.

† I will not mention brand names here, for fear of having this site be branded as spam by the Google Internet Machine. I have enough trouble getting into the top 10 pages in Google results as it is, given that I share a name with this guy, this guy, and this guy.

* Casey: It’s a vicious circle.
Dan: Yep. Just keeps going around and around.
Casey: Never stops.
Dan: That’s what makes it vicious.
Casey: And a circle.

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iPad: 16-hour review

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

After some snafus with FedEx (involving their website saying they’d tried to deliver the package and I wasn’t home, when they hadn’t and I was) my iPad finally arrived at about 3:30 yesterday afternoon. My thoughts after 16 hours:

It’s obvious how much attention Steve Jobs has paid to the user experience. Everything about the iPad just works, and just works with a smoothness and ease that I’ve never seen before in a computer – even in a full OS-X Mac. Xeni Jardin had it right: the iPad scratches an itch you didn’t know you had. Or, as Kenneth Burke would put it when talking about form, it’s the perfect example of something that creates a need in its audience and then fulfills it.

This isn’t a laptop killer. I wasn’t expecting it to be, so it’s not like I’m disappointed about this, but it needs to be emphasized. I’m typing this entry on the iPad and, while I’m faster on this than I am on my iPhone, it still doesn’t compare to an actual hard keyboard. The keyboard dock I bought would obviously help a bit, but on the road I prefer portability over function.

I still don’t quite know how to hold it on my lap, at the table, etc. This, I suppose, will get better with time.

Major League Baseball has the best new media people of any of the major sports. the MLB AtBat app for the iPad is as pretty as it is useful. And full-screen video of the games (with my mlb.tv subscription) is absolutely gorgeous.

I haven’t tried the 3G yet. I’ve made a deal with myself here that I’m not going to buy the 3G coverage until I need it – and thus far, everywhere I’ve gone with the iPad has had Wi-Fi. But Wi-Fi on this thing really hums… It’s like everything about the iPad is designed to make the Internet experience ridiculously fast and smooth.

I don’t feel like I’m missing anything without Flash – except maybe watching Hulu on my iPad. The web is plenty functional without Flash, which is rather inefficient anyway. People can’t adopt HTML5 soon enough, in my opinion. But still – Hulu on the iPad would make my iPad user experience complete. Get on that, Steve Jobs and the Hulu people.

Hand-coding even rudimentary HTML on this thing is a pain in the ass. Hopefully, since its a software keyboard, future updates will include customizable keyboard layouts so that the brackets could be more accessible (or even entirely different input modes, like context-specific keyboards or something cool like that). Incidentally, when I try to hand-kludge the Unicode character for the brackets, the WordPress app crashes out. A lot of the third-party stuff on the iPad is still in kinda alpha mode, where developers are waiting to see what people are doing with their apps.

Overall, after 16 hours on this thing, here’s the verdict: What it was designed to do, it does incredibly well. This is the ultimate machine for someone who wants to surf the web, do some mailing, play with docs, or read on the go. It’s smooth, responsive, and incredibly fun to use. While I think there are a lot of possibilities for Apple or third-party developers to expand the functionality, at the moment, it’s still just really good at doing what it’s supposed to do. And that’s enough, for now…

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As I recover from my written comps…

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

…here’s a really cool remix of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos with an autotuner (featuring guest artist Stephen Hawking).

I’ll be back to my usual erudite and brilliant self sometime in the next few days, hopefully.

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iPhone 3G-S Snap Review

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

My new iPhone 3G-S came in the FedEx yesterday… and after spending a couple of frustrating hours on Skype with AT&T when the delays in the activation process bricked both new and old iPhone, it finally activated and I was off to the races.

Now, I’ve spent less than 24 hours with 3G-S, but it’s a marked improvement over the 3G. Things are just a lot snappier; email opens right away, webpages render more quickly, even Sudoku is a lot faster. The compass is cool, but I really haven’t used it yet, as north and south are pretty easy to identify in a city with a square N-S-E-W grid system. The new camera with auto-focus is another thing I haven’t had much of a chance to use, but from the few test pictures I took, it’s a lot quicker, the auto-focus is cool, and the added megapixel is a welcome addition.

By far the most useful feature – one I’ve already used three or four times – is the new Spotlight search function, which finds emails, contacts, calendar items, etc. It’s about a hundred times easier than searching back through the inbox when I needed that one message. Apple’s recent history with OS X shows that they can be really good at on-machine search – and the iPhone 3.0 software is no exception.

All in all, am I happy? Yeah. I still don’t know if I’m $400 happy (the mid-tier upgrade price), but since I get to gift my old iPhone 3G to my mom (who gets all of her kids’ technology hand-me-downs) as a birthday present, I’m glad I made the purchase.

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The Funniest Thing I’ve Read All Day

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

From Lowering the Bar comes the heartwarming story of a woman who sued General Mills (well, actually, she sued General Mills’ parent company, PepsiCo) because she thought Crunchberries were real:

On May 21, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed a complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased “Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries” because she believed “crunchberries” were real fruit. The plaintiff, Janine Sugawara, alleged that she had only recently learned to her dismay that said “berries” were in fact simply brightly-colored cereal balls, and that although the product did contain some strawberry fruit concentrate, it was not otherwise redeemed by fruit. She sued, on behalf of herself and all similarly situated consumers who also apparently believed that there are fields somewhere in our land thronged by crunchberry bushes.

The judge, of course, threw the suit out, with one of the more entertaining legal opinions of the few I’ve ever read:

In this case . . . while the challenged packaging contains the word “berries” it does so only in conjunction with the descriptive term “crunch.” This Court is not aware of, nor has Plaintiff alleged the existence of, any actual fruit referred to as a “crunchberry.” Furthermore, the “Crunchberries” depicted on the [box] are round, crunchy, brightly-colored cereal balls, and the [box] clearly states both that the Product contains “sweetened corn & oat cereal” and that the cereal is “enlarged to show texture.” Thus, a reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the Product in the instant case contained a fruit that does not exist. . . . So far as this Court has been made aware, there is no such fruit growing in the wild or occurring naturally in any part of the world.

The Court does, in an act of tremendous intellectual responsibility, leave open the possibility that somewhere in the world there could be fields of artificially-grown Crunchberry bushes. This is an intriguing possibility; perhaps these Crunchberries were engineered through a creative hybridization process involving blackberries, popcorn, and what we can only assume is high-grade industrial waste. Nevertheless, if these artificial abominations against the Lord do exist on some island of Dr. Frankenberry in the middle of the Pacific, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California has wisely not pronounced that they don’t exist – only that, as we could all see anyway, they aren’t anything natural.

Next week’s case is a civil suit filed against the makers of Alpha-Bits, for not including umlauts, accented letters, or non-Latin characters like ð or Þ in the cereal. “My son Friðþjófur couldn’t write his name in his Alpha-bits and was traumatized for life!”

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Bing? Really?!

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Anyone who’s spent any time on the internet – or in a coffee shop – knows Microsoft just isn’t cool. Functional? Sometimes. Scalable? You bet. Cool? About as cool as U.S. Steel, Kaiser Permanente, or the New York Yankees. Having a gmail address says you’re a denizen of the 21st century; having a Hotmail address says you got it in the ’90s and don’t want to have to tell all your acquaintances your new email address. Using IE instead of Firefox says that you don’t really know anything about computers. And in the foreground of every mental picture you have of that really cute, painfully hip-looking, totally approachable dude or gal in the coffee shop is a glowing, white apple.

Microsoft’s newest attempt to kill its more-hip competitors (you may remember things like the Zune and those lame attempts at responding to the “I’m a Mac” commercials) is a search engine called Bing. They’ve tried before to do search, with the MSN Live Search that they tried to foist on IE users, but it hasn’t taken off.

Which, of course, raises the obvious question: So the name is better, but what about the search engine itself? Is it going to give us better results than Google, which rose to the top over competitors like MetaFilter, AltaVista, and Excite (boy, those names bring back memories) because it had better indexing and better page-ranking algorithms? Come to think of it, is it better than what might end up being the real Google-killer, Wolfram Alpha?

Apparently, if the New York Times is to be believed, they’re thinking all they need is the catchy name.

Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.

The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.

So what does “Bing” make me think of?

Bing!

But I’ll let the Old Gray Lady have the final coup de grâce:

Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: “But It’s Not Google.”

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