Random Musings and Nicknacks

It has long been a point of contention in the world that the organization that manages internet domain names is an American company (there have been suggestions that given the importance of email and web sites, it should be UN controlled).

This situation certainly won’t help settle the concerns … the US government has seized the domain name of a Spanish company that sells Cuban vacations because it violates US law.

Ars Technica certainly pulls no punches in their final analysis:

As previously noted, Marshall is a British citizen operating a business from Spain, with servers located in the Bahamas. He does not claim that no Americans ever visited Cuba, but he has stated that he was uninterested in marketing his services to the US. In this case, the Department of the Treasury was able to shut down his business without notification or negotiation of any sort. Even if he wanted to appeal the decision, Marshall has no organization to which he can appeal, save his registrar, which can simply claim to have been following government orders.

If the US intends to continue presenting itself as the guardian of Internet rights, situations like this require a bit more delicacy. By effectively shutting down Marshall’s business, the United States has committed the censorship it condemns in other nations. Even worse, the Department of Treasury effectively shut down an international business without any type of due process. Both France and Germany followed a court process when investigating Yahoo for alleged improprieties, and the company in question (Yahoo) had the opportunity to respond to the charges in a court of law. Marshall was afforded no such luxury.

Radiohead may have made the largest splash lately with an online offering however they are neither the first nor (IMNSHO) the most innovative.

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Well, It’s been a while, and I’ve not been talking about things.
Well, about a week ago, something happened. An incident in YVR. Unfortunately, the news is eating this up like a fly in a pile of manure. Seeing how much publicity this has made, I would be surprised if the family hasn’t go time to grieve alone.

By now, most people have seen the video — taken at Vancouver International Airport on Oct. 14 — that shows Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski’s final minutes.
Dziekanski died after being Tasered by police in what, to the casual observer, appears to be an overuse of force.

Seriously, I saw this video. It seemed very vicious. I have my own opinions, but if you want to see it, go to Youtube.com and search it yourself. I don’t like sending the link. I feel its wrong for some reason…

But if you don’t want to see this, just take my opinion. It was very, very abusive of their powers. I didn’t enjoy the sight.

Christopher Paolini is a great writer, but he does really bug me sometimes.
Yesterday I heard something from my dad, about the release of the third book, I was really excited…
Instead I was not impressed…
It turns out there not only 3 books in the “trilogy” in which he calls. It’s now decidely going to be 4 books. He calls it a “cycle”… but anyways, I was really looking forward to reading the next one, figuring out how it ends.
But no… he just had to make us read an extra thousand so pages, and even so, he did something else that really upset me.
The deadline for the release of the book was delayed by nearly a year. It was supposed to come out this summer. When I heard that, I though of what my mom always said,
“When you set a deadline, you have to complete it in the deadline!”
Yesterday it was contreversial, she said it was all very well planned and smart, but I think it’s just plain stupid… it’s going to kill nearly all of his fans…

Well, if you haven’t read Eragon anyways, you can borrow it at a library… remember, it’s by Christopher Paolini…
And check the website out here

I got an email message yesterday purporting to be from Future Shop, warning me that someone was running a phishing scam. One of the things the email said was

For your information, we only offer authentic promotions on our web site and via our e-newsletters which take you directly to our secure website at www.futureshop.ca (clickable link), clearly identifying out company’s identify in the URL

Something didn’t seem right, so I looked at the raw email, and discovered it didn’t come from the futureshop email servers, and all the links actually sent me to a different address, and promptly wrote this off as a phishing attempt.

Well I found out on the radio this morning, that the email was real.

That’s right, they sent me an email warning of people pretending to be Future Shop but really redirecting me to another site to steal my information, and all I had to do to find out more was click this link that looked like it was from Future Shop but really took me to another site…

What is wrong with this picture?

All hail the all-knowing, all-seeing, benevolent Google.

It appears that as of now only the last point is debatable. I have no idea how this slipped under my radar, but Google has upgraded their maps and are starting to roll out Google Street View. Because being able to zoom in and see cars, houses, and trees was not enough apparently, so Google has been sending vans driving around the country taking pictures, and now in a number of areas you can zoom right down to the point where you are standing on the street looking around.

Apparently this has created a few privacy concerns. My favourite images so far are the guy climbing the fence to get into a locked building, and they guy thinking he is very anonymously walking into the adult bookstore.

Big brother is watching us. Funny how we had always assumed big brother would be a government keeping the data secret.

I actually skipped mentioning this when it came out, because I believed it was a misunderstanding. Surely it couldn’t be this bad.

But there came confirmations. Then other people repeated the experiments and got the same results. Now it is beyond a doubt.

Apparently Microsoft Vista can’t play music and use the network at the same time.

Then it gets worse. Microsoft has responded, and confirmed not only is this not a bug, but it is expected behaviour.

Apparently, on current hardware, Vista is incapable of using the network connection fully without causing an MP3 to skip (something that OS/2 could do properly on my old 486).

“Please note that some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not. In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design.”

Well, you know when parents just talk about work at the dinner table? (more…)

Spam. I don’t think that there is much more annoying than that on the internet right now.

In the last 24 hours I have received 45 spam messages to my personal email address, which is significantly more than actual real email I get. Fortunately my junk mail filters caught all but 3 of them (which is a bad day — normally only 1 a day get through) so email is still (technically) usable for me. It causes serious business problems though — I have found requests that I never actioned because it turned out they got tagged as spam.

I think the email spammers have lost — but not in the way most people would think. (more…)

I finally set up my club! (more…)