I was having a discussion of old computers, so I put up a list of my old toys.
I tried, years ago, to donate them to UCC but I think the CS department head thought I wanted something for them, like a job.
Blog
MicroPayments, again?
I may have gotten myself in trouble with Britt Blaser at the Web 2.0 pre-conference dinner when I slapped down his discussion of micropayments for the Internet. This is a subject that I have heard at least a dozen time over the years, I even had the the same discussion with Bob Medcalf years ago. I don’t believe that micropayments will reach a critical mass of trust necessary to bring this off. The economy is really just a complex barter system. Don’t let it fool you into believing it is some numeric machine. It’s roughly the same as having a fool proof gambling scheme. The economy is a belief and trust model, I believe my money is worth this much, and I trust that you do too. If we don’t have the same foundation, that one currency is stronger than another, or that the exchange isn’t fair, it all collapses. Micropayments are the same thing, except that it operates at internet speed. Too fast and too mystical for the average person to trust. Even a credit card provides a receipt, and a signature or a pin. Prices can’t change from moment to moment, micropayments could provide that, and no one could trust that happening.
I suppose that If I had known how famous Britt was, I might have kept me mouth shut. But I’m becoming Irish, and it just won’t close on it’s own.
Funny search items
Come on, who’s searching for “cat milker device” in the internet?
😉
A brief historical of the WWW
Just so no one forgets a few elements of the history of the WWW, often referred to as the World Wide Web.
1) In reality there was a beginning to WWW before HTTP servers appeared on the internet.
and only later did HTTP, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol appear, along with HTML, or Hyper Text Markup language, a derived, or DTD from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)
2) The original ‘Web’ browser was Mosaic as it place all of the WWW protocols under one browser. And linked these together to what we now call the World Wide Web, a real “Mosaic” of the Internet protocols.
I know this as I was developing Gopher and Anonymous FTP servers when HTTP was developed. And you can still find some of the protocols still listed in the URL of your favorite browser
http://
gopher://
ftp://
https://
shttp://
archie://
Now Famous, wealth to follow
Now that I’m famous, having been disscovered by the Sunday Business Post. along with fellow Bloggers Damien Mulley, Dave, Tom and Donncha. We are all now waiting for the checks to come rolling in.
Or NOT!
But who knows, a wealth of friends is probabally more valuable in the long run. And I’ve even made a new friend of Bernie Goldbach at Irisheyes 😉
The GOP is cracking up, Paradigm change in the wind
I can’t begin to tell you where all these links lead you. I can only tell you where they lead me. The first article Revisionist History Is yet another attempt to spin the history of the Iraq War in President Bush’s direction, but it created a question from the near right Neo-NeoCon about Why this war is so hated And I took time to comment there. But the arguments on both sides did not present a clear listen, from either side of the equation. And it only reminded me that any investigation into any event should be confined by ‘motives and passions’. and not by any ‘beliefs’ or philosophy one has.
It did illustrate the desperate measures the GOP it taking to spin history in a positive manner, and how badly it has worked. Many right wing blogs are now questioning ‘things’, unlike before, the unquestioned belief that the president was the source of all truth. The right has begun to question.
Yet another spinning article about Bush-hatred a threat to national security misses the point entirely. Bush is only a man, a man who should be constrained by the constitution, the laws of the United States. But who, in this article, is being elevated to the level of Godhood. My perspective, if Bush hatred is so great, then he should step aside in order to reunite America and prevent this disharmony. I don’t hold out any hope that the good of america will ever cross Bush’s mind.
wp-trackback spam, an attack on WordPress?
I have been fighting a distributed, wp-trackback comment spam ‘attack’. Along with this I have been ‘discovered’ by distinct automated wp-trackback comment spammers. And putting on my tin-foil hat, I thought about that for a minute.
What if this was not just a advertising spam campaign? None of the comment spam I looked at (and I looked at a great deal) was not appealing, nothing I read would encourage a reader of the spam to follow the links. So you could say that the content was ineffective. Just random noise, only made to look like spam.
The second thought was that it was focused on WordPress software, and the bloggers that used WordPress. From what I can gather WordPress has become the choice of bloggers running their own sites.
Yet a third Idea, came to mind in that trackback is one of the important interconnects between websites, and part of the defense of this spam attack, was to break this interconnect.
So, if this were an attack, what would be it’s purpose?
1) an attack by a rival blogger software system competing with WordPress?
2) an attack by someone to herd bloggers on to one of the big blogger sites?
3) an attempt to break the relationships in the blogger community? (political?)
4) a … Well you fill in the next one ….
in any case, I’m taking off the tin-foil hat as it’s making my head hurt.
The wp-trackback spam is a pain in the ass, and it really sucks having to deal with it.
Commentary brings, reaction commentary
A fellow blogger (Damien) is worrying Am I damaging Ireland’s international reputation? And while I believe he is not damaging it, I find that it is interesting that there is so much reaction.
And I believe, when he quotes the ministers reaction to ‘some commentators’ that those commentators are bloggers. It may be that same reaction, or the general buzz in the internet in general, about the ‘old’ media and the ‘new’ media that may have triggered a writer to interview Cork bloggers on the issues. (Cork being the center of Blogger Heaven) I find it also intriguing that, as I have been commenting about this phenomena, that I managed to get included in the process.
I look forward to having my name, Branedy, in the Garda SÃÂochána blotter Newspaper headlines.
The rhythm of the blogs, the melody of opinion.
If blog sites were musical notes, of the spectrum of opinion you could play the music of opinions to render the musical mood of the world. You could use the hit counts and durations just like sustain, attack, decay of real musical rhythm. You really could determine the ‘tone’ of the period we live in. The beat of the world.
Mass Media, and the Internet’s blogger truth.
I have been reading plenty about the fears that the Television and print media are loosing ground to the Internet and bloggers as a source of news. And as I posted earlier I knew that I was missing the point as well. The mass media just like most of the reporters now are just repeating ‘stuff’ and not reporting the whole story. They never put the information into context, never illuminate the information into anything other than a mental monotone of words. It’s no wonder that no one listens to them any more, or worse yet listens and then gets it wrong.
Years ago I was on a Jury in a manslaughter case. (Trust me you do not want to be on a jury for capitol offense trial) I always thought that the nature of lawyers was to get at the truth in the case. But both the Defense and the Prosecution did more to withhold the truth than illustrate the truth. Both presented facts, in general terms, but what they left out was all the contextually important facts. We as a jury had to recreate the actions of what had happened. We had sat through a whole week of the trial, and then we spent more than a week deliberating, and analyzing what really went on.
This is what has happened to our very ‘legal’ and proper news in the mass media world. The lawyers have prevented the reporters from doing analysis of the news to prevent liability. So there is no real reporting, only information droplets dispensed from their sources are presented. Always legal deference can be applied. It’s always ‘Their’ information, ‘Their’ facts, or the ‘what your see is what you get’, the camera never lies. ‘We just report the news as we see it.’ And should things like ‘Bias’ be accused, well that’s not even a legal issue. You can’t call them a liar if they DON’T report the facts, only if they report the facts wrong.
And this brings us back to the Blogs. People are seeking the analysis that is missing from the news, they are seeking point, counterpoint. They have the news illustrated and illuminated to make sense of the world. Bloggers on their own are only responsible for their own opinions. Viewers of Blogs usually only visit blogs that generally reflect what the viewer is seeking. They receive the illustration painted in colors that are familiar to them. And if the mass media, afraid of the loss of revenue, seek to regain their viewers. The first place they will have to start is to, fire the lawyers, and get back to news analysis, and proper investigative reporting.
Automated Blog Spammer at …
I am currently fending off an automated blog Spammer originating from IP address 65.39.251.54. It appears to be using the WordPress “wp-trackback.php” as it’s vector. I have sent email to the hosting service and the whois holder for this IP range. But no luck yet. I am currently being hit every 2 minutes, which isn’t yet a Denial of Service, but it is coming close.
Update: This spammer now has changed the address to 216.195.47.248 It’s the same Linux system as before, just another address.
UPDATE: Now a regular spammer at 69.31.32.5
CIA Monitors Blogs
CIA Monitors Blogs in Intelligence Gathering Efforts
Could Gaelic be considered encryption?
PNAC, MySpace, Murdoch and Technorati Search
I was disturbed the other day that Technorati was returning a different political balance when I searched. It seemed that the entire blogsphere had moved to the right. And I noted that most of the links were in MySpace blogs. I didn’t think too much about it, just that MySpace bloggers might have been very busy on the subject I was searching for.
Then I saw this:
NeoConservatives: Destroying America for Republicans and Democrats alike
and noticed one thing out of place, or rather one person Ruppert Murdoch and I remembered my search results. And remembered that MySpace.com blogspace had been bought by Murdoch. The phrase from the article “Control the International Commons of cyberspace” struck home.
Could Technorati search results be biased to conservative Blogs on MySpace?
Even given the easily availability of my tinhat close to hand. This scared me. I hope it scares you also. Has someone gained control of blog searching. Could they? And is this part of the NeoCon plan?
Update: More interesting things about MySpace Murdoch wants teenagers’…
Political Critical Mass
In a nuclear reaction, radioactive material is brought together until neutron density increases until critical mass is attained, and ‘boom’, Fission happens.
I think the GOP and the current administration has brought the political climate in the U.S. almost to critical mass. I believe this is getting to that stage by, of all things, reading geek news groups, blogs and message boards.
Geeks are a unique breed, give them enough technology, and they are happy. But lately many of the tech talk sites are degrading into political debates. Well not debates so much, as strangely, they have taken a very anti-republican, anti-adminstration, anti-GOP stance.
When you get stimulated geeks together, you get new technology, fission/fussion reactions. If the politically activated geeks apply themselves, we are going to get new government. And I don’t think the Democrats are going to be any more the winners here than the republicans.
All I can say is it’s going to get very explosive, politically speaking that is.
Information Stressing
I have noticed over the years that when a big issue appears, or when big issues are in the news over a long time, that people in general tend to become saturated with the subject. They ignore it in favor of mundane trivial subjects. It occurs at a more rapid rate when there is someone, or something confronting the subject in question. It happens even faster when the subject is controversial. Subjects like Religion, Science, politics and War are such subjects. When there is a long running issue, the general population generally duck for cover into non controversial details like gadgets and toys, entertainment, and Hollywood stars, restaurants and food, anything not related to the controversy at hand.
This may be due to the belief that ‘someone’ else is dealing with it. Say a government, or a politician or priest. And that therefore it need not be necessary for themselves to deal with it. Or it may be due to fear of confronting the issues, and either the belief or hope that the matter will just go away.
All of these behaviors are indicative of a generally ignorant population, or of a population completely overwhelmed with information. And that’s the point, I can’t tell the difference.
Blogging is a point in reference, the blogging world will hop on a subject to great illustration and commentary, but like a wave, the focus moves on, crashing on another subject shore.
I have noted such waves in my blogging statistics, when the wave is high, any comment I make on the focus-du-jour brings in traffic. And when I comment, or post an article not in the ‘curl’ of the wave, the traffic diminishes. And while the subject I post might be important (at least to me, or the world as I perceive it), it gets no viewing. It is easier to post trivial things, computer items, trinkets, gadgets subject materials, than it is to post subjects with substance. And I get more traffic dealing with gadgets than with the ‘big’ topic items.
Go figure.