Archive for November, 2006

Clever title, eh? Mark Geiger, regional director of engineering for Suddenlink has published an article in the Times-Standard (for RTC’s weekly Tech Beat) about the switchover from Cox to Suddenlink. This particularly affects Internet subscribers who must create suddenlink.net email accounts to replace their cox.net accounts. All well and good. But it appears that Suddenlink only wants to help people using Windows machines (and then only certain flavors of the OS). They have a tool you can download to help transition your data but it’s a Windows only application. Their instructions for setting up your email accounts in your mail aplication are illustrative on Outlook only. And finally, the Suddenlink mail servers seem not to work well with Mac OS X’s native Mail client. After a bunch of trial and error I was able to get it to work. If you’re having trouble, let me know. I might be able to help.

E-week has an interesting article on the sudden, rapid increase of spam and how they are getting around filters like our own MailScanner. I found it somewhat ironic that we are all suffering from the increased levels of spam because it’s so easy for spammers to recruit unprotected Windows machines and turn them in to drones for sending out spam. So, people are victims twice over. Their machines are compromised and they are recipients of spam.

Over on the Redwood Technology Consortium mailing list (anyone can join, you don’t have to be a member) there’s been some discussion about an AT&T press release that was posted to the list. The headline of the Press Release reads “AT&T ANNOUNCES EXPANDED AVAILABILITY OF HIGH SPEED INTERNET ACCESS SERVICES IN EUREKA”. But the content of the release had no mention of expanded coverage. Instead the article talked about its various price/service programs. While interesting, there was not much really newsworthy in this release.

People on the list quickly pointed this out, and complaind that expanded coverage really would have been something to write a press release about. DSL in the Eureka area (and elsewhere) is still notoriously spotty. Humboldt Hill, parts of Cutten, even the Pine Hill area right on the edge of the city limits have not been able to get DSL service.

It appears, though, that AT&T actually has increased its service areas, though it’s not clear where. According to some accounts, they now do cover Humboldt Hill and Freshwater. This information was gleaned anecdotally from technicians called out on service calls.

If this is true, it’s good news, and I hope they keep expanding their service areas. But it’s odd they have not actually sent out a release on this. I still don’t know if we can get service in our area.

Once again, Andrew Cohill hits the nail on the head when he addresses the reasons why setting upper limits on bandwidth needs is short-sighted. The examples he points to may seem extreme to us here on the North Coast, but that, too. is short-sighted. As the U.S. falls further behind in broadband deployment this short-sightedness will become ever more evident. This isn’t just about getting the latest cool video on YouTube.

Have you been getting a lot of extra spam recently? Spam that seems to be slipping by the filters? I am. There’s a couple kinds of spam that seems to getting through our usually very reliable server based spam checker called MailScanner. One, I kind of understand. The message is contained in a small image attachment. It’s very difficult for filters to detect content in images as this article explains. What I don’t understand is the pure text spam always with the subject line “It me (fill in the name)”. The body of the message is always touting some penny stock. It’s almost become funny. In our house we shout at each other “It me, Blaine!”, “It me, Quentin!”, “It me Domonique!”. Almost funny…

We’re about to go to the polls again in a very crucial election for both local and national politics and the direction of government. It’s certainly a valid question then to ask if our votes will be accurately and fairlly counted. Unfortunately, the answer is, it’s really hard to be sure.
What’s so disconcerting is that since the Florida hanging chad debacle in the 2000 presidential election, things have actually gotten worse as far as creating a secure voting process.

The obvious human failings that that have plagued our elections (lost or stolen ballots, miscounting, purposeful or mistaken disenfranchisements in various forms) remain with us. But now, in a misguided attempt to overcome some of these issues and an unsophisitcated trust in technology by officials has brought about another layer potential errors and malfeasance with electronic voting machines.

Jim Nelson provided a good summary of the issues in last week’s Tech Beat (this orignially appeared in the Times-Standard, but is archived at the Redwood Technology Consortium web site). And he offers some excellent links for further information.

Technology is a wonderful thing. But when it is misapplied as I think it has been in this widespread adoption of voting machines without careful thought and planning, the results can be disastoruos. It’s clearly too late to change the system for this election. But certainly not too late to make corrections before 2008. Let’s hope concerned citizens and politicians can find the will to  make the changes necessary.

OK, I admit it. I have a MySpace site. Well, not a site, really. I have an account that has really minimal information on it. I signed up for the account basically because I was curious what all the buzz was about. Also, my daughter has an account there and I wanted some way to see what she was doing (not much, it appears, I think there is a lot of that: signing up for an account, then, after the novelty wears off, doing not much at all with your site).

But suddenly, today, I got a message through MySpace from what appeared to be a young woman who happened to have moved to Eureka and ostensibly likes more mature men. Hey, that’s me! So I clicked on a link which took me to the full message:

How’s it goin? I’m Kristy, I just moved to the Eureka area and I wanna meet a nice guy around here :). I moved here to California a couple of weeks ago for work and now that I’m here I have nobody to hang out with! I read your profile… You’re cute and I liked what you had to say :).

I’m 25/F/single and I’m lookin for a guy who is a little bit older or more mature than me. You say you’re 54 and you’re cute so I guess you’re qualified

My friend Jen from back home suggested I tried using myspace to meet people in my area. I just signed up and my profile sux hehe. I do have a blog/profile page at (site deleted to prevent further advertising this sleazy come on) … I have alot of photos and stuff up if you wanna see me.

I left you a personal msg on my homepage and I took a new pic for you today. Come check me out when you have a chance, k?

Lookin forward to seeyin ya,
Kristy

Wow! Kristy left a special message just for me on her home page! Thanks, Kristy! I’m sure you live right down on D St. with a bunch of folks who also take pictures of themselves in revealing outfits.

OK. So, by the time I finally got to this message the actual account (or profile in MySpace) had been deleted. In fact, the only messages I have are from people whose profiles have been deleted. Well, except one from my daughter who mocked me for having only ‘Tom’ in my friends list. Tom happens to be a MySpace employee, one of many, I suppose who gets assigned to each new signup, kind of like a tour guide. I have yet to communicate with Tom.

I’ve gotten off topic here. Kristi was just so hard to resist… What I really wanted to write about was the growing trend against social networking sites. It was inevitable. The Internet is full of distractions. And distractions tend to attract crowds. The trouble with crowds is they are easily distracted and move from one “cool thing” to the next. And social networking is a huge distraction. There are tons of sites for telling stories about yourself (or your created self) and finding like minded (or like created) folks. MySpace is only the best known of these sites. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands. Some are general in nature, like MySpace, but others are specific to a certain theme or interest.

But how much of this self-revealing, networking stuff can one take? Or participate in? Who has that much time? Who has that much to say about oneself? Right now Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp bought MySpace looks like a genius. The site continues to grow and strike deals. And other sites are trying to hang on to its coat tails. But trends and crowds move on. And on the Internet they both can move like lightning. How long will it be before the next big thing and MySpace will have morphed in to someting else in order to try and retain its market share.

I would have thought we had reached 100 million web sites a long time ago. I think I have probably visited 5 million myself. But, according to this article by CNN, October saw the Internet pass the 100 million web site milestone. Of course, according to the aritcle less than half of those sites get much traffic and are updated regularly.

You have to get through a lot of text, but at the end of the article is a good description of where we are on the web today from Professor Rebecca Grinter of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing:

“The Web has gone from being a very straightforward thing where you put some text and perhaps some images, to being this incredibly powerful medium in and of itself. You can engage so much more dynamically, and so many more people are doing so many more things. And who knows what will come about tomorrow?” said Grinter.

Amen.