Internet

It’s a series of tubes that Al Gore invented, right?

Are ‘diggers’ the internet’s neocons?

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A couple of disclaimers to start with:

  1. I don’t use digg (outside of setting up an account which has rarely been touched).

  2. The analogy is probably quite strained, and I keep bouncing between two ways of expressing it, neither of which I think are quite right:

  • internet : politics :: digg : internet
  • neocons : politics :: diggers : internet

That said…

Wil went on a rant today about diggers dragging the ‘net down to somewhere below the least common denominator.

I’ve been a Digger for a long time, and always felt like I could rely on Digg’s homepage to reliably and consistently direct me to interesting and useful content, accompanied by insightful, funny, and interesting commentary.

My, how things have changed in just a few months. The links (that make it past the bury brigade) are still pretty good, but for whatever reason, the maturity and behavior of the average Digger has evolved into, well, something resembling a middle school lunch room. While Digg has always been a great way to share your creation with a large audience on the Internet, the associated grief that frequently comes with being exposed to Digg’s userbase has lead to several sites blocking Digg, shutting off comments because of abusive Diggers, and using complicated .htaccess rewrites to send Digg’s traffic away.

This struck me as being the same basic premise of part of what Mike was talking about here (some of which I mentioned yesterday) only applied to neocons and the internet in relation to politics, rather than to diggers.

I think this is a specific result of the rise of neoconservatives to cultural and political power. Note that I don’t attribute this to conservatives or conservatism, but specifically to _neo_conservatives. I don’t believe that the neoconservative political or social culture is interested in conducting their affairs with civility or with any degree of compromise — and therein lies the problem, as it creates a culture of war. I may not have written about politics in quite a long time…but during that interim, I’ve constantly linklogged to neoconservatives’ actions throughout the American political and social culture, and they are always extremist and seemingly operating under the slogan of “no quarter given.” And although I had hoped this extremism might die with the end of Bush’s Presidency, it seems as if moderates are willing to metamorphose into extremists if it gets them the power they seek (McCain) or that other extremists are ready to jump into the situation the moment a void forms (Romney).

It’s that same all-or-nothing, no-quarter-given, us-or-them, black-and-white viewpoint that our culture is rapidly sinking into. No matter whether the arena is politics or the net, online or off, there seems to be no room left for people who actually want to talk to each other, even if they don’t agree. Respectful discourse, on the whole, doesn’t exist anymore — and how can it, when we’re too busy shouting down the opposition to actually listen to what they have to say?

coComment Enabled

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I’ve been seeing rumblings about coComment for a few weeks now, but finally decided to take a closer look when I noticed it up and running on a post at The Republic of T. coComment is a service that lets you track the comments you’ve made on other weblogs, keep track of when people have responded to them, and so on…basically, trying to make sure that those comments you leave don’t just disappear into the great bit bucket of the ‘net.

So, I’ve signed up, and have enabled coComment integration on this site (for all future entries, at least…all entries on the main page have been rebuilt, the rest of the 3801 entries will be rebuilt eventually) — Movable Type integration was a snap with their included instructions. I don’t figure a huge percentage of my readers will be using it, but it’s there for those who want to.

iTunes “Bring on the Dancing Horses” by Echo and the Bunnymen from the album Pretty In Pink (1985, 4:00).

Gored for Women!

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Another example of organizations that should check their web site addresses a little more carefully.

Today’s case in point: The American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women site, promoting heart disease awareness.

Unfortunately, ‘go red for women’, when written as a single phrase for the website — www.goredforwomen.org — looks a lot like ‘Gored for Women’.

This made me laugh.

(It’s still a good cause, though, and if I had any red in my wardrobe, I might wear it today.)

It’s Illegal to be Annoying

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Update: Apparently, the article I’m quoting is somewhat misleading. According to a lawyer’s comment on BoingBoing:

Declan’s article is misleading. The provision extends a telephone harassment law to apply to email. Declan describes the provision as applying whenever a person “annoys” another: “A new federal law states that when you annoy someone on the Internet, you must disclose your identity.”

But that’s not what the law says. Instead it provides: “Whoever…utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet… without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person…who receives the communications…shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

Note that “annoy” is part of the intent element of the statute — it requires the intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass. Far from an anti-anonymity provision that applies whenever a person annoys another, it is merely a prohibition on harassment.

Thanks, Don! This kind of thing happens when I’m a bit behind…

No, I’m not kidding. Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

[…] Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.”

To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section’s other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.

The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.

Once again, something which, admittedly, likely started from good intentions — preventing cyberstalking — has been dumbed down to the point of ludicrousness by politicians too stupid to think about the real legal ramifications of the laws they’re enacting.

On the bright side, maybe we can use this law to get the freepers booted off the ‘net? ;)

(via [seattle's info]seattle)

iTunes “Relax (AK1200)” by Keoki from the album Jealousy (2001, 6:46).

Ten Years (roughly)

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I first started bouncing around the ‘net in the fall of 1991, when I made my first ill-fated attempt at being a college student (a half-semester at UAA that I pretty much just stopped going to). I had the user ID of ‘ASMDH’ — Anchorage, Student, Michael David Hanscom — and the sole remaining evidence of that first ‘net address is a comment by Royce from a few days ago, and a listing in the IRN FAQ, also courtesy of Royce. Digging through the IRN archives gives me an earliest confirmable ‘net presence of Thursday, the 17th of October, 1991 at 12:18:11 (entry #5 in IRN 1.5).

As I discovered about four years ago, the first definite evidence of my existence as a denizen of the ‘net outside of UAA comes from a Usenet post archived by Google Groups that dates to February 9th, 1994 at 5:49am. The post is to rec.music.industrial and concerns nine inch nails bootleg CDs. Heh. Sounds like me, alright. By then I had an account through Alaska.net, but there’s no web presence listed in my signature — which makes sense, as the web was still a brand new thing in 1994.

My first web page went up sometime in 1995, though I don’t know exactly when. The earliest archive I have dates back to February 27, 1996, but I’d been working with the space and teaching myself HTML for some time at that point. With a little poking around, however, you might stumble across the “these pages last updated” link at the bottom of that page. And what do you think you’ll find if you follow that link?

Time- and date-stamped entries in reverse chronological order (the most recent at the top) detailing little updates I’d made to the website and some personal bits here and there.

Sound familiar?

Going by the earliest entry on that page, I’ve been blogging in one form or another for ten years as of 3:13am (Alaska time), December 29, 2005.

That’s a long time. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed this if I hadn’t decided to put all those early, hand-coded entries into my current Movable Type installation a while ago. It was kind of fun to see my archives page list posts all the way back to that earliest archived post!

I just wish I hadn’t lost a lot of pages from back when I was hand-coding my site. While my archives jump from early 1996 up to 2001, I was keeping a blog-like website during all that time…I was just hand-coding everything, and when the page got too long, I’d delete the oldest entries at the bottom. Ah, well…as often seems to be the case, it seemed to be a good idea at the time.

In any case, this post marks ten years of archived babbling and rambling — blogging, in today’s vernacular — for me. As I write this post, those ten years have created (and this doesn’t even factor in my LiveJournal account):

  • 3,614 entries.
  • 8,548 comments.
  • 1,228 trackbacks.
  • Four different management systems:
    1. Hand-coded
    2. NewsPro
    3. Movable Type
    4. TypePad
  • One lost job and subsequent Slashdotting.
  • Countless new contacts, friends, and interactions, some of which have spilled over into the “real world”, others of which have been entirely through the electrons of the ‘net.

Those of you who stop by from time to time, be you family, friend, anonymous stranger, or any other visitor — thanks for being around, dropping by and saying hi, and generally giving me a reason to keep this thing going.

And here’s to the next ten years.

iTunes “Anniversary” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:35).

Time to put my money where my mouth is?

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Ten months ago, when I was trying to figure out BitTorrent so I could keep up with Battlestar Galactica, I wrote this in a comment:

As it is, I’d gladly pay a few dollars per episode to download high-quality versions of this show (and, theoretically, other shows that I might be interested in in the future), much like I currently do with music from the iTMS (with the caveat that I’d expect any DRM to be no more restrictive than what the iTMS uses).

And wouldn’t you know it — Battlestar Galactica is now available through the iTunes Music Store at $1.99 per episode! Very nice.

Of course, over the past ten months I’ve become accustomed to the quality afforded through captures of HD broadcasts: the episodes I download through BitTorrent are ~350Mb each and widescreen at 624×352 pixels; the episodes Apple offers are ~200Mb and shown at the ‘standard’ (pan-and-scan? cropped?) 4:3 ratio at a much smaller 320×240 pixels. Of course, there is the risk of getting a bad quality rip from BitTorrent that wouldn’t hold up to the norm, while it’s probably safe to assume that the officially sanctioned videos from Apple will be consistently good quality.

As an experiment, I purchased the most recent episode of BSG (‘Pegasus’) and compared Apple’s version to the version I downloaded via BitTorrent.

Battlestar Galactica’s ‘Pegasus’
iTMS BitTorrent1
Filetype: .m4v .avi
Length: 45:27.04 44:19.03
Filesize: 207.26 MB 345.80 MB
Time to download: I didn’t immediately think to time this, roughly 20-30 minutes on my connection. Varies depending upon the number of active BT clients: at best speed should match the iTMS time; at worst speed could take anywhere from hours to days.
Dimensions: 320 x 240 624 x 352
FPS: 24.00 23.98
Video encoding2: -NA- Generic MPEG-4
Audio encoding3: AVC0 Media MPEG Layer 3
Data rate: 636.72 kbits/sec 1106.58 kbits/sec
DRM: Apple FairPlay v2 None
Comparitive: At native sizes, the iTMS video is sharper but noticeably darker. The BitTorrent copy isn’t as crisp, but being a few notches brighter makes it easier to see (a situation exacerbated by my using an old 17″ monitor that already has its brightness and contrast at maximum and really needs to be replaced when I can afford to do so). Even so, the iTMS video is gorgeous: darker and smaller (2/3 the height and 1/2 the width), but better quality — at native size.

At full screen, the smaller size, greater compression and lesser data rate of the iTMS track is very obvious. Compression artifacts not noticeable at 320 x 240 are very visible when blown up to my monitor’s standard setting of 1152 x 870. The BitTorrent video, while softer, doesn’t show nearly as much artifacting (but then, given the larger native size and widescreen ratio of the video, it’s also only being enlarged 247% as opposed to the iTMS version’s 360%).

All in all, while the iTMS video is better quality at native size, the BitTorrent copy is far more watchable when blown up to full-screen.
Notes: 1: Due to the distributed and decentralized nature of BitTorrent, the reported statistics, while representative of the quality of most BT downloads I’ve received, are only definite for this particular copy of this episode.
2: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Sound Track’.
3: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Video Track’.

So, now what? I did say in the original quote that I’d happily pay for “high quality” copies. At the moment, with Apple’s focus on optimizing the video for the iPod, I’m not sure that the video offerings are quite enough to tempt me away from BitTorrent on a regular basis. It’s close…but not quite there.

Unless someone gives me an iPod video for Christmas, of course. Then I may need to re-evaluate. ;)

Reconnecting

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This is great.

Some time ago — back in April of ’04 — I came across an old Anchorage Press article talking about the “glory days” of the underground/punk/alternative music scene in Anchorage, from the late ’70’s up to the early ’90’s, which touched off my own post reminiscing about my days running around the local scene, from the ’90’s to the early 2000’s.

Touched off by a couple of random Google searches, over the past couple of weeks (starting in August, and really picking up steam in November), that post has become an impromptu meeting point and simple message board for quite a few of the Anchorage scenesters of the ’80’s. While I was just a few years younger and don’t know any of the people who’ve been posting, I have been having an absolute blast watching all the various comments come in as this group of old friends re-connect after twenty-odd years or so.

All I did was provide the right Google keywords and a comment form that these guys have been using to get back in touch…but it’s enough to get a grin on my face whenever I see another comment roll in.

OpinionOutpost Apology

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Last June, I got a comment on my site that as far as I could tell was comment spam advertising a site called Opinion Outpost. Not being a fan of that style of advertising, I posted about it. In the following months I’ve gotten a few comments from satisfied Opinion Outpost customers defending the company — but yesterday, I actually got an apology from the person who originally left the comment that started it all.

I was looking your webpage this morning and wanted to apologize for posting our email on your weblog.  When I first posted on your site I was looking for your email address to contact you about our affiliate program and I could not find it so I thought I would make a post not knowing what I was doing was inappropriate in the weblogging community.  I was new with the company when I posted this and learned very early that this kind of practice was wrong and I haven’t done it since.  I know that what I have done has made you very upset with me and Opinion Outpost.  I ask that you hold nothing against Opinion Outpost, I am the one at fault.

As for this email that you said you sent me, I don’t ever remember receiving it.  I receive large amounts of emails every day and I probably looked at it with confusion (not understanding it or not knowing what I did wrong) and discarded it.  I am very sorry for my actions and hope this post will ease the tension and conflict between you, your weblog and me.

I am willing to post this on your weblog if you would like me to.  Just let me know what you would prefer.  Thank you!

Sounds reasonable to me — it’s a pity my original e-mail got lost, but everyone makes mistakes from time to time, and he was kind enough to send the apology along. The apology is certainly accepted, and I’ve gone back and edited out all the names and contact information from the original post and the follow-up comments.

Opinion Outpost still doesn’t look like the kind of thing I’m interested in for my own needs, but with this, I’ll file them back into the “on the level” bin. :)

Basic HTML tag cheatsheet

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After a friend asked me a few questions about the basic HTML tags while trying to clear up some confusion, I went Googling for some sort of cheat sheet listing just the most basic tags. I couldn’t find one — just came up with a lot of full-blown tutorials or cheat sheets listing every tag in the book — so I tossed this together. Hopefully it helps.

I’m only looking at the tags most likely to be used in your standard, basic weblog post, so there won’t be much in the way of structural stuff here, just presentational.

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We Are the Web

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This month’s Wired has what is likely not just the best article I’ve seen come out of Wired in a long time, but the best piece I’ve seen in ages on the Web, where it’s been, and where it may be headed in the future.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don’t see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

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