Category: Annoyances

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Suing JibJab over using the tune and some lyrics of “This Land is Your Land” is like filing a class-action suit against grade-schoolers for using “The Birthday Song” to sing “You look like a monkey/And you smell like one too.” The contention that the song has been “damaged” by its use as parody is ridiculous. Have these people not been outdoors since 1999? Do they not know how long internet fads actually last? Sure, for some people the cartoon will be the first thing they think of on hearing the song for a while, but that will go away. The only reason Badger Badger Badger and All Your Base are still primarily associated with their source material is that they were either widely unknown before the humor emerged (AYB), or were original creations (BBB). “This Land is Your Land” is, or at least used to be, aggressively marketed as an assembly-appropriate song in elementary schools, and children’s brains are much more receptive than adults’. I don’t even think of the cartoon now on hearing the song, but of the inside of my elementary-school cafeteria, the time they accidentally let the record play all the verses, and, of all things, tissue-paper flowers. (God only knows why, as they weren’t used at the same assemblies.) TRO needs to grow up and let people have their perfectly legal fun. Though it would be fun to see them get a trial date a year from now and try to prove there was any lasting damage.

Thtphphtppthtphttt.

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I regularly get bogus bounces from clueless virus scanners that don’t realize the sending address is fake 99% of the time, but this takes the cake:

Sometime last night I received three copies of the same notice from some system in Brazil. They had written their virus warning in Microsoft Word, saved it as HTML without cleaning up all the extra junk, and made it the only part of the message… in Base64 encoding!

If you’re going to send any kind of diagnostic notice by email, you want it to be as simple and widely readable as possible. That means plain text (not HTML or Base64, and certainly not both!) It also means if you do want to use HTML, at least clean it up and include a plain-text alternative. For all you know it’s going to be read by some admin logging into a GUIless server through SSH over a modem connection on a hotel phone line!

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1. Obtain a gun.

2. Provide ammunition.

3. Vote to pull the trigger.

BANG.

And the Democratic party drops off the House floor.

At least, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. If I lived in Nuñez’s district, I’d be royally pissed that I voted for him (because I probably would’ve) and would be willing to sign any paper that would kick his ass. Democratic party leaders don’t seem to realize that they’re in danger of dying out without this kind of stunt. If you’re going to assert your belief in balance and diversity, you better damn well show it, because it isn’t just voters who write letters to congresspeople.

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I am thoroughly sick of the phenomenon I call the Draco Malfoy Effect. This is the process by which young (and not-so-young) women become convinced that not only are evil bad-boy types desirable, but completely reformable. Liking the maverick is nothing new for the Hollywood-hypnotized masses, especially seeing as how he’s so often played by a desirable star. However, liking the villain–the kind who has not yet been definitively shown to possess a heart–to the point that you believe he can be saved through sex with either a) you, b) your Mary Sue, or c) the ingenue of the cast is, to my thinking, simply bizarre.

I’d love to have a discussion on this. Please comment. (Even if you think I’m the one with her head on crooked.)

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To be honest, I haven’t used any instant messaging system much since college. But every once in a while I fire up Gaim just to see if anyone I know is on AIM or ICQ. I have a Yahoo account, but I’m not sure anyone I know actually uses Yahoo Messenger, and I’ve been avoiding MSN mainly on principle.

Sadly, it seems the IM wars have returned.

This time it’s Yahoo that’s blocked other clients from connecting to their networks. The most high-profile victim has been Trillian, another client which talks to multiple IM networks, but of course Gaim was hit as well. What’s interesting, this time, is that Yahoo claims it’s doing this to cut down on spam.

Now let’s think about this: In order to send and receive instant messages on Yahoo’s network, you need a Yahoo account, correct? So no matter what software a spammer uses to connect, he still needs to log in, which means Yahoo can control them inside the network. This is where current IM systems are fundamentally different from email: instead of many independently-controlled systems talking to each other, each IM service is one system with many accounts, more like a website with required registration. Place limits on what clients can do, and (barring bugs in your server) no matter what client someone uses, he can’t get around your spam/virus/hack controls.
Continue reading →

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I’ll be the first to admit that I go near-ballistic where cigarettes are concerned, from sprinting by smokers on a sidewalk to springing up to turn our window fan to exhaust mode. But, rude though I may be, I’m not as bad as the AMA. An R rating for smoking? Even when the smoker is an evil character, or when a would-be teen smoker lights up and doubles over coughing? What about random guy in the background on a busy street scene? How the hell are filmmakers going to deal with that?

Unfortunately, I have a guess, and it doesn’t involve parental permission cards. If this rating-system change does happen, the industry will know that any film involving smoking has no chance of hitting the PG-13 sweet spot for audience draw. Rather than making something like Forrest Gump inauthentic by leaving out the ubiquitious Vietnam cigarettes, they will instead add footage and sound that they may have held back on before, simply because they have that freedom under the measure. We will see films that are more violent and more full of sex and cursing where there is no cause for it, because there is nothing to lose. Imagine biographical movies about well-known smokers–Churchill, FDR, Einstein–done by John Woo, and you’ll have an idea what we’d be in for.

Now think of all the foreign films we import. Continue reading →

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These people are no longer amusing. I’ve been getting about 10 messages a day from them. On Friday I actually had to add a rule to the server config to detect their domain names, since half of them didn’t score high enough to get labeled as spam. (Bayes training helped, but not enough.) And some of their ads are for really sick stuff – not just garden-variety porn, but fetishes I don’t even want to hear about.

They all have the same structure, the same types of misspellings, the same type of Bayes poison, and point to a website named after food. And while names like “hot carrot soup dot com” and “sexy naked sushi dot com” (I won’t list the exact URLs, since that would only improve their page rank) were funny at first, their persistence has gotten %@*! annoying. Why the heck do they need to send me 10 messages a day advertising what’s clearly one site? And why cluster them?

Mandated opt-out links aren’t enough. Even if spammers weren’t already known to ignore/abuse requests to be removed, it’s obvious that these aren’t complying with other provisions of federal law (fake return addresses, no street address, no “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” tag on the subject line), so why should anyone assume they’ll honor the unsubscribe links?

The two main email accreditation companies (OK, the only two I know of), Habeas and Bonded Sender, hold their clients to opt-in only criteria. So did California’s stillborn anti-spam law (superseded by federal law the day it was to go into effect). Why couldn’t congress do the same? I do think CAN-SPAM is better than nothing, but it’s done little to stem the tide in the 5 months it’s been active.

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