Thought and Freedom

The Republican Mother has posted a good video summarizing the dangers of the protect IP act. Contact your congress person today and tell them to get their hands out of the internet.

Take action right now. Go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and send a pre-written email directly from their site.

While surfing the net, there are a number of times that you don’t want to give out your real email address. For example, you come across a site that says you must enter an email address to view the content of a help article. Why do they need your email address?

Now, there is an easy solution: Disposable email addresses!

Just enter any address at mailinator.com, then go to their site, type in the address, and presto, your mail awaits.

1. Make it unique: Of course the catch is that none of the email is password protected. So you may want to choose a unique name that someone will not guess. Don’t choose bob@mailinator.com. Instead, choose bobddcc8888d3df@mailinator.com. That way,
2. Don’t use for private information: Someone could view the email besides you, so don’t use it for private information.
3. Delete the message: It works when camping. Leave the site as you found it! You can delete the messages. So if you really want to hide your trail, just delete it.

Twitter Pollution

Excessive targeted marketing using a social network’s status updates.

Most people have at least heard of Twitter by now. The mini social network seemed like a great idea when it was born out of Odeo (a podcasting company). It can be highly addictive, and can even save you money on your text messaging bill.

Twitter does have a major problem. The biggest of these is money. As of this writing, Twitter still has not found a way to generate income. If Twitter does find a way to generate advertising revenue, will it’s users continue to embrace the service?

But an even bigger problem looms for the messaging site. Twitter has opened the floodgates of a very open protocal. Marketing companies, universities, and even politicians are utilizing the networking site to flood users with advertising. As twitter grows more popular, more companies and organizations will get on board.

Unless something drastically changes, Twitter will likely see it’s peak within one to two years. Afterwards, it is quite possible that user-ship will decrease as as rapidly as advertising (from inside and outside) increases.

The biggest problem with advertisements on Twitter is that there are no “banners”. Banners were designed to take a portion of the message on a website and turn it into revenue.

With only 140 characters per message, there is no way to insert advertising into these messages. Therefore, advertisers are forced to send separate messages for advertisements. This is the equivilent of a website sending popup messages throughout the day because you accessed the website at some point. Nobody would agree to such a proposition.

This advertising can be seen as “Twitter Pollution.” Unfortunately, Twitter itself may be the final casualty of Twitter pollution.

I am on a broadband connection this week, but it is nothing like my connection at home. So I decided to look for some ways to speed up my web browser. Fortunately, I use Firefox, so it is highly customizable.

I found a great article on Free Republic, that really speeds up my web browsing experience. I have included it below for your use.

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

Have you ever gone to a website’s login page, typed in your user name and password, only to find that Firefox does not ask to save your password. This usually happens with banks, credit card companies, etc.

The problem is not with Firefox. The issue actually arises from the Javascript used on the website. Many companies feel that they create a more secure environment for their users by not allowing passwords to be saved.

Sometimes, the risk of a Mozilla Firefox password list being compromised is incredibly low. Sometimes, you may just not care about securing your passwords. The risk should be up to you.

So how do you save those “unsavable” passwords in Firefox?

1. Save the Javascript to enable password storage. Drag the following link to your bookmark bar: Enable Password Saver.
2. Whenever you come to a website where passwords can’t be saved, just click on the “Enable Password Saver”.
3. Finally, enter the password as normal, and submit the form.
4. Firefox will ask if you want to save the password. Tell it you would like to do that!

Some great news broke today. MySpace will utilize Google’s new Social Network API, OpenSocial.

According to TechCrunch, the APIs allow applications to run on multiple social networks and use standard web development tools like html, javascript, and flash.

Using the API, you can access Profile Information, Friends Information, and Activities (i.e. profile changes).

These APIs will be incredibly useful for those who have their own website. It finally allows us to realize the goal of a “Social” web environment.

For those looking to get extra help with the APIs, there are already sites being created to help developers build websites based on OpenSocial standards. One such site is OpenSocialStuff.com.

In the news today, Vonage lost their patent trial against Sprint. That means that there may be one less player in the internet phone service market. They are still in business, but with huge fines and the big phone companies suing whenever possible, it could be the beginning of the end for the first major Voice Over IP Carrier.

Now there is a new company emerging onto the VoIP scene. Only this is better. ThePudding.com is offering free Telephone service through your web browser.

It seems a typical setup, but there is an interesting twist. ThePudding.com uses voice recognition to display advertisements and websites relating to your conversation while you talk on the phone. It takes context sensitive ads to a whole new level.

If you have an email address, and you sometimes check it, you do get spam. Modifying Benjamin Franklin’s original saying, it now reads: “There are three things certain in life, Death, Taxes, and Email Spam.”

Email hosts and ISPs have their own problems with spam (infrastructure, bandwidth, etc.). I could go on about that, but it is not why you are here.

You are probably reading this because you just received that one additional spam (or1000) that put you over the edge. You now want to take charge and stop the spam at any cost.

Marking your message as spam usually only blocks the one address that sent you the garbage. There are other ways of automatically deleting all messages from specified spammer domains.

One “solution” is to use email filters. Follow these steps to begin weeding out those unwanted messages.

1. First, find a domain of a known spammer. If you don’t know of any, check the email headers (“Show Original”) of your latest spam message. Otherwise, use one or all of the following (they are known scam/spam artists who should be on everyone’s blocked list):

• messagereach.com,
  
• premiereglobal.com,
• venturedirect.com,
  
• xmr1.com ,
  
• xmr2.com,
  
• xmr3.com,
  
• xmr4.com,
• xmr5.com,
• xmr6.com,
• xmr7.com,
  
• xmr8.com,
• xmr9.com,
  
• xmr10.com,
• xmr11.com,
  
• xmr12.com,
• xmr13.com,
  
• xmr14.com,
• xmr15.com

2. Click on the “Create a Filter” link next to the search box at the top. A box will open up letting you enter in criteria for your filter.
3. In the “From” box, type “*@” followed by the the domain name of the spammer. This will block all email from that domain.
4. If you have more than one domain you would like to add, see below.
   • You can add many domains to your custom spam filter by separating each one with a “|” (This is called a “pipe” character and can be created by pressing SHIFT and “\” at the same time). The pipe between domains means “filter the email if it comes from domain1.com or domain2.com”.
   • Your from box should now look something like this: messagereach.com|*premiereglobal.com|*venturedirect.com|*xmr1.com|*xmr2.com|*xmr3.com|*xmr4.com|*xmr5.com|*xmr6.com|*xmr7.com|*xmr8.com|*xmr9.com|*xmr10.com|*xmr11.com|*xmr12.com|*xmr13.com|*xmr14.com|*xmr15.com
5. Click the “Next Step” Button.
6. Now there will be a list of check boxes. Click the one that says “Delete It.”
7. Then click the “Create Filter” button.
8. Your auto deletion of spam has now begun.

If you are curious about other ways to use Gmail Filters, check out LifeHack’s 20 ways to use Gmail Filters for great tips and advice.

You probably think I am crazy if you read the title of this article. Right now, I bet you are saying “Of course the subject of politics is online. Just ask John Kerry or Dan Rather what a bunch of bloggers equipped with your dirty secrets can do. Or look how much influence the fascist run move-on.org has on politics.”

But I am referring to the main political candidates and politicians. I recently moved to Inver Grove Heights, MN and I had the hardest time finding out about the local political scene in the area. In fact, my congressional district is different depending on if I look at Congress.org or House.gov. It is strange that it is so hard to find who your representative is.

Politicians are even harder to find. Yes, big name candidates have websites, but even those are sometimes hard to navigate and void of real meaning. But try searching for a candidate’s personal campaign site. It is almost non existent.

Going even further down the line, look for your local BPOU (Basic Political Organization Unit for those of you that don’t speak politic). Type your county followed by a political party and “BPOU” in Google. You will likely find at best an outdated site from a few years ago, announcing that they are excited to start the 2004 campaign season. Usually all the contact info is out of date, and there is no detailed information on party platforms. Worse yet, they do not even say a good way to get involved.

I know there are exceptions (if you know of exceptions to this, post a comment and let me know), but the vast majority of sites are useless. I think that politicians underestimate the power of the web and search engine optimization. Candidates have a great opportunity to sell their ideas to an audience. Candidates also have a powerful recruiting tool.

It is time that candidates and BPOUs realize the power of social networking, forums, blogs, online advertising, and a good website. I believe that websites may play a major role in the 2008 elections. Whoever can capitalize on this market, will likely gain an easy 5 to 10 percentage points in the election.