Too Beautiful, the blog

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Sunday, February 07, 2010

Netflix, may I kindly say 'Fuck off'?

Mark, based on your interest in "3:10 to Yuma" ...

We think you'll enjoy "Spartacus: Blood and Sand"

Is this kind of shit supposed to endear Netflix to me? Did they really award somebody one million dollars to improve their recommendations? Can I turn it off somehow?

Does anybody at Netflix know the meaning of the verb "to patronize"?

Labels: films, the internets

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Uncovering a mysterious blogger

This article on Streetsblog, a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website.

Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing conspiracy, but just some really energetic (if error-prone) work by one angry little man. It's amazing how much one angry, energetic little guy can do on the internet.

technorati: bloggers, privacy, identity

Labels: blogging, closet cases, crypto-fascists, privacy, Republicans, the internets

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Crank of the day

The novelist and short story writer Ray Bradbury, now 89, is the subject of a New York Times profile because of his campaign on behalf of his local library. "Libraries raised me," he says.

But on the subject of the internet and e-books, Bradbury turns up the cranky old man:

Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet."

While I admire the spunk, and acknowledge the author's right to control the distribution of his work, I wonder who he thinks has been reading his work for the last ten or twenty years. The same people who are crazy about the internet. And once a decent digital device is arrived at, Bradbury's books will be on it, along with everyone else's.

technorati: Ray Bradbury

Labels: books, the internets, writers

Friday, March 06, 2009

The new economic reality, part XVLII

To the pictures of shell-shocked laid-off workers add this story from the LA Times (courtesy Valleywag). The lede sums it up:

Sitting in a bare cubicle, with her reading glasses perched halfway down her nose and typing away on a laptop she'd brought from home, Lois Draegin looked a bit like the extra adult wedged in at the kids' table at Thanksgiving. This accomplished magazine editor lost her six-figure job at TV Guide last spring and is now, at 55, an unpaid intern at wowOwow.com, a fledgling website with columns and stories that target accomplished women older than 40.

Even more compelling is the picture that runs atop the article, showing an already-exhausted Draegin being helped, no doubt for the 68th time, by a patient, fetching young blond.

The telling detail in the lede is the "empty cube." For me it evokes every unwanted, dusty spare cubicle into which I've been plopped as a temp or a contractor -- that and the picture showing the spiral notebook next to the keyboard, in which the new intern has undoubtedly written at the top her username, password, and the first of several URLs and directory names where things are stored.

Of course, it's sadder not to have a job at all -- even that unpaid one.

technorati: eoncomy, retraining, workers

Labels: economy, the internets, zeitgeist

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Dept. of Too much information

Look at this -- something called SocialWhoIs. The idea is:

Once you've setup an account on Socialwhois, you can create a more detailed biography (Twitter limits you to 160 characters), add links to more social profiles, and add in some interests, which then become clickable so you can find other people on Twitter and Friendfeed (who have also created Socialwhois profiles) with similar tastes.

Stuff like this is like the opposite of what I want the internet to be like. The guy who posted that has this problem:

While the names of some new followers I get on Twitter or Friendfeed immediately ring a bell, with others, I have no idea who the person might be.

Jesus Christ, if you don't know who they are, why should you care?? Are you really on the internet to "find other people with similar tastes" and interests? Then go to a dating site, you tool!

This is why I'm not on Friendster or Facebook or even LinkedIn. I really don't want to get into the whole etiquette of social networking. It's already strange enough that people whom I don't know follow my Twitter feed, but at least that doesn't require any reciprocal action from me.

Then again, I realize I don't have a great instinct for creating networks of friends in the first place.

Labels: blogging, social networking, the internets, twitter

Friday, January 30, 2009

Google drive? I already have one, and it's called GMail

I was underwhelmed by this report about a putative "GDrive", that is, an online file repository managed by Google.

I don't get it. There already is such a thing; it's called GMail. I use GMail as a file archive all the time, and GMail's excellent search feature -- fast and accurate -- enables me to find my file without having to create and navigate a file hierarchy.

Worrying. This is how Microsoft went bad: they took something that worked just fine, for example Microsoft Word 4.0, and gilded it until it's almost unusable -- meet Microsoft Word 2007! Now I have to keep a laptop around running Windows XP and Microsoft Word 2003 for the rest of my life, so I can actually format a document and trust it to come out the way I want it to. Google, don't go down that road.

technorati: Google

Labels: Google, the internets

Monday, December 08, 2008

Hitler might not have survived internet mockery, Nobel prize winner says

In his speech Sunday accepting the Nobel Prize in literature, French writer Jean Marie Gustav Le Clezio suggested that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler might not have been able to survive for long if the internet had existed in his day, saying "Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded - ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day."

The story is illustrated with an example of what that mockery might have looked like: an lol-hitler, if you will, with the caption "I Can Has Sudentenland?" (A reference, of course, to the classic lolcat site ICanHasCheezburger.)

technorati: Le Clezio

Labels: Hitler, Satire is dead, the internets

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

My near-misses with the near-famous, part 1

In August 2002 I went to L.A. to do a reading for Too Beautiful, the first edition of my first book. It was a strange event, held at the Hustler Store in Hollywood. Of all the writers who appeared, I was the only one who actually read anything; everyone else just talked for a few minutes. Among those appearing was a woman who did a strange sort of grad-student presentation about bukkake porn almost illegible blown-up photos that had been turned into a sort of black-and-white poster-sized comic book. She had "researched" the subject by attending the filming of a bukkake video, but was at pains to say that she, personally, was not into it. My whole reaction was, yeah, whatever. This turned out to be Suzannah Breslin, who has become internet-famous. Just as I didn't get her presentation, if that's what it was, I have never really gotten her blog or her writing.

technorati: Suzannah Breslin

Labels: porn, pornography, the internets, writers

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

BoingBoing - Violet Blue - memory hole kerfuffle

I've resisted commenting on the kerfuffle in which all mentions of San Francisco blogger Violet Blue were suddenly erased last month from A-list blog BoingBoing. But today's Valleywag post by Melissa Gira Grant pretty much blows it wide open, reducing what initially seemed like a sinister case of Big Brother-type memory-holing into a jealous snit by an alleged former paramour.

The point most bloggers seem to be making -- that if this had happened anywhere else, it would have been reported with the usual mixture of glee and outrage on BoingBoing -- is hard to dispute. Pretty much every other aspect, such as Grant's parsing of BoingBoing's too-little-too-late excuse that it is entitled to be as "personal" and petty as it wants to be, is splitting the finest of hairs. There's a lot of harsh rhetoric blowing around the internets about this, including an anti-BoingBoing backlash [for example], and Grant's post will only inflame matters. What amuses me is how much it matters to everyone, making it clear that a high school hallway ethos pervades the internet and those who have become "famous" because of it. If anyone comes out ahead, it's Violet Blue, whose own comments and postings on the affair have shown admirable restraint. One thing I admire about Violet is that she always seems to remember that a few pixels one way or the other don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

technorati: Violet Blue, BoingBoing, internet censorship

Labels: bloggers, blogging, free speech, the internets

Friday, June 06, 2008

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Munchausen Syndrome By Internet edition

You may have heard of the mental disorders Munchausen Syndrome, and the even more nauseating Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. In the former, a personality disordered person deliberately injures themselves to gain attention and sympathy; in the latter, they injure a loved one, usually their child, so that they can appear to everyone as a loving and selfless caretaker of their poor hurt little darling. The phenomenon experienced by the writer Armistead Maupin, in which an insane woman built up a phone relationship with him based on a supposedly seriously ill but actually non-existent child, was written up by him in the novel "The Night Listener." The J.T. LeRoy hoax, which was carried out primarily on the telephone by a manipulative former phone sex worker, also had a whiff of this.

With the internet, we have a new version of this illness. There are two websites called Dogster and Catster -- run by the same company -- which are social networking sites for pet owners. The conceit of these sites is that the pet owners don't post as themselves, but in the personas of their pets. My wife Cris has been a member of Catster for several months in the persona of our cat Milagrito. She is essentially writing tongue-in-cheek blog entries about current events; right now Milagrito is running for president.

Of course, pets do get sick and die. When this happens, the other users in their network -- their cat's "friends" -- naturally post sympathetic messages and condolences. One of the users, I mean cats, makes little "angel wings" graphics to bestow on the departed kitty.

By now you may be able to see where this is going. According to a post from the wing-bestowing user, someone is going to elaborate lengths to create fake users, complete with pictures taken from cat adoption websites; after their cat has acquired several "friends," it begins to suffer a series of illnesses and accidents and eventually "dies," all accompanied by an outpouring of sympathy from their "friends." The wing-building user realized this was going on when she sensed something strange about a request for wings for a newly dead cat. I'll let this user, Krishna, take it from here:

A couple months ago I was contacted by a member of our community with a request for wings. The person asking for wings had recently lost their cat to a degenerative health problem that they did not name on their profile.

Something about the request set the hairs on the back of my neck up. As I read the pmail and looked at the picture I had a sense of deja vu. I had seen the writing style before and had seen the same picture on the profile somewhere else on the internet.

After spending about an hour or so searching google images using countless search strings I came across the picture of the departed kitty same cat same picture of a garden in the background same everything. The cat was alive and up for adoption on petfinder. The petfinder entry was a new one too. I was infuriated! I started searching for pictures of the persons other cats and dogs and found them on google. Some were stolen from kittenwar some from petfinder and some from independent breeder sites.

I was so angry I confronted the person. They first tried telling me that they travelled extensively and picked up animals from all over the world. I asked them for the pets pre-adopted names, they couldn't. They told me to go to hell and stop being so nosy. That I was cruel for doubting them and their pain. Then they dissappeared off of dogster and catster completely. I breathed a sigh of relief.

But a day later I was asked to make wings for a new member. After reading the profile outlining their rapidly declining health and final death; my suspicions arose again. I went to google and again found the profile pictures mocking me. Mocking the pain I felt at the death of my beloved pets. I couldn't understand it at all. Why would someone fake a death? Is it the attention, is it the rosettes [virtual presents given from one user to another -- ed.], is it the wings, or something else?

Honestly I couldn't figure it out. Anyway as the weeks passed I started noticing more and more profiles using the same writing style, same flash toys on the pages, same backgrounds from the same site, and the same types of dramatic deaths. It was amazing to see the unbelievable events that lead to the deaths of these pet profiles.

It has prevented me from enjoying this site. Following the new profiles that come on, the insurgence of users that only join for the free giveaways, it's overwhelming. Understanding the freebees was easy. The fakes sickness and deaths is dumbfounding.

So, that's pretty pathetic, faking the death of a pet to get people's attention and sympathy. I suppose it's better than actually hurting yourself or, worse, a child or pet, but really, how gross.

technorati: Munchausen Syndrome, pets, catster, internet

Labels: cats, fakes, hoaxes, the internets

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Loopt and other services: goodbye to privacy

Reprinting this NYT story as a public service.

New York Times, 23 Oct 07

Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You

By LAURA M. HOLSON

Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in
cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues
to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where
they are?

Obvious benefits come to mind. Parents can take advantage of the
Global Positioning System chips embedded in many cellphones to track
the whereabouts of their phone-toting children.

And for teenagers and 20-somethings, who are fond of sharing their
comings and goings on the Internet, youth-oriented services like Loopt
and Buddy Beacon are a natural next step.
Sam Altman, the 22-year-old co-founder of Loopt, said he came up with
the idea in early 2005 when he walked out of a lecture hall at
Stanford.

"Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone
and said, 'Where are you?' " he said. "People want to connect."

But such services point to a new truth of modern life: If G.P.S. made
it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder
to hide.

"There are massive changes going on in society, particularly among
young people who feel comfortable sharing information in a digital
society," said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco.

"We seem to be getting into a period where people are closely watching
each other," he said. "There are privacy risks we haven't begun to
grapple with."

But the practical applications outweigh the worries for some converts.

Kyna Fong, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate student, uses Loopt,
offered by Sprint Nextel. For $2.99 a month, she can see the location
of friends who also have the service, represented by dots on a map on
her phone, with labels identifying their names. They can also see
where she is.

One night last summer she noticed on Loopt that friends she was
meeting for dinner were 40 miles away, and would be late. Instead of
waiting, Ms. Fong arranged her schedule to arrive when they did.
"People don't have to ask 'Where are you?'" she said.

Ms. Fong can control whom she shares the service with, and if at any
point she wants privacy, Ms. Fong can block access. Some people are
not invited to join ? like her mother.

"I don't know if I'd want my mom knowing where I was all the time," she said.

Some situations are not so clear-cut. What if a spouse wants some time
alone and turns off the service? Why on earth, their better half may
ask, are they doing that? What if a boss asks an employee to use the
service?
So far, the market for social-mapping is nascent ? users number in the
hundreds of thousands, industry experts estimate.

But almost 55 percent of all mobile phones sold today in the United
States have the technology that makes such friend-and- family-tracking
services possible, according to Current Analysis, which follows trends
in technology.

So far, it is most popular, industry executives say, among the college set.

But others have found different uses. Mr. Altman said one customer
bought it to keep track of a parent with Alzheimer's. Helio, a mobile
phone service provider that offers Buddy Beacon, said some
small-business owners use it to track employees.

Consumers can turn off their service, making them invisible to people
in their social-mapping network. Still, the G.P.S. service embedded in
the phone means that your whereabouts are not a complete mystery.

"There is a Big Brother component," said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless
analyst at Forrester Research. "The thinking goes that if my friends
can find me, the telephone company knows my location all the time,
too."

Phone companies say they are aware of the potential problems such
services could cause.
If a friend-finding service is viewed as too intrusive, said Mark
Collins, vice president for consumer data at AT&T's wireless unit,
"that is a negative for us." Loopt and similar services say they do
not keep electronic records of people's whereabouts.

Mr. Altman of Loopt said that to protect better against unwelcome
prying by, say, a former friend, Loopt users are sent text messages at
random times, asking if they recognize a certain friend. If not, that
person's viewing ability is disabled
.
Clay Harris, a 25-year-old freelance marketing executive in Memphis,
says he uses Helio's Buddy Beacon mostly to keep in touch with his
friend Gregory Lotz. One night when Mr. Lotz was returning from a
trip, Mr. Harris was happy to see his friend show up unannounced at a
bar where he and some other friends had gathered.

"He had tried to reach me, but I didn't hear my phone ring," Mr.
Harris said. "He just showed up and I thought, 'Wow, this is great.'"

He would never think to block Mr. Lotz. But he would think twice
before inviting a girlfriend into his social-mapping network. "Most
definitely a girl would ask and wonder why I was blocking her," he
said.

technorati: Loopt, privacy, tracking, stalking, mobile phones

Labels: privacy, the internets, tools, zeitgeist

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Spam subject line of the month

Busty Wife Swinging glass earth

Labels: the internets

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Obfuscate and subvert

In a wonderful example of a company tricking people into giving up information about themselves, Google has added a "feature" to its Book Search function "allowing" users to tell Google all the books they own.

I refrain from writing paranoid little posts every time some company announces something like this, but in this case I want to point out that whenever the government tries to do this by force -- asking a library to turn over records of books its patrons have checked out, for example -- everyone is outraged. How much easier it would be if Mr. Citizen compiles the list himself and throws it out there on the web for everyone to view, or registers it with Google, Library Thing or another such service.

I don't mean to be paranoid. But in this culture where everything is thrown out onto the internet for public consumption by anybody -- people you would feel comfortable sharing personal details with, and (much more likely) people you wouldn't -- I get uneasy from time to time. Not that my own website isn't crammed with personal details.

What I would like is a subversive movement in which people register all sorts of completely random books with Google Book Search and make their database utterly useless. I doubt anyone would do that, although it would be nice if some hacker would write an automated program to do it.

technorati: Google, Book Search, privacy

Labels: privacy, the internets

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Elton John: Kill the internet

Courtesy BoingBoing: Elton John suggests:

Let's get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging. I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span... Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet.

That's some music I'd like to hear.

Reminded me of Alex Chee's post a couple weeks ago, Delete Your Blog.

technorati: Elton John, internet, new music

Labels: art, the internets