Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Online

  • FUD Alert

    There’s this site called Technofile written by some guy named Al Fasoldt that has this article that I thought was pretty FUDish. I found it because my wife sent me a link to online news source Syracuse.com that had picked up this article. It’s about alleged spyware Hotbar, and after reviewing the article, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that this Al Fasoldt doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

    Hotbar is apparently similar to the Google Toolbar (which I use at work, and it’s great): a browser plugin that offers information on related sites to ones you are browsing, and additionally allows you to install skins that replace the flat gray on the Internet Explorer toolbar with overlaid graphic images. Okay, no big gotchas here so far.

    But to quote the article:

    But it’s actually monitoring the surfing habits of all users and reporting this information back to a central site so it can be marketed to anyone who wants to buy it.

    Hmmm. Sounds like any other website to me. Then the article mentions a problem with slower browsing and crashing Windows, and that there are problems with popup blockers—Hotbar still lets some popups through, apparently. Interesting, but still doesn’t really raise any red flags.

    Then the article begins spouting off about some “startling admissions” about what Hotbar does, admitted by Hotbar (gasp!) on their own website.

    This is funny: it’s a direct quote from the article again, itself quoting the Hotbar site:

    Here are excerpts from the Hotbar site:

    “For every Web page you view . . . the Hotbar software transmits and stores the following information from your computer to Hotbar: Your IP Address, which may include a domain name; the full URL of the Web page you are visiting; general information about your browser; general information about your computer’s operating system; your Hotbar cookie number . . . and the date and time the above information is logged.”

    Excuse me? This is exactly what every webserver on the internet does! There’s no conspiracy here, no unethical behavior on the part of Hotbar from this excerpt, this is how the web works.

    At this point I pretty much decided this Fasoldt guy has no business writing about technology. All I can see he’s doing is spreading FUD without any real knowledge of how things operate.

    (Out of curiosity, I checked out Hotbar’s privacy policy. It’s pretty standard, and it’s pretty clear that any additional information they collect about you (aside from standard web log data) is something you would know about, since you have to provide it yourself in the registration forms. I know a thing or two about this type of browser application, too, and I’m pretty sure it’s not spyware any more than the Google Toolbar is.)

    Hey Al—you better watch out! I’m collecting your IP address, the pages and files requested, the browser you’re running, and where you came from too! And I track the dates and times! I even track what you search for when you use the search box feature on my site!!

    And oh man, you better avoid any search engine sites, like Google, because not only can they track all those things, they can also track every search term you’ve ever tried, and if they wanted to, they could track what sites you visited from the results list they gave you!!

    Moron.

  • GeoURL

    I just found a neat site: GeoURL ICBM Address Server. You register the latitude and longitude of your web site (or your location if the web server housing your site is elsewhere, as in my case) with GeoURL, and they will then show you all the other websites they have registered in proximity to you. Neat!

    Right off the bat I see that within 4 miles of me is UtterlyBoring.com, a blog site run by another local computer geek.

    Damn, this is what the internet is all about.

  • No clever title

    I love the irony in this Slashdot posting: “XML Co-Creator says XML Is Too Hard For Programmers“. Reads to me like a title The Onion would publish.

    Anyway. The Slashdot post led me to Tim Bray’s weblog, which is pretty cool to me. (But then, I’m a geek and this probably won’t be as cool to you.) This is the guy who helped invent XML. His blog posts look pretty insightful and/or entertaining, and I rather like the design of the site. Simple. Uses CSS for all the layout, no HTML tables. Nice. I need to brush up on my CSS.

    On another note, I’m finally re-launching The Brew Site. I’m working behind the scenes to get all the PHP working and the site active, but I figure if I don’t do this now, I probably never will…

  • Clearing out the Month

    The end of the month is here already? Wow. Turn away for a moment, and the year’s already a sixth over.

    Interesting fact I learned this week in a Wired magazine article about the file-sharing software Kazaa: It’s a company decentralized and scattered around the globe: software code is housed in Estonia, the servers are in Denmark, the domain is registered in Australia, and the corporation— or pseudo-corporation, as it were— is located in the tiny South Pacific island of Vanuatu.

    The part I especially found interesting was Vanuatu itself, which is billed as a tax haven with a strict code of secrecy. Several years ago (okay, along the lines of 10 years ago!), I had a story idea that would involve this obscure little nation I found in an almanac that nobody had every really heard of before, but of course I never really did anything with it, other than file a bit of knowledge about the country away into some dark corner of my brain.

    So now, it seems a bit prescient (only to me, of course, since I never mentioned this story idea to anyone) to find this new stuff out about Vanuatu. It gets the idea gears turning again, and I’m thinking I should blow the dust off this story notion and see how well it dovetails with these new insights.

    Also this week we had a close encounter with the W32.Opaserv.Worm virus on my wife’s computer. Damn thing had been infected with three variants (in the C:Windows directory were three separate .EXE files of the virus: “brasil.exe”, “alevir.exe” and “scrsvr.exe”), and since this machine is running Windows ME (I hate Millenium Edition!!), you had to jump through four times as many hoops to kill the virus as you would for any other system. Watch out for this little bugger. It’s a pain in the ass.

    And how come nobody has registered the sweet domain mybandersnatch.com? 15 bucks on directNIC, people! (Ten points to you if you actually know what a “bandersnatch” is.)

  • Tribute to Gharlane

    A post on Wil Wheaton’s Soapbox made me think of this.

    If you had ever spent any amount of time on Usenet prior to 2001, especially in the geek-populous (hey, I’m a geek, so I can say that) groups relating to science fiction, then you’ve probably read posts from Gharlane of Eddore. As a Usenet poster, he was probably the smartest, most prolific, and most opinionated person I’ve ever come across on Usenet, before and since. Reading his posts were always worth the time, and it’s fair to say that in many ways, Gharlane was Usenet culture.

    Sadly, he died in June of 2001.

    I’ll just quote from the post on Wil’s site:

    *sigh* I miss Gharlane…

  • Beer & Wiki

    I just finished up making a batch of beer, an English Old Ale that I’ll be giving to my Dad for his birthday this year. This is the second beer in as many months that I’ve brewed, and I’ve already got plans for at least two, maybe three more: a Pumpkin Ale (I used to brew this every year around Halloween), a wheat beer for my Mom’s birthday (perhaps a blackberry wheat), and I’ve been thinking about a barleywine in December. Though I’ve been thinking about experimenting with the style and using wheat malt instead of barley malt— a “weizenwine” or something.

    Here is an extremely cool site: Wikipedia.org. It uses the (relatively) new concept/technology of the “wiki web,” and is essentially an online, freely editable encyclopedia. And by “freely editable” I really mean freely editable— anyone (anyone!) “can edit any article right now, without even having to log in” (in their words). It’s true. I had edited their Beer page and added an entry for Barleywine, then added and edited the very page for Barleywine myself, just today.

    And, it’s collaborative. Within three hours of my creating the Barleywine article, someone else had edited it and added links. What more can I say? Check it out.

    Random Web Link: BookCrossing – I just love this concept. Right along the lines of Where’s George?

  • Wayback to Portland

    Went on a business trip to Portland today (for Alpine Internet Solutions, the company I work for) to meet with a new client we recently signed. It’s a big project, potentially high profile… though I probably shouldn’t mention who they are yet. I don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention too soon…

    Here’s a cool link: The Internet Archive, featuring the Wayback Machine. They’ve been taking “snapshots” of websites for a number of years now (in association with Alexa) that you can search for and view. So you can check out what your favorite website looked like in days past. Pretty nifty!

    Random Web Link: Tilt of the hat to my bro: WildStorm Comics.

  • I’m Batman

    Bat-Sandwich
    So on ReasonablyClever.com there is this Flash-based applet called the Mini-Mizer which allows people to build little custom Lego people out of all sorts of parts. Clearly, I’ve been playing with it.

    The coolest part about it is some wickedly neat things like Star Wars and comic book superhero parts, and some utterly non-sequitous things like some of the items you can place in your Lego person’s hands: a large drumstick, a tennis racket, an electric guitar.

    Needless to say, it’s been eating up my evening, so instead of various other things I had a mind to do, I’ve been sucked into a hilariously simple activity with endless permutations. Ah, viral marketing!

    Everyone should visit Wil Wheaton Dot Net for bringing the Mini-Mizer to everyone’s attention.

  • Roommates & Fraud

    Second entry already. Whaddya know.

    Got a call today from a Greg Madigan at RoommateAccess.com regarding the old chuggnutt website I used to have on Tripod. I hadn’t updated this old site in about 2 years, and apparently someone based in New York used my old website and signed up for the Roommate Access affiliate program, and is now attempting to run some sort of credit card fraud.

    Wow.

    I spoke with Greg and the vice-president over there at Roommates, and they were very cool, they just wanted to give me a heads up about what was going on. Very much appreciated.

    Needless to say, I logged into Tripod, removed all the old files from my chuggnutt account, changed the index.html file to redirect to this site, and changed the password. Hopefully that’ll help clear things up a bit.