Oblomovka

2002-06-27»

So Oblomovka finally appeared in the Google rankings - with the cached copy containing my recent whinging. Justice!

If you do the search yourself, watch out: it's Google Dance time. That means Google will return different results depending on which set of servers you access. This happens once a month, as Google rejigs its page rankings. It's a Saturnalia for searches.

I am so shooting myself in the foot publicising this: an auction this Sunday of tinkey-toy molecular models, demonstration-size slide rules, and "portable potentiometers" from the attic of Berkeley Physics Department.

Typical Swedes: think everything can be solved with a nice sauna

A Swedish clinic says it has developed a highly effective treatment for anorexia and bulimia, eating disorders affecting many thousands of people, especially teenaged girls.

The treatment involves training patients in normal eating habits then making them sit down to rest in rooms with a temperature as high as 104 Fahrenheit.

2002-06-26»

The desperate traffic in illicit goods across America's borders continues. With Kinder Eggs.

Kinder (pronounced as in kindergarten and meaning "children" in German) can't be sold legally here because the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says the toy is a choking hazard. The Food and Drug Administration also objects, deeming the thumb-sized plastic capsule that contains the little toy an illegal, "embedded" nonfood item.

For years, Americans who returned from Kinder lands supported a small market here in the illegal eggs, and the feds were prompted to make periodic crackdowns against importers, often ethnic food shops. But in the past year or so, scofflaws have risen to a new level of Internet-fueled defiance, touching off a lucrative Kinder boom. Web sellers buy the candies -- which are the size of a hen's egg, with milk chocolate on the outside, white chocolate on the inside -- and charge from 80 cents to $2 or more per egg.

2002-06-25»

Owen Thomas' Ditherati.com just got domain-jacked. And there continues to be a pattern. I'm not sure, but I'm betting that the new whois owner:

Administrator:
Huang ming drc@vip.163.com 13018501730
Huang ming
gd
Guangzhou,gd,CN 510000

is another fake, but convincing-sounding, international address. Just like hoopla.com and smug.com. I feel like I'm in some clumsily-updated Agatha Christie novel, where a mysterious stranger is knocking off all my favourite Websites, one by one. Except the real criminal here is no stranger at all. Is there a security hole in Network Solution's system, being exploited by one group of domain thieves? Or even an exploit script doing the rounds? Hard to tell - but I wouldn't be surprised. Those incompetent, money-grubbing, secretive little fatcats at NetSol have sat in luxury so long they couldn't even secure their own disgusting little monopoly.

Update: it expired. Reminder got lost in the post. Netsol let off hook. Daaamn them!

VerisignOff - it's the only solution.

And do you know what really pisses me off? The one thing that ICANN could have done, should have done, within a week of its existence, was shut down Network Solution's (now Verisign) .com monopoly. The rest of that quango's job is, as so many people say, merely what Jon Postel did alone at his workstation for decades. But when ICANNwere first given power, for a brief moment they had the political mandate to cut NetSol down to size, and spread the registry out. And no matter what they claim, they fumbled that chance. And within a year or so, they were the absolute creature of Verisign.

There's a expiry time for top-up credits. And, it appears, an expiry time for the phones themselves. Nick found the the FAQ:

Q. Is there a minimum amount I need to Top-up?
A. The minimum amount you can Top-Up at a time is $20. As long as you add at least $20 every 90 days your account will stay "Current."
Every time you Top-Up your 90 days starts over. If you forget to Top-Up at all in 90 days, your account becomes "Past Current" and you won't be able to make or receive calls.
60 days after your account becomes "Past Current" your account will expire. But you don't want that to happen because expired accounts lose their phone numbers.

Ah well. This isn't that bad, but it's still nothing like the straightforward nature of Virgin's deal in Britain. One more catch and they're out, I suppose. I did worry that they'd get screwed over by the American telcos.

The customer support voicemail is Very Virgin as well: 1-888-322-1122, if you're in the US. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Biella, who runs the best reading group in the universe, and is the Bay Area's free software community's very own anthropologist, now has a blog. This is good news for me, because it means I can secretly discover what The Ruckus Society is without having to ask.

Evil twists that killed Internet radio. Mark Cuban, the man who cut the Yahoo!/RIAA deal that the US Library of Congress ruling was based upon, admits that it was designed to destroy competition in the Internet radio market.

The Yahoo! deal I worked on, if it resembles the deal the CARP ruling was built on, was designed so that there would be less competition, and so that small webcasters who needed to live off of a "percentage-of-revenue" to survive, couldn't.

2002-06-24»

There's something a bit awry with Google's indexing of my site. Which is to say - it ain't doing it. Despite Googlebot sniffing around, it's only indexed a few of the static pages.

Of course, some of that might be down to Oblomovka's singular lack of Google Juice, but I'm thinking maybe it's also my code. Each of the day entries also shows the subsequent seven days of entries, which a lot of the pages appear rather similar to each other. Could the bot hive mind think I'm trying to game the ranking? There's not an easy hack to fix this - I'm going to wait a week and see if anything turns up.

So it turns out that under Virgin Mobile USA, you still pay for incoming and outgoing calls - even though the FCC okayed "calling party pays" three years ago. Strike one. Next question: do prepaid minutes last forever, or do they expire after a couple of months, like every braindead US prepaid phone scheme until now?

After all the confusion during the RIP Order debate, I've written a first approximation of who can get hold of your communications data (like Web logs, e-mail addresses, etc) from your ISP. It's up on the STAND site now.

2002-06-23»

Oh, at last. Virgin Mobile's introducing a UK-style pay structure to the US mobile phone network. No contracts, 10 cents a minute after the first ten minutes. It's a bit pricey, but it does mean that I no longer have to deal directly with US cellphone providers, their insane contracts, and the most fucked-up unuserfriendly corporate customer relations I've ever encountered. Our household has been trying to cancel a phone contract with Worldcom for eight months without success. Fuckers don't even answer the phone.

I can't tell whether Virgin US still has the US airtime system of charging, where you pay for incoming calls as well as outgoing. It'd be fantastic if they junked that too.

pleasedon'tscrewthisupvirginpleasedon'tscrewthisup

The folk who brought you the The Circle (a P2P network with some intriguing properties) have just finished their first round of funding. To get the cash, they used one of their other innovations - a tweak of Bruce Schneier's Street Performer Protocol that, they say, gives better incentives to freeloaders to become contributors. They call it The Rational Street Performer Protocol.

One useful aspect about the RSSP is that even if you understood none of the above, you can still use it. Basically, the RSSP says that if you are providing a regular service (like a Web comic, or software maintenance) you should get people to pledge you money in the form:

I will donate one dollar in every $____ raised over $____ up to a maximum contribution of $____

I still don't quite understand the logic here (which never bodes too well for economic ideas that rely on "rational" consumption), but at least it's easy implementable. Also, it somehow reminds me of sponsored swims at school.

2002-06-21»

I'm still pretty enthusiastic about SpamAssassin even though I spent last night fixing bugs in its 2.20 version, and unentangling one commonhouse user who was sick to death of it. Now there's a version out that Outlook users can install onto Windows. I know that SA won't be the final solution for spam, but I hope it might have the effect of making spam better written and less cliched.

2002-06-20»

Killer asteroids and killer flu viruses, all in one day. What did I do?