evilrouters.net

Several weeks ago, Chris at IIS Hacks posted a rant entitled “What Ruined the Internet?”. I just came across it and am linking to it just because of the awesome intro paragraph that took me on a quick trip down memory lane:

“I’ve been around the Internet since long before the “Dot-Com Bubble”, when we had to get our MP3s from IRC and use Blade’s Encoder for the command line. Slashdot was just starting up, ICQ was the only instant messenger around, and Winamp really did whip the Llama’s ass. Those were the days…or were they?”

I don’t necessarily agree with the rest of his rant, but he got one thing right: Those really were the days…

I’m real tempted to ditch Twitter.

I interact with Twitter in three ways:

• through their web site
• through SMS
• through ping.fm

Most of my interaction with Twitter is through SMS. Nearly all of the updates that I receive from Twitter are via SMS. I “follow” a number of people (74, as I write this) but receive updates via SMS for perhaps only a third of those. I started out having everyone’s updates sent to me via SMS, but some people either 1) post way too frequently and end up annoying the shit out of me or 2) just don’t say enough interesting things (e.g., the “signal-to-noise” ratio is way outta control).

Most (but not all) of my updates are done through ping.fm. My BlackBerry has an AIM client and that’s how I communicate with ping.fm. I send updates to “pingfm” on AIM and those are broadcasted out to Facebook, Pownce (which I hardly ever use), and Twitter. This is nice because I can update Twitter and Facebook at the same time. Because I don’t want every update going to Facebook (e.g. “@ replies”), I usually send those back to Twitter as an SMS.

Last, if I’m at home and on the computer I usually keep Twitter open in a tab and occasionally refresh it, just to keep up on everyone that I don’t receive SMS updates for.

When I first signed up for Twitter, my primary method of interacting with it was via IM. The “track” feature was awesome and allowed me to find others who had similar interests as mine. Once the shit hit the fan with regard to IM (in other words, when it became massively unreliable), they pulled support for it. Suckage.

Then, several months ago, the Twitter service as a whole became extremely unreliable for a good period. A number of folks jumped ship then. I almost did, but I stuck around.

Today, I read on the Twitter blog that they pulled support for receiving SMS updates in Canada (due to rising costs). Since Twitter has no apparent business model (and, it seems, isn’t generating any revenue), it makes sense to assume that eventually the cash supply will be running low. At some point, they’ll pull support for SMS updates in the U.S. as well, at which time I’ll really have no use for the service anymore.

Maybe I should just get out now.

Are there any viable alternatives? It’d be nice to be able to send and receive updates via SMS. I’d be content with receiving updates via SMS and sending updates through another method (e.g. ping.fm, web only, etc.). What are my choices?

a young lady named kate perry has a hit song called “i kissed a girl” that my girlfriend loves. the video for it is okay, but someone came up with a “remix” video that is ten times better (maybe more). don’t believe me? watch for yourself (warning: probably nsfw):

if you need a beta code for ping.fm, use “pingofpings”. it worked for me a few minutes ago.

what is ping.fm?

ping.fm was created for the sole purpose of making it as easy as possible to share your posts with the world. now you don’t have to fumble around the web in order to post anymore, you can just post once, and be done with it.

the idea came about when making some posts to twitter and tumblr . the idea of posting the exact same information in two places seemed a bit tedious, so ping.fm was born.

the toronto star tells the story of chris avenir, a first-year student facing academic expulsion “for helping run an online chemistry study group via facebook“.

“so we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we’d post the question and say: ‘does anyone get how to do this one? i didn’t get it right and i don’t know what i’m doing wrong.’ exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the dungeon.”

as an educator, i think ryerson university is taking this way too far (based on what i know). if there was blatant cheating going on, then by all means punish those involved. if this is, as the article says, the students were simply using the forum to “brainstorm” in groups then it is completely absurd.

i *encourage* my students to work together in groups. working together in groups in something that higher education should teach you. every one of these students will have to work together in teams once they get out into the “real world” and will have to collaborate with their peers. it should also be common knowledge that having multiple people in your group who can provide their own insights is an asset, and makes the team greater than the sum of its parts.

again, blatant academic dishonesty should be punished. from what i’ve read, however, that is not the case here.

best of luck to you, chris avenir.

el di pablo recently got a blackberry pearl. yesterday he wrote “reading rss feeds on your blackberry”, but he forgot to mention one very important thing (especially if, like me, you use google reader as your aggregator): google reader has a “mobile” version accessible from your phone.

if you’re using a blackberry, hopefully you’ve already installed opera mini on it. just load up opera mini and point it at the mobile version of google reader and you’re set. it even syncs up so that you don’t see the articles you’ve already read when you later visit the site in your browser.

a native application for the blackberry would be nice, but i can deal with that for now. =)

stan schroeder’s article “richard stallman invents new way of browsing the web” on mashable directed me to this e-mail on the misc@openbsd.org list where stallman (allegedly) states:

for personal reasons, i do not browse the web from my computer. (i also have not net connection much of the time.) to look at page i send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. it is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

this took me on a trip down memory lane. i can remember, 13 or 14 years ago, when i had to access the internet via long-distance phone calls (which didn’t please my parents a whole lot). juno came out with a service where they provided free e-mail to anyone (ad supported) and even had a 1-800 number you could use to avoid long-distance charges. the proprietary client would dial up, send any queued mail, downloading any received mail, and disconnect.

some of us discovered that it was possible to access the internet by e-mail. using juno’s free e-mail service, you could construct specially crafted e-mail messages and send them to certain “gateways” to do things like download web pages, perform archie searches, and even ftp files.

ahh, the good ol’ days. =)

according to the international association of privacy professionals, january 28th is “data privacy day”:

north america joins 27 european countries to celebrate data privacy day 2008. the day will feature several efforts to promote the importance of data protection, including a meeting at duke university among european and u.s. privacy experts.

the iapp is encouraging privacy professionals to contact local schools, colleges and universities and offer to give a presentation on or during the week of january 28 about privacy using the materials provided. our goal is to have privacy professionals all over the country giving presentations to students about the importance of privacy today. details about presentations that happen during the week of january 28 should be sent directly to kim macneill at kim@privacyassocation.org.

as john bambenek mentioned on the sans handler’s diary, however:

“the important note about this effort is that it focuses its attention on the weakest area of privacy protection, the individual themselves. if people do not protect their own information (for instance, by putting their entire lives in their facebook profile) there is little other groups can do to prevent the misuse of that information.”

i just wish i had heard about this earlier. i work in higher education (college students are the most prominent facebook users) and could have done some presentations there. my hometown, an hour away, also has its share of parents who i’m sure would have benefitted from something like this. alas, maybe next year.

if you’re interested in seeing how much personal information i have on my facebook profile, add me as a friend!

just a heads up, don’t link to businessweek.

according to the terms of use on businessweek’s web site, you may not:

use or attempt to use any “deep-link”, “scraper”, “robot”, “bot”, “spider”, “data mining”, “computer code” or any other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, process or methodology or manual process having similar processes or functionality, to access, acquire, copy, or monitor any portion of bw.com, any data or content found on or accessed through bw.com, or any other bw.com information without prior express written consent of bw;

i guess that means it’s also against their terms of use to subscribe to their rss feed as well.

i suppose that launching firefox and entering the url to businessweek would constitute a “manual process” which, therefore, means that even reading their web site is now a violation!