There’s pretty cool interactive site to the xBox game Fable. It works like the old choose your own adventure stories. Shame about the annoying Flash reloads for each page
Troy Javaher and Frank Weyer, operating under the newly formed company Nizza Group, are suing Network Solutions and Register.com for infringing on its e-mail and domain naming patent, which covers assigning each member of a group an URL of the form name.subdomain.domain and an e-mail address of the form name@subdomain.domain
Warp Records, an independent label for electronic music (featuring artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada), has made their entire back catalog available thru Bleep, a new digital download service. To quote from the FAQ: We are at present the only store to offer very high quality MP3 files
and Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals
Just looking through the logs, always interesting reading to see what weird search terms people use on the site, when I ran across an MT-Blacklist comment denial from IP 68.173.7.113 — which is one of the New York based Road Runner servers.
On 10 January, over a period of six minutes, this particular comment spammer — pushing sex, drugs, weight loss, baldness cures and, would you believe, online privacy — tried to spam the site 93 times. A handful snuck through, bringing the hit up to a hundred, and all were promptly added to my blacklist and submitted to Jay Allen’s Comment Spam Clearinghouse. After the initial assault, the spammer must have decided to test the waters and sent a single spam two and half hours later, with a follow up an hour after that. Both were denied.
And on other site related matters, we’ve just updated MovableType to version 2.661, which has added a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can be limited over a set time period, an automatic IP address ban based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time and the format of links in comments has been changed to redirects to stop spammers trying to boost their PageRank.
Unfortunately, there’s an XHTML bug in the MT update that was only partially fixed by the 2.661 release. Jacques Distler has a patch available to fix the problem.
Comedienne Margaret Cho was recently speaking at a MoveOn event. Matt Drudge subsequently posted excerpts from her speech, and she was inundated with hate-mail for being overweight, Chinese, gay and a Democrat. Cho’s publicist then posted all of this hate mail, complete with names and email addresses, on her web site — via Darren Barefoot
AAMI has made some changes to some of their policies. Details of changes…
Car Insurance Policy Changes
Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes… Details of changes…
A bit drastic I’d say, but fair.
Let see how long it takes them to realise that they’ve fucked up a tad.
A group of international telecom providers, ISPs and software companies plan to form a neighbourhood watch to oust junk e-mail from their collective networks
Does the amount of time it takes your PC to boot up drive you mad? Well for those using multimedia PCs as the heart of their home entertainment system, the following will be music to your ears. InterVideo of California has launched the INstantOn PC which boots up in less than 10 seconds, giving all but instant access to TV, CDs or DVDs and internet radio. The trick is running all the entertainment functions on a pared-down version of the open-source Linux operating system, which is small enough to be held in a read-only memory chip
Optus has released new plans for its cable broadband and dial-up Internet products, but OptusNet DSL customers will have to wait until March for new pricing
The estate of JRR Tolkien won a cybersquatting case against Alberta Hot Rods, a Canadian-based operator which registered jrrtolkien.com and linked it to its commercial celebrity Web site. The group — which has already lost domain name cases brought by actors Pierce Brosnan and Pamela Anderson, and author Michael Crichton — was found to have no legitimate rights
Almost 500 Australian information technology jobs could shift to India under a new deal between Telstra and IBM worth up to $200 million and will save the telco about $75 million
In an important victory for Italian consumer rights, an Italian court has rejected the seizure of Sony Playstation game consoles that use modified chips to permit unauthorised uses of the game systems. The case is one of the first to be brought in Italy under the new European Union Copyright Directive, which is modeled on the controversial US Digital Millennium Copyright Act — via The Importance Of
If you need discounted inkjet or laser-printer cartridges, Wisconsin’s LaserMonks say they’ll give you a doozy of a deal while you ‘support prayer for the world’. The Cistercian priests — yes, they’re actual Catholic monks — oversee a novel e-commerce enterprise out of their rural abbey. Proceeds go to maintain the monastery and finance charitable works around the world
1. They took 2 weeks to port my telstra number to their Opt-sucks shit, which I was told would take 3 days max.
2. Their customer service staff on both phone and in store give you the run around. I have only encountered 1 helpful lady and 1 guy who could actually tell me what was going on, although he was still bloody annoying because he kept apologising in that monotone ‘I don’t care’ voice, out of 15 or so phone calls.
3. It is now January 2004. My mum and I submitted the change of ownership forms with 100 points ID in October 2003. It still hasn’t been done even after receiving an sms from Opt-sucks saying that my change of ownership has been actioned on the 14/10/03.
A phone call last month to see what the hell is going on turned up some other guy who said the info was there it needs to be processed, and I’ll email the dept. to do it and we’ll give you a call. Needless to say I received no such call.
Of course amongst all these phone calls, I have to have my mum to give authorisation because the account’s still in her fucking name. I don’t think I need to tell you how annoying that is.
Today’s phone call was more informative, the guy informed me that the account had been separated, but the ownership hadn’t been changed. Would be nice if I was informed properly about this in the sms or previous phone calls. No info had been submitted, I would have to go into an Opt-sucks store. I rang my Opt-sucks store. They told me Robbie was handling it and would chase it up. Robbie had since October to chase it up. What the fuck was Robbie doing? Oh I have a phone call.
It was Robbie he needed to confirm some more ID details and he’ll get back to me when he’s finished chasing it up.
Why am I still with Opt-sucks you ask? Well, they are the only mobile service that gets decent reception when I’m at home, and I would like decent mobile reception when I’m at home because I use this phone for both personal and freelance business calls. I don’t want my clients to have my home number, and I don’t do enough freelance business to warrant getting another phone line.
Stay tuned for more Opt-sucks antics or read about my previous entry: Port This!.
For the purposes of effective google searching (see Red wolf comment): Optus, Optus, Optus, Optus, Optus. Oh and Optus.
Community Service Announcement: If you’ve got serious issues with your phone service provider that you have been unable to resolve, it would be well worth your while to have a chat to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.
A US Federal Court last week imposed an order prohibiting two alleged ID fraudsters from taking part in Internet auctions. The duo was also ordered to pay more than $93,000 in compensation to consumers at the end of a civil case brought by US consumer watchdogs
Hewlett-Packard’s invention, due in drives soon, lets users burn labels directly onto discs
FJ van Wingerde, the artisan who brought us the Pink Hello Kitty Laptop, has instructions for making a Yellow Zipper Pokemon Laptop. It’s worth taking a look at the White Moonbase Alpha Laptop project while you’re there
The controversial winner of last year’s Esat BT Young Scientist competition, 7-year-old Sheffield University computer engineering student, Adnan Osmani, says his mega-browser
will be ready for commercialisation soon. Patents for the Xwebs mega browser should be filed and the software will be primed for commercialisation. Osmani said that he hopes to sell the technology to an interested company, holding on to the proceeds as a nest egg
Foxtel announced today it had secured a $550 million bank facility which would fund its full digital conversion and launch of new digital services, expected in the first half of this calendar year
The expiration of some of VeriSign’s certificate-authority certificates last week appears to have caused problems beyond harmless error messages generated when users tried to access secure areas of Web sites. Security-software firm Symantec on Friday blamed VeriSign for problems with its security products that left users’ PCs unresponsive and unstable
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