Tag Archive for 'Internet'

Page 4 of 4


22
Apr
2005

Universal Translator or Visual Directory

Published in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .
original article

A Flickr user created a cool Flickr hack that will enable you to search for a word and get photos representing that word come up in a mobile browser friendly way.

The obvious use is helping to communicate with someone, whose language you don’t speak: “Ein dieses foto, bitte”. The results, however, can be somewhat unexpected at times.

The same effect can be achieved with Google’s Mobile image search feature, of course.

Both are great examples of what sort of innovative ideas API access to public data unleashes. At the same time one of our fine senators is trying to keep public data out of the public hands at the behest of his handlers (AccuWeather from Pennsylvania). The mind boggles.

-TPP


29
Mar
2005

What’s a “mature” video gamer to do among the adolescent jerks?

Published in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .
original article

If you’re a video gaming addict over the mental age of 21 and you play a lot of multiplayer online games, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the online gaming services are full of griefers, assholes, racist homophobes and other misfits. It seems that the anonymous nature of pretty much all such services encourages antisocial behavior.

It makes the online gaming experience pretty miserable for the rest of us. The gaming companies are doing what they can to mitigate the problem, but they really can’t control behavior especially when the services are being used by millions of people every day.

Fortunately there are solutions, and they’re all community based.

Instead of going and playing against the general masses, playing with and against other mature gamers works wonderfully well. There are several online communities for more mature gamers, one of which is Seasoned Gamers. I joined October 2004 and the change in the online gaming experience since then has been like day and night.

The group is made of over 500 people between the ages of 17 and 72 mainly from the United States, but there are a few Europeans and a strong Canadian representation in the group as well. The people are XBox owners and mainly play multiplayer online games on XBox Live.

There’s really nothing else common with any of us, except that we like to play video games, online. In fact, in every other aspect we’re probably an extremely diverse group of people. Do not attempt to discuss politics or religion in the group, you’ll get an earful from someone on the opposite side of the opinion spectrum.

As a somewhat of a online community geek, it’s interesting and fascinating to me how this particular community and communities like it have all successfully worked around an otherwise “unsolvable” problem. It truly demonstrates the power of a user driven community building. The online communities Microsoft has tried to build around XBox and XBox Live! are perfect examples of what’s wrong with online communities formed from the top down. They are cesspools of antisocial behavior, overt marketing by the community “owner” and generally tend to be useless. Yet the user driven communities thrive.

-TPP


08
Dec
2004

The Dirty Punk Fuckin Anarchy Machine

Published in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: , .
original article

My friend Jamie sent me the link. Rock on, dudes! Don’t go crazy with the solos.

-TPP


22
Sep
2004

More legislation to fight online fraud is good, right? Wrong.

Published in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: , , .
original article

The House of Representatives approved a bill that would jail felons even longer, if they used fraudulent information when registering a domainname used in committing the felony. Wow, that’s great.

When you register a domain name, there’s two pieces of information you give to the registrar. The billing information for payment, and the contact information displayed publicly in your domain’s whois records. The bill would make it a felony to falsify the publicly displayed whois records information.

There’s a whole bunch of things wrong with this.

If you falsify the payment information, that’s already a crime. The registration is usually paid with a credit card, and if you falsify that information you commit credit card fraud. If you use a stolen credit card, you get a few additional felonies tacked on top of credit card fraud charges. You could therefore charge the criminals on existing laws already making this new bill redundant.

The bill is worded in such a manner that falsifying the publicly displayed whois record information is not a crime, unless you use the domain as part of committing a felony. Considering that copyright violations these days appear to be felonies, under certain circumstances, by having an outdated address, your parents’ address or by some other means having your whois record information false, you’ve just tacked a few years on top of your copyright violation felony. The Church of Scientology, RIAA and MPAA have been very aggressive in pursuing copyright violators online. Heaven forbid any of them operate a website with fraudulent whois records.

The penalty for this horrible crime is up to 7 years in jail. Gee whiz, I’d be better off selling crack.

-TPP