Since I am tired of having this argument:

That would be Visa’s card acceptance policy. Yeah, all those people who tell you to leave your card unsigned or write “See ID”? They are wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. WRONG!

Here’s American Express. And Mastercard, which sayeth: “The back of the card must be signed, and the signature should reasonably compare to the cardholder signature on the sales receipt. Check to be sure that it has not been taped over, mutilated, erased or altered in any suspicious manner.”

The big three all say the same thing, kids, and that is: SIGN YOUR DAMN CREDIT CARD.

I was interested to read on Tuesday about a plan among several major Internet service providers to block content which contains child pornography, in yet another attempt to cope with the flowering of child pornography here on the wilds of the Intertubes. This is not a proposal I support, for an assortment of reasons, and I think that a fair number of Internet users are probably with me on this one (including, of course, and unfortunately, child pornographers and their customers).

Before I spell out my reasons for being opposed to this, I feel that I should say, for the record, that I am categorically opposed to child pornography and the exploitation of children. I think that porn which features children is foul, and disgusting, and that we most certainly should be taking regulatory steps to make it harder to access to to penalize the people who produce it. I would hope that this is a given, but I thought I should throw it out there.

In the first place, this proposal sets a very dangerous precedent, and I could see it getting bound up in the more general discussion about net neutrality. The proposal to block “objectionable” content could balloon; while I think we can all agree that child porn is not ok, what about porn in general? Directions for making bombs? Racist websites? Where do we draw the line, and who decides how that line gets drawn?

I am also curious to see how they plan to filter content. It’s been pretty clearly proved that the vast majority of content filters are not terribly smart, and I can see the potential for a lot of perfectly acceptable websites being swept up in the ban, which is no good. And, if it’s going to be done purely on the basis of user reports, could people start getting vindictive or try to shut down competition by crying “child porn”?

Furthermore, how effective would such a ban really be? People are pretty adroit at circumventing all manner of measures on the Internet, and I’m willing to bet that innovative and determined kiddie porn lovers and those who supply them will find a way to step around the boundaries of the ban, like simply switching to another ISP, for example. While the Times clearly enjoyed taking a potshot at Usenet, what about email services? File sharing applications? Instant messaging? Is there a serious proposal to block these services as well? Because that could be really, really ugly.

In the wording of the article, it sounds like all Usenet access could be shut off, which would be a major bummer for people with legitimate uses of Usenet. Now, I’ve read several poorly researched and badly worded articles in the Times lately, so I’m hoping that was just poor editing, but one never knows where the insanity will stop. The things that make Usenet so very handy for the distribution of child porn are also useful for political dissidents trying to exchange information, for students to communicate quickly and effectively for people all over the world, and for people to generally exchange ideas and information without excessive scrutiny. Should we sacrifice all that for a tactic which may not be all that effective in ending child porn?

I also note that the “agreement” was the result of sneaky and coercive tactics on the part of the office of the New York State Attorney General, which doesn’t bode well, in my book. I’m with Internet service providers on this one; the Internet is a big place, and by using it, you run the risk of seeing some things you don’t like. To suggest that ISPs are responsible for the abundance of child porn is just fallacious.

What it really boils down to, for me, is the question of whether or not this tactic will prevent the exploitation of children in pornography. I don’t think it will. It might drive child porn underground, and cause ISPs that go along with it a lot of customers in the meanwhile, but it won’t address the root problem, which is the very existence of child porn. Going after the people who make such content may not be working as well as we’d like, because where one pornographer falls, 10 will rise, but it’s better than penalizing the rest of the Internet.

Blocking sites which offer child pornography is like covering your eyes in a nuclear explosion. You might not be able to see it, and that might make you feel better, but…guess what? It’s still happening.

You Suck. Seriously. You. Suck. You suck so much that I’m surprised you don’t create a vacuum.

Sincerely,

s.e. smith

At the risk of confusing Google even more, I had to share some of these search terms with you, because they are too funny not to spread to the world at large. This, my friends, is why I like looking through my server logs:

“cost to transport dead body by air” -I don’t know the answer to this one, but I’ll bet you’d qualify for a bereavement fare.

“fort bragg glass jellyfish fire” -Uhm. What?

“picture of stink in the book not in the book” -I don’t know how one would photograph stink, exactly, whether it was in a book or not.

“low water pressure glen park san francisco” -I know this may come as a shock, but I am actually not the San Francisco Department of Public Works.

“dog vomit brown odor how to clean” -Someone with synesthesia has a sick dog, apparently.

“coconut porn” -Why? Seriously. WHY?

“pillow feathers girls” -Once again, what?

“have sex in san francisco” -Don’t do it. It’s a trap!

“pippis longstocking fort bragg” -They sell awesome socks, it’s true.

“behaving like an adult” -Boy, did you come to the wrong place.

“is twenty dollars a good tip at spas” -It depends on how much you paid for the massage. And how good the massage was, of course.

Naturally, no list of searches is complete without “nefarious pickle,” and I am pleased to see that I am back at the top of the Google results for that particular term. Which must be really annoying for the porn site of the same name, as well as all of the people who innocently click the link looking for porn and get pictures of cheesemaking instead.

Those of you who read along via RSS have probably noticed odd little things popping up in my posts, and since you’re undoubtedly wondering that in the heck is going on, I thought I should explain, but in order to do so, I briefly have to discuss a foul beast without discourse of reason known as a splogger.

Sploggers steal things. Things like my content. They use these things to make money. Here’s an article all about them. Basically, a splog is a spam blog, filled with nonsense content, and most splogs aren’t even really meant to be read, they just hang out, making money for their lazy, two-bit, worthless owners who can’t even be bothered to do actual work.

This irritates me. I really don’t like seeing my content smeared onto websites which don’t belong to me and being used to increase their PageRank and revenue, especially since I don’t profit at all from this site. I’m fine with a little fair use action, but I really like people to visit my site to read my writing, and I like to have some control over who reprints my work.

I think this is reasonable, because my work is a part of me, and there are certain things that I don’t like to be associated with. As a general rule in the past, any time someone has approached me and asked to reprint my photographs or writing, I have consented, and in some cases I have donated work to charities, so I don’t have a problem with people making money off my work, I just like to know who is making the money, and where that money is going.

Once I started tracking the theft of my content, I was pretty amazed and rather disheartened. Those of my readers who are also bloggers who aren’t aware of the splog problem might want to use Copyscape as a jumping off point to see who is stealing their work. You’d be astonished at where it pops up, and if you’re even a bit like me, a twinge of infuriation will burn in your heart when you see your words on someone else’s site without your consent.

One of the ways in which sploggers steal content is through feeds. I could turn off feeds for this site altogether, and I have considered this as an option, but I find sites without feeds immensely inconvenient and annoying, and as a result, I don’t keep up with them. And it would be rather hypocritical of me to rail against sites without feeds and to then close my feeds.

I could also turn my feeds into excerpts instead of full posts, except that it annoys me all to heck when people do this. The whole point of having a feed reader is so that I don’t have to read 80 million websites every morning. When people turn their feeds into excerpts, I only click through when they are really enticing, which is rare, so once again I would be kind of an ass if I did that.

Therefore, I’m having to be a bit more crafty. I’m using two Wordpress plugins, AntiLeech and Digital Fingerprint. I don’t really want to go into lengthy detail, but they are designed to thwart sploggers, and they are designed in a way which allows me to control them, which should prevent y’all from getting caught in the crossfire, except that you will notice weird little things in my feeds like sentences which look out of place.

Splogging is really frustrating to me on a lot of levels. Not least because it clutters the Intertubes, making it really hard to find valid, useful, interesting content. It is also frustrating to have my words repeatedly stolen from me (and yes, there are measures to deal with it, but it’s a pain in the ass). A lot of blogging services are starting to realize that splogging is a major problem and they are theoretically taking steps to combat splog, but sploggers are of course getting smarter, making things even harder for those of us who are trying to maintain our integrity.

There’s no easy way to solve the splog problem, but I do appreciate it when readers pass on information about other sites passing my content off as their own, or using my content in a way which violates fair use. And I also encourage you to report splogs when you encounter them on hosted services like Blogger (a favourite splogger domain which should probably just be changed to “Splogger” at this point).

Splogs have been around almost as long as blogs have, illustrating the amazing talent spammers have for filling every possible niche, and they are unlikely to go away anytime soon. But I’m not going down without a fight.

I don’t know how closely you have been following the national ID issue in Britain, gentle readers, but a leaked document from the British government has recently surfaced, and in this document, the option of “coercion” to force people into getting government IDs is discussed. Needless to say, I don’t think this is a good thing.

A British group called NO2ID has asked people all over the world to mirror this document, spreading it through the delightful diffusion process which is the intertubes. You can read the .pdf version of the National Identity Scheme Options Analysis-Outcome on my site, but I want you to do more than that. I want you to share it with people. If you have a server of your own, I want you to mirror it, and send the link to as many people as possible. The document is annotated, and well worth reading, especially for those of us who don’t want to live in a nanny state.

Information likes to be free. So free it.

I am writing this post to test my feed redirection plugin, as my recent migration to Wordpress has changed the URLs for my feeds. If you can see this post, ignore it and think about something fuzzy, because all is well; you will continue to receive a fresh serving of this ain’t livin’ whenever you check in on your favorite feed reader.

If you can’t see this post, uh, we have a problem.

Incidentally, the new RSS feed is here, RSS2 is here, rdf is here, and atom is here.

My new keyboard is so awesome that I am actually going to dedicate an entire post to telling you all about how awesome it is. (And no, I’m not being paid for it; I really do like this keyboard this much.) I didn’t think it was actually possible to get this excited about a new keyboard, but it is. This keyboard is just that cool. It’s called the diNovo Edge, and it’s made by Logitech, which already has a pretty nice niche in the mouse and keyboard market.

If you bothered to follow the link above, you probably noticed that this keyboard looks incredibly cool, and it’s also very expensive. (Although I didn’t pay sticker price.) One might reasonably wonder how you could possibly spend over $40 on a wireless keyboard, let along almost $200, and I was pretty surprised when I noticed the price myself. However, in my humble opinion, it really is worth it.

First, a little background. I go through keyboards really quickly. I’m a writer, so I need a keyboard which can withstand a high number of keystrokes and some serious hard use. I am also just hard on electronics in general, partly because I have a nasty temper and I tend to slam things around when I get irritated; I go through mice at an astronomical rate, for example. So when my latest keyboard failed, I decided that I was going to set out to get the most durable, high quality keyboard possible.

First, I looked at Das Keyboard, because it has mechanical keyswitches and it is incredibly durable. And it also makes that oh so satisfying clackety sound when you type, which is an important part of the computing experience for me. But it’s not wireless, and I really need a wireless keyboard. I don’t like cables, and I don’t like feeling tethered. I also stash my keyboard and mouse when not in use so that my desk stays tidy, because I likes me a tidy desk.

So then I hit Amazon and looked up keyboards by user reviews, and the diNovo kept coming up on top in pretty much every category. Despite the expense, it comes in #2 in popularity in the wireless keyboards category. So I decided to just go for it (Tristan egged me on, pointing out that it is, after all, a write off). It also has a three year warranty, which is good news for me. It’s also pretty sexy looking, but I swear that’s not why I got it.

Like most wireless keyboards, it comes with a USB dongle and it worked right out of the box, although I also installed the keyboard’s management software to take advantage of the extra features. The diNovo also uses a built in rechargeable battery, so it came with its own charging station: I just checked the power management software, and it says I have 54 days left on this charge. Which is pretty amazing, if you ask me.

The reasons this keyboard is so awesome are myriad. For one thing, the keys are incredibly responsive, and it’s a fairly quiet keyboard, considering how hard I pound the keys. I imagine that more sedate users probably generate a faint whisper of sound. Like most keyboards these days, it also comes with hotkeys, which are nice but not terribly exciting. What makes the diNovo especially cool is the built in TouchDisc, which you use to mouse and scroll with. The TouchDisc is pretty much awesome. The volume controls are also activated by touch, which is nice; the slider is really intuitive and very responsive. The brushed aluminum armrest doesn’t hurt either, because it stays nice and cool, and I’ve noticed that my wrists are not as painful after a day of work as usual. So not only does it look awesome, it’s also apparently helping my repetitive stress injuries.

The one flaw with this keyboard is the lack of a number pad. I really do like number pads, and I hope that Logitech issues a version with a number pad soon. Other than, it’s pretty much perfect, and totally worth every penny of the seemingly insane price. So if you happen to end up needing a new wireless keyboard in the future…

Now that I’ve had more time to play with my XO, I feel like I can expand on my initial impressions of it. My impressions may also be hampered by the keyboard; I suspect that I have a case of the infamous “sticky keys” which have been plaguing the XOs, so I’m going to use it for another week or so and then decide if I need to ship it out for a new keyboard. Apparently there is a process for this, although given my general frustrations with OLPC, I’m hoping my keyboard settles down so that I don’t have to deal with it. Given the way I slam through keyboards on the desktop, I feel like a functioning keyboard is a pretty critical need for me (a replacement keyboard just arrived today for the one that’s crapping out on me; expect a review on that in the near future, since it was quite expensive and it’s supposed to be very good).

One complaint I see from a lot of users is that the XO is slow, and in comparison with a lot of computers, it is a bit slow. But it’s not intensely slow. It’s very easy to switch between activities (XO users who have not figured out the Alt+N trick should start using it, because it saves a lot of time). Booting up and shutting down are a bit slow, but not unbearably so; of course, I’m not one of those people who needs everything to work instantly, so maybe my impression there should be taken with a grain of salt. The activities launch quickly, and they are pretty speedy; the only time my XO has really lagged is when I’ve confused it.

I continue to be intrigued by the Sugar interface, which is very different. I actually kind of dig it. I don’t use my computer for anything terribly complex, and I like the simplicity of Sugar. It’s very straightforward, simple, and clear; even using the terminal is not terribly challenging, and this comes from someone who is not very adept with manipulating things from the terminal. Navigation from within Sugar is clear and logical; I’m actually rather surprised that people have had issues with it.

I’m sad to hear that OLPC is partnering with Windows, because I feel like that violates the organization’s open source goal. And I don’t think Windows is a good choice of OS for the XO. It’s bloated, it crashes, and, er, it’s not very good. Rather than trying to build a lean, stripped down version of windows, I think that OLPC needs to concentrate on refining Sugar (ha ha). To go back on the open-source pledge would be a pretty major compromise, in my opinion.

When I was at the coffeehouse with the XO the other night, a friend noticed that the networking capabilities are pretty formidable. Since this is one of the main features of the XO, it was nice to note that I could see six networks from Headlands while my friend could only see three, and I was getting a pretty strong signal from five of those networks. No other XO’s in the region, of course; I don’t think anyone else up here has one, which is kind of unfortunate, because I would like to play with the mesh networking and collaborative features of the XO.

I have not tested out the e-book reading mode yet; I know that’s a topic of interest to some people, but I don’t really do e-books, so I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one. At some point I’ll need to open a lengthy .pdf and maybe I will check it out then, assuming my loathing for .pdfs can be overcome.

My major complaint about the XO at this point has to do with the power management. I really think that the development team needs to sink some serious energy into power management, and I hope it’s a priority for the next build. I can get about three hours on a charge, which is alright since I have ready access to electricity to recharge. People in developing nations, however, need more serious battery life. What if people can only charge their laptops every few days? Or once a week? It’s kind of silly to provide kids with laptops that they can only use for three hours between charges.

I’m interested to see reports from school deployments, especially from the perspective of educators.

So, for those of you who could not figure out what yesterday’s cryptic post was about, my XO laptop finally arrived.

You can learn more about the XO at laptop.org. In short, it’s an extremely rugged laptop designed for deployment in schools in developing nations; I got mine through the Give One, Get One program, by donating funds and getting a laptop in return. I have a lot of criticisms about the way in which the program was run, but I’m not going to talk about those right now, because I would rather not dwell upon them. I want to talk about my shiny new toy, instead.

The first thing you need to know about the XO is that it is small. Very small. It is designed, after all, for children. Here’s a shot of it with my wireless keyboard and monitor, to put it in context. That keyboard, by the way, is a very small slimline edition which most of my friends can’t use because their hands are too big.

The whole thing is only about nine inches (23 cm for my metric readers) across, and the keyboard is tiny. Really tiny. I started writing this post on the XO and stopped because it was taking so long; while I will get used to the keyboard eventually, right now I’m a very slow typist on it. I keep hitting “S” instead of “A” and having trouble with the shift key.

The other important thing to remember about the XO is that it is really not designed for computing in the industrialized world. It is slow. There’s no way around that. I think that later builds and beefier versions will improve on this, and considering what the XO is designed for, I think that the speed is perfectly acceptable. After all, I can’t drop my desktop onto a stone wall from four feet and calmly pick it up again and start working. It is not insanely mind numbingly slow, but you do need to wait a moment for it to open programs, and sometimes it has trouble switching between activities…

…which brings me to the really interesting thing about the XO, the interface, Sugar. Sugar is a stripped down form of Linux which takes some getting used to. I worry, actually, that kids will get used to it and then be unable to use more widely available operating systems, including distributions of Linux. It definitely makes me rethink the way I compute, what with “activities” instead of programs, and all. But it is an easy interface to use, as long as you are comfortable working in the terminal. I am finding it very intuitive, and that may be because I am reasonably comfortable in Linux; I think that some folks are really struggling with it, which is unfortunate.

As soon I got my XO booted up, I was off and running, exploring the interface and playing with various commands. It feels extremely native and logical to me, and I like a lot of the features. I like that I can push a button to view the source of any program I am in, for example; I think that’s pretty neat.

XOs have a whole lot of other neat features, like mesh networking, which make them amazingly cool. They really are innovative, and I am proudly geeky about being able to obtain an XO, because it is fun, even though I think I will be using it mainly for the novelty and less for computing. I was hoping that mine would arrive before the G1G1 program ended so that I could gloat and convince y’all to get one, but instead you’ll have to look on eBay, alas, although there is talk of reviving the program later this year (hopefully sans the kinks I had to deal with).

I originally got the XO for work, actually, but I don’t think that I am going to be able to do work on it, unless I can adapt to the keyboard. I am also concerned about the potential for causing repetitive stress on the small keyboard, which is an issue for me. It’s still pretty damn awesome, and it will be great for sitting on the porch in the summer, because it has a screen which is specifically designed to be highly visible in daylight. Wahoo!

The other amazing thing about the XO is the user community which has grown around it. People are really helping each other out in forums, leading each other on a voyage of discovery and making resources for Sugar readily available. I was able to install Opera and Finch right after I booted up, by following very precise directions from people who had already done it, and I happen to think that is really neat. I think that developers in the industrialized world are going to contribute a lot to the XO, as we play with it, tinker, and think about ways to retool it.

Some criticisms of the XO and One Laptop Per Child have been raised, and I do think some of them are valid, but I’m not going to address them just yet. Right now, I just want to explore my new toy…I’m sure I’ll have more posts up about the XO as I play around with it and learn more about it.

For now, I’ll leave you with the truly awesome warning screen which comes up when I shut down:

I especially like the one with the baby.