Posts Tagged ‘tech’

There is charity and there are scams…

Posted: January 26, 2010 by datechguy in tech
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and our friends at Zolex PC have an important warning about the latter:

Unfortunately tragedies and catastrophes like Haiti’s current situation can give rise to golden opportunities for scammers and Flim-Flammers alike to make money off of a willing and generous public. There are plenty of Scam Sites already out there trying to do this masking themselves as helping Haiti but really just helping themselves to your generous donations.

The advice is basic but too often ignored. Remember the thieves go where the money is and the money now is online, and available via “text”…

Websites can be put up in a matter of hours and appear completely legitimate so do your research before you donate your money to a scam. Texting scams are very common. With texting you never know what else you could be signing up for. Scams come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Be it via Text messaging, Email Scams, Websites, Facebook, or any other means. Where there is a way to take advantage and trick people through their own generosity, you can be sure there are plenty of slime and scum who will take advantage of it.

Read the whole thing as they say. Also if you decide to give online do a google or yahoo search to be sure you are getting to a real site, particularly if you are iffy on spelling. This makes it less likely to hit a “spoof” site. DON’T give via e-mail links or IM requests.

Take this advice to heart so that your hard earned money goes to those who need it not to those who are looking for a quick buck. (My advice: give through your local church if you have one).

Of course as the technology gets smarter…

Posted: January 13, 2010 by datechguy in tech
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…so has the spam.

I’ve found that my spam over the years (counting the hiwired blog) has gotten smarter and smarter, to the point where the filters will catch one but miss a nearly identical one.

The phony names, semi generic messages etc are getting better too.

I’m sure other bloggers see more of this than me, but considering how prevalent it is I’m shocked that there are some sites that still don’t moderate comments.

Yahoo is looking better and better.

Posted: January 6, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, tech
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I popped over to Pam Geller’s site today and noticed an interesting post concerning Google search. She references this post at the next web:

When you search for the major religions of the world, the monotheistic faiths for example, Google serves up suggestions for the search “Christianity is” such as, “a lie,” or false.” Try it on a a number of faiths, and then Islam.

Notice any difference?

Google is systematically blocking, it seems, all search suggestions for Islam. Why? To remove the chance of an adherent of the faith from being offended by a perhaps severe search suggestion? Why not treat all search terms equally?

Given the complete lack of suggestions, not just terms that could be perceived as negative, it seems that Google is covering its, well, behind.

Take a look at the graphics, they are rather damning and cowardly. I tried the “is” combinations myself and got the same results as the screen shots. Remember Glenn’s oft repeated warning:

MY ADVICE TO CHRISTIANS, JEWS, HINDUS, ETC: Start blowing things up and beheading people. This will gain you enormous solicitude from the powers-that-be…

…No, I’m not serious about the advice. But they need to think about the incentive that’s being created here, or I fear that others will take the lesson. When you reward behavior, you tend to get more of it.

For the fun of it I tried the same thing with yahoo. The results for “Christianity is”, “Judaism is” are comparable with the Google results, but take a look at “Islam is”:

When you use google as your only search engine, you are behaving no differently than if you used only ABC, CBS and NBC as your only networks.

Amazon retreats slightly on the Kindle

Posted: March 3, 2009 by datechguy in tech
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Score one for the publishers:

“Amazon realized the magnitude of the contractual problem,” Aiken said Monday morning. “Many of the author’s publishing contracts give publishers the right to publish e-books, but only without enhancing audio. A reasonable reading of those contracts shows that publishers didn’t have the authority to sell e-books for use in a Kindle device with audio enhancement.”

An Amazon spokesman denied being pushed into Friday’s decision. As for whether contractual issues played a part, the spokesman repeated what the company said Friday: “Kindle 2’s experimental text-to-speech feature is legal.”

Aiken began criticizing Amazon soon after the Kindle 2’s debut last month. He argued that the retailer was violating the author’s copyright and was cutting them out of a potentially new and lucrative market.

On Friday, Amazon announced it would reconfigure the Kindle 2’s systems to allow publishers to disable the text-to-speech function for titles of their choosing. However, the retailer made it clear in the announcement that it believed text-to-speech did not violate copyright.

Amazon may be the big fish in the pool but they don’t own the lake.

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