Obfuscated Thoughtlessness Inversed

The idea is simple enough. Import your list of contacts from GMail / Yahoo / Hotmail / AOL into MySpace and see who is already a MySpace member.

Too bad it doesn't fucking work.

You give the man your password, wait a while and then boom, crash, down goes the system. 404 errors all over the place and links to who knows where.

Then there is the second and third try where it finally figures out that it should load your address book without sending you into the nethers of cyberspace. First few people are displayed you go to the next bunch and wait for 10 minutes while it moves like mummified molasses.

I'm all about overloading your server, but damn, I run on a free server at home, not a multi-billion dollar News Corp flagship.

Oh, and to top that off you get all these people you added to your addressbook in high school, and no new friends cause everyone you like is obsessed with Myspace as you and has found you already.

Stupid Address Book import....

BTW: The same function on Facebook works great! Now all I need is one to import my friendster "friends" into myspace, that list into hi5 and that into facebook and it will appear to those who are looking that I have friends again.

I have a real friend, she uses hyves.nl.

I don't want any friends at all on Digg.com, Technorati, Windows Live or anywhere else with a social networking component so you won't see me importing stuff there...

Ok, enough of this blogging, time to go drink with real people.. maybe they'll be my real friends and leave comments on this blog after they are good and drunk with me. Maybe I need a Second Life this one is cyber-lame.

Labels: alternatives, anti-microsoft, health, opinion, personal story, tools

Google News has numerous effective uses that enhance a news watchers ability to keep up with what is going on in the world.

I have been using Google News for many years as my own personal clipping services, to track specific stories and to get an international perspective on stories that appear to have an excessively narrow view expressed in the source that brings the piece to my attention. This week, I realized that one of my close friends had never used Google News. This is despite having been given explicit instructions to use it a number of times in the past.

I am guessing it is possible you to have not used Google News or at least that you have not made use of it with the advanced features that make it the powerful tool it is. If you have never used Google News you should go there now, and come back to this article to read about the advanced features later.

If you have been a regular Google News reader spend a moment considering these uses.

Google News - Your own clipping service

Let's say you are working on an election campaign, planning on highlighting a specific issue in a community campaign or you are simply completely envious of that cool kid from junior high school and want to track her every move on her way to another dozen Junos. Google Alerts has for a long time been a part of Google News and has recently expanded to include all web content.

Let's go back to the cool kid from high school scenario. In this completely ridiculous scenario, I would add an alert for the search terms "Nelly Furtado", of the type Comprehensive (this includes blog content, news content and web content). Given that I really don't want to think about her more than once-a-week I would then choose that option as how often I would like to receive an alert by e-mail, summarizing new cool kid from high school content. By the way this alert is fictional and I do not receive weekly e-mails with updates of Nelly Furtado from Google News, but I could...



A more likely use? Let's say you are a not a Nelly Furtado stalker and were thinking of working on an election campaign in the City of Victoria in 2008. You could add Google Alerts for local city electables "Dean Fortin", "Pam Madoff", "Alan Lowe" and "Ben Isitt" with the setting as-it-happens. You would then immediately be notified if any of these folks made the news or were written up in a blog. The alert gives you a brief summary of the article and a link to the full article.

Really need to make it your own clipping service? Set up a 2 GB Gmail account to receive the alerts and keep them in a searchable form there.

Google News - Your own anti-censor

When reading an article that appears to show an extremely narrow point of view, choose a few key words, who, what, where, and type them into Google News.

You will instantly be given a screen of all the articles on that topic.

Today, was the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Guatanamo Bay Gulag - the US Government's illegal torture camp. Let's say you happened across a US Government News Release reproduced in a major news source on how Guatanamo Bay was doing wonderfully and almost complying with the law. Thinking to yourself, wow, this seems a remarkably one-sided story you can then do a search for the term Guatanamo-Bay in the Google News search bar. This gives a whole group of stories about illegal detainment, torture, and the protests against the open illegality of the US Administration's on-going breaches of the Geneva convention.

Additionally, let's say in protest against the on-going illegal detentions you decided to set-up a website supporting further protests. You could use Google News to generate an RSS/Atom feed of all stories with the keywords Guatanamo Bay and add that to your website.

Google News - A tool for democracy

As we change this world for the better, sites like Google News will be a powerful means by which to track an expanding dichotomy of debate and to increase your voices potential to be heard at the right time to impact the world.

A discussion like today's freak announcement that; the main strategy scientists had to keep nuclear waste with a 24,000 year half-life safe for 250,000 years, can actually only keep nuclear waste safe for 1400 years, can be tracked on a single website.

Watch the media for your favourite politicians, issues and writers. Post the RSS on a website where other people can read through the content.

But, most of all read the news, read the blogs and don't forget to read the wind!

Labels: alternatives, anti-war, democracy, leftist content creation, nuclear waste, online campaign, opinion, public power, spy-watch, tools

The revelation today that RFID devices have been found hidden on three separate US Contractors coming back from Secret Weapons Trade shows in Canada came to my attention on Slashdot.org. The CBC remains an incredible source of what is going down in the world, but I have to say Slashdot is definitely worth reading everyday.

Some of my favourite Slashdot stories on scary technology over the last few months include:

• Bugged Canadian Coins?
• Worst Ever Security Flaw in Diebold Voting Machine
• Machine Gun Sentry Robot Unveiled

Bugged currency, how to steal an election with an electronic box and how to defend your country with robot sentries. Sounds like George W. Bush's wet dream. Who else is opening up the details on how these technologies work or even reporting their existence? Well that's what Slashdot is for, to link you to whoever is.

Labels: anti-war, new media critique, scary technology

The Irrepressible campaign by Amnesty International is definitely worth checking out.

The absolutely funnest part of this campaign is that it allows you to break the law in other countries. By pasting in censored blog code via irrepressible - you are allowing censored words to bypass the repressive regimes under which they were written and reach you.

How great is that!

Now every time you visit this blog, you may be helping break the law in China, Saudia Arabia, Syria or Iran.

While you are visiting Irrepressible.info don't forget to sign the pledge:

I believe the Internet should be a force for political freedom, not repression. People have the right to seek and receive information and to express their peaceful beliefs online without fear or interference.

I call on governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of freedom of expression on the Internet – and on companies to stop helping them do it.

Labels: annotation, anti-war, human rights abuse, leftist content creation, new media critique

I don't know how I stumbled on to these racist freaks.

But, they have a whole coalition against Illegal Aliens.

They need some intense scrutiny, a little myth debunking and a fair bit of anti-fa political action against them. Too bad I'm laughing way too hard to provide any that.

Have a look and laugh along with me.

Labels: annotation, blogosphere, human rights abuse, new media critique

"Abbas also confirmed the United States is sending aid to boost the Palestinian security forces loyal to him. U.S. officials said Friday that President George W. Bush is asking Congress to provide $83 million US for those forces." CBC Online

When I wrote that the "Economic and Financial Blockade of the Palestinian people must be stopped" I wasn't calling for funding one side of a developing civil war.

Bush's decision to test the Democratic Party on the key question of the Palestinian people by requesting $83 million for Abbas's presidential military forces is a clear sign of Bush's continued contempt for any democratic outcomes in the middle east and possibly in the US. The timing is intriguing as the Democratic Party will be forced to quickly declare their position.

It is simply ridiculous to assert that a Hamas government is an ideal scenario for this territory, at this time. However, they won the election. Unlike in the United States where the executive is appointed by the President, in the Palestinian system the government reports to the legislature and is not led by the President Abbas. Where Bush is the commander in chief, no such clarity exists within the Palestinian authority. To fund an insurgent military against a democratic government in another territory is a path no democracy should go down; even though this will certainly not be the first time the United States has done this.

Given that Hamas has won a democratic election putting it in charge of the legislative and executive branches of government, to fund a military force led by Abbas is to encourage civil war against a democratic elected authority. This shortsighted policy can not be supported and I sincerely hope (but have little faith) that the Democrats turn down this new direction of the US Administration. It is very hard to know where the Democrats will go on this question, try this link to search the Democratic Party website for the Palestinian, you won't find much at all.

Here's also hoping that the strength of the opposition in the Canadian Parliament is enough to sink any plans Harper might have of following the Bush lead on this one. We'll have to watch this unfold.

Funding should be restored, a dialogue reopened, but monies flowing from other countries, as always should not be used to kill people or to destabilize what little democratic governance there is. No doubt this is a difficult delineation in this complex territory.

Labels: anti-war, democracy, internal, leftist content creation, link, opinion, unfolding