Category: Ramblings

  • Pop-ups are click fraud

    In Media Sites: Say No to Pop-Ups, I don’t think Adam Penenberg spent enough time on one point: One survey conducted in 2004 by Bunnyfoot Universality, a U.K.-based web consultancy, determined that as many as nine out of 10 users who clicked on a popular pop-up ad were really just trying to get rid of…

  • Portrait of a broken spam blocker

    For HME.PVRblog.com users get their password via email when they register. Occasionally someone will have a spam blocking service that requires people who send email to verify themselves by going to a site and passing a Captcha. I just got one of those requests from Earthlink, and the damn thing won’t accept my input. I…

  • Kryptonite’s implications

    Wherein I use Kryptonite bike locks to explore computer security and copyright laws.

  • How to compete with Best Buy

    It seems home electronics and computer shops are having trouble competing with big box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. Smaller stores could attract a lot of customers away from big box stores pretty easily: advertise a “no rebates” policy. Everyone I know hates having to float loans to companies under the guise of…

  • Odd Todd Robbed?

    June spotted these Weber grill ads on TV and thought they looked a little familiar. They style mimics Odd Todd, the guy who made Flash cartoons about being unemployed, to a tee. June isn’t the only one to see this, gigglechick.com saw it and emailed Todd to see if he was involved. According to her…

  • The Porn Myth and gender politics

    From The Porn Myth by Naomi Wolf: At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology…