The Hypocrisy Weblog

The funny actor Michael Richards, you know; “Kramer” from the late hit sit-com “Seinfeld”, goes off on a racist slur on stage. I don’t think that it was intended to be racist from the start, as you can sense that he is trying to go off at the hecklers in the audience, but it is still not “ok”. I mean, you shouldn’t be held accountable for such statements in a court of law (due to freedom of speech) in my personal opinion, but it’s still not “ok” in my book.

A commenter on YouTube had a point when he wrote:
” but its ok for them to call him cracker ass…

go to his show and watch, don’t heckle. rediculous. if you dont like it leave. uncalled for my ass.

chris rock would call that guy a n*gger too. watch chris rock’s stuff. He makes fun of people just like that who can’t stop talking.

If only he hadn’t been so stupid ass to call him that, and used something a little more tasteful to get back at him. what a shame.”

Touché!

Richards should have made a George Carlin-like comeback and bury the hecklers in their chairs, now Mr Richards just ended up looking like a fool. Yeah, you should be able to say whatever you want up on stage, and yes – hecklers should thrown out with a pitchfork and yes I think it’s ridicolous that certain words are paria, but I should say that this particular stand-up is one of the many reasons to why certain words after all are paria in the view of the general public. (Apart from the PC-panic showing up once and again.)

We could go into a detailed discussion/conflict regarding the hypocrisy about hizzing at some words, but saying the same things with another “dress-code” and we can also discuss that these words are not a disease, but a mere symptom of something being very very wrong. If there wasn’t something wrong, you’d be able to say any possible racist slur possible and no-one would raise an eyebrow.

With this said, google “racist slur” and you’ll be taken to “the database of racist slurs” and also a full wikipedia entry with various racist slurs. Not for the faint hearted, but why do we really react?!

Aren’t we citizen of the global village yet?!

How many of you administrates your own server(s)? How many of you don’t but still receive on the magnitude of 10 to 1 more spam than real email in your inbox?

Matt Lake really puts down the grim reality into words in his chronicle.

One of the biggest problems is the outgoing spam which we as domain-owners can’t protect ourselves against: Spoofed from-addresses.

This quote says it all:

“Somebody out there, probably thousands of people, are getting messages for V-1-A=G-R-A and c1a-L:IS and embedded GIFs touting some penny stock that nobody’s heard of–all with my domain name all over the From field.”

The above can be handled on a pure technical level, as most of the error-responses can be filtered out automatically. What is worse however is the bad-will that these spoofed send-outs creates, whether these fake emails contains the spam mentioned above or viruses.

This is how it works, told through Matt Lake’s experience:

“Essentially, spoofing would mean that a spammer ran a piece of software that got hold of my domain name, possibly from its own spam lists, maybe from sniffing around in vulnerable e-mail servers from which e-mail came to me, or maybe from the central WHOIS database. The software then generated a mess of fake addresses with my domain on the end to masquerade as the sender’s addresses in the From and/or Reply To fields of their crass bulk e-mail. Then they sent out messages to unwitting strangers.”

Matt continues:

“I picked up the bounced-back messages only because I have a catchall account at my domain host. E-mail spoofing could happen to anybody with a domain (it could have happened to you), and most people never find out about it.

Unfortunately, if this spammer manages to annoy enough people, my domain may end up on a blacklist. Fortunately, because this kind of thing happens all the time, the blacklist compilers probably won’t punish me for what that spammer did, but they may. So I need to keep an eye out for any dropped messages to important clients and friends and comb the huge public list of blacklisted sites and hope for the best.

All told, my options aren’t terribly cheering.”

What is needed is an overhaul of the email-system, however there are many competing technologies and companies promoting these technologies plus that email shouldn’t lose it’s simplictic and genious usage.

A risk that is often forgotten when talking about which way is best to develop email to be less sensitive to UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email = spam) is that less developed countries will be left behind (again) if the systems becomes too complex and / or expensive.

Another quote from Matt’s chronicle shows on another trap you as an administrator / provider can run into:

“So perhaps Verizon’s spam filter was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: removing objectionable unsolicited content from my mailbox. But of course, this does also mean that Verizon considers itself a spammer.”

Also note that there’s been a class action lawsuit against Verizon due to their spam-filtering methods. (Read about it here.)

It looks like we are stuck between a rock and a hard place…

Okay, I promised myself to keep sports out of this site, but seeing this my morning-surf made me cough up my coffee! Sven Göran “Svennis” Eriksson is portraited in today’s “The Sun” with a noose around his neck according to swedish newspaper “Aftonbladet“. When reading this I wonder: has the editor at The Sun no shame???!!!!! No matter what “Svennis” may or may have not have done, this is crossing the line!!! Disgusting…

Justice has been served:

A former America Online software engineer was sentenced yesterday to a year and three months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers who sent out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mail messages.

“I know I’ve done something very wrong,” a soft-spoken and teary Jason Smathers told U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein.

Jason Smathers will be spending 15 months in jail and will pay $84,000 in liability to AOL. I find the sentence to be fair, even though it could be even more severe in order to set a legal precedent.

Speaking about AOL, this is from the Slashdot sea of comments:

America Online: A sucker born every minute…

According to a corporate press release dated June 16, 2000, America Online has surpassed the 23 million member mark. Founded in 1985, AOL has been a household name to novice computer users worldwide. Unfortunately, many of these novices don’t know that they’re only seeing a small portion of the Internet and are being limited by AOL’s proprietary and archaic interface.

Now, it’s fairly safe to make the assumption that at least a quarter of AOL’s 23 million customers are simply short-term users along for the free trial or jumping from service to service looking for the best deal. And, using that same line of thinking, roughly half of those 17.25 million remaining customers are probably smart enough to see AOL for what it really is and cancel their service in a desperate fit of fight or flight.

That leaves approximately 8.63 million customers that use AOL as their primary Internet Service Provider, give or take a random three quarter million people at any given time signing up or canceling. With this in mind, and approximately 7.88 million minutes in AOL’s 15 year history, this proves that a sucker really is born every minute.

Hate is such a strong word, I agree – I guess I just wrote that one down for shock-value!

But in all seriousness, what is the use of having a laptop, aka a portable computer, when you can’t use it when you are out in the sun? (anyone ever tried to work outside under the sun knows what I’m talking about)

It really bugs me that I can’t go out in the sun with my Dell, just because I can’t see squat of what is on the screen, thus making the mission of working outside impossible.

Same thing with mobile phones. Ok, they’ve gotten better these later years – the mobiles with colourscreen that is, but they are still not a pleasure to use when under the sun.

Anywho, I just wanted to get this off my chest!

See you next time…

On http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/7506669/ you can read the following;

“but the commentary is all below, at “more on 360.” [disclosure: that's not a glare on the whiteboard; it's where Yahoo!'s internal network password was posted, deleted in order not to tempt the easily tempted.]”

Though user jzawodn, your average friendly Yahoo! employee is fast with a comeback and says;

“Heh. That’s the first time anyone has every airbrushed my handwriting.

That was the password to the guest network. Our real internal network requires more than a bit of stuff copied from a whiteboard, of course.”

I guess Jeremy got the last laugh after all!