My broadband access was out again for most of this afternoon. What are NTL playing at?
Quite an inconvenience this time as I was trying to do some work which required me to be able to connect to the office network. I suppose I’ll have to spend half my evening doing that now.

Look out for that puddle!

Thanks to TS for the link.

Prompted by comment left by Chris. I’ve looked into this story some more.

The story at Lockergnome points to a story on The New York Times (free registration required). Which goes into more (non-technical) detail. Software involved in this scam include Morpheus, Kazaa and LimeWire.

Last week, Amazon cut off affiliate payments to Morpheus, one site that employs the shopping software, said an online executive. Coldwater Creek, an online clothing store, has also blocked Morpheus….
A successful affiliate Web site can make $60,000 a month from referrals alone, said Haiko De Poel Jr., chief executive of Abestweb.

That’s a lot of money to be stealing!

At least two of the companies involved, have recently made changes to their software to stop this happening, but that of course won’t affect the millions of copies already downloaded.

Note that this redirection continues even after you have uninstalled the software!

Here’s another article about software, including KaZaa, using Microsoft’s ‘Smart Tags’ to steal visitors from web sites.

I can’t seem to find anything on the technology used, but I image it is simply that the software installs a local proxy on your machine (or hooks into one that’s already their) and parses either the incoming html to re-write the tags or the outgoing requests to substitute the affiliate number part of the well known query strings.

If you have the full spyware/sleazeware version of Kazaa on your machine and click on an affiliates link on someones website; for example a link to a book on Amazon, and subsequently purchase the book, then Kazaa will steal (that is the correct word) the small commission the refering site should have received.

These people are unbelievable in the things they think they can get away with. I really hope they don’t get away with this one.

If you must have Kazaa on your PC use the stripped down KaZaa Lite or at least run one of the spyware removal programs

Thanks to EVHEAD for pointing me to the story on Lockergnome.

Sparked by a post by Chris over at monosyllabically.com in which Chris, in essence, notes how watching the news on TV has a negative effect on her, and how “NOT watching the news has improved my psyche.”; I was prompted to comment

I agree entirely, Chris. I haven’t watched the TV news for nearly 12 months! In fact, I try not to watch TV at all. I watch films, and occasionally sit down with my daughter and watch something ‘harmless’ on the Disney Channel.

Unfortunately, I often hear the news on the radio which my partner insists on having on most of the time. It just confirms my opinion that the world at large is losing it’s morals, it’s intelligence, and is getting more trivial and petty. Or is that just the media?

Of preference I will read books, listen to music, create something (usually computer programs), have conversations (online and IRL), and read blogs!

I forgot to mention that like another commenter I too don’t read newspapers or magazines (except technical ones).

You know, I’m old enough (40) to remember when the news (TV/radio/newspaper) didn’t require EVERY story to have a superlative!

I mean, in the UK, every single headline story seems to have a superlative: “the worst xxx in 40 years”, “the most yyy since the war”, I’ve even heard “the coldest month this year” in February!

There must be armies of researchers sifting through records to find that crucial superlative and the appropriate time period. Or perhaps they make them all up. 😉 Who would know?

An example: the recent earthquake we had in England was quite minor (4.8 on the richter scale) compared to those suffered in other countries: Buildings near the epicentre had minor structural damage, but there were NO reports of injuries. The 7:30 news on my local radio station that morning reported the story quite sensibly, with interviews from people who were frightened, police men who’d been inundated with calls, etc. Quite a reasonable story, not too sensational. By the 8:00 news, the story was reduced to a sound bite: “England Rocked by Worst Earthquake in 60 Years!!” and a couple more sentences. You could actually hear the exclamation marks and the capitalisation.

I hear it all the time in conversations now: Everyone talks about “the worst this”, “the best that”, “the most”, “the least”. People no longer say “Last night I had a great night out.”, they apparently had “The Best Night Ever!”… Until next week, when the also have the “The Best Night Ever!”, unless they have “The Worst Night Ever!” for a change.

The English language used to be wonderful for its subtleties and its shades of meaning. There are often dozens of words to use to modify, qualify or enhance a particular adjective, or adverb, particularly if one includes regional colloquialisms. Today things are ‘top’ or ‘naff’, they are ‘the best’ or ‘the worst’, people are loved or hated, football teams are the ‘best’ or ‘nowhere’, you are either successful or a loser. Everything is extremes, there are no shades anymore.

I suppose it still is wonderful, the English language; there are many skilled authors around, some better than others. But it seems that no longer is it a requirement for mass media writers to have a mastery of the English language, or even a good grasp of it. The most basic of understanding will do. Grammar is not required, spell checkers will correct their most obvious errors. A good grasp of one-up-manship in sensational headlines is more valuable than actually being able to string together a coherent sentence. The same seems to be true for advertising copy writers too, including the sensational headlines!

Maybe I’m just an old fogy, wishing for the old days, and bemoaning the “state of the kids today”? Or maybe I’m one of the last generation to get a decent education in this country.

Ho hum.

Cool! I’ve already passed 100,000 hits this month (107895 as of 26-Sep-2002 00:08 EDT).
I know hits aren’t the same as page views (or even visits) but those figures are already well up on last months totals!

Thankyou to all my visitors. A special thankyou to Mr Google Bot, Mr Inktomi Search, and Mr GB Logs, my most frequent visitors! 😀 😀

Wow, apparently we had an earthquake in England last night!
Thanks to Steve for the the details.

This is the second one I have missed! The last was in the late eighties. I didn’t notice a thing! I did notice however that workmen were outside our house repairing the temporary traffic lights. I’d assumed that a passing car had knocked them down, but it was probably the earthquake.

Update: I guess being below ground (in the cellar) when it happened may explain why I didn’t feel it.

Update: 30/09/2002 I’m getting so many hits on this post which hasn’t anything useful to say that I’m adding in this link to the story from the BBC news site.

Wow, I’ve just found this really good Wiki Wiki Web, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Welcome to Wikipedia, a collaborative project to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch. We started in January 2001 and already have 44400 articles. We want to make over 100,000 complete articles, so let’s get to work! Anyone, including you, can edit any article right now, without even having to log in. You can copyedit, expand an article, write a little or write a lot.

Very interesting. (don’t mention the dipthongs missing from encyclodaedia 😉