Blogging power

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Well good. Let's hear it for the bloggers!

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In a colossally stupid move, Best Buy triggers the Streisand Effect by issuing a take-down notice to a blogger who wrote about something they didn't like.

It turns out that this group called Improve Anywhere did a funny prank where they got about 80 people to dress in khakis and blue shirts and had them all enter a Best Buy and stand around. I heard about the prank last year sometime (and I saw the video).

Now they are selling joke t-shirts based on their famous stunt and Best Buy (not surprisingly) doesn't like it. Whether they have a real claim or not, I don't know (or care), but they've issued a take-down notice to the guys over at the Laughing Squid. Who's that? Well, the Laughing Squid is a blog, not unlike many other blogs online and the key issue here is that Best Buy is trying to surpress the blogger's right to cover information by saying that he's "promoting" the shirts.

Here's one for you Best Buy, I'm covering all his articles, and the original story, plus I'm promoting blogging! Oh horrors. I wonder what they'll do now.

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My poor wife went to a website that I directed her to to buy something for me for Christmas. It turns out that website is a front where they take your money and give no product. If we had known about resellerratings.com, we'd have saved ourselves the hassle, but now we have to cancel the order and possibly get a new credit card issued.

Well, you can bet we'll be checking a site's rating before purchasing directly through a non-major site again.

Anyway, I'm ticked and I'm going to do everything I can to make life miserable for this slimeball. First I'm going to dispute the charges with my credit card and ask if they have any means of prosecution. Second, I'm going to try and get his hosting, domain name, and merchant accounts canceled (with no domain name, no hosting for his site, and no merchant account to take credit cards, I'm guessing it will be harder to scam people in the future). And, if I can, I'm going to see what agency is responsible for this kind of fraud and see what they can do about it.

I'll post updates here if I manage to get any of this accomplished.

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A study recently reported that Youtube contains many videos that contradict mainstream science, but get better ratings than the ones that are scientifically correct. We all love a conspiracy, but try to remember not to believe everything you see on the Internet.

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Embarrassed that they got caught, Facebook is now offering a worthless Opt-out policy that will help only the users who know about the problem and manage to find out about the policy and then take the trouble to do it.

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Over 10 Million e-mails were deleted during historically important time periods (also periods where corruption and incompetence have been alleged). How convenient that they're "missing".

Either way, count another law broken by the Bush administration.

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Facebook has been caught with a seriously nasty tracking and monitoring program that it's unleashed upon it's users.

Their new ad software broadcasts your current activities to your facebook friends. If you just bought a ticket to a concert, your friends might see an alert to that effect. If you just bought medication for your embarassing personal issue, they might see that too. But it gets worse:

Beacon will report back to Facebook on members' activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Because Comcast has been denying the results of an Associated Press study showing they've been blocking certain types of traffic, the The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has done their own study proving that it's true.

Beyond that, they've created software that can be downloaded free that people can use to test it for themselves. Go EFF!

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It's a little light on content at the moment, but I think this has potential. If you can't remember what something is called, you can hunt it down visually via connections to other pictures that are related or part of it.

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There's been a recent report about the Typo-squatting problem where they talk about mistyping a popular website name can get you served with a fake site full of ads, Malware - Viruses, Worms, and Trojans (Oh My!), or porn.

They mention the McAffee SiteAdvisor software that tries to alert you if you're on a site that probably isn't what you intended, but I offer this simple tool instead: Google. Set Google to your homepage and from now on, whenever you would normally type a site name into the address bar, hit the "home" button and type it into Google's search box instead.

If you misspelled it, Google will correct it and the first or second link will probably be the page you meant.

Substitute a different search engine if you must.