Stupid users are the worst problem on the Internet, according to this survey of more than 600 Internet users.
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Articles on Just Plain WrongStupid users are the worst problem on the Internet, according to this survey of more than 600 Internet users. The Internet can be used for all kind of great things, and certainly one of those great things has been the development of the microlending sites - where users contribute a small amount of funds, and then the microlending site extends a small business loan (typically up to a few hundred dollars) to individuals to allow the recipient to get on their feet by starting or furthering a small business. However, one site is funding cock fighting, which is not only a horrible blood sport, but is illegal here in the United States. Perhaps more astonishingly, the CEO of the site, Kiva.org, is justifying the practice! Here's something that we just learned the hard way - from direct personal experience. If you file a dispute with Paypal - and then escalate it to a claim, as Paypal encourages you to do - there is only one situation in which Paypal won't then immediately dismiss your claim, making it a win for a non-compliant, non-responsive, or just plain sleazy seller. Spamza.com is a website that recently went live, where you can enter someone's - anyone's - email address, and they will start getting instantly spammed by dozens of newsletters for which they did not sign up. If you've had a sudden increase in spam or suddenly found yourself signed up for a lot of mailing lists and newsletters that you didn't request, Spamza may be why. You see, the Spamza site runs a script that takes their email address and then Spamza signs them up for those newsletters, without their permission. You know what I can't stand? When I click on a link on a website - to go to another page - and it ends up being a PDF download instead. Now, I have nothing against PDF downloads, but I do have something against finding myself downloading and opening PDF files without warning. C'mon people, put a "download PDF file" or "read PDF file" link there, or at least a warning that says "clicking this link will download a pdf file." (In case you are wondering "What is a PDF file?" or "What does PDF stand for?", 'PDF' stands for "Portable Document Format", and it is a format that was developed by the Adobe corporation.) Shocking news came to us this week, with the results of a Samsung Mobile survey showing that more than 6 out of 10 people asked for a preference stated that they'd text in their vote for the Presidential election this fall if the option were available to them. If you've ever gotten an email from someone offering to pay you to put a link on your site - or even if you've just ever stumbled across a link from one site to another that is completely out of context - you've probably stumbled across one of the newer grey areas on the Internet: paying someone who couldn't care less about the quality of the content of your website to go find and spam other websites who won't care about the quality of the content of your website and convince them to link to your site. Now, we all know the importance of feedback. Giving feedback is what allows businesses to even better serve their customers. And we're all familiar with feedback forms on all sorts of sites, the quintessential example being the feedback form for eBay feedback. There are all types of feedback - positive feedback, negative feedback, and even constructive feedback which may be neither. But demanded feedback? Giving and receiving feedback should be a voluntary act. Demanding that I leave feedback for a transaction with you may lead to destructive feedback, or maybe I should learn how to give scholarly constructive feedback that feels positive when it isn't! I mean, why provide feedback at all if it's going to be so strained? Why do you feel entitled to - indeed - how dare you demand feedback from me? [And check out how eBay is forcing sellers to leave buyers only positive eBay feedback - no more eBay negative feedback for buyers with the new eBay seller feedback rule!] Following complaints about police officer safety based on concerns that the policeman (policeperson?) rating site ratemycop.com (that's Rate-My-Cop .com, get it?) posed a danger to law enforcement personnel because it outed the full roster, including names and badge numbers, of police officers at nearly 500 police departments around the country (to the tune of some 140,000 police officers), RateMyCop's host - GoDaddy - unceremoniously and without warning pulled the plug on the site. So who is in the wrong here? To quote that famous Buffalo Springfield song, we say nobody's right if everybody's wrong. According to a tip received by the Internet Patrol, the resident evil behind the throngs of social networking and other sites that are tricking people into logging into their AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail accounts, and scraping their address book, has a name, and that name is Sigma Visual Technologies. Sigma Visual Technologies provides software that allows sites to get their users to import and email all of their contacts in their address books. Put another way, it lets these sites scrape and spam your contacts. In your name! It's like all those foreign movies with bad translations that you like to laugh at, only this time it's real - journalists in Israel used the Babelfish free online translator to translate an email request to the Dutch foreign ministry - and in the process insulted a Dutch dignitary's mother and created an international incident. Who in their right mind would let Babelfish translate a message - let alone send a Babelfish translation - to members of a foreign government whom they wished to interview?? Self-professed pedophile Jack McClellan ran his Seattle Tacoma Everett Girl Love website at stegl.org openly and, by all accounts from legal authorities, legally. You see, Jack McClellan has no criminal record, and as best as anyone can tell (and of course he claims) McClellan has never actually molested or illegally touched a minor. He just loves them. But his website - which we recreate here - was knocked offline by an outraged public. The Pure Digital PSV-352 60 Minute and Pure Digital PSV-351 30-min Point & Shoot Camcorder are really catching on. But the software, while simple to use, is crippled, and worse, it emails your videos through Grouper.com, where Grouper grabs not only your video, but harvests the email addresses and creates an account for you, all without letting you know at the time! Forget plain old mobile phone tracking. FlexiSpy is a cell phone tapping and spying software that, once slipped on to your cell phone, sends all of the data from your cell phone to the person spying on you. It also allows them to turn on your cell phone's microphone so that they can remotely listen in on what you are doing, and on your calls! It currently works with all Nokia 60, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones, and, according to FlexiSpy, more phones are being added all the time. Documents produced by Whole Foods Market in response to a lawsuit filed by the FTC have revealed that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey routinely posted anonymously to Internet stock boards, bashing competitor and acquisition target Wild Oats by name and stock symbol. The Whole Foods FTC lawsuit was filed in an effort to stop the takeover, asserting that it would be a violation of antitrust laws. The Geek Squad at Best Buy Electronics stores is supposed to help customers with their computers. But some geeks on the geek squad have instead been helping themselves to porn files found on their customers' hard drives, with one Geek Squad member copying the files to his own thumb drive (issued by employer Best Buy .com). If you have a Sprint cellular phone and Sprint cell phone service, or are considering getting a cell phone fro Sprint, you'll want to know just how the Sprint phone company treats customers of their Sprint wireless phone service when they call Sprint PCS customer service. Because customers calling the Sprint customer service phone number too often are being terminated by the Sprint/Nextel service! The trio that brought us Blue Security and their Blue Frog, the DOSing service that planned to DOS spammers, and that went belly up after a spammer instead DOSed them (well, duh), has apparently decided that spamming is more lucrative (again, well, duh), and founded a new company called Collative to do just that. I read an article this week about "virtual rape". Yes, really. That would be virtual sexual assault on your virtual online character or persona. This is all coming out now because, I kid you not, someone from Second Life reported a virtual rape to the police in Brussels. And they are investigating it. Oh for pete's sake, give me a break! How tenous a grasp on reality do these people have? And how the heck can there be "forced online sexual activity"? Isn't that nearly an oxymoron? Yesterday we found that someone had come to our site using this search: "find out where ppl logged into your paypal account." Really. It turns out lots of people search online using the term "ppl", and expect to find useful information. Terms like cool ppl, naked ppl, gay ppl, fat ppl, hot ppl, ppl at the beach (they must be the hot ppl), short ppl, and even Lego ppl. Do they find that useful information? I'm sure they find the information they deserve. A scam hoax on Craigslist has led to a Tacoma woman, Laurie Raye, having everything stripped - even the fixtures - from one of her houses. It all started with a seemingly genuine post on the popular Craig's list site. Recently I started getting invitations to join Flixster from complete strangers. Obviously, this was spam, but why were these complete strangers sending it to me? And why were they always from AOL and Hotmail? Now people are asking - is Flixstr accessing your AOL and Hotmail contacts list and spamming them in your name? The British government is considering making registered sex offenders register their email addresses and chat names - including names that they use in chatrooms along with their other details. Good idea. Let's have them register what sort of clothing they wear, while we're at it. Sony sure is a PR nightmare, not to mention their careless disregard for the safety and security of their customers. Apparently knowingly installing rootkit software on their music CDs which opened up their customer's personal computers to hacking (which ultimately lead to a lawsuit and recall) wasn't quite enough for them, as it's now coming to light that with the current issues that Sony faces with their laptop batteries catching on fire, they apparently knew that the batteries were flawed and vulnerable to overheating and catching on fire! Having received the "either pay your eFax bill up front for a year or suffer a 30% increase in your monthly rate", I chose, instead, to cancel my eFax account. However, it turns out that it's not easy to cancel an eFax account, because eFax doesn't make it obvious how to cancel an eFax account. So here is how you do it. eFax today announced that they are raising their already gouging rates from $12.95 a month to $16.95 a month. But there are alternatives, and there is a way to cancel your eFax service, even though they hide it very well. Starbucks has been sued for retracting and failing to honor an email coupon which was distributed to people who never should have had it in the first place. Radio Shack has given the pink slip via email to 400 RadioShack employees, giving rise to what may be the first instance of "pink email". Hollaback (Holla Back - holler back - get it?) is a blogspot website where women who feel victimized by men complimenting them on the street (and, to be fair, also doing more than complimenting) can post pictures of the men who are complimenting or harrassing them. Here's the thing: one woman's harrassment is another woman's compliment. And the same goes for the harrassment or compliment givers. The NBC show "Fear Factor" counts on a lot of things, including its gross factor, and human fascination with rubber necking from a distance. But when they decided to air an episode in which they incite "junkyard dogs" to attack the human contestants, they apparently didn't count on the backlash from the dog-loving Internet community. After "buying" a stolen Sidekick, Sashacristal8905 at AOL used the stolen Sidekick to log into her AIM account, and take pictures of herself. And then was surprised when she was tracked down, and threatens the rightful owner! So does her brother, WarriorPena84, who is an MP in the Army. Richard Kudlik, who went by the AOL name "Off2Hunt", got a lot of mileage out of being a Federal marshal. It impressed the women no end, as evidenced by the several who dated him. Only problem is, Richard Kudlik wasn't a Federal marshal, nor was he single. Now Off2Hunt, who also used the names "DHSFireRescue", "USMarshal152" and "USMarshal67600" is more likely Off2Jail. When Jesse from Denver thought that he'd found a good thing in MySpace friends, being able to find all those beautiful MySpace girls right near him whom he could play, and trick into befriending, bedding, and boarding him, he hadn't counted on the fact that MySpace is a two-way street. It was the MySpace comments what done him in. Last week eBay announced tentative plans to allow people to sell live pets through eBay. The announcement prompted such a backlash that today eBay has announced that those plans have been scuttled. There has been an 84% increase in product placement on television shows in the past year, and many blame products like Tivo, which allow viewers to skip regular commercials. Ok, so a woman and team of doctors made history when she received a face transplant this week, but wait until you hear the rest of the story! Instructions for exchanging Sony BMG CDs with XCP for Sony BMG CDs without the Rootkit It's true! Your printer can play a role in getting you busted if you are using it to make counterfeit money! A new law in California allows any town to pass a local law which requires forced-sterilization of any breed they choose! This website is working to help repeal that new law, SB 861, or the "Dangerous Dog Breed" law. Skype uses your computer's resources to handle Skype traffic which has absolutely nothing to do with you, and it's all completely legal because you agreed to it. Sony BMG has secretly included the First4Internet XCP2 digital rights management (DRM) software on its CDs in order to keep you from using any other media player on your computer with their content. Unfortunately, it has rootkit like properties, and actually exposes your computer to great risk. Hallmark email cards really show that you don't care enough to send the very best. Plus, ecards are bad for the recipient. And ecards are often spoofed and sent as a vector for viruses. Rental car GPS is suppose to be a perk which comes with renting certain cars. But one couple who relied on an Avis rental car GPS were lucky to survive the ordeal. The machine identification code of your printer may be being embedded on every single page you print, including the date, the time, and your printer's serial number. Is our technology spying on us? eBay's Giving Works and MissionFish may be a dream for charities, but it's a nightmare for participating eBay sellers. It's bad enough we have to worry about the charity scams, now we have to worry about the "good guys"? American Airlines, along with Continental Airlines and Delta Airlines, have been ordered to stop operating free wireless hotspot locations by Logan Airport. The wireless hotspot locations compete with Logan's Internet access service, for which they charge $8.00 a day. Internet service providers Level3 and Cogent are feuding, and Level3 has blocked all traffic from Cogent, causing both Cogent's and Level3's customers to lose Internet connectivity. Industry experts are not amused. A typo (typographical error) in an IP address led to Brian and Sarah Doom being wrongl accused of child pornography. "Oops," said Cox, the fumble-fingered ISP. "See you in court,", said Brian and Sarah Doom. FEMA has put up a barrier to Hurricane Katrina survivors attempting to apply for assistance from FEMA. If they don't use IE 6.0 or higher, with Javascript enabled, they can't apply for FEMA aid online. Tsk tsk, FEMA. A Korean man has hung himself while video chatting with his girlfriend. After the two got into an online argument, police say, the young man suddenly got up, and hung himself while his girlfriend was watching. Hurricane Katrina email hoaxes are already starting to fly, to add insult to the horrible injury already suffered by the thousands of people in Katrina's path. This first Hurricane Katrina email hoax claims that the Red Cross will donate money for each email sent. Rapex is a new anti-rape device which is worn like a diaphragm, only it has sharp teeth which clamp down on any foreign object. Nintendog Hot Biscuit mod rumours are flying. Did someone really create a Hot Biscuit mod for the new Nintendogs, much like the Hot Coffee mod for GTA: SA? Or is it all just an elaborate spoof? Downloading MP3s illegally really does take money directly out of the artists' pockets, it turns out. This article lays it out on the table, with the real facts, from an industry insider. A man in Japan has just been arrested for virtual mugging. Really. He set up a player-bot - a virtual virtual gamer, if you will - and had his player-bot beat up other online gamers' virtual characters, and steal their lunch ... As I believe I've made abundantly clear before, I'm not big fan of Blue Security's Blue Frog. Just like the Lycos 'Make Love not Spam' DDOSing screensaver, and the bandwidth-stealing Mugu Marauder, Blog Frog is founded on the concept that DDOSing is ... The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) has just released the results of a three-month long probe during which they confirmed that there has been a boon in the trading of both endangered species, and endangered animal parts (sigh), in online markets. On eBay ... People seeking to take advantage of the Federal Copyright Office's recent rules allowing an online preregistration of copyright may find that they can only preregister their copyright if they use Internet Explorer. Will people never learn? Apparently not, as California's Blue Security brings us Blue Frog, YADDASP (Yet Another DDOSing Anti-Spam Program). The underpinning of start-up Blue Security's Blue Frog is the "Do Not Intrude" registry. Users register up to three email addresses ... Security experts are saying that Apple's iPod is the newest rage. Not among the teen set, Gen-Xers, or even baby boomers, but among criminals. Now, it's true that the use isn't novel, just the choice of device, but as Marshall Mcluhan so deftly ... Like Christopher Pierson, the Tsunami Spammer before him, some sicko has decided to take advantage of the recent bombing in London, and to use them as a hook for his (or her) spam, which carries a Trojan horse to the victim's computer. The spam ... Have you heard about "Dog Poop Girl"? No, she's not some new style superhero, although I do believe that her partner, Dog Poop Man, has made an appearance on "Whose Line Is It Anyways?" (couldn't you just watch Ryan Stiles and Colin ... California Senator Debra Bowen, known for her tough stance against spam, is now taking a shot (no pun intended) at what she sees as another Internet scourge: real-time remote Internet hunting of live game. While some consider the Senator's stand on the remote ... Everyone knows that you shouldn't drink and drive. A lesser known, but perhaps equally dire warning is "teenagers, digital cameras, and Internet access don't mix well". Consider the recent case of a group of cheerleaders from Thomas S. Wootton High School, in Rockville, Maryland. By all ... Some people are sick. Really sick. But Christopher Pierson, of London, England really takes the cake. Pierson, a 40-year-old father of two (oh my, his poor children), was arrested and arraigned yesterday for sending spam to those known to be looking for lost loved ones, in ... Forget upskirting and downblousing. What do you call it when you take a video of yourself during an..um...intimate moment - with a camera phone for chrissakes? How about this one: what do you call it when you take a video of ... Blogs became a front-running source of information during Tuesday's election, as millions flocked to political blogs to get a taste of early exit poll numbers, available on blogs often hours before the more traditional news media doled them out. Nevermind that early can also ... |
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KingofthePaupers: Jct: There’s nothing wrong with small denomination California State IOUs if I or anyone else can pay their taxes with them. When Argentina’s government workers read Flexispy Review: @ Martin Curry - Unquestionably the Government have the ability to listen in on your Cell Phone through remote activation - so in theory it read Joe: Since you are dealing with politicians, it is really a combination of arrogance and stupidity. read Piewrre ML: And the answer is SO simple! I really query the adequacy of state legislators to do their jobs! Granted, it would required agreement read bigjohn756: Do we have to choose between arrogance or ignorance? How about plain stupidity? It takes no thinking ability to be congressman or to read MartinCurry: I have a guy who claims he is ex-cia tracking my family phones to find material to use against me and my loved ones. Can read andrew: Hi there lve receaved one of these emails and l got him or her tagging the line at the momment what steps can l take read
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