The McWetlog

Yes, I got caught up in DreamHost’s stupid billing error situation (follow-up posts here and here). Fortunately, they only overbilled me by $230 — my monthly hosting bill is, shall we say, not large — though others were dinged for much more. They’ve since reversed the charge and are even doing something to address the differences in exchange rates between the initial billing error and the refund.

As I said about DreamHost in the inevitable MetaFilter thread, “They fuck up a lot — sometimes too often — but they fuck up in plain view, and they’re honest about it. I’ve never had a problem that they didn’t fix, rather than pretend it wasn’t there. That’s worth something.” In case you were wondering why I’m still hosting with them, it’s because they don’t hide behind a wall of corporate PR bullshit. I like that their mistakes are honest mistakes.

Speaking of crack, I’ve been spending too much time on Facebook lately. I’ve been on a number of social-networking sites; Facebook impresses me the most. Here’s why:

Design. Really, really clean user interface, responsive servers. Tribe was schizophrenic, MySpace a renowned mess. The only really poorly designed aspect: the groups. There’s something wrong, design-wise, if there can be more than a hundred Steve Irwin memorial groups, all with the same name and group icon, with fewer than five members each. Regional networks seem to be a problem with some of my friends, especially if they’re near, but not in, the appropriate network. I’m in rural Quebec, but I’m in the Ottawa network: it’s the nearest one. People in Gatineau should be in the Ottawa network. People near Toronto should be in the Toronto network unless they’re closer to Barrie, Hamilton or Kingston.

Privacy. Most social networks are binary: see everything or see nothing. Facebook is network-based: it’s a series of regional, school and work networks. You can control which networks see your full profile. You can control what information appears on your full profile. You can control which of your friends sees your full profile and which sees a “limited” profile.

People. I never had more than a handful of friends on other networks, most of whom I’d never met in person — or I’d signed them up to the service myself. This is the first network I’ve encountered where the network effect is in full force: when you sign up, you will find that many of your friends are already there. At the moment I have 43 friends, all of whom I’d at least exchanged e-mails a few times with, and all but two of whom I’ve previously met in person.

Friend management. Tribe has degrees of separation; in most other social-networking sites the friend feature is binary — you’re a friend, or you’re not — or graded (contact vs. friend or family on Flickr). Facebook asks how you know a person. That encourages — at least in me — a sort of social taxonomy. You end up trying to find — collect, really — friends from all aspects and periods of your life, and mark them up: this one I went to high school with, that one I was in a club with for a couple of years. Filling in your social timeline can get a little compulsive, but it has the happy effect of encouraging reconnections with people that, in my case, I haven’t seen in more than 15 years.

As for my Facebook profile, you won’t be able to see it unless you’re in the Ottawa network, or if we’ve added each other as friends.

Persona is my ISP. For the past two days I — and every other Persona customer — have been suffering from seriously degraded connectivity: about half the addresses I would try to reach would simply not resolve. DNS seemed fine, but ping averages were occasionally high. Five different calls to five different tech support agents yielded a different answer each time (the core router was frequently fingered), but the final answer seems to be that Persona was having issues with a new upstream provider that they switched to on Monday. Everything seems fine this morning, though, so I’m crossing my fingers.

I have this tendency to sign up for social-networking web sites, even though I despise real-world networking, am a profound introvert and — except for the notable exception of Flickr — there really isn’t much to do at these sites once you’ve signed up, unless you bring 60 of your closest friends with you. Still, I sign up.

So of course when Google announced (on the sly: last sentence of that post) that you could join their social-networking site, Orkut, without an invitation — you can just use your Google account — I did.

And, well. It’s sparse (it’s Google). It’s sort of blue. And the groups are covered in spam, much of it in Portuguese. There needs to be better spam reporting on the groups if they are going to be at all useful.

I knew about the Brazilians going in. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the site’s membership is from Brazil. The net effect of it: even explicitly Canadian groups are full of Brazilians looking for advice on travelling to Canada. English-language groups also have strong representation from India and Pakistan: India comprises 11 per cent of Orkut, low for its percentage of the world population but high for its Web presence. The high Indo-Brazilian mix makes for a different place, with different rules of etiquette. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this — it’s just a bit of culture shock for net denizens who have gotten too used to an Internet that reflected their values. This says as much about the Angloamerican centricity of the other sites as much as it does about Orkut. This is what the U.S.-centric Net looks like to the rest of the world.

So … anyone want an Orkut invite?

Eight messages (so far) doesn’t exactly constitute a bombardment, but new reptile site Snake Tracks has been sending me automated e-mail at virtually every address they can find on the Internet (addressed in some cases to “Librarything” or “Feedburner,” so you know they did their homework) — asking, as usual, for a link exchange. You know what that means: if someone asks you for an “exchange,” it’s all in their favour — they need it more than you do.

And, as it turns out, Snake Tracks is yet another generic set of reptile forums, with hardly any members (only 28 so far) or other original content. (A ball python care sheet and a species list? That’s it? Are you kidding me?) There are about four zillion other reptile sites just like it out there. And they call themselves the “World’s Largest Snake Enthusiast Website” — which is not only laughable, it’s demonstrably false.

(Hint: Spamming me isn’t a good way to get a positive review.)

Ask MetaFilter is as useful as you make it.

Hello, I would like to buy a fish licence, please. A licence for my pet fish, Eric. He’s an halibut. I chose him out of thousands. I didn’t like the others, they were all too flat.

Please limit comments to answers or help in finding an answer.

You don’t need a licence for your fish.

There’s no such thing as a bloody fish licence.

I promise you that there is no such thing. You don’t need one.

Wisecracks don’t help people find answers.

You must be a loony.

He is not a loony! Why should he be tied with the epithet loony merely because he has a pet halibut?

A licence. For a fish. You are a loony.

Look, it’s people like you what cause unrest.

Regarding etiquette on mailing lists. So long as people stay reasonably on topic, I’ll tolerate a lot. For example, I’m much more tolerant of foul language — in fact, I embrace its use.

But I’ve noticed that one thing gets my attention every time: I ban people over it if I’m the list manager, and raise a stink over it if I’m not. It’s personal attacks, some so strong as to constitute, in my mind, slander. Lord knows there have been times when I should have stepped away from the keyboard, but I’ve learned from my mistakes; others, it seems, have no qualms about making accusations that, if they were printed in a newspaper, would generate instant calls to the lawyers.

It’s amazing what happens when I ban people over such comments, or block their messages. The howls of protest! The cries of censorship! The accusation that I’m taking sides! Antics I’d expect from six-year-olds, not fiftysomething professionals who are upset that I won’t let them smear someone else.

The fact is, mailing lists are subject to the rules set out by their provider: Yahoo! Groups, for example, has terms of service, and private lists are owned by their listowners in a very literal sense. Those who freak over being censored forget this — and also forget that a failure to police bad behaviour might well expose a listowner to liability, even if, as in one risible recent case, the perpetrator offered to “indemnify” me against any legal action.

Anyway, if you’re wondering where pontiacenvironment.org went, that’s why. I got tired of it and walked away. Too bad the list — and the site — went with me.

DreamHost, my hosting provider, has been having a whole mess of trouble lately — enough that I started a separate blog to chronicle any outages and downtime (see previous entry). Yesterday, I noticed that rebuilds on Movable Type were abominably slow — it took as long as 10 minutes to rebuild if I saved an entry. I suspected a MySQL or network issue. So I opened a support ticket.

Continue reading this entry »

An ad in today’s paper announces the availability of two-way satellite Internet from Telebec (the phone company for the Quebec sticks; civilization gets Bell). Prices range from $65/month for 512/128 Kbps to $190/month for 2Mbps/500 Kbps (which is what I get now with cable, at $42/month). Plus, a two-year contract is required, as is a $399 (or $20/month) connection fee. Not in the least bit cheap, but at least equivalent-to-cable speeds are available in places without cable or DSL. So, in theory, we could move to an extremely isolated location and still have highspeed. I wonder what the latency is like.

See previous entry: Satellite Internet for the masses.

So, Google Talk. The app is Windows-only, but Jabber clients can also connect — on the Mac, you can use either iChat (Tiger only) or Adium. Either way, though, you need a Gmail account, and for that you need an invite. I have lots of invites, so if you’re interested, let me know. (Best if we’ve already met or exchanged messages before you ask for one, though.)

There have been some developments in the AIM story, which I’d better report here for completeness’ sake, since I’ve been shooting off my mouth about it.

First of all, AOL will be bringing out a revised TOS. Ben Stanfield is claiming vindication, both on his blog and in an e-mail to me.

Ben points out that lawyers agree with his position on ownership and content: essentially, the terms of service permit exactly what Ben says they do (e.g. here and here). Fair enough: point conceded. But that doesn’t mean that AOL was lying when it said it wasn’t monitoring communications. As their spokesman said, the offending passages of the TOS were only intended for public posts. From the CNet article:

That unfortunate wording was intended to apply to an AIM feature called “Rate-a-Buddy,” spokesman Andrew Weinstein said. Like the classic HotOrNot.com site, Rate-a-Buddy permits AIM users to post photographs publicly so others can rate them on how “cute” and “interesting” they seem to be.

The Rate-a-Buddy language was “wrapped into” the AIM terms of service, and that “inartfully” worded phrase has been deleted from a new version that will be made public Tuesday, Weinstein said. “It’s going to make it very clear that this section applies to public areas.”

In other words, they goofed. What they intended was not what ended up in the legal language. (As someone who once edited laws and regulations, I can tell you that that happens all the time.) So we’re not talking about a change in policy, only a change in legal wording to better reflect AOL’s intent, which has not changed. This is the legal equivalent of correcting a typo, though, granted, mistakes in this context have a much greater impact. (You think this is bad? Imagine this kind of confusion happening in, say, criminal law, and you will understand why lawyers are expensive.)

There were two separate questions in this controversy: what was in the terms of service; and what plans AOL had for our data. Ben and those who agreed with him focused on the first question; I and others focused on the second. Neither of us was wrong, but neither of us was really answering the other’s question: the TOS did not mean that AOL was lying; and AOL’s statements did not explain away the problematic clauses in the TOS.

Oy. Ben Stanfield’s response to an AOL spokeman’s denial that they monitor AIM conversations is to call him a liar. Because a random nitwit’s parsing of a TOS document is inherently more accurate than an official denial. I can’t believe Ben’s take gets the benefit of the doubt, but AOL’s response doesn’t: apart from his interpretation of the document, which I believe is mistaken, there is as yet no corroborating evidence to support his claim.

Cory doesn’t believe the AOL spokesman either, but that’s Cory being Cory.

Update: Ben uses MacSlash to flog this horse some more. More coverage from the Houston Chronicle and from Slashdot.

Spreading like wildfire across the blogosphere this weekend is the news that AOL’s terms of service for its Instant Messenger service have been changed to give them the right to use your messages and denies you any right to privacy. It’s all over the place: Boing Boing, MetaFilter, Slashdot, TUAW. The originator of this story appears to be Ben Stanfield (MacSlash’s acaben) who posted about it on Friday.

There’s only one problem with the story. It looks like it’s completely full of shit.

Continue reading this entry »

Affordable high-speed Internet by satellite?

[The new Anik F2 satellite] will, for the first time, let an Anik satellite deliver two-way, broadband Internet service to any location in North America at a price that’s competitive with residential cable or DSL high-speed services.

Previously, you’d have to spend at least a couple hundred dollars a month to get high-speed access to your cottage or rural business. Bush estimates Telesat’s consumer high-speed Internet service, which will be sold through a distribution network yet to be announced (but likely to include Bell Canada), will cost only 5 to 10 per cent more than what Torontonians pay for high-speed services from Sympatico and Rogers.

Via Boing Boing. As it stands, I’m fortunate that Shawville and a few other places around the Pontiac have high-speed Internet via DSL or cable. But, while I like living out in the boonies — most of the time! — the absence of high-speed Internet outside certain towns and villages is rather limiting. Absent this satellite, my choices were to (1) limit myself to places like Shawville that have it, (2) resign myself to dial-up (making do with dial-up accelerators), or (3) shell out for seriously expensive satellite service. So this is good.