The Kimi Raikkonen Drinking Game

Posted on by SpongBo

After the race itself, my favourite part of any Formula One race is getting smashed while Kimi gives his press interviews.

Here’s how to play along with me:

So, when Kimi:

Plays with the microphone: have a shot

Picks his nose: a double shot;

Picks his nose, inspects the picking, then somehow disposes of it (or returns it): go the triple shot!

Looks like he’s going to pick his nose but ends up rubbing his cheek or pulling his ear: look like you’re going to have a shot, but have another drink instead.

My theory is that the better his result, the drunker you’ll get after a race.

(I always thought it was spelt Raikonnen, but seems I was just drunk at the time)

Deleting your IE Feed Subscriptions

Posted on by SpongBo

Let’s say that you’ve outgrown IE’s RSS feed capabilities.

Let’s say that you’ve already exported your feeds to an OPML file for later re-import.

To export the Windows RSS feed list to OPML:

Click the Add Favorites button in IE, choose Import and Export, then Export Feeds

Let’s say that now, you want to get rid of them. All.

How would you go about doing that?

With a script, dear Liza, dear Liza, dear Liza, with a script, dear Liza, dear Liza, a script.

What does such a script look like?

Like this: (save as DelAllRssfeeds.vbs)

set oFmgr = CreateObject(“Microsoft.FeedsManager”)

set oFeedFolder = oFmgr.RootFolder

for each thing in oFeedFolder.subfolders
Wscript.echo thing.Name
thing.Delete
next

for each feedthing in oFeedfolder.Feeds
Wscript.echo feedthing.Name
feedthing.Delete
next

Nice and easy.

morans

Posted on by Shifty

We get a lot of attempted comment spam, as I am sure all bloggers do. I just had a look at an item in the moderation queue and had a bit of a laugh. The idiot spammer actually included rel="nofollow" in the links that he was trying to insert onto Pinkjoint. This is a tag that tells search engines to ignore the link, which is exactly contrary to the spammer’s purpose. Morans.

Is Privacy Legislation The Answer To Online Sociopaths?

Posted on by SpongBo

I was disgusted to read about the Jason Fortuny sex baiting saga on Dare’s blog.

In short, as reported, “RFJason” posted a personal ad (in which he reportedly misrepresented himself as a promiscuous female), and then posted verbatim every response that was sent in response, including all sorts of personally identifiable information, including photos, phone numbers, email addresses and so on.

Requests to remove the privately-supplied information and pictures were ignored and/or ridiculed, and posted as well. The fear and humiliation caused by this sequence of events is disturbing to say the least.

That is what strikes me as at best, sorely empathically lacking and at worst a sociopathic act. This is someone’s anonymous online identity playing with the formerly-private identity of others. Obviously the individuals that provided their details did so with the expectation that they would be kept private by the recipient. The Lawyers have been engaged.

Dare’s question was how Craigslist was going to respond, but it got me thinking about what sanctions are possible against an online sociopath like Fortuny. From Craigslist’s perspective, what can actually be done?

This highlights one of the key problems with social software. When you build software that enables people to interact with strangers, you run the risk of people interacting with strangers who aren’t so nice.

It’s a seemingly-tough problem to solve: Does a click-through “I Agree” privacy policy page provide a legally enforceable contract for scammers? If they sign up with an identity other than their real-world identity, how is that then enforceable? Must we require non-anonymity for all, to provide protection for other users’ anonymity?

Hopefully Craigslist have some legal recourse, but let’s go one step further: what could any individual do in the event that another individual – either known to them or not – chose to expose personally identifiable information that had been obtained in a private interaction?

I’m not a lawyer. It strikes me that control and exposure of personally identifiable information by one entity to another could or should be protected by law. Communications that aren’t explicitly tagged as “forwardable without restriction” might be assumed to be private and confidential.

Business and government entities in Australia are covered by Privacy legislation (summary of Australian privacy legislation history), so why not individuals? (or are they?)

In the meantime, a) keep it in your pants, and b) if you’re going to post it somewhere, at least post it with a fake gmail account.

Update: Wired picked it up, and it looks like it might actually be illegal. Good.

Ad-Click Sundays

Posted on by SpongBo

If you’re like me, you’re probably quite well-used to avoiding banner ads. You see them, you recognize them, you ignore them. You never click them. I don’t actively use an ad-blocker (I use pop-up blockers), though.

Well, I’m instituting a new policy – on Sundays, if a site rewards my presence with information that I find useful, I’ll reward the site with some clicks on banner ads that don’t do the pop-under, pop-up, pop-around, pop-in or click hijacking thing.

If a site isn’t going to abuse my trust or attempt to fool me into ad clicks, I’ll click. And this applies to RSS feed ads too.

Is it valuable to click an ad on a Sunday only? Well, when the choice to the advertiser is between clicks on a Sunday and no clicks at all, that’s a more than infinite-times increase in clicks from me. That’s value.