aubreyturner.org

It appears that the script kiddies are planning to try to deface a bunch of websites on July 6th.

The government and private technology experts warned Wednesday that hackers plan to attack thousands of Web sites Sunday in a loosely coordinated “contest” that could disrupt Internet traffic.

Organizers established a Web site, defacers-challenge.com, which was shut down early Wednesday evening. Before it was removed, the site listed in broken English the rules for hackers who might participate. It cautioned that “deface its crime”—an apparent acknowledgment that vandalizing Internet pages is illegal.

I guess these pathetic fools have nothing better to do than to waste everyone’s time and money by monkeying with websites.

You never really know how secure your webhost is until someone tries to attack it.  For now, the best advice would be to make sure you have good backups of everything (including your databases) and to make sure you aren’t using any default or weak passwords. 

Link via Slashdot.

It appears that the telemarketers aren’t getting the message.

Companies that are major users of telemarketing calls are preparing to shift efforts to e-mail and direct mail once a new federal “do-not-call” list takes effect in October, according to a published report.

As of Tuesday morning about 12.5 million Americans have signed up to block phone solicitations in the first four days of the program, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Solicitors who call homes on the list after Oct. 1 face fines of up to $11,000 per call. Another 14 million homes are being transferred from state do-not-call registries, and 60 million homes are eventually expected to sign up to block calls by calling the FTC or signing up on its Web site.

The Wall Street Journal said Wednesday that companies such as AT&T and Allstate Insurance are looking to shift some of their sales efforts away from the phone solicitations that have been central to their business plans in the past.

“We plan to shift into other communication mediums, and rely more heavily on traditional TV advertising and e-mail marketing,” Allstate acting Chief Marketing Officer Todd DeYoung told the paper. “We also plan to stimulate inbound call volume by doing more directed advertising and more direct mail.”

It should be clear from the backlash against telemarketers that a large number of people are not receptive to their message.  Why would they think the message would be better received if sent via another medium?

I closely guard my email addresses, and I’m careful to make up a new address for each company I deal with.  That way, I can find out who sold my address to spammers, or I can tell which company is ignoring its promises to me.  I come down hard on companies that contact me via email without my permission (to the point of redirecting the email to the company’s marketing address in one case).

Oh, and this won’t be very helpful, either:

The paper said that in addition to seeing more e-mail or junk mail, consumers who call companies on other business may now have to listen to sales pitches while negotiating voice mail messages.

If they incoporate this into their VRUs, I’ll be more likely to drop out to an operator rather than sit around listening to their crap.  This will ultimately increase their costs and decrease customer satisfaction. 

On the other hand, a few companies are seeing an opportunity in all this:

But the companies won’t drop their phone banks altogether. They believe that those who do not sign up for the do-not-call list will be more open to telephone pitches and that could help their phone solicitation efforts.

I don’t know if that will exactly be the case, but at least they won’t be bothering people who obviously don’t want to be bothered.

Link via Slashdot.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been having problems with my cable modem.  Or more specifically, it appears that Charter has been having problems, because the “cable” light on my modem keeps going off and I lose connection.  When it’s up, I don’t have any problems connecting, so I know my home network is OK.  There are no events I’ve been able to correlate to the outages (i.e. wind, rain, etc).  My suspicion is that they’re having a problem on their end (although there is a remote possibility that there is a problem with the wire from my house to their local connection point or the modem itself is going out).

Anyway, Charter’s support website requires that you install their spyware in order to use their “wizard.”  Since I won’t install that crap (I installed their software package when it first came out and it took over my browser and rebranded it; I had to reinstall Windows to get it back), I had to drop out to their web contact form.  This probably puts me somewhere below fungus on their priority list, so I’m not sanguine about the probability of a fix anytime soon.  I’ll probably have to call them and deal with the level 1 and 2 crap before I get someone who knows what’s going on.

In the meantime I probably won’t be making too many updates to this site, because everytime I get set to go online at home the cable modem is out.

I watched the first episode of Dead Like Me today.  Overall, I liked it.  It had a good mix of humor and drama.  I’m looking forward to future episodes to see how the main character develops.

Is it just me, or does that picture of Glenn Reynolds underwater look really weird?  I think it’s the eyes.  They’re going to haunt me until he gets back. 

I was simultaneously amused and appalled when I read this article in the Denton Record-Chronicle today.

The last thing former Krum Mayor David Polley said he expected to find when he drove up his driveway was a white toilet on his lawn. But it was not just a toilet: It’s the Krum High School Band’s new fund-raiser.

“We had seen it in front of the bank and thought it was a joke of some kind,” Mr. Polley recalled. “I walked out and as soon as I saw the sign, I laughed.”

A sign on the toilet says, “Dump some money into the Krum Band and help flush away our worries!!!” and lists a phone number to call to have it removed. The requested donation to have the toilet removed from a yard is $15. For $20, the commode is not only removed but relocated to a location of one’s choice.

Being the curmudgeonly type, I wouldn’t pay to remove the toilet, even though I’d be inclined to donate to the band otherwise (I was in band myself back in the day).  But I don’t like the extortionate approach they’re taking.

I’ve had a TiVo for a little over a year now.  This article from Business Week points out some interesting things that they’re learning about what ads people are watching:

Indeed, just like clickable ads, TiVo’s initial data reveal some trends that ad agencies and networks might prefer to bury. For one, a program’s rating—the number of people saying they watched a TV show at a given time—appears to have an inverse relationship with the proportion of ads viewed. On April 11, 2002, ABC’s popular TV drama The Practice drew a TiVo rating of 8.9, meaning 8.9% of TiVo owners watched the show live or recorded it and watched it later. But those viewers watched just 30% of the ads shown. Meanwhile, quiz show The Weakest Link, drew a rating of 0.9, but viewers watched 78% of the commercials. TV news magazine 60 Minutes got only a 2.2 rating, but its viewers sat through 73% of the ads.

Certain genres are “stickier” than others, TiVo’s research shows. Big-budget situation comedies and dramas tend to have the lowest retention and commercial-viewing rate because couch potatoes tend to record them and skip through the commercials rather than watch them live. Reality TV, news, and “event” programming such as the Oscars do significantly better at getting viewers to see the commercials. Just 39% of viewers watched ads during the highest-rated network TV show, Friends, vs. 75% for the 45th Annual Grammy Awards and 58% for Fox reality show Fear Factor.

In my case, I generally use the TiVo to record shows that I really like and watch them later.  I do this because it’s convenient (i.e. I don’t have to rush home just to catch the show), but also because it allows me to skip the ads.  This isn’t necessarily an intentional thing to skip the ads, it’s just because I want to know what happens next on the show and the ads are getting in the way (although I will admit relief at being able to skip some of the really obnoxious commericials, like that Oxyclean guy).  With other shows, I’m just as likely to put the show on while I’m doing something else and I don’t think to fast-forward the commercials, unless they’re really annoying and they break my concentration.  On the flip side if I see an ad that looks interesting I may even stop fast-forwarding and go back to watch it.

I tried to sign up for the National Do Not Call list this morning, but it took me about an hour of waiting and retries to get through.  Now I’m waiting for the email confirmation so that I can complete the process.  I don’t envy the system admins for this thing.  I bet their mail server is coughing up a huge hairball about now.

Texas Penal Code,  Chapter 21:

§ 21.01. Definitions

In this chapter:

(1) “Deviate sexual intercourse” means:

(A) any contact between any part of the genitals of one person and the mouth or anus of another person; or

(B) the penetration of the genitals or the anus of another person with an object.

(2) “Sexual contact” means, except as provided by Section 21.11, any touching of the anus, breast, or any part of the genitals of another person with intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.

(3) “Sexual intercourse” means any penetration of the female sex organ by the male sex organ.

Acts 1973, 63rd Leg., p. 883, ch. 399, § 1, eff. Jan. 1, 1974. Amended by Acts 1979, 66th Leg., p. 373, ch. 168, § 1, eff. Aug. 27, 1979; Acts 1981, 67th Leg., p. 203, ch. 96, § 3, eff. Sept. 1, 1981; Acts 1993, 73rd Leg., ch. 900, § 1.01, eff. Sept. 1, 1994.

Amended by Acts 2001, 77th Leg., ch. 739, § 1, eff. Sept. 1, 2001.

§ 21.06. Homosexual Conduct

(a) A person commits an offense if he engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.

(b) An offense under this section is a Class C misdemeanor.

Acts 1973, 63rd Leg., p. 883, ch. 399, § 1, eff. Jan. 1, 1974. Amended by Acts 1993, 73rd Leg., ch. 900, § 1.01, eff. Sept. 1, 1994.

Deviate.  Sexual.  Intercourse.  The very phrase drips with moral opprobrium.  I thought it would be informative to see exactly what the Texas statute said, and I find this very interesting.  I think this is a case where they just weren’t devious enough for their own good.  While the law prohibits anal and oral sex between two men or two women (and also appears to prohibit the use of dildos or other “objects”), I think there just might be a little loophole in the law.  I don’t think they classify the human hand as an object, so it would seem that it wouldn’t prohibit fisting.  I hope that someone, somewhere pointed this out to the bill’s author so that he died of shock at the thought…

Anyway, that wasn’t what I really set out to write about.  The old “Morality can’t be legislated” saying came up in the comments to this post at The Bitch Girls.  One poster thought it was dumb “bumper-sticker philosophy”.  I think the commenter misses the point, or at least misses the way I’ve always interpreted it.  To me, it simply means that any law that attempts to legislate something on moral grounds will fail.  I was amused several years ago by a television interview with some politician whose response to this was, “Just watch me.”  He obviously didn’t get it.

As we’ve seen with morally-based laws on sodomy, alcohol (prohibition, anyone?), drugs (history repeats itself with tragic consequences), prostitution, or just about any other victimless crime, a large number of people will simply ignore the law.  Why?  To these people these aren’t areas where the state has any business if their actions don’t have a direct, non-consensual effect on other people.  In a way, this is an intuitive natural rights view (at least from my viewpoint).  Some people try to argue that if we don’t enshrine moral judgements into the law then we’ll have to rip the murder and rape statutes from the books.  However, if one starts from a natural rights foundation of the person as self-owner, one can build a case for laws against murder and rape (and a whole host of other acts).  I understand that some people dispute the natural rights concept, but that leaves them with the nasty dilemma of trying to decide whose morals to use.  And what if the democratic majority’s morals say it’s OK to do something horrific (like killing homosexuals)?  This is why I think there are areas that are not subject to legislation or intrusion by the state and that there must be limits to what the state tries to do (i.e. any area where acts between consensual adults take place that do not harm any nonconsenting party should be out of bounds for the state).

Of course, I’m a bit radical in my thoughts on this matter.  And I fully understand that my beliefs would open the door to removal of laws against bigamy and prostitution and a whole bunch of other stuff.  But these things don’t scare me like they seem to do the moralists who would like to control us every minute of our lives.  Some days I’m not sure who’s worse, the moralists or the socialists.  Both of them want to control us; they only differ slightly on the areas they would interfere in (and it won’t be long until they’ve converged).

The National Do Not Call Registry has opened for online registrations at donotcall.gov.  If you’re already on a state do not call list, there is a possibility that your number will be automatically added to the national registry.  This is decided on a state-by-state basis.  The list of states and their decision on this can be found here.  I discovered that Texas will not be automatically adding people to the national registry.

Of course, the registry was mentioned on Slashdot this morning, so the server is being pounded into a pulp right now (i.e. it’s experiencing a thorough “slashdotting”, which is kind of like an Instalanche to the third power).