Internet – Page 2 – john paganetti

Amusing Spam

Despite having half a dozen emails connected to my gmail account, I don’t get much spam. So I check my spam folder pretty regularly, to make sure nothing got incorrectly flagged. Last week, I started getting spam with really funny subject titles. Each lead to a website with a fake youtube video and tried to get the user to install a backdoor in their own system. But the spam was amusing.

UN Threatens Sanctions If Obama Not Elected In November

Obama Makes Appeal for Bitter White Midwesterners: “Let ’em Drive Drunk!”

msnbc.com – BREAKING NEWS: Grinch Turns Attention to Gas Tax Holiday

I saved these hoping I would get more, but since then it has been all garden variety spam.

RSS Awareness Day

So apparently today is RSS awareness day. Who knew? It turns out only about 5% of internet users use RSS feeds. Which is kind of sad. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, give yourself a pat on the back. Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while that I oughta post some of the RSS feeds that I love. As I’ve said probably too many times: Google Reader is amazing. I’m using it to aggregate 102 feeds right now, and its a breeze.

Anyway, on to the feeds…

According to Google Reader, some of my most read feeds are:
Fark.com – read only for the headlines
Gizmodo – I’m a gadget geek
Ask Metafilter – This is quickly becoming my favourite subscription
Waxy.org Links – great source of interesting links

I’m bored with this. Maybe I’ll post more about it later. But not today.

Video on Flickr?

Consonance by …me, embarrassingly enough
[audio:http://john.paganetti.com/wp-content/uploads/Consonance.mp3]

http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/04/08/video-on-flickr/

I would be really pumped for this. YouTube / Google Video / whatever other flash video site mostly annoy me. The only one I could ever really see myself using is Blip.tv, but even they are missing some basic things I would want from such a service. I’m almost certain that if Flickr can handle the backend for hosting videos, then they will be the best such service on the web. Their frontend for photos and even general site usage is unparalleled. Looking forward to it.
Update: Video on Flickr! But only 90 seconds? :-/ Guess I’ll stick with Blip

Feedburner

Cassidy by the Grateful Dead
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/gd80-05-11.rolfe.pujol-vernon.19266.sbeok.shnf/gd1980-05-11d1t05_64kb.mp3]

So, it has taken me forever to get around to it, but I’ve finally signed up for FeedBurner. I’m not really sure why it took so long. I guess it was because I never really cared (and to be fair, I still don’t) about the stats or whatever on my personal blog. But I did care about the stats on juanway.org, so I went on over to FeedBurner to get that all set up. In the process of setting up that blog, I noticed that FeedBurner is pretty damn nice – significantly nicer than when I last saw it (ages ago). So I’ve gone and changed this blog over to FeedBurner as well. You don’t need to update your feeds though, they should redirect automagically. If you’re reading this through an RSS reader now, then it has obviously worked.

So I guess the only real reason I’m posting this (besides to gush about FeedBurner) is to give a heads up to anyone reading this through RSS, because thanks to FB I’ve included my del.icio.us bookmarks in the same feed. Which is rather cool.

Change Congress Together

I hope you saw my post a little while back with the video Lawrence Lessig made about the Change Congress project (change-congress.org). If you haven’t seen it yet, go watch it. If you have seen it, I hope you’ve signed up on their site.

We need a change in Congress. We need members of Congress to care about what their constituency care about. I know I don’t contact my congresscritter because I’m almost certain it won’t make a difference. The few times I have contacted them, I’ve either heard nothing, or received a letter detailing their stance on the subject, and why they won’t change it. We need straightforward bills that won’t be sabotaged by earmarks snuck into otherwise useful legislation. We need Congresscritters to stop taking money from lobbyists and PACs, and start relying on public financing. The people’s voice is the one that matters.

For God’s sake the color wars are coming!

New York City by moe.
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/moe.2007-12-31.matrix.flac/moe2007-12-31.mtx.d1.flac/moe2007-12-31d1t04_64kb.mp3]

So wow. Check out the color wars on twitter. I’m not really sure how it started, but it seems like zefrank has taken control. I was wondering if ze would take to twitter, or if it would just fade into a weird little twitter page like everyone else’s, giving readers more information than they ever really wanted or needed. Its cool to see him starting craziness in some place other than his own realm.

Three Years of Excellence in Blogging

Peaceful Valley by Ryan Adams
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/radams2008-01-26.akgc1000s.flac16/radams2008-01-26d1t03_64kb.mp3]

Ok, maybe not excellence, but I have been blogging for three years, which is cool. It’s always fun to look through the archives and see what I was talking about at [some given point]. I can walk through noteworthy events in my life that I definitely don’t remember.

It occurred to me recently that there are people who are alive today who have blogged throughout most of their adolescence and will continue to until they die. What an incredible record of a person’s life, all of it autobiographical. I hope families will realize the values of these, and keep their presence online. Archive.org’s wayback machine doesn’t really like my blog, but it has a couple snapshots of the old SomJuan.com. I’m going to try my hardest to keep some form of a blog running for the rest of my life (hopefully right here). It would be incredible to look back on this 10 or 20 or more years from now.

Don’t worry blog, I promise to keep you as almost in the loop as you always were.

Bittorrent Advancements

Puttin’ People On The Moon by Drive-By Truckers
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/dbt2008-01-12.km184.flac16/dbt2008-01-12d1t01_64kb.mp3]

I started using AllPeers again recently, and since I had last used it, they added Bittorrent functionality. But even more interesting, is that they let you download individual files from a torrent. Because of UConn’s bittorrent cockblock, I haven’t even opened a torrent client on this computer yet, so I don’t know if this is a wide-spread feature or not.

Whatever the case, a website called BitLet (which I guess has some connection to Mininova) has launched, and it allows you to stream music from within a torrent. Yes, its cool, but apparently, there is video on the way. That is far cooler. So I started snooping around to see if I could find out any more about this technology, and apparently there is something called Bittorrent DNA put out by Bittorrent Inc. which does something similar. As I understand it, its a backend that you could integrate into a site like YouTube, and have users supply some of the bandwidth via bittorrent protocol.

So all of this new functionality got me thinking about my idea for a browser based off bittorrent protocol, where webpages and other things would be served up from the people viewing the site, instead of a central server. I don’t have anywhere near the technical knowledge that I would need to pursue this project, but I’m going to keep designing it to see if it could be feasible. Right now I’m thinking it would be best to have it as a Firefox extension, so it would be easily adopted by users. I’ll post more about this when I figure it out.

Project Chanology

Victory Song by Keller Williams
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/kw2007-08-11.km184.v2.flac16/kw2007-08-11.flac16/kw2007-08-11d2t02_64kb.mp3]

I’m really really enjoying the recent feud between Anonymous and Scientology. I’ve never really liked either of these groups, and seeing them trying to destroy each other is far more fun than anything playing on TV this year.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, anon has been bugging Scientology for a while now, but this recent spit is about Scientology trying to remove a video of Tom Cruise from the internet. Anon responded to this with DDoS attacks, and that video in the above wired article. What prompted me to make this post is the image that’s shown up recently (today?).

Now that’s just plain fun. I really can’t wait to see what happens.
more press

INVISIBLE MAN!

/obscure