29 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
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The Telecom Digest for July 28, 2011
Volume 30 : Issue 187 : "text" Format
====== 29 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ====== |
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Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:57:51 -0500
From: John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Google Search problems
Message-ID: <CALtjCnKv4KNtWt5JpLY2AA5Z7bi8+xO0ar+gAYr=iPfs5LndqQ@mail.gmail.com>
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 9:04 PM, Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com> wrote:
>
> Why?
>
> You have EVERYTHING about you here http://www.mayson.us/ so why
> do you want to perpetuate Zuckerberg's company which, by the way,
> is referred to as Fecebook in many forums and groups I frequent.
> That name was coined by a [female] member of the Yahoo linux group
> of which I'm one of the moderators. Â :-)
Pragmatism.
> All of the "social" sites are money magnets for their owners due to
> the advertising which is becoming almost obscene and extremely
> obnoxious in addition to being a vector for malware which inflicted
> even the New York Times whose ads are offsite-hosted.
I know.
I never joined Friendster. After getting sick of hearing about it and
how I needed to be on it, I created an account on MySpace which I
quickly deleted without doing anything with. Then suddenly everything
was Facebook! Facebook! Facebook! Many of my friends and family
were on it and I kept getting pressure to join. I finally did. It
was good to hear from people I hadn't talked to in many years. I have
been careful what I put up on the site. However I'm also well aware
that insurance companies, marketing firms, tax offices, etc. know all
about me already. The idealist in me wants to kill my Facebook
account. The realist in me knows it wouldn't do much good in a
practical sense. I have all but "ghosted" my Facebook account. It's
there. People can find me. But I rarely interact with it.
> I don't see ANY ads, anytime or anywhere, when I browse the web with
> thanks to my merger of the two free well-researched databases here:
>
>   http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm  as of 23-J
UL-2011
> and
> Â Â http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ as of 21-JUL-2011
>
> both of which are updated frequently.
>
> The /etc/hosts trick works on every system in the world: BSD, Linux,
> MacOS, UNIX (AIX, HPUX, SLES, Solaris, et al), and Windows (Win98SE,
> Win2K, WinXP, Vista and Win7). Â And, yes, Windows is POSIX-compliant
> and has an "etc/hosts" file here: Â C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/
> and, yes, the "/" does work correctly in the "DOS" Command Prompt
> of Windows systems.
I'm quite familiar with /etc/hosts. I used to be militant about that
file. I had it loaded with "bad" hostnames on my RedHat system at
home, my Win2k system at work, and even my Zaurus PDA. Since then I'm
moved on to Mac OS X (home), XP (work), and Android (phone) and just
haven't bothered with it. But since you made it so easy for me.
Hmmm.. ;-)
> ***** Moderator's Note *****
>
> Why do YOU moderate a group on Yahoo? Isn't it more pure to have
> everything on Usenet?
>
> Bill, with his tongue firmly in his cheeck.
Bah! We should be exchanging text files on 5.25" floppies.
In short: I really believe in the ideals promoted by people like
Richard Stallman and organizations like the FSF and GNU. But I also
understand not everyone on the planet has the skills or resources to
run their own web or email servers. If an individual is comfortable
with exchanging some personal information for a free email service or
presence on the web, that's fine. I think it's more productive to
inform the general public exactly what they're giving up so they can
mitigate it than to sit in an ivory tower in Cambridge, MA without
giving the average computer user a viable alternative.
John
--
John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
Austin, Texas, USA
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 08:06:56 -0400
From: Bill Horne <bill@QRMhorne.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Google Search problems
Message-ID: <20110727120656.GC27667@telecom.csail.mit.edu>
On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 08:57:51AM -0500, John Mayson wrote:
> > ***** Moderator's Note *****
> >
> > Why do YOU moderate a group on Yahoo? Isn't it more pure to have
> > everything on Usenet?
> >
> > Bill, with his tongue firmly in his cheeck.
>
> Bah! We should be exchanging text files on 5.25" floppies.
>
> In short: I really believe in the ideals promoted by people like
> Richard Stallman and organizations like the FSF and GNU. But I also
> understand not everyone on the planet has the skills or resources to
> run their own web or email servers. If an individual is comfortable
> with exchanging some personal information for a free email service or
> presence on the web, that's fine. I think it's more productive to
> inform the general public exactly what they're giving up so they can
> mitigate it than to sit in an ivory tower in Cambridge, MA without
> giving the average computer user a viable alternative.
>
> John
>
> --
> John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
> Austin, Texas, USA
I'll crank up my old H-89 if you have any hard-sectored floppies to
trade: they're the kind with a hole at the start of every sector, not
just one at the start of the disk MBR.
No, that's a lie: my H-89 went to electronic heaven years ago,
replaced by a Zenith Z-150 that I built from the kit. It was a classic
PC clone, but it worked OK, even though it used MS-DOS. I sold it to a
couple who wanted to have a computer, back when that was a status
symbol, and I sweatened the deal by throwing in a dot-matrix printer
made by a company that had just gone out of business.
The Z-150 was replaced by a 386, which IIRC I built around a
motherboard I got from the MIT flea market, and that was replaced by a
motherboard I got from my sister, who worked at Intel back
then. (Trust me: the Intel employee discount isn't all that it's
cracked up to be).
That 486 is long gone, and last week I bought the first "store bought"
computer I've ever owned, a Lenovo laptop that performs adequately,
even though it runs MS-Windoze. I like the simple keyboard layout and
the fact that the screen is visible in daylight.
The moral of the story is that things always change, and the early
days of the Internet are gone and will never come back. It's tempting
- trust me, I know - to take the attitude "I crawled under the barbed
wire to get here, and by Ghod YOU will crawl under the barbed wire,
too!". It doesn't work. Children use Facebook because they want to,
and I build the H-89 because I wanted to, and there's nothing you or I
will ever be able to do that will change what the Internet's users
want or do not want. That's life.
Bill
--
Bill Horne
(Filter QRM for direct replies)
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:08:07 +0000 (UTC)
From: Paul <pssawyer@comcast.net.INVALID>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Google Search problems
Message-ID: <Xns9F2F7B7276948Senex@88.198.244.100>
Bill Horne <bill@QRMhorne.net> wrote in
news:20110727120656.GC27667@telecom.csail.mit.edu:
> I'll crank up my old H-89 if you have any hard-sectored floppies
> to trade: they're the kind with a hole at the start of every
> sector, not just one at the start of the disk MBR.
>
> No, that's a lie: my H-89 went to electronic heaven years ago,
> replaced by a Zenith Z-150 that I built from the kit. It was a
> classic PC clone, but it worked OK, even though it used MS-DOS. I
> sold it to a couple who wanted to have a computer, back when that
> was a status symbol, and I sweatened the deal by throwing in a
> dot-matrix printer made by a company that had just gone out of
> business.
I think I have an H-89 somewhere in the basement, which I last used
as a dumb terminal for e-mail and Usenet. If you know anyone who
wants it....
It's not the only piece of obsolete electronics down there - I should
get a tuit and bring it all to a Flea one of these days... but that
would mean getting organized, something I had thought would be easier
now that I am retired.
--
Paul
***** Moderator's Note *****
Tell us where you are: I'll bet there is a Heathnik out there who will
take it off your hands.
As for flea markets, you'll never get what it's worth. Epay, for all
it's faults, is a seller's platform.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:23:43 -0700
From: Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Google Search problems
Message-ID: <4E2F4C7F.2000108@thadlabs.com>
On 7/25/2011 7:04 PM, Thad Floryan wrote:
> [...]
> You have EVERYTHING about you here http://www.mayson.us/ so why
> do you want to perpetuate Zuckerberg's company which, by the way,
> is referred to as Fecebook in many forums and groups I frequent.
> That name was coined by a [female] member of the Yahoo linux group
> of which I'm one of the moderators. :-)
> [...]
> ***** Moderator's Note *****
>
> Why do YOU moderate a group on Yahoo? Isn't it more pure to have
> everything on Usenet?
>
> Bill, with his tongue firmly in his cheeck.
"Tongue firmly in his cheeck (sic)" noted. :-)
Several of the [now Yahoo] groups were founded in the 1990s and
I'm not those groups' owner. Consider the linux group list:
- From 1993 to 1999 the group's submission address was
linux@onelist.com. The group really didn't "take off"
until 1998 with about 1000 messages that year.
- Then it was snatched up by Egroups in 2000 and this
linux@egroups.com became the group's submission address.
- Yahoo acquired Egroups in 2001 and the new submission
address became linux@yahoogroups.com
For the curious, the linux group archives are public (not too
common for Yahoo groups):
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/linux/messages
Initiating new groups on Usenet is becoming dicey due to many
ISPs dropping their news services. Even Duke U, where Usenet
began, ceased its Usenet operations on May 20, 2010 per:
http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2010/05/usenet.html
Many of the Usenet groups I used to frequent have turned into
cesspools of antisocial and vulgar behavior -- we don't have that
problem with Yahoogroups. GoogleGroups is useful only for
searching the original Usenet archives prior to Google's
acquisition. I frequently cite this URL in some other groups
(it's one of my postings to sci.math in October 1988, long
before Google existed):
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/msg/d6c891302914fd84
Thad
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:27:17 -0700
From: AES <siegman@stanford.edu>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Absolute minimum Facebook exposure?
Message-ID: <siegman-D866ED.12271727072011@bmedcfsc-srv02.tufts.ad.tufts.edu>
I guess Facebook is a valid "Telecom" topic, since it seems to be
(maybe along with Google) one of the major users of telecom resources
and telecom activity by individuals at the present time.
If so, could any knowledgeable Facebook user tell me offhand: What is
the _absolute minimum_ amount of personal information that a
prospective Facebook joiner has to give to Facebook to join up and
register? And what is the absolute minimum amount of information that
can then be conveyed to anyone else as a result of my acquiring a
Facebook page?
[I'm hoping that I can supply nothing but a name and an email address
to Facebook; display nothing but a name and a link to my university
web page on my Facebook page; and have Facebook itself not transmit
any of these bits of information -- particular the email address -- to
anyone further. Is this a realistic possibility?]
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:05:53 -0400
From: Matt Simpson <net-news69@jmatt.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Google Search problems
Message-ID: <net-news69-6E4576.12055326072011@news.toast.net>
In article
<CALtjCnKOxHfc2-8ihHg09DqNi1eOCY3ZQpkRbzPiO=2Q+2-YaQ@mail.gmail.com>,
John Mayson <john@mayson.us> wrote:
> I forget where I read this recently. I might have been from the Free
> Software Foundation website. Those of us with Facebook accounts are
> not Facebook's customers. We're Facebook's products. The paid
> advertisers are Facebook's customers.
More succinctly, I forget where I read this, but it was probably here.
"If you're not paying for it, you're the product". Certainly applicable
to Facebook, but also to a multitude of other services.
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 04:51:40 +0000 (UTC)
From: David Lesher <wb8foz@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Google Search problems
Message-ID: <j0o5gs$ii3$1@reader1.panix.com>
John Mayson <john@mayson.us> writes:
>> The CEO of the Clear Channel radio network recently said "We're not
>> in the music or entertainment business. We're in the advertising
>> business."
>I forget where I read this recently. I might have been from the Free
>Software Foundation website. Those of us with Facebook accounts are
>not Facebook's customers. We're Facebook's products. The paid
>advertisers are Facebook's customers.
>Think about that for a moment.
I think it was FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, appointed by
LBJ, who said
~"Television is a company selling a product to its
customers. The customers are the advertisers, and the product
being sold are the viewers..."
--
A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com
& no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
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