Google Blogoscoped

Friday, December 3, 2004

One Man Band (Video)

If Renaissance all-around talent Leonardo da Vinci would be alive today, I’m sure he’d be either video game designer, multimedia blogger, or one man futuristic live band. [Via the B3ta newsletter.]

Googling Your Ex

“The problem with Google, computers, the whole internet shebang is that it’s all right there, all the time, even at 2 a.m. when your judgment is impaired by nostalgia and tiredness and maybe a glass of wine and a sentimental novel.

And because it’s right there, it’s hard to resist its lure, especially if you have a laptop and Wi-Fi and you don’t even have to get out of bed to look somebody up.”
– Regina Lynn, How Long Is Your Digital Trail? (Wired), Dec. 03, 2004

Terri Tickle

Terri DiSisto was one of the most annoying online stalkers and private fetish spammers Usenet saw. (I read about her in the book Spam Kings I’m currently reading and looked her up on Google.)
You can find around 4,000 posts of her stored in Google Groups. Terri wasn’t just present in newsgroups such as rec.music.phish; many of her annoying requests and complaints were sent out in private as well.

What did “Terri Tickle” want? She didn’t spam to sell any product. She pestered newsgroups to ask for videos of men from the age 18-23 filmed being tickled. That’s right, and here’s a sample post of Terri from 1998:

“Are you a guy between the ages of 18-23 who is HOT, TICKLISH, and IN NEED OF SOME U.S. CASH? If so, read on...I’m very serious about what you’ll discover...

My name is Terri. I am a female college student in the Boston Massachusetts area that is a total TICKLING FREAK. As a hobby...one that costs me ALOT of money...I maintain an personal collection of amateur videos featuring guys being tickled (usually for 30 or 60 minutes) by a girlfriend, good girl friend, girl friends, or even guy friends. I am not a business, video trader, or porn solicitor. My interest is in TICKLING.

I am actively looking for guys to make videos that I can add to my collection. Guys that interest me are YOUNG (basically, my age...18-23), HOT (swimmer/soccer/runnerbuilt...on the thin side...not too “big-n-buff”...with absolutely no bodyfat whatsoever), and TICKLISH! No sex or nudity are wanted in my videos. I just want to see guys tied up and mercilessly, relentlessly TICKLED.”

In the end, some years later, “Terri” didn’t get the last laugh and was prosecuted. It turned out “she” was 39-year-old New York man David P. D’Amato, a high school assistant principal and director of guidance. In 2001, D’Amato pleaded guilty as he was charged with violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Bloglines International?

Blogspace portal Bloglines is now available in many different languages like Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Or is it?

The German version – the only translation I can pass judgment on – looks like a horrible job either not done by a native speaker, or by a machine. It contains a great variety of missing punctuation, spelling errors, English left-overs (and not always fashionable ones), so-called Deppenleerzeichen, as well as plain wrong grammar or words.

For example, the sentence “Enter keywords or URL” has been translated to “Betreten Sie Schlüsselwörter oder URL”, which is either sad or funny (depending on whether you want to use the site, or just laugh at it).
The sentence “Your news feeds and blogs with friends and communities” has been messed into “Ihre Nachrichten Feeds and Blogs mit Freunden und Gesellschaften"; the FAQ contains the phrase (take a deep breath) “Bloglines kostenlose Emailkonten erlauben Benutzern Email Newsletter Abonnements innerhalb Ihrer Meine Bloglines Seite zu erhalten” – the list goes on. But my favorite has to be the translation of the announcement of the new international Bloglines, straight from the “Press Mitteilungen”:
“Internationalisierter Globaler RSS Service Bloglines Debuts Zuerst Völlig.”
Indeed.

Bianca Bueno told me similar errors were apparent in the Portuguese version. After some time she gave up and went back to English.

Strange Gmail Spam

My friend Jan S., who has an email address like exampleguy@gmail.com, is receiving a lot of spam apparently sent to emails only similar to exampleguy@gmail.com (like exampleguy22@gmail.com, or examplegod@gmail.com). Some of them only barely resemble his own email address, which is always available in the "Delivered-to" field of the email. (The "To" field of the email does not contain his own address.)
Does anybody know what's going on? An example email copy follows below:

X-Gmail-Received: 87fe0f85adcbb76804a493a7af411018b4ff4a98
Delivered-To: exampleguy@gmail.com
Received: by 10.54.24.61 with SMTP id 61cs7012wrx;
        Thu, 2 Dec 2004 21:44:38 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.11.94.56 with SMTP id r56mr503338cwb;
        Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:44:37 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <DGCVGRBCD@yahoo.com>
Received: from dsl-201-135-169-8.prod-infinitum.com.mx ([201.135.169.8])
        by mx.gmail.com with SMTP id o9si596910cwc;
        Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:44:37 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: neutral (gmail.com: 201.135.169.8 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of DGCVGRBCD@yahoo.com)
Received: from 216.101.76.64 (HELO ea20487bsfb.iruqj1766111.mob.42.6.48.101) (24.91.112.8) by 5161ggwv.mail.iwun.201.135.169.8 with SMTP; Fri, 03 Dec 2004 10:42:25 +0500 
Message-ID: <RIYBZCUPJLMREUNQIWTZFSFYXOZXDO@201.135.169.8> 
From: "Royce Melton" <DGCVGRBCD@yahoo.com>
To: examplegod@gmail.com 
Subject: Examplegod cheap oem s0ftware shipping worldwide 
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 23:41:25 -0600
MIME-Version: 1.0 (conrailstingy wilful lust.7) 
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Google Groups Back to Old Version

Now this explains why the Google Blog quickly removed the post on Google Groups 2 from yesterday: today, Google replaced Google Groups with the old interface again. It looks as if the new version (still in Beta) wasn’t quite ready for primetime yet. Poor Google developer who pressed the wrong button!

Stikiwiki

Stikiwiki is a new Wiki software, and I found it makes editing exceptionally quick and easy. Try yourself by clicking “Edit” in the Stikiwiki sandbox. I’d ponder installing this PHP4/ MySQL driven Wiki on my server except the price is a little too high, and the HTML a little too depcrecated.

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