Daily: November 17, 2003

LJ Parody

| c: Uncategorized | t:

In some ways, LiveJournal is one of the more powerful and convenient “online communities” around. Unfortunately this is partially due to it’s insularity — a walled garden approach to community building. Walled gardens can be pleasant, unless the gardener starts ripping things out of the ground without warning…

A parody journal by user “george_w_bush” was recently deleted without warning by the LiveJournal abuse team because it didn’t contain a notice on every post that the writer was not really George W Bush. Because it was deleted without warning, all the writing is gone, and LJ won’t allow the user to have it. (The author of this post at Shock and Awe claims that they had their paid LJ account suspended for criticizing a politician by name…)

One of the authors of the deleted parody explains the whole thing, and she’d like other LJ users to put the word out.

Warrior

| c: olde | t: | Comment

Crawling out from a SimCity binge (fortunately it was version 3 — version 4 might have put me under for the Winter…) and looking for another expression of digital monomania, I started hunting spammers.

Not the spam sent to the addresses I posted to the web, put up in clear text back in the old utopian days before mailto was equivalent to bullseye. Those poor things are incurable. Wrap ‘em in filters and stick ‘em in the basement.

But for my proper-name email address, sold by some… affilliate, complete with physical mailing address — this one i’ve taken to patrolling like a remote shack in Montana. Whois on the weblinks, AIRN lookup on the IP, find the upstream owners of the block. Pointless. So pointless. But actively pointless. And, like holding back the tide with a broom, it actually works for a few seconds.

It’s also very educational. Who knew so many American mortgage companies were actually based in Pakistan and China?