Some Advice for Bill O’Reily, ‘Cause I’m Felling Generous

Mr. Oreily, here’s a tip about malicious hackers: they tend to take talking smack about them as a challenge, which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t talk smack about them, but if you are going to do so, you might want to make sure that your own website is a hardened fortress first. Dude, your user’s passwords were stored in plain text? WTF? I suggest you have your site administrators look up the word encryption.

I’m just saying…

GMail Goes Down. Internet Self-Implodes

Best comment on GMail going down earlier today: “Just found out Gmail went down for 2 hours today and I didn’t even notice, even though they host all my email. Apparently I have a life.”

Now, I don’t want to get up on any high horses or anything. I’m as obsessive about checking my email, feed reader, social networks, and all as much as the next person; but the reaction to GMail going down for a mere two hours is astonishing to me. Apparently, I’m the only person on the intertubes that doesn’t store all my personal information online. The number of comments I’ve seen from people saying as soon as GMail is back they’re backing up their contacts list was kinda scary. Really? You never thought to keep that info on a hard drive? As a print out? Don’t people realize that these things happen? Servers go down. Sites break. Information is lost. Why would you trust an online service as the sole holder of your info, sometimes your work? Personally, I still use an email client. I haven’t been to the actual GMail page in probably a year. I’m not sure whether it was just the site that went down or if the entire service went down, but chances are I wouldn’t have even noticed. In all likelihood, had I been home I would have opened up Thunderbird, gotten an error message, and then spent the next two hours fiddling with my settings trying to get it to work again. By then, Gmail would have been back up (Ok, that’s not entirely true. I probably would have noticed due to that obsessive feed reading thing, but you get my point.).

The lesson here: don’t keep everything online. Back your stuff up. Several times. On different mediums.

Google Alternative?

Today was the launch of Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search engine that claims to be better and faster than Google.

There’s a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below.

Unfortunately for them, their claims seem to have backfired on them. I just checked it out and the page says, “Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.” Well, duh? You go around claiming you’re bigger and badder than Google and of course you’re going to get Slashdotted and then some.

They seem to be taking the concerns from folks about privacy seriously, though.

Privacy Policy

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

More precisely:
Logs

We do not keep logs of our users’ search activity.

Nice touch.

I gotta say that I agree with everyone that the name is dumb. Then again, Google is dumb too. At least the pronunciation is obvious, though.

James Rucker on Net Neutrality

Save the Internet

Tha Hell?

So, I’m fooling around with the blog, trying to clean some things up, maybe add a snazzy web 2.0 feature here or there, and I notice the Google Ad currently showing up on my blog. It’s a block ad for John McCain for President. In what universe is it possible for Google’s programs to do whatever it is they do and come to the conclusion that a John McCain ad would fit nicely on this blog? This one, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean I have to willingly put up with it. I shudder now at the thought of what other ads may have popped up here during my absence or when I just wasn’t paying attention. It’s nice to get a little extra help with the web hosting and all, but not at the expense of appearing to support people, ideas or programs that I oppose. So, goodbye Google ads. Don’t let the door hitcha…

Gibbons Versus Tigers

Watch the Gibbon pwn the Tiger!¹

1. If you get this joke, you are a nerd. Welcome to the club. [↩]