After their retirement from blogging, I did not expect to find Kim and Connie du Toit doing Internet talk radio. They started back in September, and I didn’t notice until tonight.

“Welcome back; the Internet was getting too gruntled without you.”

I received a little piece of email sent to an address that I’ve only used with Oakley, in ever-so-slighty-off English, claiming to direct me to download a new version of Adobe Reader from adobe-pdf-pro.net, which is registered to a company in Moscow and hosted in the UK. Visiting that site (with wget, not a real browser!) redirects me to signup-way.com, which redirects me to pdfnewdownload.com, which tries to get me to become a member to gain access to this and other free software. I strongly suspect that someone visiting with a real browser will get a lot more than a deceptive and pointless offer.

Hey, maybe it’s not from Adobe after all!

Sadly, the real Adobe does not provide a way to inform them that this is going on; it doesn’t qualify under any of the feedback categories they permit, sigh.

[and it got past my spam filters because I whitelist the special addresses I give to companies I’ve done business with in the past; looks like someone “acquired” a copy of Oakley’s mailing list…]

The main focus of the mildly-NSFW and likely-staged photo isn’t particularly subtle, but I had to stop and think for a moment about how I immediately knew that it was taken in a Japanese book store.

After the fact, it’s easy to find all sorts of supporting evidence, but the original pattern-matching process was unconscious and instant.

Found a picture online and want to figure out where it really came from, so you can see it full-sized, without captions and site banners and censorship and loltext? TinEye to the rescue. It hasn’t been able to track down every picture I’ve fed it, but it also hasn’t had a false positive yet.

Please stop upscaling VHS-quality video and labeling it “HD”.

You’re still having this problem?

I search for Revo sunglasses, to replace the pair that just snapped in half while I was wearing them. I find the closest model available with free shipping, and what do I find as the “active discussions in related forums”?

You folks make a living doing keyword matching, and this is what you throw up on my screen? Are you suggesting that sunglasses lead to cross-dressing, like some sort of optically polished gateway drug? Should my mother be concerned?

Have you thought about moderating, or better yet eliminating these forums? The signal-to-noise ratio makes Youtube commenters look like modern sages.

The illiterate kind, the unintentionally honest kind, or the “we’ll say anything to get your attention” kind?

more...

I believe you have chosen the wrong word for the activity described in this headline:

Bay Bridge crews scuttle to fix span by Tuesday

[aw, they finally fixed it (the headline, that is). shame, really]