Tuesday, January 15, 2002

Privacy There are 2 main intrusions on your PC these days: Spying on your surfing habits and spam email. Info from your surfing is used by companies to bombard you with pop-up ads. Not only is this a huge intrusion on your privacy, it also slows down your productivity, sucking bandwidth with those unwanted ad graphics. And, well, we all know about the feeling of invasion and time we waste deleting junk email! I'll expand more on these points later. But here are some starter steps you can take to fight back: Delete any spyware from your machine! I've found partial lists at technoerotica and OptOut. But, I haven't found a single, updated list yet. I will try to find such a list and put their corresponding filenames here for easier search/deletion from your hard drive later: 24/7 Media, Advertising, Adware, Alexa 1.0-5.0, Aureate v1.0,2.0 + 3.0, Avenue A, Blue Streak, Comet Cursor v1.0 and v2.0, Cydoor, Doubleclick, DSSAgent, EverAd, EzUla, Expedioware, Fastclick, Flyswat, FTapp-BHO, Gator, Hotbar 1+2, Interpolls, OnFlow, The Breast Cancer Site, The Hunger Site, The Rain Forest Site, Transpondert, TimeSink v1.0,v2.0 and v5.0, Web3000,VX2, Webhancer, Wnad, X10, Install some anti-spyware software (blocks against known offenders) get yourself personal firewall software (blocks against possible un-known email "bugs" (tiny .gifs found in bulk mail spam)) never open email attachments from people you don't know! Crumble your cookies weekly (or daily if you are on the Internet a lot) Change your browser settings to turn off unsafe/prompt for safe scripts cut down physical junk mail by sending form 1500 to US Postal service Let it be known you want privacy. Know your rights! When I browse anymore, with my browser script settings, I just always hit "Enter" to deny any scripts. This saves me lots of annoying pop-ups! I only hit 'yes' to scripts if I'm filling out a form for something I want or browsing a non-profit art page that I know has streaming art media, not commercials! If I'm feeling terribly paranoid and highly suspect a URL (e.g. a link you see in a possibly malicious email) or (not my case now that I'm self-employed) you're in a corporate firewall and you just don't want Big Brother Employer to know all your surfing habits, I use an anonymizer to hide my identity. It's a bit cumbersome to always go 1st to the anonymizer, then type your url, but it could save you a barrage of unwanted email or your privacy! If you want to become a vigilante yourself, check out Steve's excellent pages. Download a packet sniffer and begin analyzing those traffic patterns. Use your data mining know-how to sniff out the sniffers! When you find a possible spyware offender, post it to a spyware website. They'll check it out. If it verifies, post it everywhere you can. This is one way we can fight corporate crime! 10:45:46 PM

Gas Prices After we bombed Afghanistan, gas prices went down. Why? Essentially this is a prime example of corporate greed. The middle-east holds some 80% of the world's supply of fossil fuels compared to 20% in the rest of the world (see Goode's World Atlas thematic maps, I couldn't get their online links to work here). Yet, non-middle-east countries supply more than 50% of the world's market demand. It should come as no suprise that countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia want a bigger piece of market share. Thus, the price wars. It's simple supply and demand principles. If the price goes down, demand should go up. Once demand goes up, non-Opec countries such as Russia (whose oil reserves reside mostly in expensive-to-mine Siberia), who can't produce as cheaply, won't be able to compete. The U.S. also won't be able to compete at such low prices. The Permian basin is almost dried out. Now Bush is talking about expensive pipelines from Alaska... And Russia's oil industry "in the hands of dozens of mainly privately-owned companies." What does that smack of? Mafia. I've been to Russia. That's scary. These days big corporations are the enemy of democracy. They are much more to be feared than government. At least government is accountable, corporations are not except to shareholders. And all that most shareholders care about is money. Have you ever thought that gang/mafia leaders and corporate executives are alike? They both: have turfs expand their turfs unless stopped by outside forces use underlings to do their dirty work rule by intimidation encourage members to put interests of the gang/company above their own have gang/company lingo have gang/company slogans engage in black market/market manipulation purchase politicians deal with money and power 10:44:39 PM

Art I used to compartmentalize "art" as visual versus "music" as auditory. San Francisco (the last place I lived) is a great place to explore these boundaries. Some of my favorites are SYNTH, Pond (need to allow scripts to view), the Lab, ATA, and XLR8R Magazine. My favorite music goodies: downloadAustin or downloadBayArea and listen to your heart's content check out my MusicHomepage to see my shareseys listen to your music on WinAmp Do not listen to you music on RealNetworks! In fact, if you've used Realnetworks in the past, uninstall it! It puts itself in your start-up registry and automatically reports through a cookie as you work!  Some songs buzzing in my brain lately... Cibo Matto - Aguas de Marco, je t'aime moi non plus DJ QBert - Aphrodisascratch DJ Food - Ageing Young w/Ken Nordine Lesser - The Gearhound Suite Joao Gilberto/Astrud Gilberto/Stan Getz (famous for "Girl from Ipanema") In Austin, Audiogalaxy(*) works best for me. I suspect it has to do with their file-sharing design. When you do file sharing, you always have to route first through their central server (which in fact is a farm of 430 servers) based in Austin. When I was in San Francisco, Morpheus worked faster and Audiogalaxy slower. This makes me suspect, their "routing" algorithms might be Austin-preferent, which would explain the geographically-dependent download times. Hmm, maybe there's some optimization potential in this P2P stuff... (*)If you install AudioGalaxy, be sure not to accept anything they bundle with the satellite! I mean this! (More comments in my privacy section below.) Especially mean is gator. If you do make a mistake and install any of the spyware accidentally, be sure to remove it promptly. Why let Big Brother multi-national corporation spy on your surfing habits? 9:38:28 PM

Literature In preparation for my move to Paris, I've been reading alternately: Ernest Hemingway's posthumously-published A Moveable Feast Adam Gopnik's recently-published Paris to the Moon. Paris in the 20's would have been my favorite place/time to be alive. I'm trying not to get expectations too high for myself. Hem says that back then 2 people could live comfortably in Paris on $5/day. Today it costs 2 people $80/day (including mortgage) to live comfortably in Austin, Texas... Reading Paris to the Moon makes me wish I had kept a diary when I was living in Germany. Details of everyday life that seemed mundane back then would be an interesting read now. Such foreign notions as: declaring your religion on public forms and actually paying federal religious tax legalized prostitution government-sponsored clinics that give out free heroin to drug addicts in the interest of "public safety" legalized marijuana possession for personal use (up to 1.12 grams or ~1/25th oz. is allowed) practically-open showers and co-ed saunas (Europeans don't wear swimsuits in the sauna!) getränkmarkts (drink markets) with kistens (crates holding 12 liter-size bottles) with glass bottles that are "recycled" simply by washing them out an unlimited number of times until the bottle breaks and pfand (deposit) on each bottle amounting to almost half the cost of the drink (70 pfennigs/DM 1,20 bottle vs. our measly 5cents/$1 can) which means practically everybody recycles Recycling - a story by Christy Bergman. Maybe someday I will write Moveable Eclectica: Perspective of an Asian-American Female Software Engineer in Germany... 9:36:13 PM

© Copyright 2002 christy bergman.