Online Neighborhood Watch Nails Phishers

This could be a really cool thing, if it’s done correctly:

A volunteer group, dubbed the Phishing Incident Reporting and
Termination squad (PIRT), will take in reports from consumers of
suspected phishing Web sites and work to take the sites offline.

On Friday, before its official launch, the group received 100 phishing reports, and 30 of those were shut down in a few hours.

read more | digg story

Most of us can quickly and easily spot a phishing scandal (if it even gets past
our filters) but it’s people like our parents who need to be protected.
If we can work together to nail these phishing fuckers at the server
level, it’s time well spent.

question for the podcasters

I’ve been working on a new episode of RFB most of this morning, and I’m incredibly sad to reach the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen.

I don’t have anything original or interesting to say, but I figured it wouldn’t be the biggest deal, because the bulk of the show would be audio from the Star Trek convention and my audition on Tuesday. The big problem is, that audio is just for shit. It’s so blown out that listening to it gave me a headache and actually made me feel a little sick to my stomach by the time I gave up trying to clean it up in garageband.

I’ve been using an iRiver 795; I’ve noticed that the last few times I’ve used it, the built-in mic is so sensitive, that with the encoder set at 44 kHz and 160Kbps, unless I’m speaking very quietly or there is absolutely no ambient noise, the audio is useless at best, and painful at worst. I’ve tried the line-in with a clip-on mic, but without some sort of pre-processing, the levels are too low.

So, can any of you experienced radio people or podcasters out there suggest an extremely portable, very affordable solution to my audio problem?

(Thanks to Matt D. for catching a picture of the official RFB truck in action!)

state of the exile

The day I got the WWdN database fixed, and had all the old WWdN entries rescued and readable was the day I found the path out of Exile.

Now that I know there are two ways out of this prison (in a pine box, or through that large opening over there that we all like to think of as "off limits, as a favor to me,") it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to stay here.

Which brings me back to the Typepad vs. MT w/plugins issue. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I like about Typepad, that MT 3.2 doesn’t have out of the box, and I came up with three things: Typepad has a great WYSIWYG editor, it easily and seamlessly handles uploading images and enclosures, like the RFB files, and all those little things on the right side are so easy to add and remove and update, I can’t believe I ever did any hand-coding of tables and filled them with php includes (which I also had to create and edit by hand.)

But I miss WWdN, and all its lameness and non-W3C-compliance. I miss its out of date FAQ and musical suggestions. I miss its clunky archives and the sense that, even though it’s a shitty house, it’s my house, goddammit.

Redesigning issues aside, can I move back to WWdN and still have as much control as I have right now? And most important: will it be easy?

I’ve been playing around with three different editors that all have WYSIWYG editing, and various other features:

Flock, which is a browser that is built on top of Firefox with integrated blogging tools.
Performancing, which is a Firefox extension that puts a WYSISYG editor into your browser.
ecto, which is an editor and publishing tool that lets you compose and edit entries outside of your browser.

Flock is pretty cool. It’s got a nice editor, and I especially like how it seamlessly integrates Flickr images and del.icio.us bookmarks into your blogging experience. It integrates lots of tools and appears geared toward blogging and anything which involves a tag. If I was all about that sort of thing, I’d be really into flock, but since I’m not, I can’t see myself using it.

Performancing is also really nice. I love that it easily inserts technorati tags and adds del.icio.us bookmarks whenever you update one of your blogs, (if you want it to), and I love that it lets you see a ton of information on the page you’re viewing. It’s a free Firefox extension, and free is good.

But I think ecto is the way to go for me. It does all of the things that the other two do, and adds in too many features for me to list here. I was introduced to ecto when Xeni told me she uses it to update boingboing, and even though I have to buy a license for it, if it’s good enough for boingboing, it’s totally good enough for me.

Last night, while I was goofing off with ecto, I ended up quasi-live-blogging part of an episode of TNG:

I’m watching one of my favorite (and most heartbreaking) episodes of TNG, The Offspring. It’s one of the best episodes we ever did, and it nearly reaches —

UGH!
There I am in the ugly grey space suit on Stage 9. I’m not acting very
well right here, even though the scene is really about the Admiral.
Nice package on Wesley, though. Eww. Gross.

Gods. Data
has to say good bye to Lal now. This always makes me cry a little bit.
Lal says, "I love you, father," and Data just looks at her and says, "I
wish I could feel it, too."

It’s such a testament to the writing
in this episode (and the actors in the scene) that Data didn’t end up
doing a cheesy "I love you too," thing. It’s so true to his character
that he remains emotionally unattached, because Data doesn’t have
emotions. (I always thought it was an insanely stupid fucking move to
give Data his emotion chip, like giving Geordi sight. Weak.)

Heh.
I just said, "Course is set, sir." See? That’s why I hated working on
TNG in those days. Even though the episode is great, just saying those
stupid lines bored me to. fucking. death.

Now G4 is running an
ad for Star Trek 2.0, which I think is going to be the dumbest thing to
happen to the original series in 40 years. And now, it’s time for
Futurama on [adult swim].

So I have three things left to do before I can return to WWdN (in this order):

Find an editor that I like, that’s easy to use and reliable. I’m pretty sure I’ve done that.
Figure out a way to easily update modular content for the non-blog areas of the site. This feels like it should be fairly easy, but I haven’t put all that much time into reading the MT forums or digging through the plug-ins. I suspect the answer is to use MT-Includes that are files linked to various MT Templates. Alternatively, I can figure out some sort of web-based php backend that will let me update all that information without having to go into an html editor offline, and ftp the damn thing whenever I want to make a chance. And don’t even talk to me about ssh-ing into the server and using vi from a shell prompt. Those days are long behind me. This is, I think, the stickiest widget.
Complete the re-design. We’re working on this, and once we figure out a couple more things, it will go live very quickly.

odeo, eventful, isolatr

I have added Radio Free Burrito to Odeo.com, so if you’re an Odeo user, you can subscribe to the RFB, and do whatever you do when you’re an Odeo podcast listening guy. Or girl. Or flaming-moe-juggler. While you’re at Odeo, you can also listen to a bumper from All Over The Place (which needs a little more cowbell, but is still cool, and was created by the same guy who created the hawesome "trust him, he’s famous" RFB bumper.) Speaking of RFB, I found a band I like so much, I sent an e-mail to their label asking for permission to share one of their songs on a future podcast. I’ll let you know if they laugh at me.

Eventful is a service similar to Upcoming.org, which allows you to find out when an artist or event you dig is coming to a venue near you. What sets Eventful apart is a spiffy feature that allows people to let artists, authors, flaming-moe-jugglers and actors turned bloggers turned writers that there is a demand for them to appear in your hometown.

This is an extremely cool and useful tool for performers and their fans, because it lets us all know where it makes the most sense to schedule an event. For example, right now there is a demand for me to come speak or read or set up a spectacular display of dominoes that displays the Fijian flag and launches a balloon at the end in San Diego. But what if you’re not in San Diego? What if you’re in Phoenix? What if you’re in Chicago? What if you go to college in West Virginia? The cool thing Eventful lets you do is create your own demand, for your own area, and then share that demand (via e-mail or a blog, or an EAM or a complex series of rebus puzzles) with your friends from the same area, so they can join the demand. When enough people let an artist (or me) know that they’re interested in a performance, or a demon-purging in their town, the artist (or snake handler) knows that it’s worth his or her or its time and effort to come to your town. So what makes the "demand" thingy so cool is that fans can let performers know that there is a demand for them, and where that demand is. So if you want me to come bake bannana bread in Eugene, Oregon, but there’s already a demand for me in Portland, make a demand of your own, and if Eugene ends up with more demands than Portland, guess where I’m taking my ultra-portable oven?

I’ve added an eventful demandy-thingy over there on the right side of my blog, which you can use to let me know if you want me to come to your town for a reading, or a flaming-moe-juggling, or maybe even a sketch comedy or improv performance. I haven’t decided what the critical mass for me to come out is, and I suppose I’ll cry bitter tears of defeat when no more than 15 people want me to come anywhere. Thanks for nothing! And to think I played my harmonica for you while we were on the rocket ship X-M!

Finally, I’ve been skipping around all sorts of social network bookmark groupthink zeitgeist things lately, and I think I finally found the one for me. Created by my friend and occasional partner in crime, it is called isolatr.

how about a wwdnbot for aim?

danger, will robinson
Jason says that AOL is opening up AIM to third party developers. This is pretty cool, and is a strange coincidence, because I had an idea for an AIMBot yesterday.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could build your own bot, which would be relevant to your audience, and let them add it to their buddy list?

For example, if I did a WWdNBot, you could talk to it like an old irc bot, by asking it FAQs, or askng it if I had any appearances coming up, or when the next book would be released, or something like that. I could also use it to automatically tell you when I updated my blog, with a link to the entry.

Or how about a FarkBot, which tells you when a new headline hits the main page (with a link) and would tell you about Fark cliches?

Or a SuicidegirlsBot which would tell you when a friend’s journal was updated, a new item was on the newswire, or your favorite girl had released a new photoset?

I know that most of this is just another way of using RSS feed-style information, but doesn’t the interactivity and immediacy of an instant message seem cool?

As I understand it, if you want to hook into the AIM API, you have to cough up a significant fee to AOL, so I don’t see rampant ‘bot development happening any time soon, but if AOL decided to dump the fees (maybe they could add a line after the message that says, "brought to you by [sponsor]" if they wanted to make up for lost fees, and sell the adspace) and a company like blogger or sixapart incorporated some easy to use code for their customers (add "wake up the bot" to "send trackbacks" or whatever), we could have an entirely new — and very cool — method of communicating with each other.

Okay, people who are more tech-savvy than me: tear this idea apart.

(photo via flickr user drp)