The Re Collection

Amazingly, IE is ONLY number 8 on this list.

AOL is number 1, and deservedly so. Unfortunately, there are still some rural folks who have no other affordable choice but AOL dialup to get online. This is unforgiveable in the “most advanced nation on Earth.”

However, if those folks also use IE, they have no one to blame but themselves. PLEASE people, love yourself enough to get Firefox.The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time - Yahoo! News

1. America Online (1989-2006)

How do we loathe AOL? Let us count the ways. Since America Online emerged from the belly of a BBS called Quantum “PC-Link” in 1989, users have suffered through awful software, inaccessible dial-up numbers, rapacious marketing, in-your-face advertising, questionable billing practices, inexcusably poor customer service, and enough spam to last a lifetime. And all the while, AOL remained more expensive than its major competitors. This lethal combination earned the world’s biggest ISP the top spot on our list of bottom feeders.

AOL succeeded initially by targeting newbies, using brute-force marketing techniques. In the 90s you couldn’t open a magazine (PC World included) or your mailbox without an AOL disk falling out of it. This carpet-bombing technique yielded big numbers: At its peak, AOL claimed 34 million subscribers worldwide, though it never revealed how many were just using up their free hours.

Once AOL had you in its clutches, escaping was notoriously difficult. Several states sued the service, claiming that it continued to bill customers after they had requested cancellation of their subscriptions. In August 2005, AOL paid a $1.25 million fine to the state of New York and agreed to change its cancellation policies–but the agreement covered only people in New York.

Ultimately the Net itself–which AOL subscribers were finally able to access in 1995– made the service’s shortcomings painfully obvious. Prior to that, though AOL offered plenty of its own online content, it walled off the greater Internet. Once people realized what content was available elsewhere on the Net, they started wondering why they were paying AOL. And as America moved to broadband, many left their sluggish AOL accounts behind. AOL is now busy rebranding itself as a content provider, not an access service.

Though America Online has shown some improvement lately–with better browsers and e-mail tools, fewer obnoxious ads, scads of broadband content, and innovative features such as parental controls–it has never overcome the stigma of being the online service for people who don’t know any better.

[…]

8. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)

Full of features, easy to use, and a virtual engraved invitation to hackers and other digital delinquents, Internet Explorer 6.x might be the least secure software on the planet. How insecure? In June 2004, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) took the unusual step of urging PC users to use a browser–any browser–other than IE. Their reason: IE users who visited the wrong Web site could end up infected with the Scob or Download.Ject keylogger, which could be used to steal their passwords and other personal information. Microsoft patched that hole, and the next one, and the one after that, and so on, ad infinitum.

To be fair, its ubiquity paints a big red target on it–less popular apps don’t draw nearly as much fire from hackers and the like. But here’s hoping that Internet Explorer 7 springs fewer leaks than its predecessor.

Bloggers Against Torture

Join Us!

Join Us!

I know it will come as a huge surprise to my loyal readers — all two of you — that I am taking a firm stand on this issue.

Add your blog to the anti-torture side of the internets by clicking the Join Us link. It’s a small step, but if enough do it, it may garner some Corporate Media attention and perhaps instill some small bit of shame among those who…I know who am I kidding, those folks have no shame or they wouldn’t be involved in the disgusting business in the first place.

Nonetheless, it can’t hurt, and will give you a reason to harp some more on such quaint notions as human rights and American idealism during the month of June (in addition to the always festive queer rights topics that June has provided for some time now).

If you follow the links, you will get to the site of the new film Road to Guantanamo which opens (somewhere, not where I am) on June 23. There is more info on the whole torture business as well in other links.

As difficult as it is to deal with this, this is being done in our name and so we have a responsibility to learn and of course to act to stop it. We cannot turn our eyes away and pretend it is not happening, which is a natural and understandable reaction. A new kind of strength is required in this movement now, and we (in which I of course include myself) must find it in ourselves.

Meet the New Boss…
Note link to great article on Colbert & the media at start of the post.

• Pam Spaulding at Pam’s House Blend
• Taylor Marsh
• Arianna Huffington
• Watertiger at Dependable Renegade
• Belle Waring at Crooked Timber
• Laura Rozen at War and Piece
• Barbara O’Brien at Mahablog
• Avedon Carol at the Sideshow
• Susie Mandrak at Suburban Guerilla
• Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon
• Sheri Zollinger at World ‘o Crap
• Xan, Leah and Chicago Dyke at Corrente
• Georgia10 and McJoan at Kos
• Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah
• Jeralyn at TalkLeft
• Ellen Nagler at The Broad View
• SusanG at Booman
• MaryScott O’Connor at My Left Wing
• Lindsey Beyerstein at Majikthise
• Athenae at First Draft
• Echide of the Snakes
• Roxanne at Rox Populi
• Elayne Riggs
• Julia at Sisypus Shrugged
• Shakespeare’s Sister

This is critical. So please take action RIGHT NOW!!!

Sign MoveOn’s petition and call Congress today.

More info.

FEC Won’t Regulate Internet Politics - Yahoo! News

Expanded explanation of how this affects the netroots.

The search results sweep by the US spy industry continues:

Google to feds: Back off

Google lashed out at the U.S. Justice Department on Friday, saying that a high-profile request for a list of a week’s worth of search terms must not be granted because it would disclose trade secrets and violate the privacy rights of its users.

and now there’s three in the fight:

Google may be about to face a second round of subpoenas for search-related information

If the U.S. Justice Department is successful in obtaining a week’s worth of search terms from Google, which it demanded as part of an attempt to defend a 1998 Internet pornography law, a second round of subpoenas is shaping up to be far more intrusive.

The American Civil Liberties Union warned Friday that if the first subpoena is granted–giving the government’s expert the information to use to evaluate the effectiveness of porn filters–the ACLU’s legal assault on the same antipornography law will require it to target Google as well.

Steve’s take on a MSM Wall-Street-themed take on blogs. You can count on him for a reality check. To the writer (of the NY Metro feature), blog readers are simply consumers, and blogdom is designed by Christof.

He references the dotcom disaster (and before that, I remember all the hoopla about the Japanese business model, that was going to leave us all in the dust), and all the CW about where that was going, as a cautionary tale. So have no fear about the Wal-Martization of blogs.

As one of his commenters stated:

What makes Gilliard solid, in my opinion, is his ruthless allergy to bullshit, his eye for creative abuse and his ability to caption his abuse (the better shots of the ongoing Stop Snitching “portraits” deserve framing IMO.) If Gilliard turns into a whiner or a panderer we will all leave his whining, pandering ass in the dust. He probably wouldn’t have it any other way.

What non-bloggers don’t understand is how time-consuming and difficult blogging is. Those who make it to the so-called A-list, usually do so because they work extremely hard and take it very seriously.

This is a new medium still in its infancy, but it has already changed the way information is produced and distributed. It has the potential to spread democracy in a viral way in which no tank, bullet or bomb can come close.

I am perfectly content to be a C-list (more like Z-list, but the NY Metro writer assumes only three levels to his heirarchical flowchart) blogger. My blog will not have advertising, unless it’s for items like books or films that promote my bigger agenda. It is an adjunct to my organizing work, and I think at this point I can safely say I won’t be selling out to on that score.

Right now, this blog is about progressive politics and the greater Waco, Texas, area known as “The Heart of Texas,” with a little science, food and personal diversions thrown in for seasoning. Not really a recipe for “success” as defined by Blogshares.

Update:
Peter Daou surveys the left side of blogland.

The attempt to marginalize progressive bloggers as part of an angry, unwashed, irrational mob is in full swing, but truth-telling has a self-sustaining power. Bloggers will continue to cut through the fabricated storylines, providing clarity, sanity, honesty, and an abiding loyalty to the Constitution and to the principles our country is founded upon.

History will look kindly on them.

And Reddhedd at FireDogLake takes the next logical step:

It seems to me that we have reached a point where things are moving up to a whole new level of discourse among progressives around the blogoverse. The question is: what direction do we take things from here? Now that is a question worth pondering, isn’t it?

Businesses have been encouraged by our government for years now to go into China, and the motivation was NOT to bring them our freedoms, but to take away their money. Now, the shit has hit the fan, because Yahoo, no doubt like other companies dancing to China’s tune, provided info that got a dissident identified and imprisoned for 8 years.

There will be hearings in the House this week. But as Steve Guillard correctly noted, there are only two choices here, and one of them is the right one.

I am a heavy user of various Yahoo services, and I recently contacted the company with my outrage over their release of search information to US spying agencies. Now this. I will be paying attention to the hearings, and seeing what Yahoo does about this. But things don’t look promising.

It will be a big hassle to move dozens of listserves to another service, to say nothing of my SBC account for internet access and several Yahoo mail accounts, but I will not continue to support Yahoo if this isn’t handled appropriately.

My message to Yahoo: Get out of China.

Yeah, I’m blogging again … until the next time I suddenly take a long break. If you’re one of the two or three people who have kept up with my blogging over the past three years, you know I’m not joking.

During this particular break, i.e. since I left Oklahoma to go to Crawford to spend a couple of days with Cindy Sheehan, I’ve moved to Texas, close to where everything happened last August, and made a lot of other major changes in my life, like, um, working for a living. I’ll be adjusting the categories of this blog accordingly over the next little whiles, and/or as necessity dictates, to reflect the geographical and personal changes.

Mike at Okiedoke is a great promoter of Oklahoma and bloggery — he’s even organizing the 2006 Oklahoma Blogger convention — so who better to institute the Okie Blogger Awards? Good thing he’s taken his own out of contention, or the rest of us wouldn’t have much of a chance.

I don’t do nearly enough browsing of the blogs of my fellow Okies, despite the fact that Mike and K at BlogOklahoma make it their mission to keep track of them for us. I have become quite partial to Okiefunk since its debut this year. Kurt’s profiles of radical Okies really are something special, and the one of Woody Guthrie was so good I copied it to OKIMC.

My friend James Branum was kind enough to vote for me in two categories, which only makes me think he hasn’t been doing much blog surfing lately either. The categories were “unusual” and “culture.” Hmmm, I wondering about that! But I do appreciate the thought.

But if there was a category for most blogs created and/or maintained, I could really be the hands-down winner. To wit:

www.gypsyresort.com
www.peacearena.org
www.herlandsisters.org
www.okgreens.org
www.okobjector.org
okcodepink.blogspot.com
ruralgreens.blogspot.com
www.okimc.org/blogs
www.okimc.org/network
www.greencommons.org
www.greenbloggers.org

There are others that are no longer active, and thus not eligible, including okprogressive.blogspot.com and www.gypsyresort.com/shoot66/.

There are probably a couple of other live ones I’m forgetting at the moment, but I think I’ve made my case.

Found another lefty Okie blogger, in this case at Daily Kos (via diary). The Oklahoma Hippy calls his blog Phish Fan in Jeebus Land. I know that Phish is a band, but if I’ve ever heard their music, I’m not aware of it — just not that into music. Anyway, he’s pretty rad politically (outside of seeming to be a big fan of Hillary Clinton), but I can only read half the thing, cuz it’s black with dark blue links. I thought it might just be displaying poorly in Opera, but no, same thing in Firefox. Why? Why do people do that?

How Comcast Censors Political Content says David Swanson of After Downing Street. (Comcast is a major internet service provider, equivilent, I think, to what Cox is around the OKC area.)

I can think of a couple of other possibilities for the source of the email blockage they experienced, but all of them involve squelching of political speech, and it comes down to Comcast being more responsible for how it operates it’s near monopoly (in some areas of the country).

I realized this week that my blog has been screwed up for almost two months. Well, actually, the blog was fine, but it was in the wrong directory.

See, I originally was going to use Mambo for The Re Collection. I set it up, found a theme I really liked, then started posting, only to find that that CMS was actually too robust for my little effort here. It wasn’t really geared to posting on the fly, which is a feature I need if there is ever to be any activity here. (BTW, I’m now using Mambo for another project, where it is an appropriate choice.) So, I decided to switch to Wordpress, which really is, IMHO, the best CMS for a basic personal blog.

Things then got complicated, because I really, really liked the Mambo theme I had found, called box_red451, which is a Mambo China creation (see the link at the bottom of this page for more info). So, I began to port that theme to Wordpress. This became quite the project — in fact, I’m still not finished with the finer points — since the two templating systems are rather different, and box_red451 is, dare I say, a wee bit over-designed.

Anyway, somewhere in that process, sometime in April, I think, I actually began posting to the WP blog instead of the Mambo one. However, I forgot to change the directory names, putting WP at the /re/ address, so for all that time, I’m strictly blogging for myself (which I do anyway, but I like to pretend I’m putting it out there for the world, else I wouldn’t do it at all, most likely).

So, this week, light dawned, and I made the correction. I’m still tweaking the templates and adding plugins — something I will probably never stop doing, since I clearly prefer designing and fiddling to actually posting content!

At any rate, welcome to the new, simpler-but-not-so-simple WP version of The Re Collection. Let the collecting resume.

(I will have a theme-changer at the bottom of the sidebar, so if you hate box red, or don’t want to load all the images involved (or have a browsing device that won’t accept them), then you can switch to a basic, cleaner display. Your choice can be saved in a cookie.)

Not a Good Day for Innovation, Customer Rights and Free Speech

The Grokster file sharing decision was the most notorious of the ones handed down today. But the court also came down on the wrong side in the so-called “Brand X” matter, saying cable Internet access providers companies don’t have to provide access to third party ISPs. They own the cable, so they get to decide what data gets sent, in what order.

Given that there are only two “broadband” providers in most communities — if that many — this is an invitation to a media consolidation that makes the current one look pale. The decision, which ratifies Congressional and FCC failure to address the open-access question in a way that promotes freedom of speech, is a gift to the cable/phone duopoly. They will abuse their power, because history shows that’s how they work.

Do you care? Or are you a sheep, baa baa, ready to be just a consumer of the crap Hollywood feeds you? Are you willing to let the phone and cable companies dominate tomorrow’s media, having built “their” networks on the backs of monopoly deals with government that they now leverage to capture entirely new markets? Baa baa.

If you care, fight back. Call, and especially write, your member of the U.S. House and U.S. senators. Tell them that the law is now grossly out of balance in the hands of the entertainment cartel and data duopoly. They won’t pay much attention if you’re the only one who calls, but they may begin to wake up if enough people care.