Internet | The Mad Rants of a Raving Genius

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Internet privacy

Published

on October 30, 2007

. 2 Comments

This is a most tech rant, so some of you probably won’t care about it at all. But it’s also a privacy rights rant, so I suppose there’s something for everyone. I might even mention kittens. All right, I just did. Moving on…

There’s a service on the Internet called Whois. You can think of it like the phone book for the Internet. Basically, it stores the registration data for owners of millions of web domains (like mine). This can be a very useful tool for various reasons. Since it lists things like phone numbers and addresses for domain owners, it can be useful for tracking down pirates, spammers, and other problem-causing website owners. The IP address side of Whois has helped me many times identify the people who spam my blog so I could report them to their Internet service provider.

But there are some out there who want to do away with Whois entirely. They call themselves privacy advocates, but I have a feeling most of them just don’t like the idea of the law being able to track them down for doing illegal things. Privacy advocates can be like that sometimes. Anyways, the whole thing annoys me. A large group of these people are pushing to remove the Whois requirements placed on domain registrars (the companies you pay to get a .com, .net, .whatever) so people don’t have to put their contact info on a publicly accessible database. This will make it much harder to find the owners of illegal websites, as you can no doubt guess. What torrent site owner is really going to put his name and phone number on the Internet if he doesn’t have to?

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Damn you Chaintech!

Published

Cody

on November 12, 2005

in Personal

. 1 Comment

My computer seriously hates me. First off, my video card died (crappy Chaintech support is partially to blame), so I’m being forced to use an ancient NVIDIA TNT2 card (it’s almost seven years old, people) just so I can use the computer. On the plus side, it’s a better card than the piece-of-crap ATI Rage Pro card that I could have used. On the down side, I can’t use Photoshop because my video card is too slow, meaning I’m going to fall way behind on the logo project for Digital Imaging, which should have been finished Wednesday. On the Internet side of things, Firefox won’t show half my bookmarks and it’s having problems following links when I click on them, Internet Explorer just plain sucks, and the fresh copy of the Opera browser I just downloaded doesn’t like MySpace.

Anyways, I found an old Texas pal on MySpace, Stephen Reilly. He moved up to New Jersey right after 8th grade and I thought I’d never see him again. So, a few days ago, I was searching for junior high friends on MySpace and, lo and behold, his name popped up. It was pretty cool.

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Snail-eating fish

Published

Cody

on November 11, 2005

in Personal

. 1 Comment

Craft fair tomorrow. And Vet’s day parade. And O’Dea football game. Joy. Rapture. Glee.

You can tell I’m not terribly excited about the whole thing. Of course, I did volunteer to play at the football game, so that bit of pain is totally my fault, but the parade is required (oh please let it rain and thunder and stuff) and my parents are bound to drag me to watch their booth at the fair for no reason at all.

Well, things on the Canuck are going swimmingly. Somehow, my less-than-sterling recruiting efforts have gained me a few new crewmembers, bringing the total ship’s enrollment to 12, including myself. That’s none too shabby. The only problem is, my XO doesn’t post a whole lot (curse you Ian!) and all the new players are…well, newbies. Complete and utter n00bs. One of them has already dropped off the face of the Earth, and I didn’t even get to yell at him for posting wrong. Just kidding. I don’t do that. Except to Ian. *runs away from a certain viola-wielding Trekker*

On the home front, my Internet is being naughty again, possibly due to this nice little rainstorm that’s moved in and covers all of the Pacific Northwest. It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t rely on satellite for our entertainment purposes (meaning TV and Internet). I also got a little (well, not that little) snail for my Betta fish’s tank, which was being rampantly overrun by algae until I attacked it with a toothbrush and paper towels. In theory, this snail will eat the algae and keep the tank clean. In practice, it’s just sitting up near the top of the tank doing nothing. At least the fish isn’t trying to eat it, which I’m told can sometimes occur. Of course, sometimes the snail can be the one doing the eating. That’s usually a disturbing sight to watch.

I’m experimenting with various website templates in the hopes that I’ll finally get my personal website up. Unfortunately, the majority of them require editing of various PSD files for customization, and my copy of CS2 is being really, really slow. Seriously, I don’t know what’s up. I even stole–I mean scavenged–an extra 256 meg memory chip from another computer in the house to see if it made any difference. It didn’t. So here I am, 768 megs of RAM, and my computer still hates Photoshop. Figures.

Oh, and I also went over to Lindsay’s house today to watch Mask of Zorro. Of course, we talked more than we watched, but I suppose that’s a fair trade-off. One funny incident: Lindsay was telling me how in Drama, she was talking to my sister Chelsea, when Chelsea found out I was coming to the closing night of Charley’s Aunt. Chelsea said, in typical sisterly fashion, “Oh, Cody will do anything for you, Lindsay.” Funny thing is, that’s not too far from the truth.

Now that I’ve emptied my brain into this post, I bid you good luck, and good night.

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