trog’s haus

I have a Gmail account which is based on my real name. Since the advent of the Internet, I realised just how common my real name is around the world, which really should have come as no real surprise - but for some reason it did.

Gmail doesn’t pay attention to full stops in email addresses. That is, alicebob@gmail.com is the same address as alice.bob@gmail.com. This was reported ages ago and has been the subject of a lot of discussion, because it seemed like a bug - why would you want to get email that’s not addressed exactly to you?

At least one other person bearing my name has signed up for a Gmail account. Not an unreasonable thing for them to do. They no doubt got through the sign-up process with few problems and managed to create a Gmail account.

Or at least, they think they did. Unfortunately, they also think their email address is the same as mine (albeit with a full stop in the middle of it somewhere). Not a real drama, until they start giving that email address out to friends and family and using it for things like hotel reservations and business.

After all my time on the Internet, I’m long accustomed to getting email that I don’t want. I get literally hundreds of spams a day to my work and personal addresses that I ignore more or less completely.

However, emails like this tend to bust through my spam filter, because they’re often very similar to actual emails that I’d get myself. They’re definitely not spam, but they’re definitely emails that shouldn’t have made their way into my inbox.

I go to pains to NOT read these emails, and almost always hit reply to let the sender know (after a quick check to make sure they’re not spam that crept through) that their email was misdirected. When its a personal email or something from a business contact, I usually get a reply thanking me. But when its an automated email from a mailing list or some other non-human sending process, I’m a little bit torn about what to do.

I don’t really want to get any more emails from here, but often my only recourse from an automated email is to click a link in it that takes me to some sort of online profile, helpfully logging me in to someone else’s account. While there’s probably no real damage I could do (I’m sure, for example, that I couldn’t get my alternate namesake’s credit card details), if I was a little more malicious I could probably at least make his life a little uncomfortable or embarrassing.

Needless to say, I don’t want to do that. I just want the emails to stop. So this raises the question - can I ethically (and legally) claim some ownership of emails that are accidentally sent to an address that - while it isn’t mine per se, is still delivered to me - so that I can try to make sure the sender knows they’re sending it to the wrong person?

Case study:

My alternate namesake created a profile on an international dating site. He, no doubt, put in all sorts of personal information into this site. I could have probably gone in and messed with his profile and made him a she-male seeking furry companionship or something, but instead I went through this arduous and painful process of trying to contact the site through normal means to ask they take me off.

This process took weeks - they floundered around for a while trying to verify it, told me they’d removed me, I still got emails every few days, floundered around again, etc.

It would have been vastly easier for me to just log into the guy’s profile and delete his account. But I couldn’t do that - even though he’d used my email address to (somehow) create a profile, it wasn’t my account.

While I went through the process then, this guy just keeps signing up for services using my email address - thinking it’s his. I’m getting all sorts of stuff I don’t want. At some point, I’m just going to start deleting them, meaning they’ll go into a black hole until he finally figures it out.

I’m sure this is happening to a lot of other users. It’s crazy how much personal information I could have obtained from this guy without him even having the slightest idea about it - if I was maliciously inclined.

Obviously, you should be careful when deciding when to give someone your email address - the last thing you want is spam or more useless crap filling it up. But remember - also be careful that you’re giving it to them correctly, because it’s probably worse that your personal and private information is going to someone completely different.

David Harrison of the UK, I’m talking to you.

(Further - as a web developer-type, I find it somewhat objectionable that several sites have let this guy sign up to various emails and services without first verifying his email address.)

Revision3 got back to me and have confirmed that their content is still indeed released under a Creative Commons license.

It should be noted again though that redistribution of their “early access” releases - the shows made available for subscribers - is still strictly forbidden by their license agreement. In the interests of keeping the free content coming it’s obviously in everyone’s best interests to respect this policy.

Revision3.com is one of the biggest content creators in the burgeoning “Internet TV” market. They create and distribute a variety of popular shows, including Diggnation (as in digg.com, the pervasive social bookmarking site), PixelPerfect, Internet Superstar, and many others.

The Revision3.com site originally sported the Creative Commons logo - you might’ve seen it around:

This logo implies that the works on the site are made available under a Creative Commons license. While there are several different types of CC licenses, the most commonly used license is one that allows redistribution of content. This is extremely handy for us in Australia, as it means ISPs can easily mirror their content to make it available for their users usage-free. This is kind of a big deal, as any Australian broadband user will tell you, and I suspect will become a bigger deal for people in the US as they clamp down more on wild bandwidth usage.

Recently the site got a big overhaul - I don’t know when; I only visit it every couple months when I see they have a new show, and the Wayback Machine only goes back to August 2007.

Conspicuously absent from the new design - the Creative Commons logo.

Closer inspection also reveals the Creative Commons information is now not available in their content RSS feeds. I am not sure if it ever was, but I have a vague recollection it used to be - backed up by the fact that the RSS XML includes a references to a Creative Commons namespace. However, the feed doesn’t appear to be using that namespace at all - there’s no license applied to the relevant sections of the RSS document.

Some Googling also reveals that there has been a bit of angst from the Revision3 guys towards redistribution - part of their revenue model is to make episodes available early via a private access system to paying subscribers. However, it seems some dastardly types would get those early release videos and then distribute them publicly, citing the Creative Commons as their reason for doing so. Legal issues aside, it’s obviously a douchebag thing to do, and it’s unsurprising that Revision3 took legal action to try and stamp it out.

A quick read of the the Terms of use for the revision3.com site doesn’t really mention much about the content. It does specifically mention that you can’t redistribute “member only, not publicly released downloads” - hopefully putting a stop to people leaking those subscriber-only early access videos.

There’s one reference to Creative Commons:

By uploading, submitting or otherwise disclosing or distributing Content of any kind at or on the Site or otherwise through the Services, unless source quoted, you represent and warrant that you own all rights in the Content and you agree that the Content will be subject to the Creative Commons Public Domain License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/. All of our non-member downloads comply with creative commons 2.5.

(Emphasis mine).

This raises the question of what exactly constitues “non-member downloads”. It seems that is it probably the video content that we’re after, but it’s just a little bit too vague, especially in the context of a legal agreement.

The current situation and the net result of the above is that, at least to my eyes, the licensing of the Revision3 content is now more nebulous than it was previously, simply because of the removal of the Creative Commons logo.

While it is possible that they’re trying to distance themselves from the Creative Commons license with a view to better control and accounting of the distribution of their content, it seems that this is. It’d also be a huge shame, because it would probably dramatically decrease their audience, the size of which is arguably a direct result of their distribution model.

Last week I emailed Revision3’s official contact address to try and clarify this position - as yet I haven’t received a reply, so I have emailed them again today (from a different address, in case spam filtering was an issue) and I have also posed the same question publicly on their forums.

A follow-up to my earlier post about problems with the Linksys WAG325N ADSL modem device - after going through a couple of hours of Live Chat with the Linksys team, they have finally admitted defeat and asked me to send it back in, as it seems a hardware fault is responsible for at least the 10mbit fallback problem.

Several other users are still reporting the problems; some have also sent theirs back only to get another faulty unit and have to send it back again - so hopefully at some point in the process we’ll end up getting working units.

I am hoping there’s just a bad batch of these things out there and it’s a relatively simple hardware fault that can be magically fixed. This is my first time buying Linksys hardware so needless to say I’m a little disappointed; I’m especially not looking forward to sending this back and being without a modem/switch/wifi device for the duration.

I bought a Linksys WAG325N a month or so ago, after using a borrowed one for a while and thinking it was pretty good. Aside from the fact that I bought it brand new from Harvey Norman and it had clearly already been used (someone else had already set it up in the admin panel), it works pretty well except for two bugs that are present in the latest firmware (v1.00.11) - one of which I would call ‘critical’.

The two bugs have been documented on their forums:

1) Ethernet ports intermittently fall back to 10mbit mode, requiring a restart of the modem
2) Windows Mobile wireless devices cannot connect.

Both of these problems disappear if you roll back to a previous revision of the firmware (I’m using 1.00.06).

My mum forwarded me an email containing a PowerPoint presentation purporting to be a bunch of images taken by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams while she was up in space.

While space pictures are awesome, as always my first instinct upon receipt was that it was probably bullshit, and so I did a bit of Googling. Turns out at least one of the photos was taken pre-2003 and from a quick Google I did it seems that there’s a bit of dispute about several of the other photos too.

I can’t actually find any authoritative source for any of those photos actually being from Sunita - I haven’t seen them on any of the websites that I visit (with nerdish regularity) that have photos from the Shuttle missions, NASA, etc.

While the pictures are neat and hopefully will encourage people to take more of an interest in getting us off this rock, it serves as yet another reminder not to automatically believe anything you read in your inbox. Or on the Internet. Or in the newspaper, or on the news, or anything anyone tells you, ever.

Edit: I should point out that _some_ of the photos might actually be hers - but I can’t find any proof that they in fact are. All I can find is that at least one of them is probably not hers, which raises doubt over the others.

The Qt guys have released a new daily build which includes a new WebKit module.

WebKit is the excellent web browser engine which the Mac OS X browser Safari is built on. After trying the latest Safari build, I was blown away by its speed, so I’ve been keeping an eye on the (very rapid!) development of the various projects trying to bring an open source WebKit-based browser to Windows.

I downloaded the daily build thinking it would have binaries to test it out, but it doesn’t - fortunately it includes awesome tools so its dead easy to compile (so even half-assed people like me can make it work).

Anyway, if you’re interested in testing out the latest build, you can grab it here: qt-win-browser-4.4.0-snapshot-20080305.zip.

Note at this stage you’ll need Visual Studio Express or something installed for all the runtime stuff, thanks to the impossibly painful way Microsoft made it build executables. I’ll see if I can get it to compile statically so anyone can run it.

Just an interesting note - it took spammers less than 24 hours to realise I had a WordPress site up - I’ve had 5 spam attempts so far via the comments thing. 48 hours later, Google’s cache still hasn’t noticed it. Not really surprising; I’m sure Google don’t index this that regularly, but I just thought it was funny.

After extensive testing of various alternatives (false: I tried two things, Drupal and Wordpress), I’ve migrated trog.qgl.org to using WordPress.

As much fun as it is messing endlessly trying to hack a blog-type thing into shape, there’s just practically no point when a billion of other people - arguably much better at it than me - are working on something the sole purpose of which is to provide blog-like functionality.

I got bored of trying to maintain something that was blog-like and decided to cave and just install the same damn thing everyone else is using. WordPress is, in all honesty, quite a nice piece of software - it looks well maintained, its flexible and functional, and does what it’s supposed to do.

Whether it will prompt me to update more, well, that’s another matter.

Deezer is a cool new French website that lets you stream music - deezer.com.