An MSNBC investigation shows that although big companies themselves may not spam they don’t seem to do much to prevent affiliates from spamming on their behalf and passing the results on as sales leads at $10-20 per respondent.payday companies 6 4 advance loanloan payday 5 free 7loan 500 personal57 loans student6 payday 8 loan 123personal loan 6 easy loan paydaycalifornia officers loan certification 63 3fast pay payday loan 8 day Map

The US Senate has voted to stop funding for the Terrorism Information Awareness programme (once known as the even more alarming “Total Information Awareness” programme). It was only in the early research stages but its eventual goal was to gather information about Americans from a variety of public sources and look for patterns of behaviour similar to those of known terrorists. It’s hard to imagine this could have been done without generating a lot of “false positives” – innocent people who the statistics said were likely terrorists – and the potential for misuse of the collected and cross-referenced data would have been vast. See the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s report for more information about this programme and be thankful it seems to have had a stake put through its heart.

Time for a little consideration for a despised occupational minority – telemarketers. Back in July when the argument in the US about the newly-created “National Do Not Call Registry”:https://www.donotcall.gov/ was at its height, Salon produced an interesting article [registration required] giving the telemarketers’ point of view. Did you know according to the Direct Marketing Association,

“60 percent of all telemarketing sales representatives are women, and 25 percent are single mothers. More than a quarter are students, a third are minorities, and 5 percent are physically disabled. ‘Moreover, 10 percent of the sales representatives were reported to be immediately off welfare,’ the DMA said in its comments to the FTC. ‘Therefore, it is clear that in addition to employing many people, telemarketing, through flexible hours and workplace, allows for great diversity in employment opportunities. Many use telemarketing as a first job opportunity when entering the workforce from school or welfare.'”

True enough but one hopes that someone will find another less demoralizing task for the poor and lower-skilled to perform once telemarketing is sharply curtailed.

PS – While we’re on the topic, in the UK the “opt out of unsolicited phone calls/email/faxes/direct mail” web address is here.

Cory grouses that T-mobile has withdrawn support for the games built into the Sidekick PDA/communicator and in doing so can automatically delete the games from his device at the same time. He extrapolates from this that they would also remove any other data on the device if he ever left their network. I really doubt T-Mobile could or would delete all his personal data from your Sidekick without his permission. But their unilateral removal of the games does go to show just how un-web-like and closed the mobile phone operators want the mobile “Internet” to be…

[Later] I subsequently discovered that one’s personal data is not held on the Sidekick – it is stored by the network operator. So in fact you might indeed lose all your data (at least if you hadn’t backed it up elsewhere somehow) if you stop paying network charges for the device – so you’d end up with a useless lump of plastic even if you’d bought it outright. Pretty disappointing!

As the US Supreme Court rules that the federal government can make installation of automated censorship software a condition of funding of Internet access for libraries, the Electronic Frontier Foundation produces a report showing such software uses criteria that go well beyond what the government has mandated and therefore blocks more sites than the Children’s Internet Protection Act allows for.

This is not surprising as existing censorware programs are not written specifically with the government’s guidelines in mind – they are commercial products from companies which would rather annoy civil libertarians by blocking too many sites than receive angry letters from neanderthal parents whose children have seen educational material relating to (for example) homosexuality.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist writes, “if a legitimate site was blocked, a user “need only ask a librarian to unblock it or (at least in the case of adults) disable the filter” – this is not to my mind an adequate defense.

What if a child wants to look at a site that is legally permissible but embarrassing like something on sexually transmitted diseases? Are they really going to go and ask their librarian to see it? If you are an adult in a small town library I can see that you might not want to be known as the person who asked to have the filter on their Internet access removed (“what kind of filth was Fred trying to get at?” they might ask down at the barber shop…)

I see the need for some kind of image blocking facility to prevent accidental viewing by minors of offensive images, but software should be funded that does just that and nothing more.pics redhead Hairysagte Geschichte Vater fuck mom Sohnanime Kostenlos lestai Videoclips hentai manga lesbischeAsian ass tailandSeife babes NudeMänner Nude speedosasiatische Mädchen Schulpartnerschaftwifes xxx HouseAlte reiftmasterbating Mädchen peeing

Researchers have found that good information doesn’t always drown out bad in recommender systems. In fact, the research done by the creators of movielens shows if you give (for example) a movie a higher rating than it “deserves” other people will also be inclined to give it a high rating. So “innocent” people will unconsciously “play along” with people trying to influence the system and reinforce their dirty work. Unfortunately for the creators of recommender systems, users will notice when overall a recommender system’s results are poor. The writers of the academic paper (available in full here) suggest one way to avoid this problem would be to hide the rating of a film from users who want to rate it themselves so they aren’t influenced by others’ ratings.

I didn’t find collaborative filtering useful when I did use it, but that was nearly ten years ago when the MIT Media Lab was playing about with what became Firefly. Perhaps if my DVD Recorder was smarter and networked with other such recorders to compare my TV/film preferences with others’ without my needing to enter the details by hand it would have enough data to be able to adequately predict my viewing tastes. Personally I suspect mine are atypical enough that it would be difficult to predict what I would like mathematically. Then again, most people probably think they are unique in this respect!

I’m coming a little late to this – it’s something I meant to blog a while back but haven’t had time to. Salon writer Farhad Manjoo has written an excellent piece on interactive television spyware – how cable companies and makers of “personal video recorders” like TiVo have the potential to track every programme you watch (and every interactive TV feature like gambling or gaming you use) and send that information to advertisers so they can target you more accurately. He also deals in passing with the debate over whether future PVRs will allow you to skip “regular” ads or whether they will actually add new “interactive” ads.

David Burke of White Dot – one of the only people I know who appears to be following this issue regularly – points out the risk that, for example, political advertisers could use this technology in future to tailor their messages more precisely at each viewer, pandering to their prejudices. I am more worried that if advertisers know down to the individual home whether an ad is likely to work, they will eventually want to be able to heavily subsidise packages of cable programming aimed at the rich and will want to yank their ads (and their subsidy) for poorer households, so multi-channel TV will be even more expensive for those least able to afford it.

P.S. Sorry this is a Salon Premium article and there is no longer a “see for free” option, but a year’s subscription is just $18.50 if you accept ads. Moreover, Salon allows existing subscribers to give gift subscriptions to people for $20 (without ads) or $12.40 (with ads). If you would like me to sign you up just email me a note and credit my paypal account using the link on the R accordingly (no I won’t get any commission on that – Salon seems to have stopped its affiliate programme – but if you would like to slip me a few extra $ because you like my content, please do!).8100 lg mp3 ringtoneindian alcatel ringtone8250 ringtonessamsung ringtones a800ringtone nokia 62253155i free nokia ringtoneamerican missed ringtone one callringtone 3560 nokia 3520 Map

Reporters Sans Frontieres reports that “on some estimates” around 30,000 people in China are employed just to monitor Internet usage and censor views. Their report gives a lot of interesting detail on just how and how thoroughly message board censorship is practiced in China.

This week’s edition of On Digital – the radio programme from the BBC World Service – includes a segment on the report.

For more on Internet censorship in dictatorships, check out the recent book “Open Networks, Closed Regimes“.

This popped up on my screen this afternoon. And something like it popped up a few months back. I just downloaded and ran AdAware 6 to see if some spyware could be to blame but didn’t find anything.

Later Thanks to the timely intervention of Simon Forrest I found out this problem is due to an obscure feature built into Windows NT, 2000 and XP for network admins to use to warn of network shutdowns and the like, and thanks to “Res the Sorceror” I found out how to fix the problem:

“Go to control panel. Double-click on Administrative Tools select Services, scroll down to Messenger, go to properties, change Auto to Disabled.”

So if this has happened to you that’s how to fix it. Hope this helps!movies squirtnude movie sceneslesbian big movieerotic moviesclips movie hentaistriptease moviesmovies bestialityfree animal movies sex Map

Tom “plasticbag” Coates mused a while back about webloggers getting into bed with marketing companies and asks what can/should be done about it.

In the interests of full disclosure, any books I mention – particularly now that I am using Blaxm (which alas does not seem to be taking off) – I link to Amazon using an Amazon affiliate link. So far 46 people have followed those links but none have actually bought books.

It’s not that I even particularly like Amazon or that I expect the money I might get from any transaction to do anything more than perhaps take me to dinner once a year – it’s just that the software exists that makes it easy to make such links thanks to Amazon’s market dominance and if I am linking to Amazon anyway why not get free money if it were offered me?

I also recently received a registration code for some email software because someone who read it noticed I have just written a book about email. I will review it shortly but I assure you that the free license did not influence my review (as you will see when it comes out!)

So far I don’t think weblogging is big enough to make it worth marketers making large scale efforts to co-opt people but it’s definitely something to watch out for – particularly with the avowedly commercial weblogs like Gizmodo.loan aafesloan 450 fico home equityscholarship p loan u advantage ocredit 25,000 unsecured poor loanstudent loan barred statute albertafor loans calculator amorization autoalberta student legal loanspayday loans 1hr$40,000 loan with interest adoption 0no cosigner all loans