HaloScan Bought Out by JS-Kit

Good and evil kittens. icanhascheezburger.com.

Tired of HaloScan Sucking? Rejoice, Rejoice, Rejoice.

The deal is scheduled to close in 30 days.

Implementation has already started.

Some of the recent suckage has to do with migration issues. The claim is, as sites migrate over -- in theory, seamlessly and you can believe as much of that as you want -- the remaining sites will go faster as the load on HaloScan's servers decreases. The migrated sites moved to JS-Kit will go faster because they're on the good stuff. Thus, all is of the good.

So they say.

We're backing up comments. A lot. Frequently.

The Washington Post

JS-Kit, a provider of Javascript comments, ratings, and poll widgets for blogs, has announced their acquisition of HaloScan, one of the largest hosted comments service providers. This announcement is also coordinated with the launch of several major features. Financial terms were not disclosed.

HaloScan had previously partnered with JS-Kit in January to provide the users of their comment system with "one-click" deployment of JS-Kit's ratings widget (providing ratings for articles, not ratings for comments). This acquisition will result in an exponential increase of JS-Kit's customer base, providing new access to over 520,000 participating sites, bringing its total reach to about 550,000 sites. JS-Kit also claims that with this new acquisition, it will be registering 300+ new sites per day. HaloScan's comment systems will integrate with JS-Kit's Ratings, Polls, Reviews, Navigator, and Advisor widgets. JS-Kit's comments also comes with full Akismet spam protection and profanity filters.

JS-Kit will leverage its newly acquired users to launch important new features. One of which is the implementation of an open standards-based, portable, user profile. Users will have access to all of the comments made on any JS-Kit participating site through an OpenID login system. The portable profile is accessible through a pop-up on the hosting site. This does lend itself to easier discovery, which could possibly help with adoption for new publishers.

This also goes hand-in-hand with another new feature that JS-Kit is implementing, SEO support. JS-Kit now sets up a static page for indexing comment content, which you can host on your server as a sub-domain, so search engines see the content on your site, and not JS-Kit's.

Faster, better, standards based. Better technical support and backup solutions.

Also, you get access to ALL comments on EVERY site you comment (with OpenID.) This is causing a fight with JS-Kit's competition. Whatever.

What I like most is GNB will get credit for links to Group News Blog -- thousands of them across the Internet over months -- which people put in comments. It certainly will drive our rankings higher. Good news babycakes.

I am pleased by their promises. Now... we shall see.

As always, what counts is action, not campaign promises.

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Electronic Search and Seziure at the Border

Ironkey secure flashdrive.

What is this Fourth Amendment You Keep Talking About?

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in April, all your electronics belong to us.

Seriously.

Your laptop, your flash drive, your PDA, your iPod. Fourth Amendment? We don't need no stinking Fourth Amendment. We're the United States Customs. This is no-man's land, buddy-boy. We own your ass.

We can search you without reasonable cause or warrant. Strip-search you, x-ray you, and make you poop into a bowl.

As of April, Customs can take every electronic device you have.

Newsweek

Returning from a vacation to Germany in February, freelance journalist Bill Hogan was selected for additional screening by customs officials at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. Agents searched his luggage, he said, "then they told me that they were impounding my laptop."

Shaken by the encounter, Hogan examined his bags and found the agents had also inspected the memory card from his camera. "It was fortunate that I didn't use [the laptop] for work," he said, "or I would have had to call up all my sources and tell them that the government had just seized their information." When customs offered to return the computer nearly two weeks later, Hogan had it shipped to his lawyer.

How common Hogan's experience is remains unclear. But an April ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection, does have full authority to search any electronic devices without suspicion in the same way that it can inspect briefcases.

But congressional investigators say that copies of drives are sometimes made, meaning customs could be duplicating corporate secrets, legal and financial data, personal E-mails and photographs, along with stored passwords for accounts with companies ranging from Netflix to Bank of America.

The practice of storing and duplicating material might be something that both opponents and supporters of seizure could agree to regulate, says Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, an otherwise staunch supporter of customs' authority. Larry Cunningham, an assistant district attorney from New York, told the hearing: "I am aware of no authority that would permit the government, without probable cause to believe it contains contraband, to keep a person's laptop or to copy the contents of its files."

Customs insists that terrorism and child pornography are sufficient justification for electronics searches. And even civil libertarians agree it makes sense for customs to search luggage, which could pose immediate dangers to aircraft and passengers. But, says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, "customs officials do not go through briefcases to review and copy paper business records or personal diaries, which is apparently what they are now doing in digital form. These pda's don't have bombs in them."

Customs doesn't make copies of the files in your briefcase. For them to copy the files on your computer is to turn over one's life to the government.

“Stop! In the Name of Law” -- All crimes against the Constitution can be justified by The Four Horsemen of the Internet:

• Terrorism
• Drugs
• Child Porn
• Racism & Hatred

Rip the Bill of Rights up. We're making a safer world for the Children.

What can you do?

Take only a clean laptop and an encrypted flash drive through Customs. Be prepared to lose them forever. Send any data you care about over an encrypted channel before you cross the border.

Until the Judges currently on the Bench are replaced with ones who respect the Constitution -- a thirty year project, which will only come to pass once we have a progressive President elected, and guess what kids, Obama ain't him -- there isn't much we can ultimately do. A netroots caucus in Congress would help. Specific laws about this would help.

Ultimately what is needed is to shift the country back to a deep respect for the Constitution. Searching every electronic device, keeping them and rifling through them... obvious bullshit. Yet here it is, real as $140 oil and climbing (before we're formally at war with Iran.)

Obviously the Bush administration came up with this steaming crock of cow dung. What amazes me is the Ninth Circuit went along.

h/t Crooks and Liars.

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Rise Of The Machines?

Never Mind “Cyberdyne Systems”—Here Comes Microsoft!

An IT friend e-mailed me this and I frankly thought it was a spoof...a joke.

It ain't.

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.

Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.

Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health.

If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.

I knew that automation would someday come to replace a lot of things, but seeing the office snitch go the way of carbon paper and eyeshades is just wrong. Scrambling a nosey WiFi signal out of spite just doesn't have the same zip as cornering a backstabbing weasel in the Men's Room and threatening to cave in his skull with the stainless steel hand dryer, or sneakily Tabasco-ing his Vitamin Water as revenge for diming you out about your two-vodka tonic lunch with the hot vendor.

Although I must say, a cyber-Linda Tripp beats all hell outta having to pass a flesh and blood one in the hall.



Kidding aside here, my IT friend and I had a brief but very animated discussion about this. “The thing'll be able to tell if you had a lunchtime drink—or two and digitally rat you out. It'll report on your very move during the workday and how you feel—whether you get agitated before big meetings, or at what time your energy dips. It'd probably be able to break shit down fine enough to give readouts to a superior as you talked to him on the phone. Your smiley voice couldn't hide a blood-pressure spike or teeth grinding...or lies about progress and deadlines. I mean, what does a lie-detector report on? The same stuff. Think that kinda data wouldn't find its way to people come performance review time? Everybody jokes about how 'evil' Microsoft is and says that's what Cyberdyne was based on. 'Ha-ha.' You laugh that shit off and then you hear a story like this. What can you say? This is the kinda bullshit that'll make people in my biz root for the employees for once. If I put a thousand 'fuckins' in front of the word obtrusive that wouldn't say the half of it.”

I thought about it. Would some control-freak of a boss pull an employee aside to tell them that perhaps they shouldn't have a sip of champagne at the in-office functions because the data indicates that it “depresses them and hinders their productivity by as much as eleven percent?”

I want to say fuck that...and then I realize that thirty years ago I marveled at my AMT Star Trek “Communicator” model and laughed at the idea of a communication device being that small and working as it did.

And then I look on my desk at my RAZR phone and realize it is the Goddamned communicator—right down to the flip lid and location beacon, and then sadly further realize that the idea of a control freak boss or corporation abusing a program like the one being patented isn't just a possibility, but a stone-lock definite.

Never mind the feasibility of the set-up itself. I'd almost forgotten that NASA astronauts were monitored on that level while hundreds of thoiusands of miles away in space. Monitoring Ethan or Sara Cuberat a from few feet away would be a piece of “sleep-inducing-if-eaten-after-3:00-pm-so-maybe-you-should-skip-it-when-you're-on-deadline” cake . Big a tech geek as I am, I cherish my time “off the grid” when I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with my cell phone off, avoiding public tran. The tetheredness of many of my friends to all things communication-oriented is anathema to me. As is the idea of people in general giving so much of themselves to “the job” that they practically live there anyway as opposed to home—now umbillical-izing themselves to their paymasters while there...literally.

I suppose the obvious joke is that if the set-up is two-way—in essence, a feedback loop—the boss man could rig the son-of-a-bitch to zap the shit out of you should your energy flag. eh? Seems the logical, controlling next step.

For some reason, I just can't muster up the laugh I want to about that.

Is it wrong for thoughts of “The Matrix”, the pictured dystopian “Deathlok”, and The Terminator movies all-encompassing and fateful “Cyberdyne” to come to mind? I don't think so. Granted, the worrisome implementation of sentient artificial intelligence is not quite here, but again, that over-dependence on and tehtheredness to the siliconed, transistored world should give us more than pause.

Being jacked directly into one's work computer is something that should make your blood run Chicago-in-January cold.

Coda:

At work the other day, I went to the Men's Room and found myself at the sink finishing up.

No knobs to turn. Just that small “Hal 9000”-ish light near the faucet for the electric eye motion-sensor that prompts the water.

Couldn't get the damn thing to go. Went down to the next sink. Same thing. Got down to the fourth sink and finally got the water to run. By this time, there were two other co-workers futilely “Ed Norton” pantomining to get the other sinks to work as I had been.

“This one works.” I said.

“Jesus Christ.” one of them said. “Half the time I come in here, I can't get the water to work with these...things. I have trouble with a faucet with knobs on it maybe...one time out of ten. Can't even wash my hands. Ridiculous.”

The other guy wanly said. “It's the battery. There's a little battery in there, and when it gets low, it'll light sometimes, but it just won't trigger the flow.”

“But no knobs to use when that happens, right?”, the first co-worker said, gesturing at the bare stem of a spigot.

“Yeah.” the other laughed.

“New York, 2008, and I can't wash my hands half the time because of a friggin' ten cent battery? Now I know why people go off the grid.”

And with that he walked out, grumbling.

As I walked out behind him, the remaining co-worker said, “Never really thought about that. Kinda fucked up you can't even wash your hands without a little computer being involved.”

In the words of a noted idiot embracer of all things computerized running every aspect of our lives, “In-deed.”

There's more...

Nah...I Don't Like Macs

Look Who's Ba-aaaaaack...

Death, Taxes, Rudy Giuliani being an asshole, and lots of sparks, flames and smoke in comments on a post on anything Apple computer related.

All of these things are inevitable.

As Hubris pointed out here, there is a bit of history massaging with this new Disney (Urrrrrgh. Sorry Jesse, in spite of some wonderful product—and I can normally overlook issues and focus directly on ‘product”—the company's been a bad actor in too many ways of late for me to dig on 'em) ride exhibit where the history of communications/computing will be depicted via the use of animatronic figures—but one specific animatronic “*LMD” has got some folks in an upoar.

It's the one of Apple's Steve Jobs—to the exclusion of his fellow midwife at personal computing's true birth, Steve Wozniak.

And it's true as Hubris says that “one of the benefits of being on the board is that you can indeed “write people out of history.”

But a ride at a Disney theme park is hardly Stalin's crew of airbrushers removing no longer favored cronies with a poof-poof-poof of gouache.

Wozniak, post his plane crash in 1981 has been a bit of an eccentric (a mother-of-all-concussions after plowing his aircraft into a steep embankment shortly after liftoff fucked him up pretty badly insofar as all manners of amnesia and odd brain fucnctioning) and withdrew even further (he was already quite the introvert) from the public spotlight cast on those then-young masters of Silicon Valley. He was a brilliant software/hardware designer and builder who simply tired of the rat race shortly after his initial, but mammoth engineering successes.

The whirring and clicking Jobs at the Disney ride will do nothing to dim Woz's accomplishments. They're too well documented and so much the stuff of can-do legend. If the “Hall of Presidents” exhibit was all we had to go by to learn about Abe Lincoln, well...it'd be one sorry-ass world we lived in. It isn't., and Wozniak's legacy is safe.

Plus, even though he's no longer a day-to-day employee at ol' Infinite Loop, he still draws a paycheck and is a shareolder—which is kind of scary to think about how wealthy he must be, having gotten in at the ground level and seeing that stock split, and then double its worth again in the last three years. Maybe that brag of his about always carrying at least $20,000 in cash on him is true.

I mean...Goddamn!

But the fact remains that Jobs is the company's public face—like it or not. Woz's retreat into the shadows may have been a factor in fueling Jobs seeming ubiquity. But remember, he booked up too, and was coaxed back after the Gil Amelio debacle of the mid-nineties. The company was damaged goods and he put his face, name, and ass on the line when Apple needed to pull itself back from the brink. Perhaps he got lucky. Maybe it was good timing, and he sold his soul to the devil for a machine that allowed him to simultaneously tap the brains of superior computer intellects for their ideas, and mass-delude millions of people into believing the resulting products integrated better with their lives than what they were using. I dunno. What I do know is that he NOT a technical genius or the second coming of Modok, The Living Brain.

What he is a genius at is in marketing, style sensibility and trend-sniffing.

Madonna didn't invent “The Vogue”, she just packaged it and sold it perfectly.

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile. What he did was perfect it's production and market it phenomenally.

Jobs is an iconic figure in that sense—the Ford/Madonna sense. I tip my cap, there.

What strikes me is the venom against him, though. I, and no one else for that matter saw him bounding across the stage screaming “I love this COMPANY!”, in full, crazed Ballmer-mode. That smug, self-assuredness may come off like a screaming boast, but in the end, it's just smug, self-assuredness. The “Come on, you want this stuff and you KNOW IT” smirk sets a lot of people off, evidently. Me? I could care less. There's a lot of “hateration and holleartion up in this here dancery” over Apple's “marketing”. I don't understand it. The company's still in a single-digit share of the market, so why so much venom instead of what should be ridicule? I could see it f they were going all “GoDaddy” with trashy promotions and the like, but that's not it. If there's a “problem” with their marketing, some major annoyance that is patently egregious. I'd love to know just what that is.

I mean...Is it the “cool” factor that so sends people 'round the bend? What makes for that “cool”? Is it the “Reality Distortion Field” button on that machine Jobs got from the devil? Or is it the fact that Apple routinely ties a certain elegance of operation—software, to an equally elegant physical aesthetic—hardware design, and that draws a definite, maddening distinction between them and the competition?

Maybe it's that whole “cult of personality” thing, and a lot of folks just find Jobs' confident soft-sell stealthily arrogant. Crazy-making, in fact.

Again, I don't care. I met the guy and talked to him for a few minutes when they opened the Apple Store here in NY. Went for the opening day free swag, saw him and said ”Hi. I like your company's products.” Told him some ways he could improve on iMovie and Final Cut Pro, and to maybe inform consumers better about the short life of his computers PRAM batteries and how when those cheap items fail, they cause no end of trouble. How they should maintain them to maximize their life. He listened, said they were looking for a way to do away with dealing with that old technology altogether and that they had some ideas on that.

Shook my hand, got an extra free T-shirt and he had a floor person give me a 20% discount voucher for my next purchase. Seemed decent enough.

And I wasn't kidding. I very much like—no, let me piss off the detractors here—LOOOOOOOVE Apple's products.

Why? Because they work consistently—unlike the Windows stuff I've had to use when under a deadline. Maybe it was bad luck on my part, but I had four major failures of Windows-based items during four major projects, and I have come to not trust the stuff. Never liked the A,B,C,D drive set-up. Drivers (Sweet Jesus...DRIVERS!) and their machine and project-wrecking instability—Urrrrgh! The needless difficulty in doing simple tasks?

I walked away easily to Macs. Even with the instability issues of some iterations of OS's 8 and 9, they still worked far better for me. I'm a graphics/audio/video professional, and the Mac was seemingly made for me, and people like me. My brother switched after an album he was working on ran away to hide in a Windows-seizured system. A teacher friend I gave an old Mac to switched and bought a G5 when he started work on a chlldren's book he was creating. He got tired two years ago of his Windows computers (2 of 'em in three years) barking at him and going down at inopportune times. I have found that if you DEPEND of a computer for your graphics and art production (audio/video/film/multimedia), a Mac just seems to do that better.

If you're a gamer, and don't stress your computer with all the dedicated horsepower, and data path zipping that high-end creative applications require, a Windows box is probably more your speed.

But in the end, both camps are beginning to meet in the middle—the Windows stuff is getting better at system reliability for creative professionals, and the Mac stuff is doing much better at general computing beyond the creative.

I just need something that consistently works—and in my personal empirical dealings, the Macs are it.

They're NOT trouble free. You have to maintain 'em, just like a car that needs oil and an occasional tune-up. You have to mind your free drive space. Occasionally rebuild permissions. Keep your desktop cleaned up and so on. That being said, my problems with them have been miniscule compared with other platforms. I did have a problem with my old PowerBook 540C, where it kept forgetting the date and needed a double start-up to get going. I took it to a repair facility here in NY that shall remain nameless, and I saw the technician do a key command and I was charged $49.00.

I said never again, and I set out from that day to learn more about the damned things so I wouldn't get ripped off by another tech. Two years later, I could tear a machine down to the Mother Board and rebuild it or upgrade it. Ram, processors, video cards, hard drives, ROM swaps, overclocks—I could do it. I haven't been to a repair facility since, and began to make money troubleshooting on my own, though I mostly worked for free for friends doing upgrades and customizations.

Yesssssss, you can customize a Mac. I've done several. Started out with a shell or laptop case with no HD, processor, RAM or anything and rebuilt the damn things to newer, more powerful specs. Steve featured my re-tooled old Wallstreet PowerBook at the New Blog two years ago. Pimped the shit outta that one. Swapped out the G3 for a G4 brain, maxed the RAM, swapped in a DVD burner, made her wireless, added Firewire and USB and ditched the old 6GB HD for a 60GB.

Even pimped the case. Machine's corporate code name was “Wallstreet”, but I wanted it to look not like a broker's hoopty, but something a CEO would rock, So I tricked it out with a case customization. Deep red to simulate the leather of a bigwig's office couch, and a mahogany inlay to get that wood-paneled “club” look. I changed the machine's name from Wallstreet, to “Mogul”

That machine is pictured at the top of the post.

And in my troubleshooting, hobbyist travels over the years, my red beauty is not alone here at Casa de LM. So many Macs have passed through my hands—cast-offs that people handed me, trades from other repair folk, and my own curiosities that I've gathered out of my collector's spirit (Computers, vintage sports jerseys, vintage radios, records, and action figures), that I've got quite a group of Macs of my own—not including the numerous ones I've rebuilt and upgraded and given away to schools, friends and family.

This picture is of the various Macs in my personal collection. More than enough to make an Apple hater sick for months. And every one of 'em works!

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)


Clockwise from top left:
A.) My workhorse Graphics Dual 1.25 GHZ G4—tricked out with 3 HDs (one for system, one for media, one as a scratch disk), then my son's tricked-out GarageBand G4 Dualie (3 HDs also), and my first truly powerful desktop, a G4-upgraded Blue & White “G3” (with 4 HDs). All had their old optical drives swapped out for DVD burners. The Quicksilver and Blue & White I got from a swap list. So cheap, it hurt! :)

B.) The displays for those machines—one's an Apple monitor, the other a castoff Dell I rescued from a canvas dumpster.

C.) My workhorse PowerBook G4 1 GHZ. maxed out the RAM, dropped in a 120 GB HD...Ohhhh, she runs sweet. Note her twin in the BG at left. Got 'em both free for brokering a deal with a guy who had a surplus of 'em gently used and I put him in touch with a program that needed laptops.

D.) My red beauty “Mogul”. Steve was gonna clonk me on the head for this baby when I let him hold her in his hands. He and I had gone back and forth “nyah-nyah-ing” each other online about Macs supposed inability to be customized. They can be. This was an old 233 MHZ G3 when I got her from eBay for $150. Two months later it was a 550 MHZ G4 with a DVD burner, monster HD, maxed RAM and the custom case pimping. Pop ya' collah, son!

E.) My wall of vintage PowerBooks. from L to R, the aforementioned 540C (“Blackbird“), as featured in Mission: Impossible I (Ving Rhames used that model), my beloved 1400C (“Epic”) that started life as a 133 MHZ but got Frankensteined into a 466 MHZ G3 with a fat HD, and lastly, my still awesome 3400C (“Hooper”) 240 MHZ sub-woofered monster. Some of the best sound of any laptop ever produced—4 speakers! (and the model Jeff Goldblum used in “Independence Day”)

F.) The same 1 GHZ Titanium as shown on the opposite side—except the desktop pic of a Bond-era Jill St. John is visible minus the browser window. Redheads...“sigh!”. (Mrs. LM never sees that desktop pic. I switch to my Dodge Charger from “Bullitt” when she strolls by.)

And G.) The Wonder Twins at the bottom—2 Mirror Drive Door G4s. One is my main A/V machine (I do the YouTubes on it), a Dual 1.4 GHZ rip-snorter with 2GB of RAM, three HDs, Two burners) and the backup/loaner (for friends) machine, a total twin. Atop the twins are the fraternal twins—the aforementioned “Mogul” PowerBook at left, and at right its twin under the hood, but with a shiny black marble inlay. My brother's getting that machine for Christmas.

Just fell in love with the look of 'em, and how they worked. Not pictured—my first PowerBook, a 145B with a B&W screen. That one's packed away at Mom's house in the attic. Also not pictured, the display for the A/V machine.

As you can see...I don't like Macs even a little bit. :)

Okay, I'm being facetious. I love my Macs. As for Jobs? Eh. He's just a dude.

Put him in an animatronic exhibit? Don't really care. Want to impress folks? Truly represent computer/communication history with a Cheeto-chomping (with cheesey scent piped in) animatronic internet troll. Yeah!

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