Zaphod's Deepest Thoughts

Radio Contests Can Lead to Personal Information Disclosure.

There is this local radio station I enjoy very much, KTWO AM . I use them for my daily dose of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, plus Coast to Coast AM. Lately, they have been running a "Listener Fan Club" type contest thing, where if you enter certain words e-mailed to you, and said on the air, into their website, you can redeem these for prizes. Great, so I played the game for awhile, earned some points, and went to redeem them for a compact fluorescent light bulb.

SURPRISE! To claim it you had to fill out a IRS form W9, and give it to them.

Never before in the past had I need to fill out a W9 for promotional materials,

Now, as far as I knew, non-monetary prizes were not considered income unless the amount was extreme. But still, the thought of turning over my social security number to a radio station I am not employed by, just to claim a less than $1.00 (before store mark-up) compact fluorescent light bulb, sets off alarm bells. In this age of information theft, I am suspect of anyone reaching for my SSN without need.

I probably wouldn't mind as much if I had to send the W9 into the IRS myself, but leaving my SSN in the files of a non-related entity bothers me. As it stands now, I am not going to claim my prize due to this, and further, I am going to drop out of their "fan club" and send all further contacts to the trash in my e-mail. Sadly since there is no way to un-join the fan-club on the website, I will probably have to flag it as spam.

Now, before you freak out, I hold the Talent, DJs, newscasters, and even the station's GM, faultless. I do however suspect something fishy in the bean-counting department, or the middle/upper management. Your social security number just shouldn't be given out like this, nor should it be used for identification. Any business I can think of, would normally just write off such a small amount as the cost of doing business. I even have doubt the DJs know about this W9 silliness.

Even stranger, I am still going to listen to this station, because I like the people running it, and the content. However, in my opinion, they really need to be bought be a local benefactor, and given more control over their destiny... I do not believe the corporation holding title to KTWO has the best interests of the people of Wyoming at heart.

This article and content of this site in whole, is opinion covered under the 1st Amendment, and is not to be taken as an endorsement, nor detractment of any product or service.

New Filetopia 4 name and logo leaked!

Wow, I never thought I would see anything new out of them, but here it is...

 

Amazing isn't it?

Actually, it's not, it's a bad, somewhat inside joke based on this software in development forever. Sure hope it doesn't make for too much bad karma. But on a REAL NOTE...

BeTaGuRu has released a bugfix patch for Filetopia being run under Windows Vista, you can get it HERE.

ElePHPants shouldn't face left!

For those of you who can't stand the idea of putting a left facing elephpant on your PHP powered website like this one...

 

Might I suggest this one? Free to use with pride!

 

Yet another small stab at subliminal leftist suggesion in the flood of media.

Zap!

Edit: Have a downloadable pack of different sizes, and filetypes, and some are transparent! elephpant_to_the_right.zip

Forum Spam, and how to stop it cold.

Funny...

When I first started my forum, about the only posting I got was from spambots and malbots, dropping infectious links, and links to bogus drug company websites selling some magical brew to make my gonads grow to incredible lengths, or make my breasts larger.

Well, I would love to have huge 'nads... but forget the breast increase! LOL

So, I decided the way to keep them out, was develop a new CAPTCHA system, starting with the old one, and tweaking it into something that Mr. Bot's OCR couldn't see through.

I thought long and hard on this. And my solution was to forget how the eyes work, and forget how recognition works, and instead concentrate on how the interim step, the visual cortex works. Yes, bots have been able to crawl through most CAPTCHAs till now. I have "bounced" 100% of over 100 attempts out of the registration process. The solution, is optical illusion. Namely the type that antagonizes neurons in such a manner as to set up a wave function that causes a perceived letter to appear.

<= This is what the new CAPTCHA looks like to a human.

and this is what the captcha looks like in detail =>

As you can see, there is nothing there for an OCR system to lock onto. Just a 50% pixelated background no matter where you look, with 50% pixelated letters placed on it. If averaged, it gets blurred out. Contrast is also 100%, black and white, so there is no stretching the contrast to any effect. Scanning for gross detail, will show nothing, and scanning for fine detail will show allot of noise. Nope, this one is pretty much reserved for humans. And depending on some other things, I will release it to the GNU/LGPL V.2 in June, or perhaps earlier if any of you comment as such.

Head over to my forum , and try it out for yourself! :)

EDIT 5/18 : Wonderful response on it! Have fastracked it! Go HERE to get it!

And the beat goes on!

Just what is Yuwie? A blog site? A social networking site? A bad business model? You be the judge!

Get on over to http://www.profy.com/2008/03/03/yuwie-social-or-pyramid-network/ ...

the word-war is still going strong, and, at worst, it dull, at best, it's hillarious!

Zap!

Stripped by someone elses blog, here's my reply in full, on how to break away from Yuwie.

The original post was on, and the original stripped reply was on http://www.profy.com/2008/03/03/yuwie-social-or-pyramid-network/ Here is the full text of my reply...

Forget Yuwie. I have some friends who dumped 100s of hours in design, and time into Yuwie, and got paid 99 cents. Their "downlines" (read:suckers who signed up under them) numbered in the 100s too. So for the amount of ads they are showing, and what Yuwie is getting paid for it, they are making hardly nothing.

counterpoint: Oh! But they are making something, you just admited to that!

retort: If I hired you, as a semi-skilled web designer, and offered to pay you 1/2 of 1 cent per hour of your thoughtful hard labor, what whould you say? But rather than just whine about a place getting super-cut-rate below

sweatshop wage labor out of innocent people, let me give you some free advice, about some free things... It's up to you to put it together right though, and you do need a broadband connection.

http://www.dyndns.com/services/dns/dyndns/ <= Use the free service.

http://janaserver.de/start.php?lang=en <= Free server to point the above at.

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ <= Makes a blog website on above server real easy.

http://adsense.google.com <= Free advertising program that pays you real money.

you can add these for more power...

http://php.net/ <= Free module to use with above server package.

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html <= Free DB manager to use with above. .

and finally...

http://zaphodb777.dyndns.org <= My website that uses all of the above, and makes an honest 10-20 cents a day so far (it's young) from Google.

Yes it's work and learning, but no more than having to jump through Yuwie's hoops, and eventually alot less work once established, and much more money in your pocket! :)

Zap

(PS. I should really copy this to my own blog!)

(PPS. And I did!)

The power of webcams.

Okay, I used to think that webcams were just cute little technological thingamabobs that were an addition to a website. It's turning out they are much much more. I put up my webcam of Casper Mountain, and then submitted to 4 camera indexing sites. Wasn't expecting much, but...

The response was amazing. Almost as many visitors as sites I had submitted to! So, I have gone whole hog and submitted to every APPROPRIATE site that came up in the first 10 pages of the Google search results. Let's see what happens.

So here is my advice, if you have the savvy to set up a webcam like at http://zaphodb777.dyndns.org/webcam.php and hope to make money off something like http://adsense.google.com/  by all means get with it. It can drive gobs of visitors to your site.

What should you point your webcam at? How about the yard where the dog plays, or the bird feeder, or even the street outside? I am lucky enough to have a glorious 1KM tall mountain to point mine at, but even a marina, or a pretty red cliff that changed with the light would be nice. You could, on the edge of etiquette post a picture you took with your digital cam, and update it daily. ( Just please warn visitors not to wait all day for the next image.)

Oh, and forget porn... that is so NOT what people surfing the web who buy actual products are looking for. I would almost bet, that there would be punitive actions by adsense if you had filth on your pages. As a matter of fact, it is against their policy.

So let's get clickin' like Chickety China the Chinese Chicken, and show the world our corners of it!