The problem with syndicated news

SMH (NSW) story: A man has been shot dead on Valentine’s Day, in what locals are saying was a jealous argument over an ex-wife. A large search is now underway for the killer around the small town of Gulgong, near Mudgee in the state’s central west.

Age (Vic) story: A man has been shot dead on Valentine’s Day, in what locals are saying was a jealous argument over an ex-wife. A large search is now underway for the killer around the small town of Gulgong, near Mudgee in the state’s central west.

At the time I initially looked, neither story had any indication which state this happened in, except the SMH one linked to a Google map of Gulgong, NSW. I had guessed that, since I recalled Mudgee was in NSW.

When you’re feeding your local stories into the global (or at least national) media machine, a little more info on where it’s happening would help a lot.

Stupidity

Google Inc today lost a copyright fight launched by Belgian French-language newspapers which demanded the web search service remove their stories, claiming it infringed copyright laws. … They complained that the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis. It was unclear if Google would have to pay a fine.

— Wire story: Google loses case against Belgian papers

That’s just stupid. You don’t need to go around suing search engines to stop your stuff getting into their databases. Every web developer who knows anything about this knows you just need to drop a robots.txt file onto your web site and it stops all search engines and archivers stone dead.

To ignore that, and send the lawyers in instead just looks like you’re not looking for a solution, you’re looking for money.

The cost of the pitch

What spammers don’t seem to realise is that advertising doesn’t scale. Spruikers know this — that’s why every shop doesn’t have one, it would be a cacophony of noise. Junk (snail) mail people know this — if everybody’s mail box was flooded 100% of the time, everybody would get a No Junk Mail sticker. (Mind you I did once get 28 items in one day.) Telemarketers… well, they may not have figured it out yet.

In fact no, I’ve changed my mind. It’s all about the cost of the pitch. As the cost approaches zero, and assuming there’s no regulations preventing it, there’s more pitching. So those who don’t batton down the phone hatches like I do get endless calls. And spammers flood email boxes, despite that their pitch would work better if it was the only one that arrived that day. Not to mention if it wasn’t in broken English.

Which is why my Gmail spam folder currently has 2702 items in it.

Do people wanting to buy Cialis and Viagra actually wait around for a spam to arrive telling them how to get it? Why don’t they just go to the chemist?

OpenID – the next big thing?

Over the years, as new web services have come into prominence, there’s been a rush to get hold of the best IDs. Most people would chase something resembling their name, with those with popular names too late to the game being left with the lame IDs: nicknames, real name + licence plate number, or hackerz sp34k versions.

Some of the defunct web sites I got good IDs for include Excite and mail.com. Some I still use include Gmail (and all the other Google properties), Hotmail and Yahoo.

With the news that Microsoft will be supporting OpenId, I reckon the next big rush could be for this, particularly if Google and Yahoo are sensible and decide to jump on the bandwagon.

OpenID identifies you by a URL/URI, so it’s marginally less user-friendly than a conventional logon, but if it takes off (*if*) and gets widespread use around the web, from a user point of view, it could go a long way towards cutting down on the zillions of passwords people currently have to remember… and thus have to write them all down.

So I’ve got my OpenID already. Have you? Now, since Flickr are pissing everybody off with new limitations, maybe I’ll go over to Zooomr and take a look around there.

DealsDepot.com.au is spamming blogs

People are comment-spamming blogs on behalf of DealsDepot.com.au. The comments I’m getting look something like this:

Name: mirror
E-mail: mirrorconsultancy@yahoo.com
IP: 125.22.69.34

Talking of [topic], may be if you want to buy [product] at best price, I have a suggestion to make do look up Online Shopping

I’ve had about a dozen of these today, hitting various entries, where the topic closely resembles the topic of the blog post hit, though the link to [product] is often tenuous.

Apparently (see comment 16 here) the company offers discounts from products in return for people posting blog comments about them. Certainly looking around they appear to be successfully hitting a lot of blogs.

Not mine though.

More examples after the fold.
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Low impact installations

If only application installations were more like Java or Flash applets — low impact, with no permanent hooks into the host computer. Files that just sit in a directory, rather than installing themselves all over the filesystem, the registry, wherever-else.

Then maybe we wouldn’t be tempted to regularly rebuild operating systems, just to regain some of the lost performance, and removal of unused apps would be clean and painless.

Is it too much to ask?

No Vista clean install for you!

Counting on buying an upgrade version of Windows Vista, but wiping the machine first of the old version so it’s a clean install? Bad luck, Microsoft’s made changes that will prevent it, unless you install onto an empty partition. Never mind that it’ll make a periodic re-install a right pain in the arse. What were they thinking?

PS. Tuesday: Ed Bott pours cold water on this, not saying it’s untrue, but saying “wait and see…”

SFTP from scheduled tasks

I was asked to set up a daily SFTP job to push files off a Windows box.

Windows has FTP built-in. But SFTP? Well there’s the free (and open-source) Putty implementation which provides a number of SSH tools, including SFTP. Free is good. I like free.

Putty SFTP is fairly straightforward to use from the command line; pretty similar to any other ftp client. Basically chuck everything into a directory and you can run it directly. Under Windows it caches public keys into the Windows Registry in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and will ask about this the first time.

For batch use, you can create a BAT file that calls it like this

psftp -l [user] -pw [password] [host] -P [port] -b [scriptfile]

…and just put your FTP commands into the script file.

For running it as a scheduled task, you’d preferably want to run it under a special user, as you wouldn’t want it under your own user account. It seems not to like asking about caching unless you’re the person logged in. Even running with RUNAS didn’t work for me — it flashed up something lightning-fast, but immediately failed.

The only way around it I could find was to log on interactively as the scheduled task user. As expected it asked the first time. Subsequent times it didn’t ask, and worked happily as a scheduled task.

(Also found recently: How to set up an SFTP server on a Windows machine. Or a prefab one like FreeFtpD is also an option.)