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You Lost Me at Crash, Microsoft

Today was the last straw. While setting up a network printer, (so that my laptop could print via wi-fi), Windows Vista's print spooler crashed. It never used to crash. Now it crashes...Every time. I put the error message into google and out came thousands of forums posts. People everywhere were complaining about Vista not working with their printers. Printers?! This isn't some arcane function people use irregularly. After 2 hours of trying everything and rebooting several times, I realized this was just a big 'ol vista bug.

On my desk, I have Windows running on one screen and an iMac sitting to the right of it. The iMac is usually off.

After almost pulling my hair out, I calmly put down the laptop, walked over to my desk, and switched my Mac to my primary computer. I'm now in the process of dumping all my personal files onto the Mac as I slowly phase out my Windows computer.

The hours I've dumped into repairing Windows has finally gotten to me. My introduction to Vista was a 5 hour install time that blue-screened twice and asked for my valid Vista CD-Key 10 times. I don't need that kind of stuff anymore.

Goodbye Windows.

StumbleUpon Should Label Paid Content

Major companies that make their living off of ad revenue respect the distinction between content and paid content. The New York Times has a tiny "advertisement" on the top as well as refuses to print text in the exact font as the articles. Sites like Fark label links "Sponsored Link" and even smaller sites like I-Am-Bored correctly label an ad "AD".

The problem with stumbleUpon is they rely on the deception as part of their business model. Located on their ad page, they have, "See how many people rated your content thumbs-up or thumbs-down." This obviously would get slanted if people knew they were looking at paid content.

Digg fights hard to keep purchased links from hitting their list. Imagine if they actually implemented an ad model that interweaves paid links with content, without stating which are ads. The community would revolt and digg would be forced to, at a minimum, label the advertised links.

Returning to the New York Times, what if they didn't implement a distinction and people read an advertisement thinking it was potentially real journalism? If you think that could create problems, then realize it's actually happening on stumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has been getting much more popular and as a result, more advertisers want to use it as a platform (and more ads will unknowingly appear on stumble). Advertisers are deceptive, and stumbleUpon has delivered a perfect platform for them to deceive you.

My iPhone Likes to Call People

It's like an episode from Seinfeld. Jerry gets a new phone as a gift and puts a woman on hold when George calls. He talks to George and eventually switches back to the other line, only to find she hung up. Concerned, he switches back to George who informs Jerry that he heard the entire conversation while on the hold line.

Today my iPhone called my girlfriend while I was talking to someone else. She ended up having a 10 minute voicemail of my conversation (which luckily wasn't about her). This rarely seems to happen, but there is a bug somewhere in the phone.

I personally think the bug is somewhere in the call switching. It rarely happens, but didn't end with my girlfriend hearing a random conversation today. Also today, my iPhone called someone else right after I hung it up. I was about to put the phone back into my pocket when I hear, "Hello? Hello?". I then had to apologize for the phone's inappropriate behavior.

I also know I'm not the only one who's experienced this, because I too was prank called by my friend's phone a couple weeks ago. I heard a muffled conversation that I assume was from his pocket.

Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to cheat Digg

Ever since I decided to host DOWNFLY on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, I’ve been drinking the Amazon kool-aid.

Everything they are doing is revolutionary and also helps out start-ups like me. Their simple storage makes data redundant not just between machines, but between data centers before it gives a ‘successfully uploaded’ message (drool). And their EC2 allows me to boot up virtual machines on demand.

So I naturally thought the Mechanical Turk, a service by Amazon that allows you to outline a task and then have people perform it (Artificial Artificial Intelligence), was equally amazing and revolutionary.

Imagine all the great things you can do with it. You can have people tag images, classify articles, and create heaps of rich meta data. You can do artistic things like the 10,000 sheep market. But will this turn into another invention that was created out of good intention only to be misused by people?

It doesn’t take too much brainstorming to figure out devious things to do with the Mechanical Turk. I can start a request to have 1,000 people sign up for Digg (or use their Digg account) and digg this article (which I assure you I did not). I can say I’ll pay them each 10 cents for their efforts. I now paid $100 for a front page Digg link. Basically, I can start cheating and gaming systems that computers find difficult to game, but people find easy.

What about finding a vendor that pays you 50 cents a survey and you pay out on the turk 10 cents to take it? This one is already a reality.

How about this one? I’m a restaurant owner in New York City. I know people read reviews off of citysearch.com and menupages.com and make decisions on where to eat based off of them. So I post a job for 100 people to write convincing reviews and all give high ratings.

Sure you could do that yourself – but they’d all come from the same IP address and that can be detected. These types of AAI attacks would be extremely difficult to detect.