This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for November 2004
Countries with very high and very low levels of political freedom have low levels of terrorism. Geography is a factor as well. Seems to me that a common factor is how well you can hide…difficult to plan terrorist acts in an open society, a tightly controlled society, or in open terrain.
The many Venn diagrams of user experience. Nothing sells your ideas better than three intersecting circles.
ICANN’s new policy not as bad as I thought it was
Update: It looks like Netcraft was a little overzealous in reporting the dangers this policy change poses and I misunderstood what is at issue here. Michael Moncur explains:
1. This policy is for registrar transfers, not ownership transfers. It doesn’t make it any easier for a domain to be hijacked, except perhaps by a corrupt registrar.
2. The gaining registrar is still required to confirm the transfer: A transfer must not be allowed to proceed if no confirmation is received by the Gaining Registrar.
The policy change is to keep registrars from holding domains hostage when people wish to transfer them, which is a worthy goal. I don’t want my domains to go to another registrar, so I’ve still got them transfer locked, but it’s unlikely that anyone will have to cancel their vacation just to keep an eye on their domain names. Embarrassed apologies for any panic induced…my ass has been fact checked and it’s a little sore.
——-
Many of you are domain owners and have probably seen this elsewhere lately, but in case you haven’t, pay attention. ICANN has a new policy about domain name transfers which will make hijacking domains much easier:
Domain transfer requests will be automatically approved in five days unless they are explicitly denied by the account owner. This is a change from current procedure, in which a domain’s ownership and nameservers remain unchanged if there is no response to a transfer request. This could mean trouble for domain owners who don’t closely manage their records. Domains with incorrect e-mail addresses and outdated administrative contact information are at particular risk, as the domain’s WHOIS database information will be used to inform domain owners of transfer requests. A non-response becomes the equivalent of answering “yes” to a transfer request, according to the ICANN policy change.
What this means is that any dufus can drop 20 domain names into this form at register.com, hope that a couple of those folks don’t get the emails from their registrars about the transfer (because they’re on vacation for a week, the email gets spam filtered, etc.), and take those domains from their rightful proprietors. You probably have some sort of recourse through your registrar or ICANN, but I wouldn’t expect it to be particularly timely (more than 5 days certainly) or rigorous.
So, what can you do about this? Some suggestions:
1. Make sure your contact information listed with your domain registrar is up to date. If a transfer request comes in for a domain you own and your email address on file with them no longer works, you won’t hear about it until your domain name redirects to big-hot-mammas.com.
2. Don’t go on vacation for more than 4 days or have someone check your email while you’re gone. Impractical, but whaddya gonna do?
3. Make sure your spam filters aren’t filtering out email from your domain registrar.
4. Some domain registrars allow you to “transfer lock” your domains. Do so now. According to one disgruntled register.com customer, register.com has no such feature at this time….you’re on your own, sucker!
5. Complain to ICANN…here’s some contact information and their Board of Directors.
Scenes from a deli
Pretty much every day for the last year and a half or so, I stop at the same deli to purchase some orange juice on the way to work. When I first started going, there were two Asian women who operated the cash registers and seeing them churn through customers was like watching a fine ballet or elite athletes at the top of their game. They knew the price of every item in the store, had your change to you almost before you’d paid them, and had everything in a bag in the blink of an eye, all while constantly chattering back and forth in their native tongue and bantering with customers, everything on autopilot. They moved so fast that they could have been picking pockets as well and no one would have noticed.
One morning about nine months ago, I came in to find that one of the two women was gone and had been replaced by another woman who, it seemed, had never worked in such a fast-paced environment. She was sooo slow. Her more experienced counterpart served 4-5 customers in the time it took her to serve one…it was almost painful to observe, like watching me playing Kasporov in chess. I felt bad for her and figured she wouldn’t last more than a few days, but the next couple of months saw steady improvement as she learned the job and got used to the routine. However, she was still not as fast as the other woman by at least a factor of two.
All that has changed in the last month. I don’t know what happened, but the new woman is now working as fast and efficiently as her partner. And what’s more, she has learned my individual habits (no bag or napkin unless I get something to eat and no straw unless it’s a carton), something which the other two women had never done despite my daily visit. It’s been fun watching her develop into a kick-ass employee and now when I go in, I try to pay at her register if I can.
I hereby recommend Broadband Optimizer for OS X. My d/l speed for large files increased dramatically using this.
Frontline’s The Persuaders “is a giant steaming crock of shit”. “Culture is good, so I’m going to redefine it to this whole different thing because I think it’s bad now.”
The Uncanny Valley, or why Polar Express is so creepy. The Incredibles doesn’t have this problem because the characters are still cartoons, not real humans.
Friday night is singles night at Wal-Mart in Germany. “The events have become such hits in Germany, increasing Friday night sales 25%, that Wal-Mart has trademarked the name ‘Singles Shopping’ to deter copycats”.
NYC’s 311 phone service…making local government smarter. “Think of 311 as a kind of massively distributed extension of the city’s perceptual systems, harnessing millions of ordinary eyes on the street to detect emerging problems or report unmet needs.”
The sexier side of McDonald’s. Ever seen a chick dressed as Ronald McDonald pull a hamburger out of her bosom? You will.
Best Buy CEO: “Culturally I want to be very careful. The most dangerous image I can think of is a retailer that wants to fire customers.”. As part of that effort, perhaps you might want to stop referring to 20% of your customers as “devils” in the Wall Street Journal.
Chef in French school introducing fine but affordable cuisine to students, who are now skipping McDonald’s at lunch to eat in the cafeteria. Students and teachers eat such dishes as leek souffle and squid ink pasta, and most of the ingredients are grown or raised locally.
“From here on out, blue state voters should simply stop caring about what happens to red state voters”. Could probably make a case for vice versa as well.
This page on Google is the default start page for Firefox. Could this be the extent of all the Google Browser hoopla?
The excellent Firefox browser goes 1.0. The Web site is getting pounded right now, so go check later.
So close, yet so far away
[Potential Jeopardy spoilers] Ken Jennings is still ruling the airwaves on Jeopardy…he won his 69th game yesterday and has amassed a little over $2.3 million in winnings. As reported here in September, Ken’s run is due to end after his 74th win. His 70th show is tonight, followed by two weeks of the college tournament ending on Nov 23. Assuming that Jeopardy does not air on Wed-Fri due to the Thanksgiving holiday** and returns to a normal schedule the next week, his final win will occur on Thu, Dec 2 and he will finally lose on Fri, Dec 3.
** If Jeopardy shows are aired over Thanksgiving, his 75th show will air on Tue, Nov 30 instead. That’s the earliest the show would air if you’re determined not to miss it. I’m sure we’ll know more about the exact scheduling as the end of the month approaches and I’ll let you know when I know.
Image annotations with DHTML. Like Flickr’s annotation without the Flash.
Advice for the party thrower
Chi Chi Valenti is a NYC Nightlife Empress, but in this interview for Gothamist, she throws down some great general advice:
Since someone’s always hooking up, getting wasted or starting a fight these days, my standard for a great party is somewhat higher. Most importantly, there must be a MIX - Vampires and diamond dealers, legends and New Kids, fetishists and objects of worship, romantics and cynics, geeks and pop stars, boys, girls and everything in between. Historically, New York’s best parties (and club nights) have combined all ages, gender prefs, income levels and style schools. A roomful of one kind of person is boring and predictable - it is the mark of the provinces.
What’s true for parties is also true for ideas, friends, and experiences; diversity is a good thing.
On Bush’s plan to turn America into an ownership society. “The ownership society promises freedom, but at the price of a huge shift in risk, away from government and society and onto individual citizens.”
Faces of the NYC Marathon. Rion captures people after they’ve finished the race.
The next season of Six Feet Under will be its last season. This bums me out, but it’s probably a good idea not to go too long.
David Brooks on the election results and how evangelical Christians had little to do with the outcome. Gold star for this bit: “If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?”
The Incredibles
The Incredibles is just a flat-out fun movie. Tons of laughs, some nice family moments, and lots of explosions and cool stunts (although the latter were somewhat subdued because of the crappy sound in our theatre). Elastigirl is my new favorite superhero…great superpowers, a wonderful mom, and she vacuums too. Edna Mole, voiced by Brad Bird, who also wrote and directed the film, was the funniest character, but the uber-quick Dash provided the best laugh of the movie for me. The film was also packed with references to other movies. I only caught the Star Wars ones, but I’m sure that some industrious movie nerds are even now compiling an extensive list of references which will be available on the web soon.
Cory Doctorow’s riff on branding and trademarks. Trademarks went from protecting consumers to protecting brands.
The purple by-county map of the 2004 election results adjusted for population. This is close to a true picture of how “divided” we are as a country.
Trailer for Pixar’s new movie, Cars. No, not that new movie…the way new movie due out in 2005.
Upscale hotels now offering in-room iPods, sometimes encased in Lucite and chained down. It didn’t work for Jabba in keeping Han from walking away. (Oh wait, that was carbonite…)
James Surowiecki on the decline of branding. “We’ve always overestimated the power of branding while underestimating consumers’ ability to recognize quality.”
The Incredibles is getting some good reviews on Metacritic. Looking forward to seeing it tonight.
Socials & More