How To Spot A Psychopath

Some users of the Optus ISP here in Australia are having problems accessing dansdata.com. It’s been happening for a while - here are people complaining about it in September, with the later reports only a few days ago.

I think all of the people with this problem have Optus cable Internet (as opposed to DSL or dial-up or satellite or carrier pigeon), though, fortunately, very far from all Optus cable users seem to have the problem. The nature of the problem is pleasingly clear: Dansdata.com has, from their point of view, been completely gone for weeks now, if not months.

Except it’s not, of course. I may only put up one new article per decade on dansdata.com, but I have not died or been abducted by Zeta Reticulans or decided to reject technology and return to the land.

In the olden days of the late 1990s, the first diagnostic step when you wanted to see if a site was really down or if the problem was to do with your own Internet connection was to feed the site URL to Babelfish or one of the numerous dodgy proxy sites, and see if they could see it.

Now we’ve got more elegant solutions, in isitup.org and, if you prefer more verbose URLs, the very-similar-looking downforeveryoneorjustme.com. (I hope those two sites are actually run by different people - they seem, at least, to be on different servers - so they won’t often ironically both go down at once.)

Anyway, I’m not certain about the exact nature of these problems, because a few people have e-mailed me about them, but when I ask them for details, they don’t reply. I don’t get a bounce message, either. This is exactly what you’d expect if some Optus router has decided that www.dansdata.com and mail.dansdata.com and everythingelse.dansdata.com are filthy spam servers all traffic from which is to be subjected to damnatio memoriae.

I’ve asked my Web hosts, SecureWebs, whether this is anything to do with them. It isn’t. Well, it might be, very indirectly, since the server dansdata.com is on has occasionally been blocked on one or another of the many spam-server lists because of real or imagined misdeeds by other sites that share the server or nearby SecureWebs IP addresses. The Optus block could have been caused by that sort of thing, and then accidentally never cancelled. But Blogsome, who host this blog, stack rather more blogs per IP address than SecureWebs do sites, and the worst that’s resulted from that to date has been a few days when bit.ly was warning people who clicked links from my Tweets that dansdata.blogsome.com might be bad.

I’ve also asked Optus, and they replied almost instantly to tell me that they could not replicate the problem, please send soil samples, et cetera.

So we need two things.

One: Some more detailed info about who using Optus can’t see my site. This can easily be acquired by means I am about to explain in tedious detail.

Two: Complaints to Optus from the people who can’t see my site, including the above info. Send the results to me as well - just posting them as a comment here will do very nicely - but you’re much more likely to get action from a giant ISP on a weird problem like this if lots of people report it than if one person aggregates info and forwards it like a petition.

I could keep fiddling around trying to contact the Optus-using complainants from my addresses at other ISPs - I reckon my Optus account ought to be able to reach ‘em. And I will. But I’ll just point them to this blog post, so now that I’ve finally gotten around to writing it, so we can all try to figure it out together.

(I freely admit that I’ve known some people were having this problem for weeks now, but I was hoping the problem would just go away when someone at Optus hit a reset button or finally got rid of zzzzmust_delete_this_by_sep_9_09.cfg.)

The Whirlpool forum thread I mentioned earlier points to an excellent article on the Whirlpool wiki, “Is this site down?“. The instructions there pretty much cover what you need to do, plus some other possibly-helpful stuff.

Basically, people who can’t see dansdata.com need to ping and traceroute dansdata.com, and see what they get. Optus themselves turn out to have a Web-accessible Looking Glass server and a traceroute one too. Those can see my site, so if you can’t, comparing and contrasting their results with your own could be helpful.

The easiest way to ping and traceroute from your computer is via the command line. In Windows, click Start, type “cmd”, and in the resultant window just type

ping dansdata.com

and then

tracert dansdata.com

If your local DNS doesn’t resolve dansdata.com to anything - “…could not find host dansdata.com”, “unable to resolve target system name dansdata.com” - you can try bypassing the DNS and just going straight to the server’s IP address, which is 64.85.21.19:

ping 64.85.21.19
tracert 64.85.21.19

(You can just type or paste 64.85.21.19 into your browser address bar to go to the site, by the way, if you actually can get to 64.85.21.19 from where you are. This advanced hacking technique has delivered precious, precious boobies to countless office workers and teenagers toiling under the yoke of sufficiently stupid site-blocking software.)

You can copy-and-paste the results from a Windows command-line window to somewhere else - like a comment and/or complaint message - by selecting the text, to do which you’ll probably need to use the cumbersome Edit -> Mark option in the command-line window’s lone menu.

If you want to be all fancy and bypass the Mark-ing, you can do this:

ping dansdata.com >>c:\dan_results.txt
tracert dansdata.com >>c:\dan_results.txt
ping 64.85.21.19 >>c:\dan_results.txt
tracert 64.85.21.19 >>c:\dan_results.txt

Presuming you have a C: drive, this will create a text file called dan_results.txt there and append the results of the commands to it, instead of just displaying them in the command-line window.

(If you used a single > instead of >>, each new output would overwrite the contents of the text file, instead of being tacked on at the end.)

Like all hip and happening ISPs, Optus only want you to contact them via some stupid Web form that redirects to a billion-character URL and that could be sending your message to screwyou@example.com for all you know. But with any luck a dozen or so people all suffering from the same disease will cause some action.

Now fly, my pretties! Fly!

Ever since I started this blog, people have been complaining, quite rightly, about the dumb comment box, which was tiny and had no preview feature.

Blog comment boxes are generally unsuitable for posting really big comments, because it’s painful to edit a lot of text in even a large preview box, and because if something times out or otherwise dies when you click “submit”, you can easily end up losing everything you wrote. But there’s a large grey area between “quick one-liner” comments, small enough that you could dash them off via SMS if you had to, and “comments you obviously have to write in a text editor”. Numerous people found themselves lost in this grey area, and many comments were hideously maimed.

I presumed it would be difficult for me to fix this, and back-burnered the problem for years on end. (I also hand-corrected comments that were screwed up because the author couldn’t preview them. It was the least I could do.)

As it turns out, though, it’s piss-easy to give a Blogsome blog a proper JavaScript live comment preview. All you have to do is paste some stuff into one of the template files.

So now, at long last, there’s a proper comment preview on How To Spot A Psychopath. Do tell me if it doesn’t work properly in whatever browser you’re running; I’ve only checked it in Firefox, Chrome and IE6 on Windows.

(Bonus points if you have to tell me via e-mail, because the preview box screws up your browser so badly that you now can’t post a comment at all! Oh, and because the preview is done in JavaScript, it of course won’t work if you have JavaScript disabled or blocked, or if you’re using some antediluvian/mobile-phone/C64 browser that doesn’t support JavaScript at all.)

Yes, I am suitably embarrassed about not having taken the five minutes to do this at some previous point in the last two and a half years.

(I still have the silly CAPTCHA thing, where if you’re not logged in you’re told to fill out the CAPCTHA to post your comment, and then you discover that you actually can’t comment at all unless you’re logged in, and further discover that the CAPTCHA disappears entirely once you are logged in. I consider this slight imperfection in my blog to be evidence of its hand-crafted nature, and may take another two and a half years to fix it.)

This looked like another boring spammy e-mail asking me to link to a site full of crap or post someone’s ready-made advertorial in return for a kickback, but it turned out to be a lot more entertaining.

From: Strickman Ripps <sri-australia@live.com>
To: <dan@dansdata.com>
Subject: Hey Dan, what about this idea?
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 16:32:40 -0400

Hi Dan. My name is Jeremiah Pietroniro and I am working with Strickman Research out of NYC. We are looking for people who have made suggestions about operating systems in forums over the course of the last few years. We think that your readers might be just the people we’re looking for. If you are interested in posting something to get their attention and get them to speak with us, we have a proposal for you.

I’ve included a form letter that explains in greater detail what and who I am talking about. Thanks for taking a moment to check it out.

Jeremiah

Subject: Research Proposal

Dear Administrator:

My name is Jeremiah Pietroniro and I am with Strickman Research in New York City. We have been hired by Microsoft to conduct a paid, international blog and forum research study, finding people who have commented on various versions of their Windows OS. You have probably already been contacted by Microsoft about this research study. We are looking for people who have previously made suggestions or expressed their wishes about certain features or functions they would like to see in future versions of Windows and/or features that they currently appreciate in the Windows 7 Beta.

We are wondering if we could pay you for your assistance in reaching out to your site users? We would like to find these people by announcing our search in a system-wide email to all your users. In order to preserve the integrity of our findings, we must withhold Microsoft’s name from this study. We kindly ask for your understanding and cooperation in this. It is imperative that Microsoft’s name not appear in any further written or verbal communication.

We are proposing a $500 US up-front payment to your website (via Paypal) for sending out our call for submissions by email to all your users. (Please see the text of our proposed email below.*) You would receive an additional $25 US per person for each person from your site that qualifies for and participates in our research video interview, for which they would be paid $100 US.

We realize that privacy is a concern and can assure you that any respondents who choose to participate will only be contacted in connection with this project and their personal information will not be stored or shared for any other purpose.

We thank you for your consideration and for providing such a great platform for the tech community.

Please let me know your thoughts about this proposal or any facet of our project. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Jeremiah Pietroniro
Strickman Research
66 W. Broadway #602
New York, NY 10007
australia@strickman-ripps.com

Proposed e-mail from Hosts to Members

Subject: your opinion + 20 minutes = $100

Dear Member:

Strickman Research, a marketing research firm, has contacted us for assistance in reaching out to you with this invitation to participate in a paid research study. If you qualify for the study, they would ask for no more than 20 minutes of your time and would pay you $100 US:

What are we researching?

We are looking for people who have left comments on various blogs and forums about operating system software they’ve used. We are looking for people who have previously “published” their suggestions online and expressed their wishes for certain features or functions they would like to see in future versions of various PC operating systems. Such comments can run the gamut from very technical to very broad, for instance comments like: “I wish it would boot faster.” or “How can I share files between my home computers?” would suffice. The wishes and suggestions can be implied in a question where one is hoping to find a solution to a particular problem.

We are looking for comments published online between 1/2005 – 12/2008. More recent, positive assessments of newer operating systems published in 2009 may also be pertinent.

How do I participate?

If you left a written comment on a blog, forum or informational website which was, broadly speaking, a suggestion or wish for a certain feature or function you would like to see improved in your computer’s operating system, please find your specific comment or comments online and paste the address/es in an email to us at australia@strickman-ripps.com

Please include:

1. The link to your comment/s including the date when it/they was/were posted

2. Your username on that/those site/s

3. Full name

4. Email address

5. Phone number

6. Location (CityState/Country)

7. Best time to be reached

What should I expect?

Once we have received your email, and reviewed your comment/s, a representative from Strickman Research will contact you by phone to ask you a few qualifying questions. This call will take no more than 10 minutes of your time. If you qualify (95% of applicants should qualify) we will schedule you for a recorded internet video chat at your convenience that would take no more than 20 minutes of your time and for which you would be paid $100 US in the form of a VISA cash card.

What if I don’t qualify?

If you do not meet the criteria for our research study, we will most likely let you know in the first few minutes of our phone call. We will not trouble you any further and we will not store or share you contact information.

What if I have other questions?

Please email us. We look forward to hearing from you.

Many thanks for your consideration,

Jeremiah Pietroniro
Strickman Research
66 W. Broadway #602
New York, NY 10007
www.strickman-ripps.com

---

Insert movie times and more without leaving Hotmail®. See how.

(That’s right - Mr Pietroniro is sending his super-secret big-buck Microsoft marketing messages from a Hotmail account.)

My favourite part is definitely “…to preserve the integrity of our findings … It is imperative that Microsoft’s name not appear”.

I really don’t know what to make of this. It’s weird. I mean, even ignoring the DON’T TELL ANYBODY IT’S COMMISSIONED BY MICROSOFT OMG part for a moment, look at the bizarrely huge payouts they’re offering. You usually only see promised rewards of this magnitude in classic “Make Money By Filling Out Surveys!” scams.

“95% of applicants should qualify”, times the number of applicants even moderately popular sites like mine could drum up in response to a “$US100 for a 20 minute survey” offer, would start running into the millions of dollars in only a day or two. All you need to make it past the starting gate, after all, is a comment on a forum somewhere in which you express your wish that future operating systems will include one of those fascinating doughnut-making machines. Write your comment, e-mail the survey people, wait for your promised 95% chance of making $US100 in 20 minutes.

Perhaps Strickman Research only have enough people in their phone bank to handle a small number of surveys a day, which’d keep the total cost down. But then, of course, a more accurate description of the deal would be that “99% of applicants will never even get a call”.

(The payment, via “Visa cash card”, may be on the dodgy side too; those things are apparently often something of a rip-off all by themselves, and I’ve no idea how, or even if, the deal would work for people outside the USA.)

Keeping the identity of the sponsor a secret is not actually, by itself, an ethical problem. You need to disclose who sponsored a survey if and when you publicly release the results, but there’s no need to disclose the sponsor to the people being surveyed - actually, disclosing the sponsor can often prejudice the results. This especially applies in situations like political polling, where telling someone that the survey is being run by the party they hate, or indeed by the party they love, may plausibly cause them to say things they don’t really believe just to move the poll results one way or another. (This is kind of the opposite of a “push poll“; there’s a lengthy analysis of these issues here.)

This same argument definitely also applies to people’s computer-operating-system preferences. There are plenty of people who have a more distinct preference for a particular OS than they have for any political party.

But then again, people are perfectly happy to offer Microsoft advice on improving Windows for free, all the time, all over the place. This offer is only extended to people who’ve already expressed such an opinion, and I find it hard to believe that just being honest and saying “Microsoft is soliciting user feedback about features you’d like to see in future versions of Windows” wouldn’t be just as effective.

Do they really think they’ll gain access to some wellspring of OS-design inspiration by offering large amounts of money from a secret source?

Actually, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing turned out to be some kind of scam, that doesn’t actually have anything to do with Microsoft at all. While fishing around to see what the heck is going on, I found this blog post, from someone who just received an instant message from another “Strickman Ripps” person. That blogger has, I think not unreasonably, decided the message could be from a scam artist, based on this same weird promise of lots of money for no real effort, from someone with another darn Hotmail address.

Even if this really is a genuine offer from a rather unprofessional company whose services Microsoft have actually retained, offering someone a substantial lump of money in return for (a) publicity and (b) keeping something about the publicity deal secret… that just smells wrong, to me.

Accepting restrictions on journalistic freedom in return for “access” to news sources is bad enough. Accepting restrictions in return for a plain old pile of money is way over the line.

I’m not suggesting that some survey about computer operating systems is a major journalistic-ethics battleground. I think it’s actually only a couple of notches above the everyday situation where entertainment reporters can have their very own five-minute interview with Mister Big Movie Star, on condition that they don’t ask him anything about his bizarre religion.

But I’m generally in favour of letting cats out of bags. Especially if some PR agency with an advanced Web site demands that the cats remain within said bag.

That $500 would have been a nice contribution to my new-PC fund. But it now occurs to me that you readers can all pretend you read about the deal somewhere else and never saw the word “Microsoft” anywhere, then write an OS-feature-suggestion comment on your favourite scrapbooking or Twilight fanfic forum, then apply for your 95%-guaranteed hundred bucks, and after you get your money, kick back a little of it to me!

What could possibly go wrong?!

The computer on which I’m writing this is still the dual-core Athlon I wrote about in early 2006. Since then, it’s had some new RAM, a new video card and about as many hard drives as I could stuff into it, but the faithful old mildly-overclocked Athlon 64 X2 3800+ has kept on chugging along.

I’ve been planning to upgrade for ages, but my income’s taken a serious dip lately. Most of my money comes from ads of one kind or another - annoying ones from Burst Media, less annoying ones from Google, and my various you-can-buy-this-from affiliate links to Aus PC Market - and the global economic slump has hit all of these sources pretty hard. I’m currently making maybe 60% of my income a year ago, and less than half of what I made a couple of years before that.

So I’ve been putting off upgrading, and putting it off some more, and continuing to put it off, on account of how computer gear gets cheaper and faster pretty much by the week. But lately, my income has been dropping faster than component prices. 50%-tax-deduction-bonus or no 50%-tax-deduction-bonus, I just can’t swing a new computer, and see no real prospect of being able to in the near future.

The sensible course of action for me now is, of course, to stop complaining and just keep my old PC. Maybe, to minimise the chance of catastrophic failure, I should buy a new boot drive and clone the old one onto it; I’ve already done that once, and I’ve similarly upgraded a couple of data drives. (If your computer is more than a few years old, I strongly recommend you upgrade the boot drive, too. Every hard drive will die one day; people often add more drives to their PC, but they seldom upgrade the boot device, because it’s a hassle. But a dead boot drive can be really, really annoying. Waiting six hours for a clone operation is greatly preferable.)

I’m in no danger of actually running out of money, you understand. The cats, and staggering numbers of freeloading cockatoos, are going to keep getting fed. And my life remains ludicrously luxurious compared with that of most of the world’s population.

I also keep perversely doing unprofitable things, like picking fights with scam artists and expanding my reprinted magazine columns (like the one I just put up, or this vastly expanded one from last year).

But many of you seem to quite like that stuff. And I haven’t had a donation drive since September 2008. And back in 2002, you suckers faithful readers together donated up the not-insubstantial purchase price of…

…a 16th-scale Tamiya Pershing tank kit.

So what the hell.

Anybody want to pitch in a few bucks to buy me a shiny new computer? If you do, my PayPal donation page is right here. Or you can just click this button:

You can send me an Amazon gift certificate too if you like, but all I can do with that is buy books and DVDs, since Amazon ship nothing else outside the USA. Oh, and if you’re in Australia and would like to bank-transfer some money to me, e-mail me and if you sound trustworthy I’ll give you my bank details. Since those bank details are sufficient to make fake cheques, though, I’m not putting them on public display.

NOTE: I’m not the only person tightening his or her belt at the moment, and I’m far from the most deserving recipient of your charity. If you’re tossing up whether to send $5 to Amnesty International, Oxfam, the ASPCA/RSPCA or me, for pity’s sake support human rights, poor people, or furry animals, not some dude who just wants a new computer to go with his vast monitor.

But if, on the other hand, you should decide to forego a nice breakfast at a cafe for toast at home, and then send the money you save to me, I’d be very grateful.

I would also be perfectly happy to accept a portion of the government stimulus money you would otherwise just blow on a plasma TV, or indeed a cut of the cheque that arrived addressed to your dead great-aunt.

However and whenever I get a new PC, I will, of course, whip up an article about it, like the one about my current computer and the one about the computer before that.

In the improbable-but-delightful-to-contemplate event that you all give me more money than is necessary to buy a new PC, I hereby pledge to spend it on a better theremin than the baby one I got cheap without instructions on eBay, and then record an actual tune played on said theremin, no matter how much harm this does to my relationship with my Significant Other and/or pets.

My mail server, mail.dansdata.com, is on the fritz. Well, the server’s actually working, but I don’t have an account there any more, for some reason. So mail to dan@dansdata.com has been bouncing, for a couple of days now.

The usually-excellent support people at SecureWebs haven’t been quite on the ball about this. If you’ve got something important to say to me, send it to rutterd@iinet.net.au.

UPDATE: The mail, she works once more. (I’m perversely glad that lots of other people were suffering as well.)

I’ve got greylisting now, too. I’ll turn it off if it becomes unacceptably annoying, or if I decide I need more spam to write about.

In these days of belt-tightening and margin-cutting, have “contextual” ad companies like Kontera finally been forced to actually live up to their promise of delivering ads that’re relevant to the text they link from?

That’ll be a “no”, then.

(Source.)

You’d think that contextual link-ad companies would be in a deadly downward spiral.

They can only deliver ads that’re actually relevant if they’ve got tons of advertisers to choose from (like Google, who often deliver ads that contradict a page’s content, but are at least talking about the same subject). But anybody with half a brain can see that, at the moment, actual relevant contextual ads seem to be very much in the minority.

So if you pay a contextual ad company to advertise your product, you can’t expect anything better.

But then again, the big contextual ad companies have been in business for several years now, and most of them still haven’t gone broke.

As I write this, RealTextAds (who contacted me in 2004) seem to be out of business, but Vibrant Media are more than eight years old and still going strong. So are Tribal Fusion, as mentioned in passing in 2005 and looked at specifically here; they’re about as old as Vibrant. And Kontera, responsible for the ad in the picture above, is six years old. They run ads under their own name, and also as “ContentLink“.

So somebody must still be paying for this crap.

Perhaps the ads actually do work - get clicks, and create sales. I’m sure plenty of people at least click on these weird little pop-ups, even if they’re only trying to make the thing go away.

I can’t see how the cost per conversion can be good, though.

They like me! They really, really like me!

But seriously - thanks to everybody who voted for me in Atomic’s Issue #100 poll.

I could only be more pleased if my runaway victory actually won me a prize.

(Perhaps I’ll get a mouse!)

I just got me one of them Twitter things that the kids are so crazy about.

I have a serious, serious problem with turning things I’m writing into very lengthy projects, so Twitter actually looks like a good idea to me. I understand why a lot of people view it as pure granulated pointlessness, but it gives me a chance to toss off the occasional bon mot without any real time investment, and perhaps some of you will enjoy the result.

(In the unlikely event that anybody reading this doesn’t get the title joke: La.)

(Pennypacker also found this when I searched for “Twitter”. I don’t know why, but it’s another good one, so what the heck.)

I’m sure you usually only visit DealExtreme (previously) for their delightfully wide range of prophylactics, but they now also stock the “Spotlight” cigarette-lighter-charged flashlight that I reviewed a little while ago.

It’s yours for $US18.80 including delivery to anywhere, PayPal only. The standard price is $US14.95 ex delivery, so unless you’ve got a bricks-and-mortar shop nearby that stocks it, the DX option is very likely to be cheaper, for people outside the USA at least.

(The two vendors I originally mentioned in my review are JTSpotlight and 12VSpotlight.)

If you’re outside the USA you’ll probably get the light about as fast from DealExtreme as you would from anybody else, too. DealExtreme usually take a while to deliver stuff (I’ve not yet received my tiny plastic Buddha, for instance), but that’s because they’re drop-shipping, just telling the Chinese factory that makes whatever you’ve bought to send it to you. With perhaps some minimal amount of cobbling-together of orders on the actual DealExtreme premises as well, just to add a few more days to proceedings.

Drop-shipping means you get to wait however long each factory takes to get stuff packed and posted. But DX is presumably selling Spotlights direct from the manufacturer, too, and I think the Spotlight makers don’t also make a wide range of three-dollar Chinese oddities, so they ought to respond faster.

(If you order a Spotlight and it arrives seven months later, packaged between two Zebu cowpats that’re held together with a strand of barbed wire, I accept no responsibility. But do feel free to vent in the comments.)

UPDATE: As reader Changes points out in the comments, DX now also have a brandless “OEM” version of the Spotlight, for a princely $US8.50 delivered.

I was trying to figure out why, for the last few days, Bloglines has frequently failed to notice when I’ve read something from one or another feed. Four times out of five, the next time it checked for updated feeds it was re-adding all of the stuff I just read.

Well, I found out why this was, and I also found that this wasn’t the half of it. It turns out that Bloglines is also now just completely ignoring many feed updates. So you get to read some stuff over and over, while missing out on other stuff entirely. Awesome.

So, finally, it was off to Google Reader for me.

(Migrating to Google Reader is quite easy, if your current feed aggregator doodad can export your subscription list in OPML format. This, fortunately, is something that Bloglines has not yet forgotten how to do.)

I’ve been using Bloglines since 2003. Apparently Mark Fletcher, the guy who started the site, sold it to Ask.com (where he later took a job) in 2005, and they’ve now pretty much just left it to rot on the vine. (To the point that even Fletcher’s sick of it.)

I was happy enough with the Bloglines interface, and it’s still got a couple of features that suit me better than Google Reader does. But only if it, you know, works. Which it doesn’t any more. Oh well.