November « 2007 « Eric Faller

24Nov/072

Slow news day

Due to the extreme goodness of Super Mario Galaxy, I don't have much news to report for this week.

So here's a new entry in the classic space-filler series, This Week's Weird Google Queries.

They range from the depressing (due to the large number of hits these get):

'vista crash' (or 'vista minesweeper crash' and many variants)
'exception from hresult c00d1191'
'how to open office 2007 box' (or variants like 'cant get vista box open')

.. to the sad:

'how do i fix my broken wii'
'get rid of embarrassing google results'
'locked out of my garage help'
'i shut a painted door and now its stuck'
'locked myself out how to break in'

.. to the slightly disturbing:

'how track wow ip'
'how to forge uw student id'
'detect blog post ip address'
'where to buy nazi hoodies'
'how can i get somebody else ip address'

.. and some that are just bizarre:

'religion hedgehog'
'jokes about wal-mart employees'
'see me squirt'

The #1 search hit is still the old classic 'the end of false religion is near' (still #7 for that query, apparently). Amazingly enough, despite it being more than a year since that post, it seems that false religion has still not come to an end (who would have guessed?!).

Filed under: General, Random, Website 2 Comments

7Nov/07Off

Nazi hoodie

I was buying a jacket at Macy's the other day and was surprised to come across a hoodie with the totenkopf logo of the 3rd SS Panzer Division, the branch of the infamous SS secret police charged with running the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. It's probably one of the most offensive Nazi logos, after the SS 'lightning-bolt' symbol and the swastika itself:

3rd SS Division Totenkopf logo on a Macy's Jacket

I was not surprised specifically that the logo made it onto some clothing. It's not a very well-known logo, and the clothing designer probably just searched the internet for 'skull' and copied one of the results without knowing what it was. For some reason the skull motif seems to be very popular in young men's clothing these days (who wouldn't want to 'rebel' against the System by buying some overpriced designer clothing with a skull logo that's vaguely reminiscent of the latest Disney blockbuster movie franchise?).

I was actually mostly surprised that Macy's would let this slip through the quality-control process, risking a massive P.R. backlash and humiliation, similar to what happened to Wal-Mart when it got caught selling t-shirts with the same logo. You'd think big companies would have systems in place to stop that kind of stuff, but I guess not.

Unfortunately I'm not sufficiently outraged at this point to go on a crusade against Macy's like The Consumerist did with their "Wal-Mart Nazi T-Shirt Watch" campaign (culminating with even Congress getting in on the 'outrage'). I just find it more interesting than anything, from a sociological sort of view.

Filed under: General, Random Comments Off

4Nov/077

Bandwidth theft

Recently most of my bandwidth has been getting sucked up by bandwidth thieves deep-linking various pictures from this site.

I'm not sure why, but Google seems to like my images and places them high in its image search results. It might be because I actually write descriptive alt-text for them, when most people don't bother. For example, images from this site are in the first or second page of results for queries like starbursts, fork, elevator, and quarters. Multiple-word queries like eames chair bring in many others.

This 'success' has caused many people to rip off my images and link to them from their dim-witted MySpace or LiveJournal pages. For example:

Warning: as with most MySpace pages, your IQ may decrease if you click those links.

The majority of hits come from MySpace, but there's a large number that come from LiveJournal or random forums on the internet.

Back in the wild old days of Web 1.0, you could easily solve this problem by checking the referrer header and blocking the request or substituting the image for another one if it didn't come from your own site. Unfortunately, these days that won't work so well because it will break RSS reader apps, as well as RSS aggregators like Google Reader or Bloglines. Unfortunately there's too many of those to whitelist, and RSS readers like Outlook don't even really send a referrer header that you can filter on. I can't make a blacklist either, because there are way too many random forums on the internet to block, though blocking MySpace would take care of about half.

I'm trying to come up with a list of options. Here's what I have so far:

Stop writing descriptive alt-text for images - this may work, but it would block legitimate searches.
Block Google from crawling my images/ directory with a robots.txt file - same disadvantages as above.
Pull a Niall Kennedy on them and swap out the most commonly ripped-off images with Goatse. This has the schadenfreude-appeal of getting revenge on the thieves, but I'm not that much of a jerk (and judging by the designs of their MySpace pages, their lives must be bad enough already). It's also a lot of work on my end.
Do nothing and just pay the bandwidth bills. This is easiest, so that's probably what I will do for now. My monthly bandwidth usage isn't near the usage cap, so I'm not paying extra yet, but it's definitely increasing pretty good rate. I'll have to re-evaluate the situation in another year or so.

Filed under: General, Website 7 Comments