The Substantially Similar Weblog

Is it just me, or does the Free Software Foundation show up as a result in a Google Maps ‘local search’ for Lowe’s Home Improvement?

Here’s a screenshot in case people think I’m losing my mind.

At least it’s the last result—I suppose it is the least relevant of all the choices.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who has noticed that Google has a predilection for the Free Software Foundation.

Having thrown another obscure reference that was nearly immediately understood in email correspondence with Steve, I pondered how it was possible to have normal conversations before google. As it turns out, the answer is inherently unknowable. (At least for another few days).

Interesting short article in Wired — Question Authorities: Why it’s smart to disobey officials in emergencies. It turns out that people in the World Trade Center on September 11 who ignored official instructions fared much better than those who followed the rules:

The report confirms a chilling fact that was widely covered in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.

Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives.

People too often believe there must be someone higher up who really knows what’s going on. One thing I heard often before the Iraq war was that, even if the public hasn’t seen convincing evidence of a real threat from Iraq, they (the administration) “must know something we don’t.” After all, why else would they be pursuing this policy?

I suppose it’s reasonable, or at least comforting, to think that someone wouldn’t get into a position of power like President or Secretary of Defense without being pretty damn smart and on top of things, but unfortunately I don’t think history supports that assumption.

I’m actually usually the last one to make arguments that begin with “history shows that…”, but I think in this case we can at least say that history shows that we shouldn’t make unfounded assumptions about the competency of powerful decisionmakers.

I get more comments and visits to my Webloyalty AKA Reservation Rewards is a Scam blog entry than almost anything else I’ve written. Since the entry was posted in December, it’s received over 300 comments, and nearly 20,000 hits from nearly 5,000 unique visitors. The short version is that this affinity program signs people up for a “rewards” program where they pay $9 per month in return for discounts on other purchases. The problem is that most people (including myself) never realized they signed up for anything until they notice the charge on their credit card bill, and I’m sure many more never notice the monthly charge at all. The company probably figured $9 was just below what would catch the attention of most people when they glance at their bill.

This comment from Marshall posted yesterday is probably the most useful one so far, so I wanted to highlight it here:

Same experience here, for the most part. One difference, however, I would recommend that if we really want to stop these guys we take a different approach to getting our money back. When they give you a refund of $9.00, it costs them $9.00, which they originally stole from you. There is no further damage to them. When you dispute the charge with your bank or cc issuer, they lose the $9.00 immediately, and are charged approximately $25.00 by their merchant processor for a chargeback fee. If their chargeback volume exceeds 1%, they will most likely have their merchant account shut down or suspended. This means they may not charge other people in the future and will likely go out of business. It should take about the same amount of time and effort for you, but could “put the hurt” on these scam artists. Just because they work with large companies, does not mean they are reputable, and you just mis-understood. I own a credit card processing company, and I know for a fact that I never agreed to the charges. Also, I went back to www.deepdiscountdvd.com and went through the steps of purchasing from them. The discount offer does not tell you anything about the charges or the membership at all. They are violating Visa/MC regulations, as well as perpetrating fraudulent transactions. Please dispute the transaction at your bank or cc company, instead of getting the refund. If your bank or cc company takes too long, or won’t reverse the charges, then you can always call back for your refund later.

It seems to me the other vital part of reining in this company is putting pressure on their affiliates, e.g., Columbia House, half.com, Fandago, and others. I can’t understand how these relatively reputable Internet businesses would agree to this arrangement.

Excellent blog entry at Stay of Execution (“tales of law and life”) entitled Legal Lies. It’s a fairly damning indictment of the advice given to prospective law school applicants.

I feel proud that my alma mater, Northeastern University School of Law, has avoided some of the problems described in the article, and is at least struggling to avoid others. If anyone is ever interested in going to law school and considering Northeastern, drop me a line and I’ll talk you into it.

I was recently searching for an MP3 downloadable version of Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto,” having heard an excerpt in this episode of This American Life. I came across this version, which is quite likely the strangest cover of an Elvis song I’ve ever heard. I hope it’s not a sign that I’m out of tune with popular culture because I’ve never heard of dictionaraoke before.

The MSNBot recently attempted to request a page on a website I run that is not publicly linked. In fact, no page from the domain name in question is publicly linked. The robots.txt file excludes all robots. My .htaccess file also blocks HTTP requests from known search engine robot IP address ranges (including MSNBot’s). Moreover, the page requested wasn’t the top level page (i.e., http://domain.com/), but some page buried therein (i.e., http://domain.com/some_dir/some_page.html).

The only request I have in my server logs from MSNBot is for this buried page—MSNBot (at least, identified as MSNBot) never requested any of the pages that would be necessary to find this buried page. The universe of people who have access the website at this domain is very small; I can in fact identify every single IP address in the server log as someone I know.

I can only conceive of two hypotheses for this, both of them would be a bad sign for MSNBot:

• The URL did appear in some emails to hotmail.com addresses; is it conceivable that MSN actually pulls out URLs from emails for spidering? Seems quite unlikely.
• MSNBot visited the domain disguised, both by IP address and user agent, as someone else, to find the URL in question. I would hope MSNBot wouldn’t engage in such a poor practice, but maybe they do it to detect cloaking or similar manipulative practices.

I don’t mean to be a conspiracy theorist, but can anyone conceive of any other way the MSNBot could have even found out about the URL in question?

Google is beta-testing AdSense for RSS feeds. I hope this catches on, and encourages more content providers to put the full text of their entries in their RSS feeds, rather than just initial snippets, which makes the feed nearly worthless for offline reading. I’ve complained about snippety RSS before, as have many others. If the only obstacle to including full text in feeds is fear of lack of revenue, this should fix that. (Presumably the fear is not bandwidth-related — 1 or 2 kilobytes versus a fraction of a kilobyte per entry shouldn’t be an issue for anyone anymore, if it ever was).

I keep intending to write my omnibus Verizon gripe entry, but small Verizon gripes keep getting in the way.

The latest: I’ve had crippled DSL service for over a week now. At best, I’m getting 80 KBps down and half of that up, while I’m supposed to be getting 300-400 KBps down and 80-90 KBps up (still nothing to write home about). When I called over a week ago, they said they were in the process of fixing it and usually these outages were just several hours but this one might be a day or two.

The problem is actually at Verizon’s “trunk.” When I do a speed test on the Verizon site, it’s fine—in other words, my Internet connection to Verizon is full speed. Somewhere after the packets reach Verizon’s routing area it slows to a crawl. It would seem like this would be much easier to fix than a problem closer to the edge, but so far no luck.

The Verizon support person I just spoke with said they only just became aware of it because of the phone calls coming in. They had one team working on it, but now that they realize it’s a “big” problem, they have three teams working on it.

Do they really rely on subscribers to call in to find out their network is down? Don’t they monitor this kind of thing? Why is Verizon not able to deal?

Okay, gripe out.

Noted IP practitioner and scholar William Patry started a blog. One thing I love about the blog so far is that he doesn’t write with the careful restraint of many active practitioners. He’s quite willing to talk about how badly courts bungled the law—which I suppose is justified, since he drafted some of the legislation at issue when he was the copyright counsel to the House of Representatives.

My favorite recent bit is from this commentary on the Bootleg Statute, which many—including some courts—have criticized as being unconstitutional under the Copyright Clause:

In 1994, I had been practicing copyright law for 13 years. I was well aware of the limited Times restriction. Everyone involved was aware of it. Do critics think that in making the bootleg right perpetual we meant to legislate under the Copyright Clause but just had a memory lapse, or that we said, “Hell, let’s draft an unconsitutional provision; why not, its bound to be fun?” The answer is, no, we didn’t draft a copyright or copyright-like provision at all. We drafted a sui generis right under the Commerce Clause. (For those who are wondering, Congress is not in the habit of saying in a statute, “hey this is the power we are legislating under.” See also Woods v. Taylor, 333 U.S. 138 (1948)).