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Is SOPA Really That Good For Everyone? It Doesn’t Seem So, Despite The Intent

by on December 20, 2011

in consumer

Consumer Bits on Brusimm 200w logo, [Consumer News, advice and reviews]Once again the many can thank the few for having potential freedoms taken away and/or restricted.  In this case, I’m thinking about movie piracy, but this is not limited to just that one industry.

(This is a quickie article, shot from the hip, talking about the major outline points I’ve noticed about this SOPA bill.  It’s not intended to be the end-all of anything, except my venting a little bit about movie piracy and the cavalier attitude digital pirates carry with them. I’ve provided source links at the bottom of this rant if you want further information from different sources.)

The SOPA bill is the Stop Online Piracy Act, also known as H.R.3261. (Which is getting voted for on December 21st, 2011.)

This bill was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011 and it basically looks to expand the long arm of the U.S. law and copyright holders in their abilities to fight the online trafficking and theft of copyrighted property, or copyright infringement.

SOPA would allow the U.S. Department of Justice and  copyright holders the ability to get court orders against websites involved or, more accurately, accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.

I don’t have any issues with the spirit of this new bill.  But there seems to be a lot of freedoms granted in the exercising of the protection of the copyrighted materials…

For instance, the potential ramifications from a website that is discovered to be facilitating copyright infringement (knowingly or not) can include

  • Barring advertising networks from doing business with infringing websites;
  • Barring search engines from linking to suspected sites:
  • Requiring ISPs to block access to suspected infringing sites.

This bill also makes unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material a felony.

And the peer-pressure aspect of this bill will give immunity to ISPs that voluntarily take action against suspected websites that seem dedicated to copyright infringement.

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Curious SEO Traffic Stats And Chasing Google Traffic, Despite Attracta

by on September 27, 2011

in consumer

Consumer news, Consumer alerts and a Consumer's opinionPart of the battle of internet or website SEO and such is keeping tabs on things and going-ons in and around the site you run.  It’s crazy to try to keep a certain pace up, but somethings do need to be taken care of.  If you don’t pay attention, sometimes things get clustered!

The other day I was tooling around underneath my website and checking on some things under the hood so to speak.  Glad I did.

A few months back I was tooling around with another SEO helping process called Attracta, I didn’t give it another thought for a while.  But then last week they sent me an email telling me I needed to update my site map.  Wha???  Why would I need to do that.  Google and other search engine entities come by most every website at least once a day with their crawler bots to check on automatically generated sitemaps.  I gots me a plugin that keeps me honest with that.  (A sitemap is just a huge table of contents of your website.  That’s all.)

But what the heck, why am I submitting a new sitemap to Attracta?  What do they have to do about anything?

Well wouldn’t you know it, Attracta hijacked a file that the search engines look at and had a redirect line in that file that pointed all the search engines to a sitemap that I built over there on Attacta’s website months ago.  A three month old sitemap.  Thanks Attracta!  Now I am presuming that this redirect line had been screwing me over because site traffic had been slowly quieting down.

Eery time I tinker with a site or service that offers help in building traffic, all they do is f*! you up or take your money!  There’s nothing better than old-fashioned elbow grease to get the job done right.

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Do Team Orders Happen At Any NACSAR Race?

by on September 24, 2011

in nascar, sports

Do You Really Think There Aren’t NASCAR Team Orders?

NASCAR News and opinion from NASCAR BITS & PIECES on Brusimm.comAn NBaP Opinion piece:

Back at Richmond, there seemed to be a questionable scenario where one driver seemed to be in cahoots with other drivers and spun his car during the NASCAR Sprint Cup event, bringing out a caution which gathered up the field and gave Kevin Harvick the shot he needed to win the race while he was trying to beat Jeff Gordon.  And that other driver is, in a fashion, associate with Kevin Harvick’s team.

At first I wasn’t sure.  But watching the video tapes of radio chatter that we were pounded with during last week’s rain delay, well, it sure does look fishy.  And obviously, the driver forget his code for changing radio channels.

Now there’s an interesting perspective that when J.J. Yeley pushed Matt Kenseth around the track on the last lap at Chicago, that he was running under suggestions from a fellow Ford team.

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The Ugly of the Reality

To be honest, no matter how you cut it, no matter what really happens there’s bound to be things that take place between teams that are in some way, related teams.  Considering there are really, it feels like, only four, five huge entities in the sport and where they’re not in a garage, they’re leasing engines or chassis to other teams.

Plus, I think we get caught up in the spin we are subjected to (That might be too harsh a term), where everyone is, more or less, super nice to the world outside the sport of NASCAR.  It is a family oriented sport, is it not?

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Facebook Gets Like Microsoft While Getting Like Twitter

by on September 16, 2011

in consumer

Facebook LogoStarting back on September 14th, Facebook is offering what is called a Twitter-like option that will allow fellow Facebook users to “subscribe” to an account rather than needing to “like” a page or become “friends” with an entity.  So where is it?  How do you find it?  Bear with me but a moment as I lead up to why you may now have the ability to follow Facebook accounts:

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A Flashback!

Do you remember during the massive growth days of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer?  They would release a new version of IE and then someone would improve on it.  Then suddenly the next rendition of MS’s browser would either have a similar function or just buy up the smaller company and add their functionality to their own.  (Very Borg-like actually.  Huh.)  A prime example would be tabs, which FireFox sported long before IE started deploying them.

Much like when smaller websites have great ideas but then those ideas get sucked up by the larger sites who dwarf them…  and you’ll never know.  On the bright side… in the long run everyone wins. Well, most everyone.

But right now, the big change at Facebook is that they seem to be following suit in the footsteps of Twitter, making their own follow mode available through their application.  Or this could be a response to Google+ and how it’s been operating.

Facebook is getting it from all sides these days.

Can Facebook Pull This Off?

This could be good for Facebook and very bad for Twitter, depending on many factors.  One of those factors is how abused or ignored Facebook users feel as time goes on.

Users have been the butt of changes that Facebook continually makes, plus with Zuckerberg’s promiscuous outlook on your online privacy, there’s a hard pitch to sell as some users just aren’t pleased with how they’re handled.

Just recently Facebook made a change to the email notification update frequency.  During that update, users profiles were adjusted in the background so that if you want to continue to receive updates, you have to go to your profile and change this new setting back.  Grr.

But with Facebook addressing the ease of subscribing, they are becoming much more like Twitter has been, but with a strong established presence and an already successful business model.  All the while Twitter is still trying to find its own footing in how to make itself popular.

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How To: Setting Which Internet Browser To Be Your Default Browser

by on August 29, 2011

in consumer

Interested in figuring out how to set your default web browser to one that you want instead of what the computer OS or application thinks you want?  Read on because the following help me set my web browser choice (FireFox) for any link I clicked on!

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FireFox Web Browser logoThe other day I was tackling a certificate issue and low and behold, while I was tackling the issue at hand, I had noticed that when I clicked on a link in my Thunderbird email client, it would seem that when I last installed Opera, it made itself my default web browser and everything was opening there.

Bad Opera.  Bad browser!

I know I didn’t select any option that agreed to make Opera my default client, I’m too OCD about my working environment to let that happen.  Yes, I’m weird that way, where I want my own computing environment to be what I want it to be and not what the very next app that comes along thinks it should be.

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First, I had found one set of instructions that told me to go to (BTW:  This IS NOT the answer)

  • Start;
  • Settings;
  • Control Panel; and then
  • open ‘Add or Remove Programs’ and then to
  • choose ‘Set Program Access and Defaults.’

I was then instructed to choose ‘Custom,’ and then to select what I wanted to be my default browser.

That worked about as well as walking through a crowded mall with a blindfold on.  That option resetting itself to “use my current web browser.”  Wow, that was a futile exercise.

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The Never Ending “Facebook Chat” Button & Way to STOP It [Consumer Bits]

by on May 28, 2011

in consumer

If that Facebook Chat option is starting to bug the c*! out of you because it’s turning itself on every day?  Read on to find out how I stopped it in its tracks!

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Facebook LogoI don’t mind Facebook.  It has it’s functions that can be quite handy when it comes to interacting and keeping track of friends and family.  I thought I had the website pretty much under control and all until a few weeks ago.

I used to run with my “Chat” window set to “offline.“  It’s not that I’m anti-social, but most days I’m so busy that I hate ignoring folks online or being grumpy with them when I’m getting interrupted trying to meet my own deadlines.

But as of a few weeks ago, that little beast in the lower left (or right)  corner of your window now turns itself on every day.  So if you’ve closed it or set it to “offline” today, it will be back online come tomorrow.  This seems to be another one of those changes that Facebook installed without worrying about what we think, or is this just an oversight on their part?  Judging from their track record, I’m going with my first question.

It’s been going on for long enough that you’d think they would have time to have fixed it since folks are starting to grumble in masses.  I’m seeing all kinds of grumbling on different bulletin boards.

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Do FireFox and Hootsuite NOT Like Each Other?

by on February 21, 2011

in consumer

Consumer User Observation on Hootsuite / Firefox

I’ve been running the beta versions of Firefox for some time now and the last few weeks I’ve been tangling with Firefox, the software has been hitting up my pagefile pretty aggressively.  When a system accesses the pagefile instead of memory, it bogs the process down.  I’ve been sitting around, waiting for my application anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds for it to respond to my instructions.

I’ve been experimenting with different applications while running Firefox, turning on and turning off things until I finally hit on the idea that Hootsuite has been dogging my system.  I’ve had Hootsuite running to monitor Twitter feeds for a site or two for various reasons.

I found that as soon as I turned off Hootsuite, Firefox lit back up again and I’m no longer hitting my pagefile with every action.

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Heads UP: WordPress and FireFox 4 Beta 6 – Post Content Duplicates

by on December 15, 2010

in consumer

WordPress and ‘Beta 6′ DO NOT Like Each Other!

(Make sure to see the update below on the status of this issue with future Beta’s.)  Gang, for any web denizen out there running a WordPress powered blog and are also helping test out FireFox 4, Beta 6, I think I’ve found a slight snag in this build of FireFox 4 that’s forced me back to FireFox 3.x for the time being.

What happens is that as I create an article, everything is fine.  But when I click on the HTML tab I find I’m looking at multiple events of my article.  That includes all images.

For instance, if I had a pic and a word in a post, like this:

Image

text.

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Firefox and FTP [A Consumer Observation - FileZilla FTP Client]

by on December 3, 2010

in consumer

FileZilla, FTP Client

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When I was using the standard distribution of Firefox, I was pretty happy about things with all the add-ons that are available for Firefox through the awesome open-source community.  For me Firefox is not complete with these following add-ons (Extensions):

Practical Firefox Extensions

  • Adblock Plus
  • NoScript

Nice-to-Have Firefox Extensions

  • ColorfulTabs
  • FireFTP*
  • Forecastfox Weather

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*If you’re just a general web surfer, FireFTP (or any FTP client) isn’t something you need to even ponder about.

This is the small list of what I’ve installed but are at the core of any Firefox installation for me.  As far as I’m concerned Adblock and NoScript crank up my surfing speed and make mostly enjoyable experiences when hitting up some websites.

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Is NASCAR’s New Media Interactive Drive Going The Wrong Way?

by on December 1, 2010

in nascar, sports

Right now when you hit up the NASCAR website, call any of NASCAR’s listed phone numbers or other such attempts at communicating thoughts to the sanctioning body, you get anywhere but.  For instance, NASCAR.com is peppered with 2nd & 3rd party interactive sources.  Eleven right upfront.  Most notable of those is Turner.com.  For me to see most content on NASCAR.com, I have to allow Turner.com in my NoScript add-on here on FireFox.  Emails via the website end up with Turner Sports and phone numbers are answered by ISC. (International Speedway Corporation)

In other words, good luck!  It’s like trying to find an email address for the YouTube (Google) support gang!

Recently, NASCAR hired a survey firm to understand how the NASCAR fan likes to interact with NASCAR and the study involved 1,500 fans.  But right off the bat, from my opening paragraphs, you can see the issue already at hand.  NASCAR on the web is anything but.  The overseeing company of this study project, in both the study phase and latter execution, is called Taylor.

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Now NASCAR is looking to refocus their identity when it comes to the internet and in so doing, and in replacing Ramsey Poston, they are looking to hire someone outside the industry of auto racing to replace him.

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