Oddly today, I got 15 hits from China. 15 hits in one day is a large number, but 15 from a country that rarely visits my blog, is unheard of (there had only been 6 hits from China in the last year and a half).
I have a suspicion that this is closely related to my little experiment and it was some individual in China would had scraped my test email address and is now foraging through TecHumanity looking for more email addresses - sadly, none to be found.
Welcome aboard ChinaSpyder or ChinaBot - enjoy your crawling at TecHumanity.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Monday, March 14, 2011
The Fat Lady Has Sung...
...and Microsoft has officially pronounced the Zune to be dead. Farewell Zune, you really never had a chance. To the heap of discarded technology goes thou - to your brethren of useless electronic artifacts.
The Day that the Music Died?
Bon Jovi has stated his opinion that Steve Jobs aka Apple aka iTunes has killed the music industry. To give him his fair due, I've copied what I'd assume to be a direct quote that states his position.
That having been said, I would contend that in a lot of ways, the ability to publish and purchase music in a lot of ways has revolutionized the art. My argument being that it is given independant artists a whole new avenue to get their work out there - that the artists that can't afford the big studio time...well, let's just say that it has evened the playing field a bit.
I don't really mean to contradict Bon Jovi - after all, he is much more qualified than I to speak on the impact of technology on music, but I can't help thinking that his opinion is totall one-sided. Sure, there are probably areas where music has been hurt, but like so much else, there is good and bad - it's usually a matter of finding that balance - or if seeing which is greater.
I know that personally, I am nuts for discovering new artists on iTunes, without having this immediacy of being able to listen, ponder and purchase, I would have not bought half of my library and I have a big library of music (9,000+ songs at present).
On a side-note, I'm going to cajole my nephew to see if he can offer his professional opinion on this matter. As he is a lawyer in the music industry, and a musician, I'd love to hear his comments. However, given that his wife will be having their first child anyday now...this can - and will wait.
"Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it. God, it was a magical, magical time."There is an awful lot of truth in what Bon Jovi claims. It's not unlike a conversation that I had with a friend at lunch the other day where the assertion is that book-reading has likewise been affected. For a true book-reader - or for some of them, there is nothing like the hard-cover book in hand, the sounds of the pages being flipped instead of the buttons being clicked to go from page to page.
That having been said, I would contend that in a lot of ways, the ability to publish and purchase music in a lot of ways has revolutionized the art. My argument being that it is given independant artists a whole new avenue to get their work out there - that the artists that can't afford the big studio time...well, let's just say that it has evened the playing field a bit.
I don't really mean to contradict Bon Jovi - after all, he is much more qualified than I to speak on the impact of technology on music, but I can't help thinking that his opinion is totall one-sided. Sure, there are probably areas where music has been hurt, but like so much else, there is good and bad - it's usually a matter of finding that balance - or if seeing which is greater.
I know that personally, I am nuts for discovering new artists on iTunes, without having this immediacy of being able to listen, ponder and purchase, I would have not bought half of my library and I have a big library of music (9,000+ songs at present).
On a side-note, I'm going to cajole my nephew to see if he can offer his professional opinion on this matter. As he is a lawyer in the music industry, and a musician, I'd love to hear his comments. However, given that his wife will be having their first child anyday now...this can - and will wait.
Apple iPhone - Daylight Savings Time Bass Ackwards
Oh come on, Apple. You didn't have enough problems in the past with the clocks on the iPhone?
November, 2010 was the first bug reported when clocks were supposed to go back.
Then - in the New Year, there were reports of timers not going off, so the few unfortunate souls who depended on their iPod/iPhone to go off so they wouldn't miss the New Year's celebration - and the alarm didn't go off?
Despite these two problems in the last 4 months, now when we run into DST and some models are setting the clocks back an hour instead of forward? That's just nuts. I'm sorry, maybe there's an explanation, a reason, yada yada yada. The long and the short of it - that's inexcusable.
Me thinks this doesn't reflect well on Apple at all.
November, 2010 was the first bug reported when clocks were supposed to go back.
Then - in the New Year, there were reports of timers not going off, so the few unfortunate souls who depended on their iPod/iPhone to go off so they wouldn't miss the New Year's celebration - and the alarm didn't go off?
Despite these two problems in the last 4 months, now when we run into DST and some models are setting the clocks back an hour instead of forward? That's just nuts. I'm sorry, maybe there's an explanation, a reason, yada yada yada. The long and the short of it - that's inexcusable.
Me thinks this doesn't reflect well on Apple at all.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
"The Experiment" - The Only Downfall
Already received my first SPAM, I was interested to see which disposable address it was sent to, but the problem is (and I didn't consider this) is that if the sender uses BCC instead of CC or TO then I don't think that I can see the email address they used for me.
Still - I'm pretty sure I know how they got it. First of all, I've created a brand new Hotmail account and I've made sure that I don't post the email address anywhere, so I know it's not that email. That having been said, I've only created two disposable email addresses and used them as a test. The first was signing up with Apple Support, so I doubt that it came via that route. The second test was the disposable email address that I posted here, knowing that bots can visit sites and harvest email addresses. By the process of elimination, this must have been the source.
On a somewhat interesting side-note, today, I've found that all of a sudden, I have 23 hits, all from the same O/S, country and browser, which leads me to believe that it's somewhat likely the same source. Perhaps this bot is checking other pages on the site for other email addressed, but I don't think so. Just from the posts that were viewed and the fact that they are older, I suspect that this is an individual how has stumbled upon TecHumanity. I can't be sure, but that's what I think.
Still - I'm pretty sure I know how they got it. First of all, I've created a brand new Hotmail account and I've made sure that I don't post the email address anywhere, so I know it's not that email. That having been said, I've only created two disposable email addresses and used them as a test. The first was signing up with Apple Support, so I doubt that it came via that route. The second test was the disposable email address that I posted here, knowing that bots can visit sites and harvest email addresses. By the process of elimination, this must have been the source.
On a somewhat interesting side-note, today, I've found that all of a sudden, I have 23 hits, all from the same O/S, country and browser, which leads me to believe that it's somewhat likely the same source. Perhaps this bot is checking other pages on the site for other email addressed, but I don't think so. Just from the posts that were viewed and the fact that they are older, I suspect that this is an individual how has stumbled upon TecHumanity. I can't be sure, but that's what I think.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
TecHumanity - The Global Force!
Said totally tongue in cheek, of course. I'm pretty aware that a lot of hits that my posts get are probably nothing more than spiders and bots trolling and indexing the web for content. Still, it's interesting to view the statistics sometimes.
No big surprise to me, but Windows is the predominant operating system with 89% of the hits being from a Windows based computer.
Similarly, the typical browser is either Internet Explorer (65%) or Firefox (18%) accounting for 83% of the traffic.
The posts with the most hits are as follows:
1. Yahoo! And OtherInbox...to Borrow from Monty Python "NOSPAM...NOSPAM...NOSPAM..."
112 hits. No surprise here. This one was noticed and tweeted about from a company in the US. All of the hits on this article came within a 24h period - the vast majority within an hour or so of it being tweeted about.
2. Social Networking
60 hits. This is the one that I can't figure out. This one page consistently gets a couple of hits a week, for no apparent reason. It's not like it's recent, so I can't figure out why it's active. It's not like there are click-throughs to it, that - I would be able to tell, but somehow this page is just navigated to. It might very well be that the title of it "Social Networking" might be the key for a spider or bot to index it, I really don't know.
3. Ho-Ho-Wholly Straddling the Hi Tech World
43 hits. I must say, this is probably my all time favourite article. It was a lot of fun to write and was totally different from anything else that I had written. I suppose that the part of me that loves to write fiction enjoyed creating a Santa Claus based article. On a side-note, this article was also tweeted about, but definitely didn't result in the same traffic as my NOSPAM one.
4. Multiple Locks -- One Key
24 hits. This is my most recent article and I think one of the more important ones that I've written about. I've received a lot of positive feedback that it is given people cause to stop and think about how they use their passwords, and this is precisely why I wrote this article.
5. Blessing of The High Tech Tools
22 hits. This one was an interesting article. Well - to be honest, it was more of a short blog than an article. I think that this one received a few hits as it was noticed and posted on some other blogs.
and finally, here's an extra tidbit about the importance of never trusting an appearance of a URL:
The Old Bait and Switch
Anyways, those are the top five. Clearly, I'm never going to make a lot of money from all this traffic, but all is good. So if you got rick-rolled - drop a comment and let me know!
Here's the current breakdown of hits by country:
No big surprise to me, but Windows is the predominant operating system with 89% of the hits being from a Windows based computer.
Similarly, the typical browser is either Internet Explorer (65%) or Firefox (18%) accounting for 83% of the traffic.
The posts with the most hits are as follows:
1. Yahoo! And OtherInbox...to Borrow from Monty Python "NOSPAM...NOSPAM...NOSPAM..."
112 hits. No surprise here. This one was noticed and tweeted about from a company in the US. All of the hits on this article came within a 24h period - the vast majority within an hour or so of it being tweeted about.
2. Social Networking
60 hits. This is the one that I can't figure out. This one page consistently gets a couple of hits a week, for no apparent reason. It's not like it's recent, so I can't figure out why it's active. It's not like there are click-throughs to it, that - I would be able to tell, but somehow this page is just navigated to. It might very well be that the title of it "Social Networking" might be the key for a spider or bot to index it, I really don't know.
3. Ho-Ho-Wholly Straddling the Hi Tech World
43 hits. I must say, this is probably my all time favourite article. It was a lot of fun to write and was totally different from anything else that I had written. I suppose that the part of me that loves to write fiction enjoyed creating a Santa Claus based article. On a side-note, this article was also tweeted about, but definitely didn't result in the same traffic as my NOSPAM one.
4. Multiple Locks -- One Key
24 hits. This is my most recent article and I think one of the more important ones that I've written about. I've received a lot of positive feedback that it is given people cause to stop and think about how they use their passwords, and this is precisely why I wrote this article.
5. Blessing of The High Tech Tools
22 hits. This one was an interesting article. Well - to be honest, it was more of a short blog than an article. I think that this one received a few hits as it was noticed and posted on some other blogs.
and finally, here's an extra tidbit about the importance of never trusting an appearance of a URL:
The Old Bait and Switch
Anyways, those are the top five. Clearly, I'm never going to make a lot of money from all this traffic, but all is good. So if you got rick-rolled - drop a comment and let me know!
Here's the current breakdown of hits by country:
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Experimental PS - Ducks Away!
I was just folding laundry and I had a Eureka moment (well - I'm not suggesting that it was so much of a Eureka moment that I was running around in my birthday suit - much too chilly for that!).
I was thinking to myself why all of a sudden I had this gust of inspiration and then it came to me - clear as day.
As per my Saturday morning routine, I was having my coffee and reading the Saturday paper. There was an article that I read and I can't believe that it is a coincidence. I didn't consciously base my experiment on this article, but it just had to be the subconscious root of it.
The article was about a book that was written on an experiment that was conducted. The name of the book is "Moby Duck". The experiment is that scientists went out into the middle of the ocean with thousands of specially coded little yellow rubber bath ducks. They had a "duck overboard" moment and dumped them all into the Atlantic. The premise of this experiment was to use the coding on the ducks to track their movements through the ocean in order to study the currents.
I thought to myself, wow - this is EXACTLY what I am doing - it's just an electronic version, but the premise is exactly the same. I'm tracking the ebbs and flows of the Internet.
Ducks away! Here's duck #1 to test for harvesting of email addresses on websites:
full_throttle_t01@hotmail.com
An interesting side note that I've noticed. I've often wondered about some of these foreign hits that I get. What I have noticed is that very often, I'll get a hit from UAE or some other location immediately upon posting. Obviously this means that this site is being automatically monitored somehow. Who knows why - it's a piddly little technology blog, but I'm going to check to see how quickly I get a hit on this blog entry and where it comes from.
I was thinking to myself why all of a sudden I had this gust of inspiration and then it came to me - clear as day.
As per my Saturday morning routine, I was having my coffee and reading the Saturday paper. There was an article that I read and I can't believe that it is a coincidence. I didn't consciously base my experiment on this article, but it just had to be the subconscious root of it.
The article was about a book that was written on an experiment that was conducted. The name of the book is "Moby Duck". The experiment is that scientists went out into the middle of the ocean with thousands of specially coded little yellow rubber bath ducks. They had a "duck overboard" moment and dumped them all into the Atlantic. The premise of this experiment was to use the coding on the ducks to track their movements through the ocean in order to study the currents.
I thought to myself, wow - this is EXACTLY what I am doing - it's just an electronic version, but the premise is exactly the same. I'm tracking the ebbs and flows of the Internet.
Ducks away! Here's duck #1 to test for harvesting of email addresses on websites:
full_throttle_t01@hotmail.com
An interesting side note that I've noticed. I've often wondered about some of these foreign hits that I get. What I have noticed is that very often, I'll get a hit from UAE or some other location immediately upon posting. Obviously this means that this site is being automatically monitored somehow. Who knows why - it's a piddly little technology blog, but I'm going to check to see how quickly I get a hit on this blog entry and where it comes from.
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