I doubt I'll leave over the removal of basic accounts. I've already stopped recommending this site to new people, so after grumbling and griping a bit, I'll probably just get on with my journaling. If there is a true mass exodus, I'll join it. But right now, as much as I dislike the direction LiveJournal is going, there still isn't anywhere good enough to entice me away from my permanent account. With all the effort involved in changing journal sites and moving my old entries, another site will not just have to be somewhat better — it will have to be a whole hell of a lot better.

LiveJournal has secretly removed basic (free) accounts. Even brad is openly pissed about this one.

Even if I thought was a good decision, the lies of omission does not promote a trusting relationship between the SUP and their users.

Wow, the ABC News website has entered a whole new world of suck: loud autoplay video ads. Suck horridness is what AdBlock was made for. Blocking http://a.abcnews.com/assets/* does the trick. Actually, blocking http://a.abcnews.com/ass* would do the trick as well, which seems appropriate.

Poll #1016853 American Beauty vs. Fit Light Dairy
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Who do you find more attractive?

from purplesquirrel in squirrellovers:

One of the men criminally charged after placing blinking cartoon advertisements around the city and causing a terrorism scare videotaped a police bomb squad removing one of the devices, but did not tell the officers the object was harmless. Surveillance cameras caught 27-year-old Peter Berdovsky videotaping officers removing what they thought was a possible bomb last week. "Mr. Berdovsky didn't do anything inappropriate," his lawyer, Walter Prince, said Tuesday. full article

Well, he's screwed. If you buy his lawyer's claim that he just happened to be innocently taping the incident, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

Turner Broadcasting System has accepted full responsibility for the guerrilla marketing campaign that caused a security scare across Boston Wednesday. WBZ-TV's Dan Rea spoke with Mayor Thomas Menino Friday morning and Menino said that the company had agreed to pay about $250,000 for the costs created by the scare. Phil Kent, Turner's C-E-O, issued an apology in full-page ads in Boston newspapers Friday for "the confusion and inconvenience" caused as highways, bridges and river traffic were shut down. Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, were released Thursday on $2,500 bail each after pleading not guilty pleas to charges of placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct. full article

If this is accurate, it changes my mind about the situation. Turner should not get off with a bribe. I still believe Berdovsky and Stevens deserve to face charges, but many others deserve to face charges as well. If the city of Boston is not going to prosecute the people at Turner and Interference who orchestrated the stunt, the city has no business persecuting the bottom-level guys who did their employer's dirty work.

I would like to note that this does not change my conviction that the police did a fine job. This is on Menino, not the police.

I've been very impressed by how many Boston area liberals have gained a sense of rebellion in recent days by rallying around mega corporation Turner and their corporate lackeys who planted the devices. It's almost surreal that commercial culture has taken such a grip that even rebellion against authority has a corporate edge. None of the myriad of REAL abuses of authority since 9/11 have garnered such a tremendous response. Fail to give a favored marketing firm free reign to do whatever they please in the city, especially if they're advertising an important cartoon network show, and you have a massive outcry.

Berdovsky sent an e-mail to friends at 1:25 p.m. telling them not to talk about the marketing scheme to promote the animated television show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" on the Cartoon Network. "My boss from the Cartoon Network’s ad agency just called -- she is asking that we pretty please keep everything on the DL," or down low, wrote Berdovsky, according to a copy of the e-mail provided to the Globe. ... Moments after facing the felony charges, Berdovsky and Stevens mocked reporters at press conference outside court, deflecting questions about their culpability with non sequiter quips about haircuts in the 1970s. "Hair today, gone tomorrow," said Stevens, Berdovsky added: "I'm quite enjoying this." full article

Because actively suppressing critical security information to further the greed of your corporate masters is fun!

Does anyone else find it odd that Turner-owned CNN continued to hype the suspicious devices story even as Turner executives were aware of the situation and what exactly the devices were? If anyone was intentionally spreading fear it was Turner, not Boston Police Department.

A lot of people seem to think the response to the Mooninite devices was overblown and paranoid. While I certainly agree that a lot of the post-9/11 security in the United States has been based on paranoia, I find it completely reasonable to treat strange unknown electronic devices attached to supports for overhanging highways with a high degree of suspicion.

I've always been under the impression that it is not legal to put up unauthorized electronic billboards on public structures along the highway...

I just received a anonymous spam comment in this journal with a link to a page on Blogger (a.k.a. Blogspot, owned by Google). LiveJournal generally does a good job at weeding out spam, but blogger's recent "improvements" appear as if they're aimed at aiding spamblogs. They've removed the "flag as objectionable" feature from the blog pages so that there is now clearcut and intuitive way to call out spam. I wonder if Blogger/Google simply see no motivation to fight the spamblogs. A large percentage of the Blogger spamblogs use Google Adsense and all of them pull traffic into Blogger, so Google actually makes money on them.

However, I suspect Google's effective spam-tolerance may capsize them in the end. The Google search engine, and especially their blogsearch, is rapidly sinking into a bog of junk and spam. The Search Wikia project, due to launch this year, could start seriously nibbling at Google's marketshare by providing a less spam-ridden alternative. That not only translates to less traffic at google.com, but less traffic for the multitude of adsense-using spamsites and spamblogs as well. If Google doesn't get serious about fighting spam soon, it could be their undoing.

For each person or category of person, please indicate how ethical they are (on average) in you opinion. 0 indicates completely unethical scumbags, 10 indicates saintly perfections of ethics. For the purposes of this poll, "ethical" means whatever you view as ethical.

Poll #892485
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

yourself

me

your parents