Who you gonna call? Ghostbloggers!

Doesn’t ghostblogging – hiring someone to write your blog – defeat the whole purpose of a blog – a hodge-podge of personal thoughts, nuggets of knowledge, opinions and musings?

Of course, the main issue is time. No one has time to write a dang diary.

A killer app would be a IP-enabled voice recorder that could convert speech into text and then publish into your blog. Or maybe an intelligent spider to pore over your Outlook calendar, vmail and email and formulate a witty entry du jour.

In any case, with the mainstream use of blogs, the usefulness of blogs will deteriorate. Investors will be peering at CEO’s blogs, CEO’s at underlings, adversaries at each other.

Ghostblogging is just the beginning. People are already being sued or fired for things they’ve written. How honest can you be?

I believe eventually, content in blogs will homogenize into emotionless corporate-approved boilerplate.

Bon mots

Hold the freedom fries: I think a few modern-day American politicians should pick up this book, “112 Gripes about the French”, a FAQ for American GIs in post-WW2 France. It was published by the US government, to massage over misunderstandings and ill feelings the stationed soldiers felt for France.

Incredibly well-written retorts to common complaints, the book also offers this timeless advice: “Beware the people who do not criticize. Beware the country where criticism is verboten. Beware the country where men obey like sheep.”

Contivity confusion

This morning, I took and passed the certification exam for Nortel Networks Certified Design Specialist for Contivity VPN Extranet Switches (NNCDS – Contivity). So now I know a lot more about the Contivity than most mortal men.

The Contivity is actually a pretty neat product – it’s a router, it’s a stateful firewall, but most of all, it’s a VPN demarcation point. Simply put, it allows a remote user to access their corporate LAN via the public Internet in a completely secure fashion. Cisco PIX and Netscreen devices can do the same thing, but Contivitys are fairly inexpensive, high-performing, and easy to configure.

What was hard to figure was the bloody exam. First off, the Global Knowledge book and course I took was scarcely adequate. Sample questions, which they claimed were based on actual exam questions, did not even remotely resemble the exam in format, topic or difficulty. The samples were simple “gimmies”, like “Does the Contivity 100 support user tunnels? True/False?” (False, btw).

The real questions were scenario-based. They went like this: You are required to implement a 5000 tunnel solution. They have users dialling in from home, as well as branch offices. Which Contivity with which options would you recommend?”

Topics, such as IPX encapsulation, and the featureset of the Advanced Routing License, were not even covered.

The exam itself was fairly poorly designed. A lot of the questions boiled down to semantics. I feel sorry for the ESL crowd, they would have a helluva time figuring out these vague, obtuse questions. Here’s a good example.

Question: HQ has two Model Zs. They want remote users and their business partners to connect to them. What should the remote offices do? (“Remote offices”? I guess they mean both the remote users and business partners.)

  1. Model X, end to end (end to end of what?)
  2. Model X only for SOHO (Too bad if you don’t know what SOHO stands for. Also: are you referring to the “remote users”? Or the business partners? Both? If so, why the distinction?)
  3. Model X only for the remote offices (Only?! Isn’t this question only about the remote offices to begin with???)

In contrast, the Cisco exams are usually difficult and sometimes tries to trick you, but not by straining your knowledge of the English language.

Justice, CRTC style

Aliant, the incumbent telco, and Groupe Telecom, the competing telco, bid for two school contracts in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Aliant offers a price lower than GT. GT complains to the CRTC, charging anti-competitive pricing. CRTC agrees, orders Aliant to increase its price above GT’s. Customer looks at GT’s now relatively lower price, and switches to GT. GT crows about fair pricing to customers.

Now Aliant owns all the wiring (after all, they built them). GT now complaining to CRTC that the wholesale rates Aliant is charging are too high. Wants Aliant to now lower their prices.

Says the Yankee Group:

The night has a thousand eyes

Mozilla 1.3 introduced a nifty new Mail feature – a junk mail filter. But not just your run of the mill, “delete all emails with the word ‘sex’ in them” filter, a Bayesian spam filter. The first kicker is that it uses statistical analysis on words in the headers, body and HTML code of email, making it deadly accurate. The second kicker is that it can learn; You can teach Moz what is good and what is bad. The more spam you get, the smarter it gets (This is just one of a few Mozilla projects that involve machine learning algorithms, btw). This per-user customization is a Good Thing, because a doctor may get legitimate email with, say, the word “sex”in them. However, email that has the words “sex” and “webcam” and “girls”? Not so legitimate. Once they get going, Bayesian filters offer a near-100% detection rate, and most importantly, near-0% false positives.

That’s the only disadvantage. It was difficult, at first, to be certain that it was working. You have to teach it, remember? So, for several weeks, I would still get spam appearing in my inbox. Patience is a virtue here: 30-40 junk mails later, it’s finally picked up a full head of steam.

However, recently I’ve been getting email that has been successfully thwarting the filter once again. They are spam that only contain one or two words and a hyperlink. For example, “click here”. With so little words to work with, these emails have been slipping through the cracks.

But all is not lost! Such spam cannot be particularily profitable, since it lacks pizazz. In addition, the filter can adapt and start looking at emails with two word hyperlinks with more discretion. The filter can analyze message headers as well. Already I am seeing these emails being caught and tossed into the bit bucket. The battle continues on.

Spammers seem to think they are providing a public service, like snail junk mail. Not true. First of all, spam is often for offensive, illegal, even potentially dangerous products and services. Every spam that I receive also costs my service provider money and bandwidth. On the other hand, that Domino’s Pizza flyer I get in my mailbox is for a legitimate product, it didn’t cost me to receive it, and I get some good coupons to boot.

Blame Canadaaaa

So far, the Bush administration has tried to defame a “gay and Canadian” reporter, discredit the ambassador that investigated the false Africa is selling uranium to Iraq thing, fire soldiers stationed in Iraq that tell press everything isn’t all rosy, and stonewalling investigations that the government has possibly lied to the world so they can invade Iraq.

It’s just great when a government spends more energy backpedaling and flinging mud at its critics than actually solving the issues at hand, eh? Your tax dollars at work!

Add goodies like Patriot Act II and Pointdexter’s Total Information Awareness program, and it’s no small wonder some Americans want to be called “Canadian” too. Come on up, the beer is better.

White House smears reporter, calls him Canadian

Cause. ABC News reporter writes article about disgruntled soldiers stationed in Iraq (who are still dying one per day)

Effect. White House spokespeople launch smear campaign against said reporter, tipping off Drudge Report that reporter is gay and Canadian. Which he is, which I suppose suggests he is virtually a leftist pinko commie hippie.

Question: Have you ever tried to insult someone by calling them “Canadian”?