OVC will be demoing their voting system at the Linux World conference. They are working to raise $30,000 by August 4th, to complete and certify their voting solution in the state of California. Mark Shuttleworth, entrepreneur and founder of Canonical, has given his support to the OVC in their mission to provide an open, verifiable voting solution.

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“During a week of attempting to cloak every aspect of daily life, our correspondent found that in an information age, leaving no trace is nearly impossible”

I saw this when I clicked on the link to PopSci from the Drupal.org announcement of the release of Drupal 6 (They had a list of sites using Drupal). It is a long, but good read. One thing that stood out to me was this:

“Banks sell lists of information that you’d think would be kept private-transaction histories, bank balances, where you’ve sent payments-and can continue to do so even if your account is closed.”

Read

I did some more looking around on the net and found this tidbit over at geeklens.com which is an affiliate site for 000webhost.com, the web host for mainmsn.com.

Mainmsn.com appears to be the 2nd most popular site hosted by 000webhost.com. (as of today)

http://mainmsn.com
Setup on 2007-12-19, its 37 day ago, and currently has about 3027 visitors per day.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I submitted an “abuse” ticket to 000webhost.com. I immediately received an automated confirmation email from them stating that I would be contacted in 24 hours. It has been over 25 hours and still no word from them.

I just checked, and it looks like the name servers have changed for mainmsn.com, and the new ones are reporting “no records”.

I just got an IM from a friend on my MSN messenger account that appears to be some sort of backdoor IRC bot.

(05:18:39 PM) UnamedFriend: Hey, isn’t this YOU?? :S http://mainmsn.com/images/viewimage.php?=myusername@hotmail.com
(05:30:55 PM) Jordan: Are you there?
(05:35:35 PM) Jordan: I think you might be infected with a virus

I changed the above url to www.virustotal.com’s antivirus scan of the file.

Needless to say, I’m trying to contact that friend and let them know about their computer’s actions.

Update:

I attempted to contact the domain registrant of mainmsn.com via the whois contact info and the message bounced. I am now attempting to contact the company that mainmsn.com is using for its name servers. I also submitted the URL to Google’s Safe Browsing: Report a malware page

I just came across this video while reading this post on the Network Security Blog.

The video emphasizes what I feel when registering on all of these social networking sites – a mixture of monotony and maybe a little annoyance or just a feeling that I’m wasting my time link.

Edit: I think embedding the video messed up my template… I’ll just link to it.

I just saw this today after reading Franz P.’s comment about how he found my post. I did a search for “information overload” to see if I could find my post on Google. I looked through the first five pages and didn’t see my post, but I did find this:

Cure Information Overload Using Google Reader

Google’s feed reader has an option to sort the feeds by relevance. It’s only available if you go to “All items” and select “Sort by auto”. The cryptic name should mean that Google Reader “prioritizes the items based on their importance to you” by analyzing your reading patterns. – googlesystem.blogspot.com

I’ve noticed that I easily get distracted from what I’m doing when on my computer, be it reading my emails, school work, or other important things. I also tend to spend too much time reading interesting and informative articles online. And to top things off, I feel this compulsion to read every single new item in my RSS feed reader, and not just hitting the “mark as read” button after spending several hours trying to read it all. Too much of a good thing – too much information…

Wired is reporting that information overload is being predicted by some analysts as the problem of the year for 2008. “‘It’s too much information. It’s too many interruptions. It’s too much lost time,’ Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira declared. ‘It’s always too much of a good thing.’ Information overload isn’t exactly new, but Spira said the problem has grown as technology increases societal expectations for instantaneous response. And more information available, he said, also means more time wasted looking for the right information, whether in an old e-mail or through a search engine.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/26/2038218

I just turned off the web clips in my Gmail account, and I’m going to unsubscribe from the high-volume news feeds and try to be very selective in the feeds that I have, and I’ll probably limit my weekly time spent on feed reeding and extraneous browsing to 2 hours a week or less (for starters)…

Last night I was pondering my lack of available storage space on my laptop and I got an idea. A program to help automate the process of sorting through pictures to find the bad ones,

• that will automatically scan for blurry or under-exposed (or other) photos after or during the process of uploading them to your computer,
• and then bring up a window with all of the ones it found and let you quickly review them, deselect any false positives, and then delete them with a click of a button.

Now obviously there would need to be settings to determine how blurry the images are allowed to be before the filter gets them (compulsive, moderate, sparing – names for the different levels), and you might even want it to be “smart” and learn what you like based on what you save.

It would be nice if there was a way to have it plug-in to Picasa, iPhoto, Photoshop (Bridge?), F-Spot, and others. That way when you use the “import photos” feature in them, it can automatically scan for undesirable pictures and tell the user that it found pictures that may be unwanted.

Edit:
A quick Google search turned up this:

Photology Makes Sorting Through Photos A Snap

My immediate solution was to convince Dad, that our family needed to be able to back-up all of our computers regularly and in an automated fashion, and that to do so we needed networked storage. Enter the Fantom G-Force MegaDisk NAS / RAID MDN1000. So I ordered it a few days ago from newegg.com and am now awaiting its arrival.

On other topics…

I finished my GHOP task (a while back) and now I’m looking for some actual programming task. Although I have not done any real programming before, I still understand some of the basics. I’m thinking of doing one of the Python tasks.

What is GHOP? According to their website:

Following on from the success of the Google Summer of Code program, Google is holding a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students) with the aim of encouraging young people to participate in open source. We will work with ten open source organizations for this pilot effort, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with, from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research.

I am working on one of the Drupal tasks (#68, a documentation task) right now and am enjoying it. Don’t wait! You can’t claim any more tasks after January 22, 2008, 12:00 AM Pacific Time.

“One freelancer’s quest to streamline his life by optimizing daily his Google homepage is an exercise in efficient time-wasting.”

This is so true. I find myself easily getting distracted and ending up wasting my time online. It reminds me of the concept of spending money to save money.

Hit the read link below to read the article.

-Jordan

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