This may seem rather mean spirited...

There's a story here..  Blazing Cat Fur has more

In case you didn't know, there's no such thing as Internet privacy

Fun with Internet trolls

Obviously, I should find better things to do, but I decided to waste time again on twitter today.  As some wit once said about the Internet - if you were talking about it in the past, you might say 'someday, we will have something that will let you communicate with anyone in the world instantly and access the sum total of human knowledge, and we'll use it to look at funny pictures of cats and pick fights with strangers.' Well, I was involved in some of that this afternoon.

I retweeted a comment by Ezra Levant about the apparent hypocrisy of the Toronto Star's outrage over the, ahem, ...alleged crack cocaine use by Toronto Mayor Rob Ford:

Then for reasons unknown, someone named Werner Patels decided to include me in his reply to Ezra.

The name sounded vaguely familiar. Werner, as a quick google search revealed, is a sometime contributor to The Huffington Post. In his self-written twitter profile, he describes himself in effusive terms as a "thinker" and "improver of all things"

Now if someone with such a pompous, self-inflated public opinion of themselves wants to play trash talk with me,  I'm usually game, so I played back with:

Implying Werner is pompous evidently really pissed him off:

Scumbag?!?  Scumbag!?! Them's fightin' words!  Well, take this, Werner!:

Werner was none too pleased with that and shot back:

Ah! It appeared that Werner hadn't clued in that he had replied to me when he replied to Ezra's tweet. So being the friendly, helpful fellow I am, I thought I'd politely let him know where he made his error:

That really set off poor Werner!

He either was too lazy to bother to check his own correspondence or simply doesn't understand how the medium he was using works. But in either case, I think I actually saw some of the forehead veins in his litter twitter image throbbing and him sucking even harder on his lips when he blasted out these two tweets:

Clearly, the obviously humorless Werner still hadn't figured out that he initiated contact with me. It was therefore incumbent on me to set him straight (because I was bored killing time before I needed to join a conference call  ...ok,  that doesn't really make it incumbent, but I was having fun):

And that was the last I have heard from Werner Patels.

Bottom line: I really need to find more productive things to do between calls!

Canada, US, U.K. reject UN control of Internet

Canada said it was forced to reject the proposed treaty because of its commitment to an Internet "in which people are free to participate, communicate, organize and exchange information."

And in other Sunday news...

JR worked for Romanian communists?!?

The UN is making a power grab for Internet control

Pine Beetles said to affect Canada's climate

Is Al Gore going to start selling bug spray?

This ain't good - The United Nations wants to take control of the Internet

The Russian Federation is leading the charge for a UN treaty which would give national governments control over the Internet.

The UN itself wants the ability to impose Internet taxes to be applied from wealthier countries to poorer ones. Free speech, as always, is being threatened by the world forum whose membership includes a number of totalitarian regimes threatened by their inability to censor criticisms of their government or impose blasphemy regulations.

To give you an idea of what's in store, the UN's conference on International Telecommunications is set to take place next month in Dubai, on of the undemocratic United Arab Emirates.

If you live in a democratic country, pray your government has the wisdom and sanity not to ratify the treaty on your behalf.

Canadian Federal Court Says No Copyright Infringement For Linking, Posting Several Paragraphs

The Federal Court of Canada has issued an important decision involving copyright and posting content online. The case involves a lawsuit launched by Richard Warman and the National Post against Mark and Constance Fournier, who run the FreeDominion website. Warman and the National Post sued the site over the appearance of two articles and an inline link to photograph that appeared on the forum. The court dismissed all three claims. 

While the first claim (Warman's article) was dismissed on the basis that it took too long to file the lawsuit, the legal analysis on the National Post claim involving an article by Jonathan Kay assesses the copyright implications of posting several paragraphs from an article online. In this case, the article was 11 paragraphs long.  The reproduction on the Free Dominion site included the headline, three complete paragraphs and part of a fourth. The court ruled that this amount of copying did not constitute a "substantial part" of the work and therefore there was no infringement. The court added that in the alternative, the reproduction of the work was covered by fair dealing, concluding that a large and liberal interpretation of news reporting would include posts to the discussion forum.  The decision then includes an analysis of the six factor test and concludes that the use was fair.

More at Michael Geist's Blog

Obama says he will not support SOPA Bill

The growing anti-SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) support that has swept through the gaming and Internet community found a very big ally today. With websites like Reddit and Wikipedia and gaming organizations like Major League Gaming prepared for a blackout on January 18^th – the same day that the House Judiciary Committee hearing on HR 3261was scheduled in Washington, DC – President Barack Obama has stepped in and said he would not support the bill. SOPA has been killed, for now.

Full article at Forbes.com

Jenny vs. Spenser: mystery boss responds to online photo quit

This is pretty funny

h/t Etobicoke Slim

Internet Death Threat email scam

Here's a novel appraoch to scamming money through the Internet I received by email today (apparently it's been around for a while now):

From: robbinsj716@msn.com
Subject: Act Fast!
Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 10:46:11 +0000

Hello,

This is the only way I could contact you for now,I want you to be very careful about this and keep this secret with you until I make out space for us to see. You have no need of knowing who I am or where I am from.I know this may sound very surprising to you but it’s the situation.I have been paid some ransom in advance to terminate you with some reasons listed to me by my employer. It’s someone I believe you call a friend, I have followed you closely for a while now and have seen that you are innocent of the accusations he leveled against
you. Do not contact the police or try to send a copy of this to them,because if you do, I will know,and I might be pushed to do what I have been paid to do.Besides, this is the first time I turn out to be a betrayer in my job. I took pity on you,that is why I have made up my mind to help you if you are willing to help yourself.

Now listen I need just $5,000. And you have to send it through western union; I repeat, do not arrange for the cops and if you play hard to get, it will be extended to your family. Do not set any camera to cover us or set up any tape to record our conversation, my employer is in my control now. Payment details will be provided for you to make a part of the payment of $3,000 first,which will serve as guarantee that you are ready to you co-operate,then i will post a copy of the video tape that contains his request for me to terminate you which will be enough evidence for you to take any legal action against him before he employs another person for the job. You will pay the balance of $2,000 once you receive the tape.

Warning; do not contact the police, make sure you stay indoors once it is 7.30pm until this whole thing is sorted out,if you neglect any of these warnings, you will have yourself to blame. You do not have much time, so get back to me immediately.

Note:I will advise you keep this to yourself alone, not even a friend or a family member should know about it because it could be one of them.

Regard
Don

That hot woman on ChatRoulette...is possessed by SATAN!!

The film The Last Exorcism has one of the best ever Internet campaigns going by luring unsuspecting victims on the site ChatRoulette, where people (predominantly male) anonymously pair up via webcam, generally to expose themselves. Some boys must have thought they hit the jackpot when they found themselves looking at a an attractive brunette, seemingly in real time. She smiles seductively and tantalizingly starts to undo her lacy  top when..her eyes roll back in her head, which starts to contort Linda Blair-style and she ferociously attacks the camera.

The young men watching live on the other side of the connection are, to say the least, taken by surprise.

Watch it here:

I Write Like - A fun, if inconsistent, internet toy

There's a new site that's gone viral called I Like Write. In their words:

Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.

Any text in English will do: your latest blog post, journal entry, comment, chapter of your unfinished book, etc. For reliable results paste at least a few paragraphs (not tweets).

That sounded like fun to me, so I thought I'd try it with a post from Eye on a Crazy Planet.

The first I tried was this one from yesterday about the anti-Israel bigot, York University instructor, John Greyson.

And I Write Like told me I write like Kurt Vonnegut. Wow, was I flattered! That got me so pleased with myself, I almost clicked their link to "Learn how to secure a book publishing contract!"

But, me being the sceptic you've come to love, I figured I should try another post, just to see what happens. So I tried this one about the problematic ideological cooperation between Hamas and "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid."

On this second attempt, I Write Like told me I write like H.P. Lovecraft.

Interesting, also flattering, and while Hamas and "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid" are indeed contemporary horrors, I hadn't realized my writing style changed so drastically between posts. So I thought I should try one more time. This time taking a completely different subject, my interview piece with Rob Ford from earlier this week. I Write Like‘s analysis of that was that it resembled the writing style of The Hitchhiker‘s Guide to the Galaxy‘s Douglas Adams.

 As thrilled as I was to be stylistically compared with these three authors, it left me believing less that my prose takes wild stylistic shifts resembling three of the 20th Century‘s great authors than it did feeling that I Write Like is an inaccurate assessment tool used as a marketing ploy for the site‘s writing/publishing related ads.

But I had fun with what they describe as a Bayesian classifier and you might too. So even if your friends, teachers and Random House tell you otherwise, at least you know there is one place you can go where you‘ll be told you have the potential to be the next Tom Wolfe or Saul Bellow.