In Friday's edition of "Dear Margo" (an advice column written by the daughter of Ann Landers), a reader asked if Yahoo! employees were reading her Yahoo! mail. Margo addressed the question with a quote from her boss, a Yahoo! News VP. He not only answered the question with doublespeak, but used it as an opportunity to disparage Google's Gmail.

Many web site owners use Google AdSense to help cover the costs of their sites or earn some money from them. But for nearly a week now, Google's reporting of exposures and clicks has been at least partially broken. I've been tracking this on my blog since I noticed one of my ad channels was reporting around 7% of what it should despite my site traffic being at normal.

Google acknowledged there were discrepancies after it became so bad you couldn't help but notice it, but they only did so on a thread in the Google Groups AdSense Troubleshooting group and have yet to offer an explanation or ETA for a fix. The next day numbers went down again, this time by a factor of 10 or so, and Google remained mum. As they started coming back up on Thursday, Google chimed back in with another "we're working on it" and that was it.

They say that this problem is just affecting specialized tracking, but isn't affecting aggregate reporting for a whole domain (basically, you're making all the money you should, but you just can't track where it's coming from in as much detail), but many webmasters are complaining of lower revenues to go with the lowered channel numbers. I know my clickthrough rate was the lowest I'd seen in months on the same day this problem was at its worst, though that could be a coincidence. Despite this, Google remains tight-lipped, giving webmasters a minimum of information and providing a minimum of reassurance (two posts in three days that merely state they know it's happening and are working on it). Hopefully they'll be more forthcoming when this is solved and they can do a postmortem on it. But, in the meantime, they're making a lot of people nervous.

If you're a /. subscriber, you get to see stories before they're publicly posted (i.e. open for comment). On the story's comments section, they like to say "Posting will only be possible in The Mysterious Future!"

One problem. Those stories go up on the Firehose with their post time labeled on them. It'll say something like "Posted by Zonk on Thursday October 18, @02:10PM", only it's 1:45 PM. "02:10PM" is "The Mysterious Future". Now you have some time to compose your post in a text editor and copy it to your clipboard. At 2:10, the "reply" button appears on the page. For tne next minute or so, you'll get an error message instead of a form for posting. Then the system is ready and you get the posting form.

You type in your subject, paste in your response, count to "fifteen-one-thousand" to ensure you've waited the required 20 seconds from hitting the page to posting your comment... voila. First post.

And if you make it reasonably intelligent, it gets modded up enough so everyone visiting that discussion sees your post. If you've got a link in your .sig, you'll get a mini Slashdot effect (maybe 50 hits).

I wouldn't suggest marketing via the .sig in a first post as an effective marketing plan, but the traffic's a nice side benefit. Primarily the benefit is that just about everyone reads your post and you stop some idiot who would post GNAA stuff or "first post!" from getting there first.

Whenever the question of whether Linux is ready for the desktop comes up, I've regularly cited Linux's hard-to-find drivers and codecs as the thing that gave Windows the edge. But I had an adventure in upgrading that's ended that criticism.

When I went to find out how to detect mobile browsers, I found out it wasn't simple or trivial. After looking at a number of scripts and a couple big lists of User Agent strings, I put together a free PHP script for detecting mobile browsers. It seems to do very well (no false positives on all 63 desktop browser versions tracked by BrowserCam, caught all the mobiles I've thrown at it so far), yet the code is very compact and easy to follow. There's also a quickie mobile browser detector using the code... if you want to see it in action.

It's been 158 days since Google updated their Toolbar Page Rank (TBPR), which are the Page Rank numbers the public can see. That's 36 days longer than their prior record longest gap, and two months longer than their "quarterly" average. Furthermore, it seems Matt Cutts has been oddly silent or dismissive on the topic for months. Is Google going to terminate public page rank numbers outright, just let them die a slow death of obsolesence, replace them with something different, or are they just running really slow for some unknown reason? What's up with Google Page Rank?

To those who actually say "content wants to be free" with a straight face and seriousness of purpose...

"Content wants to be free" makes as much sense as "content wants to be a fireman when it grows up."

When you say "content wants to be free," you actually mean, "I don't want to pay for content." You're talking about your own desires, but the way a three-year-old does.

"Content wants to be free... and my teddy bear wants a chocolate chip cookie... and my shirt wants a hug."

Free content is a good thing, but let's stop talking like three-year-olds, please.

Just got a bogus e-mail, trying to get me to a malware infested site by telling me there's an embarrassing video of me on YouTube that shows my face. It may be targeting people who use private domain registrations.

So, I've been getting a flood of fake registration confirmations and Symantec finally put out a detailed warning about them. Spammers have already just about ruined it for small e-card sites. Now small membership sites will likely have increased bounce rates as overzealous spam filters reject or eat legitimate membership confirmations. Will spam have the eventual side effect of forcing every site owner who wants to send mail from their site into a $1200+ a year e-mail accreditation program?

CafePress recently announced they would begin charging an extra $3 for printing on the back of shirts, to bring their pricing in line with their competitors. Many of their t-shirt sellers place logos on the back of their shirts and CafePress is refusing to provide even a simple tool to just clear the backs of all the shirts in a store. I've calculated that the lack of that tool will cost enough man hours to go to the moon and back in rush hour traffic.

I've seen a lot of people shouting about how we have to protect our kids from porn on the Internet. But what about protecting them from ideology? Why is it not okay for someone to show my kid a picture of a bare breast, but it is okay for them to try to convert my child to their religion or political party? So, is ideology as dangerous as porn? If so, shouldn't we be doing as much to protect our kids from ideology as we're doing to protect them from pornography?

Gary Coleman has been shilling for Cash Call lately, trying to sell people on loans with outrageous interest rates (99.25% APR for example). These are the kinds of loans that help keep poor people poor. And that brings up this question: by virtue of making a buck off of this kind of exploitation of the poor, is Gary Coleman evil?

The recording industry has long blamed piracy for diminishing record sales. But are pirates really to blame? People have long complained about having to pay for a whole CD to get the one or two songs they really wanted, and now they can buy just those songs. Is it really piracy, or is the death of the album killing music industry revenues?

In two different front page stories, one on May 23 and one on May 25, the headline proclaimed that one party sued another. In both cases, they were threatening potential lawsuits if their demands were not met, meaning no one was actually suing in either story.

I have to believe that the editors took a moment to RTFA before placing it on the front page of Slashdot (though some may say that's akin to believing in the Easter Bunny). So, if that's the case, one of two problems is evident:

• The Slashdot editors don't know the difference between a strong letter and a lawsuit, thus any time anyone sends them a threatening e-mail, they clap their hands to their heads and run around the office crying "we're being sued".
• The Slashdot editors need a little remedial English study so they can learn that you only use the word "sues" to describe an action when an actual lawsuit has been filed... not threatened or implied, but filed.

I know we're not supposed to have high expectations for Slashdot, but knowing what "sues" means is not a high expectation, is it?

One of the arguments that go back and forth in the fight over abolishing copyright is that if copyright is abolished, the financial incentive to create is removed and the supply of quality work is diminished. The abolishionists counter that this is not the case, but that new business models will evolve to work with the new system. But the only ones they point to as currently working are all based around software. I don't see it any currently working for other art forms on any sort of large scale.

So I say "prove it". I have posed a challenge to the open source activists who want to abolish copyright. Nothing legally prevents artists from licensing their *original* work under open source licenses and using open source business models. So let's see these evolved business models at work. Let's see them create the levels of fame and fortune that inspire people to "suffer for their art". Or, if the concepts of fame and fortune are so antithetical to the cause, let's see them produce a significant community of artists in varied mediums who are making a decent middle class living solely from open source business models and open source licensing their art.

I'm sick of hypothetical examples. If Open Source models work for all forms of copyrighted intellectual property and this warrants abolishing copyright, then show me the money. Prove this is a workable real-world idea, and not just some utopian ideal that will never stand up in real practice.

The open source art world is a cool niche and occasionally produces some interesting stuff, but it's not producing the kind of quantity or success that proves it can be a substitute for copyright. It's time for those who advocate open source art to step up to the plate and swing for the fences instead of chattering from the dugout. It's time for them to prove their ideas are real and workable, not just nice dreams that would work in a perfect world where we were all altruists and willing to create art for art's sake.

So I challenge you to prove your claims on a large scale, prove your ideas and ideals work, and show the world that open source art is a viable alternative to copyrighting your art. By July 4 of this year, establish a central web site where this experiment/initiative will be publicized.

On July 4 of next year, declare your independence from copyright by documenting at that web site the successful open source art initiatives that have either produced comparable levels of stardom and wealth to copyright-driven models or have produced large communities of artists who are deriving a solid middle-class income from open source licensing their art.

If you can provide this proof, the quantity and quality of artists moving to open source models will increase significantly. If not, then perhaps some of you will start applying some of that formidable brain power to thinking about how to fix copyright and make it work better instead of abolishing it.

In the end, regardless of the outcome, society benefits. Either they learn a new, workable way that makes things better, or they get a new cadre of copyright reformers who will work within the system to make things better. But either way, once these models are proved or disproved, all the energy spent on debating hypothetical points can be refocused into creating real and beneficial change.