Keith_Beef - Slashdot User

Submission + - Cloning, astroturfing... and who is Rachel Ray?

Submitted by Keith_Beef on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @11:54PM

Keith_Beef writes: So, I accidentally hit carriage return after only typing in the string "news" in the URL field... and Verizon took me to a list of pages and out of curiosity I opened the first two links in new tabs.

Well, I was treated to a very nice story, or was it two stories... about a woman, or was it two women? Anyway, she (they) is (are) named "Grace Connell from ," [sic] and "Morgan Johnson from ," [sic]...

Or at least, the woman (women) was (were) from no place until I temporarily enabled Javascript... and then magically both stories announced the woman in question to be from Rutherford, NJ...

Now what is even stranger, or maybe not, is that these two women look like identical twins! Wow!

You know by now what is going on. Some advertising blurb, dressed up as a "true life story" with a bit of Javascript to sniff my IP address that gets somehow mapped to a town not too far from my address, based on Verizon's block of addresses.

Look for yourselves:
http://www.gracesdiet.com/?t202id=42143
http://www.morgansdiet.com/?t202id=32041

Now, how is this kind of thing viewed by the FTC? Surely these two pages fall foul of the "truth-in-advertising rules", no?
http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2008/01/truth-in-advert.html

Apparently, the FDA has bigger teeth than the FTC, because whoever registered (with NameCheap.com) the two domains gracesdiet.com and morgansdiet.com feels it necessary to put FDA disclaimers in page footers, but doesn't feel morally obliged to refrain from making up spurious "real-life stories" in order to sell dietary supplements of dubious usefulness...

So, what is to be done? Is there any hope? Or should I just go and buy shares in the Brawndo Corporation right now?

Submission + - Knowledge lost when old files no longer readable

Submitted by

Keith_Beef

on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @12:41PM

Keith_Beef writes: "According to an article on the BBC News website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6265976.stm ), there is a real risk of knowledge being lost when computer systems are no longer capable of reading older file formats.

In the wider view, this would be true of not only the file formats, but of the physical media themselves. Who now has an 8" floppy drive to hand? How long before nobody knows what an Exabyte cartridge is? And in a couple of decades, maybe CD-ROM and even DVD-ROM will dissappear as Blu-Ray, HD-DVD or some other technology (like holo-diamonds) become affordable.

From the article:
Natalie Ceeney said society faced the possibility of "losing years of critical knowledge" because modern PCs could not always open old file formats.

She was speaking at the launch of a partnership with Microsoft to ensure the Archives could read old formats.

Microsoft's UK head Gordon Frazer warned of a looming "digital dark age".

So of course, rather than look for Free Software to solve the problem in an open, honest way, Ceeney has done the typical UK Gov't dance to Microsoft's tune."

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