TechF*cked

I think after this story, I am going to officially close down TechF*cked.com, because nothing will ever get funnier than this. Apparently, on one of the various fake celebrity blogs, a fake Al Sharpton made a post in response to the Michael Vick commotion. MSNBC found the blurb and quoted it as being from Al Sharpton’s very own mouth. Here is the fake Al Sharpton’s quote:

Consider this: If the police caught Brett Favre running a dolphin-fighting ring out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other to the death, would they bust him? Of course not. They would get his autograph, commend him on his tightly-spiraled forward passes, then bet on one of his dolphins.

Here is the correction on MSNBC’s website:

An earlier version of this article quoted from a blog entry purportedly by the Rev. Al Sharpton. MSNBC.com has determined that the blog is a hoax. In July, Sharpton signed a letter with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals condemning dogfighting, saying: “Dogfighting is unacceptable. Hurting animals for human pleasure or gain is despicable. Cruelty is just plain wrong.”

Brett Favre… dolphin fighting ring… no red flags went up? Ha!

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Ok, well maybe the title is a bit deceiving, we don’t have the secret. But all that you need to know is that a New Jersey teenager has unlocked an iPhone, and it’s for sale on eBay ($40k+ at the time of this post).

What does this mean?
Well, now that it has been done once, it will ‘easily’ be replicated, and soon enough, anyone with a sim card will be able to share in the enjoyment of those who currently have ATT.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Worlds-Second-Unlocked-iPhone_W0QQitemZ230164884672QQihZ013QQcategoryZ64355QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

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…and is a moron. Perhaps I’m taking this statement out of context, but I can’t imagine what context this could be placed in for it to make sense. Not everyone can create such enthralling (yawn) websites as Broadcast.com, but what does Cuban expect?

The past two years have seen the biggest growth (economically and creatively) in Internet history. With web 2.0 social networking of the past and current times, and on the verge of web 3.0 (whatever that may be), one cannot logically believe that the Internet truly is boring.

I used to respect Mark Cuban, but he’s turned into an idiot (not to mention how old his whining to the media regarding the Dallas Mavericks). Just go away.

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The mayor of Atlanta, in an attempt to rid the city of child predators, has asked Craigslist to remove sex ads from the website. I’m not sure if there is a correlation between men attempting to have legit sexual relations with an adult woman (albeit… a hooker) and child predators. But that’s how it goes…

Last month, MySpace removed some tens of thousands of sex predator profiles from its site, and now with this news circulating around Craigslist, I wonder ‘What’s a child predator to do!?’

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I’m starting to think I’m blind. Literally, 33% of digg postings I do, I have to retype the CAPTCHA.

Maybe I’m not human.

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Future webmasters, I urge you, please think logically before jumping into a web venture based on what’s popular for any business.

I understand, all the rage is social networking, and the current times and future have much room for more niche networks… but a place for panty lovers? Granted, it may get some traffic (depending on how provocative its pictures are), but what are they thinking?

Maybe I’m wrong and they are right, but this is just laughable. And creepy. Very, very, very creepy.

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Facebook has announced that it will be using personal data from individual’s profile pages for better targeted ads. Wow, brilliant idea. Now advertisers can pay a much higher eCPM and still have a zero click-through rate. Sign me up!

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Just a week after the Digg clone script company, Pligg, announced it was up for sale, VideoSift, which claims claimed to be the biggest website currently not currently using Pligg’s software, informed Pligg by email that it has developed its own software and would not longer need Pliggs services. Ouch.

Here is the aforementioned email:

Pligg is a good general CMS, but there were a few considerations for moving off:

We started VideoSift shortly after Pligg was ported from the Spanish language Digg clone Meneame.net written by a talented Spanish coder, Ricardo Galli. ( http://meneame.net/) Pligg has gone through a lot of revisions and changes since then - and we haven’t moved with them.

About 2 months ago, there was a serious security breach at VideoSift (and other Pligg based sites) that compromised part of our DB. The breach was based on a simple hack that would have been found by analyzing the Pligg source. Although the Pligg community was quick to respond and patch the problem- This pushed us farther down the road to closed source.

And lastly, although we were well on our way to writing our new software, we have some misgivings about the pending sale of Pligg. Pligg is licensed under the Aferro GPL which is pretty strict about the re-sell of code.

The new VideoSift has been rebuilt from the ground up to work well around video aggregation. Our community loves it, and we can’t wait to launch it this Friday.

Thanks and cheers,

Brian Houston
VideoSift
Sydney, Australia

Terrible news for the Pligg sale. Despite some obvious weakness, like the security glitch a few months back, Pligg is a great script, and I wish the developers well in their endeavors  in selling.

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I’m always skeptical of statistics involving the loss of productivity and how much money businesses lose as a result of events, like every March when you hear that businesses lose $999 trillion billion zillion dollars during the first two days of the NCAA basketball tournament. But this one is interesting (although full of holes).

The study estimates that Australian employees spend 1 hour of time per day online. It guessed that at least one employee from the 800,000 Aussie business was an avid Facebook user, spending about 1 hour per day on the site. However, the study failed to realize the basics; that there are only about 240,000 Facebook members residing in Australia. I guess we can thus deduce that somewhere around $1.4 billion is lost per year. (Based on their formula).

Who knows.

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