Fortunately for mwave.com (and unfortunately for me), they’ve picked a good hosting company. Well, a bad hosting company as far as the rest of the Internet is concerned, but a good one to have if you’re a spammer: xo.com. I’ve sent about a dozen complaints to the xo.com abuse address informing them of their spamming customer mwave.com. No response. A little research showed why: xo.com has a huge reputation for supporting spam operations, resulting in a remarkable 48 entries in the Spamhaus SBL (at the time this is written), including 6 on the “worst-of-the-worst” ROKSO list. ROKSO is the “Register of Known Spam Operations”, a list of dedicated spammers who have been widely known for a long time and kicked off at least three hosts. In other words, xo.com had to have known these 6 were businesses devoted to spamming before they took them on as customers. (One sad side effect of ROKSO is that if you’re a spammer like mwave.com you can use ROKSO as a shopping list when you want to find a host whom you know will tolerate spamming.)

Also fortunately for them/unfortunately for me, both xo.com and mwave.com are based in the U.S. and follow the dictates of the loathsome “CAN-SPAM” act, a federal law that legalized spam that follows some (very minimal) guidelines. Conspicuously absent from those guidelines is any requirement that the spammer confirm that the person who provided an email address is the legitimate owner/user of that email address. So unconfirmed mailing lists are OK in the eyes of “CAN-SPAM” as long as they contain no forged headers and provide an “opt-out” link (you should never use an opt-out link — it just confirms your email address to spammers).

So all I can (and you should) do is boycott scumbags like mwave.com. And if you’re a non-spammer looking for a web host, cross xo.com off your list. As soon as I have the capability, all xo.com IP blocks will be banned from my mail server. I don’t doubt that many other places have done (or will soon do) the same.

UPDATE:

In just over a week since the shill from mwave.com posted here saying they don’t spam… I’ve received THREE more spams from these scumbags.

Doug’s photography, at least the material featured in this book, is what I would describe as “observational humor”; moments of real life that most of us would pass over without a second thought are what Doug picks up and turns into art. And don’t get the idea that “humor” means that he’s laughing at or making fun of his subjects. Quite the opposite is true. These are the kind of photographs that will make you smile at their truthfulness.

We could all do with a little more of that, right?

The Author

Thank you for flying American Skyways. Welcome aboard.

We realize that this was the only flight would take you anywhere near your intended destination on the day and/or time you needed to travel without either charging more money than the GDP of Scotland or requiring a 6-leg voyage passing through Detroit, Seattle, Charlotte, Anchorage and Denver — in that order. So we know you had no real choice about which airline to fly and we intend to exploit this knowledge to the fullest.

We recognize that one of the greatest frustrations of 21st-century air travel is the overfilling of cabin baggage compartments. In light of this fact we have recently added extra fees for checked baggage in order to discourage the checking of bags, thereby guarantying … even more overfilled cabin baggage compartments.

If they haven’t already been stuffed full by the passengers who boarded before you, please stow your carry-on baggage either in the overhead compartments — which have been conveniently made one and a half inches smaller than standard approved carry-on baggage size — or under the seat in front of you where it will make your own seat feel even more cramped than it really is. Remember that you are allowed only one carry-on bag plus one personal item, such as a purse or laptop computer… unless you’re Specially Privileged, in which case you can bring as many bags as you are able to carry and we won’t lift a finger to stop you. You get to decide for yourself if you’re Specially Privileged or not (and you probably are, aren’t you?) Don’t worry about inconveniencing another passenger, because you’re Specially Privileged and they’re not. And we don’t give a damn about either of you.

Keep in mind that, in the future, any attempt to make other passengers’ lives easier by checking your baggage will be punished with an additional surcharge over and above the checked bag fee we currently have. (We’ll call it an “overflow capacity fee” or some such.)

Food may or may not be purchased during the flight. Depending on your definition of “food”.

Box lunches are available for $7.95 and contain marginally more nutritional value than the box they come in (although the box tastes better). Beer, wine and soft drinks are available at a variety of prices (though uniformly unpalatable quality) and every beverage comes with a coupon worth $1.00 off the use of the rest room during the flight — a 20% savings! Coupons are not transferable to future flights but you may barter with passengers who have small bladders for use during this flight.

Please note the emergency exits located on either side of the aircraft. If you are seated next to an emergency exit and are unable or unwilling to assist other passengers in the event of an emergency, please keep quiet about it because we’ll need to use you as an excuse in the event of an expensive post-crash lawsuit.

In the unlikely event of a water landing — well, a survivable one, anyway — your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device. Or as a weapon to fight your way through to the emergency exit. In either case you will forfeit the $20.00 seat-cushion-deposit that we tacked onto your bill without telling you when you booked the flight. If there is no emergency water landing and you don’t notice the seat cushion deposit we’ll keep it and use it to pay for thicker, glossier Skymall magazines. (Because you can never have too many electric corkscrew sharpeners.)

If we experience a loss of cabin pressure, emergency oxygen masks will be deployed from above your seat. When this happens, secure the the mask over your mouth and nose. At this point you may purchase oxygen for $5.00 per minute.

All major credit cards accepted.

One of the annoying things about the new anti-photographer authoritarianism is that it generally targets users of large, conspicuous cameras; the last thing any terrorist would use. The only incident I know of in which a real prospective terrorist was caught (in Victoria Station, London, IIRC) involved the use of a phone camera… As anyone with an ounce of sense could have predicted.

The thinking of the thugs with badges undoubtedly goes like this:

"A real terrorist is almost certainly going to use as inconspicuous a camera as possible. But because it’s inconspicuous there’s basically zero chance of me getting in trouble if I miss it.

Therefore, as long as there’s a non-zero chance of the person with the expensive camera being a terrorist, that person represents an infinitely greater threat to my job than a real terrorist with an iPhone."

Great Quotations

…there’s something wrong, somewhere, when mistakes happen as often as they do, without any visible and measurable positive effect in how the police actually protects us from the real bad guys.
— Jostein Øksne

You can read the full list here.

If there’s one word I’d use to describe the Apple store it would be: Creepy.

Apple has always bothered me in a couple of different ways. First of all there’s their monopolistic/authoritarian attitude towards their users: You are not allowed to install the Mac OS on any computer that isn’t made by Apple. iPhone users can buy only applications that have been duly approved by the Powers That Be and sold in the official Apple App Store (they recently refused approval for a funny political caricature app developed by Mad Magazine and only relented after they were widely mocked for being complete ninnies/nannies). I won’t buy an iPhone because I refuse to let any Big Brother (irony alert) decide what apps I can and cannot have.

The other, less rational but still powerful, thing that bothers me is the whole “cult of Apple” thing. Every Mac user I’ve ever met has acted as if it’s the most wonderful religion in the world and I should join right now. The Apple store certainly displays this effect to the fullest: Every one of the chipper young folks working there was happy, helpful and completely upbeat about everything Apple in a slightly disquieting, Unification-Church-ish sort of way.

The store itself added to the discomfiting effect. It was large, airy and spacious; stylish in an affectedly-hip sort of way much like a certain well-known chain of coffee shops. In fact this last comparison was what led to my epiphany: The best analogy for Apple is a cross between Starbucks and the Church of Scientology.

Just ask yourself: What kind of computer do you think Tom Cruise has? (He probably drinks decaf, though…)

ADDENDUM:

You know what’s frowned on by both Scientologists and Starbucks? Smoking. Now Apple has apparently started invalidating warranties of computer owners who smoke. Read about it on the Consumerist.

Every other day someone on a mailing list or web forum is flying off the handle because he’s (it’s always a “he”) discovered an unauthorized use of one of his images. Which is OK. You’re entitled to get upset when someone takes your work without compensation. I know one photographer who had to shut down his equestrian photography business because his intended customers were just grabbing the proof images from his web site, sometimes even printing them out for display, despite the low resolution and subsequent low quality of the prints.

But here’s the irony: At almost every photography workshop with which I’ve been involved at least one of the other presenters has committed a flagrant copyright violation. Either at the end or beginning of their presentation they run a slide show of their best images… accompanied by music — Sting, Beatles, Celine Dion, whatever*. These events aren’t for charity. The audiences are paying to attend and the speakers are compensated for their presence. Using someone’s music to accompany a slide show under these circumstances is a violation of copyright unless you’ve paid the appropriate licensing fee.

It doesn’t matter if they’re giving the musical artists credit — if Sting ended his concert with a slide show that included one of these photographers’ photos, do you think they’d want to be paid for it? Of course.

It makes no difference that Sting is a multi-millionaire who would never even notice the small licensing fee needed to play his song once for an audience of 150 people. If you use his or anyone else’s music without paying you’re no better than the web thieves who ended my friend’s photo business at horse shows. And you have no right to complain about anyone scraping your shots from your web site if you’re stealing someone else’s media for your own use.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s blog post, this book: “Getting Permission” by Richard Stim (Nolo Press, ISBN 978-1-4133-0518-0)

This book tells you everything you could want to know about licensing music to go with your slide show. Or using photos on your web site. Or — and this is what will interest most of you — what to do to license your work to others. Also covered are topics like licensing artwork, trademarks, art and merchandise licenses and much more. Sections on how to research copyright ownership and the real ins and outs of Fair Use and Public Domain (not the urban legends you’ve read on the web). If what you need to know isn’t covered in this book, you really need to talk to an IP lawyer in person; it’s that thorough.

As a bonus, the book includes a CD-ROM with dozens of useful legal forms and documents like model releases, assignment and work for hire agreements and much, much more.

Highly recommended. Buy it from Powell’s for $34.99. It’s worth twice the price.

ADDENDUM:

I just received an email from Rich Stim, the author of this book, thanking me for this blog post. He has a blog at dearrichblog.com, where he answers questions about patent, trademark and copyright issues. I had a look and it’s as good as I would have expected (which is to say, very good). Check it out.

Visible light is electromagnetic radiation between the wavelengths of 400 nanometers (nm) for violet and 700 nm for red light. Rather than try to work out the wavelength (and corresponding color) directly our eyes just compare how any given light source stimulates each kind of cell. A beam of light of 580 nm wavelength will trigger the Red cells a lot, the green cells moderately and the blue cells not at all. “Ah-ha!” says our retina, “this is yellow!”.

Below is a link to a pop-up window with a small Shockwave application that will help you understand how it works (Shockwave is another Adobe plug-in like Flash — if you don’t have it in your browser already you’ll get a brief message prompting you for an automatic download and install.) The red, green and blue curves show the approximate sensitivity of the three kinds of cells in our eyes. At the top is the spectrum of colors we can see and at bottom is a scale of the wavelengths of light visible to us. Drag the vertical arrow at the left side of the box to any point on the spectrum and you’ll see the color at top, the wavelength at bottom and the approximate response of each kind of cell at the points where the vertical line meets the sensitivity curves.

Click the image below to launch the Shockwave pop-up


NOTE: Due to a bug in the latest version of Apple Safari, this Shockwave app sometimes gets a “wrong version” error (even though it is the correct version) and will not run. If you’re a Safari user you’ll have to try Firefox, Opera or even (ugh) Internet Explorer. (And please report the bug to Apple).

Human color vision is actually a little more complex than this but this is a pretty close approximation of how cameras and other digital imaging devices operate.

What’s even more worrying is that these disputes are examples of the increasing prevalence of irrationality in public discourse today. We aren’t just seeing violent disagreement, we’re seeing complete fabrication of data in support of exotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. 9-11 “Truthers”, Obama “Birthers”, creationists and autism/vaccine fanatics are the most prominent amongst this new wave of irrationality but there are many others. I find their enthusiasm for fabrication and their willingness to lie, deceive and misrepresent in order to support their views more troubling than the views themselves.

Many years ago, in Atlantic Monthly, I believe, I read a short a critique of Erich von Däniken’s “Chariots of the Gods?”, a book based on the premise that aliens had visited earth long ago and were responsible for Stonehenge, the statues of Easter Island, the pyramids of Egypt, etc. “Chariots of the Gods?” was, needless to say, unmitigated rubbish. The author of the Atlantic piece, an actual scientist, selected one paragraph from the book and researched and disproved its claims one by one. He noted that it took him most of a working day to research and debunk Von Däniken’s misinformation. One paragraph of misinformation.

He certainly didn’t get paid as much for that article as he would have in a normal day of work, nor could he expect to get paid for debunking a second paragraph the next day. Furthermore, disproving wondrous claims of extraterrestrial visits is nowhere near as glamorous as making those claims, nor does it get as much media attention: “Chariots of the Gods?” is still widely known, but very few people have heard of “The Space Gods Revealed”, a detailed refutation of that book by Ronald Story (not the author of the Atlantic piece).

What struck me in was the difference in the amount of time it took to disprove fabricated claims compared to the time it takes to make them. Thus we have what I call “Von Däniken’s Law”: It takes just a few seconds to invent a lie, but vastly longer to prove it is a lie.

This fundamental lack of balance is what makes “Von Däniken’s Law” so worrying: It brings the concept of asymmetrical warfare into the information battle being waged for the hearts and minds of the public on important issues of the day. The “Von Däniken Effect”, if you will, is exploited by the Truthers, Birthers, Anti-Vaxxers, etc.  It’s possible to invent evidence for a fantastic “proof” of a threat, conspiracy or outrage in just a few minutes … if you’re willing to lie. It will take those whom you oppose much, much longer to research and disprove your claims; and they’d better be very meticulous in their disproof, because any little slip they make can be seized upon as “evidence” of a cover-up.

The advent if the World Wide Web may have reduced the time necessary to discredit of a particular piece of misinformation, but it has also provided an equivalent decrease in the amount of time required for the dissemination of the lie. Given the great time and effort needed to research verifiable factual information versus the ease and speed of simply making something up, the advantage still falls to the fabricators. It’s easy to provide more evidence than your opponent when you can simply invent the evidence and enjoy the benefits of your opponent’s hands being tied by the time and effort he must expend to prove the falsehood of your evidence. The lie can “win” by sheer volume.

That’s not to say all the conspiracy theorists on line are deliberately using Von Daniken’s Law. In fact, most of them are (unfortunately) sincere in their fantasies as far as I can tell. But I do get the suspicion that a few are at least subconsciously aware of the asymmetry inherent in their conflict and are happy to use it to their advantage.

I can’t say I have a solution to this problem of asymmetry, but “Von Däniken’s Law” is certainly something skeptics and rational thinkers need to be aware of.