Underdog of the Day

Hey all. Remember me? This one is short and sweet…..In case you thought I wasn’t living up to my name of Underdog Blog, I thought I would point out a little bit of nasty that’s going on at the moment and introduce you to my underdog of the day.

The Rock Art Brewery in Vermont is being sued by some big arse company who don’t want them to use the name Vermonster for their beer. Now the company doing the suing doesn’t even make beer, they make energy drinks. How fucked up is that? Rock Art Brewery is a small business built up from nothing – started in his basement.

America it’s time to support the little guy.

Read a little more about this over at Griz’s Monster Energy Drink vs Vermonster Beer
or head on over to Monster Energy Drink Sucks The Life Out of Small Businesses, or even Monster Energy Drink And Hansen Have Forgotten America
Monster Energy Drink Vs Rock Art Brewery and Vermonster Beer, Round #2 from Allyn Hane – I like Allyn ’cause he swears and drinks beer on video!

Damnit I could link this up all over the place, but I’ll stop there.

243 Or How to undermine twitter accounts

So now and then, even though I don’t condone any sort of nasty ‘net activity, I do think about security and how easy it is to undermine things on the internet. The latest scandal with upstartblogger having his twitter account suspended for trademark infringement and the events leading up to that have got me thinking a bit more about twitter. I’ve just noticed that once again upstartblogger has been suspended from twitter this time with his new account. Funny thing really, twitter makes no money but has funding, upstartblogger releases an affiliate product on how to get twitter followers, makes a truckload of cash off the system and gets suspended. Hmmmm.

I’ve been playing around on twitter for a bit….it is fun, but ultimately, I think, it will slowly fade away as more and more marketers take to it and it becomes another site you go to now and then to play with. From an seo perspective twitter just doesn’t really help the old backlinks too much. I’m sure google is indexing it, but the nature of using short url services kind of defeats the object of getting targeted backlinks The interface is slick and they have the sheer numbers on their side, but I think other microblogging platforms have more to offer in the long run. What twitter has done, though is release their API to all and sundry. I’ve had a play around and I’m developing some scripts of my own to do various bits and pieces – mostly to satisfy my curiosity. They are taking a while to develop though, because, well, work has been insane recently. I’ve been working like a crack whore with an overzealous pimp.
That’s why my blog has been so neglected recently.
Anyway, on looking into creating little applets that interface with twitter, and with the recent suspension of anything that resembles a genesis rocket thing, I started to think of how easy it is to undermine someone’s account. Here is one of my brilliant but nefarious ideas that I’m pointing out as a “could happen to you kids so be careful”. I expect there are already people out there doing bad things and trying to take advantage of the hordes of people trying to get something for free, but here’s my take on what could easily happen. This is something like my way of stealing amazon affiliate sales with free software, except this one steals a twitter account……and gets it suspended. Perhaps even using it to generate some affiliate sales first.

Now if you think people are above this sort of thing. Think again. There is a world of bad out there who are happy to sell their own grandmother to make a buck, and the anonymity of the internet makes it even easier for those whose cogs of conscience have already been ground down by too many gear changes without sticking the car in neutral first.

So, you decide you are a bad person. There are a ton of accounts on twitter you don’t like. Maybe no specific account, but just in general, you don’t like people on twitter. so you look around and decide that what people want on twitter is a way to make money. How to do this? well takes your pick – affiliate products seem to be de jour so people are using those. Now how are they marketing those puppies on twitter? Well, usually they will want to DM their followers with offers and such….or maybe they want to be able to bulk delete their twitter direct messages. Naa auto DM their new followers that is much better….over and above their usual tweeting. Auto DM anyone who follows me? Hmmmm I could write a script to do that. So you do. And you make it good. It works well. It auto DMs. It has a little auto DM spinner built in so messages can rotate. You offer this service for free to all and sundry. People sign up. People have to give your their twitter id and password so you can auto DM on their behalf. If you are savvy and have read my blog…..you know not to sign up with such a service. But many people are greedy. The almighty dollar makes them see green and they eagerly hand over their ID and password for their twitter account to some service from a company or individual that they have never seen, heard of or even done some basic background checks on…..all because the service is free and allows them to make some short term cash by auto DMing people their affiliate links.

Now, run this puppy for a little while, but make it good – slick interface, good web 2.0 looks. You know the kind of thing. Build up a good user base. Get people tweeting about it. Pretty soon you have a large collection of twitter accounts under your control. Now the nefarious business, though I’m sure if you’ve gotten this far you are already thinking of a few nasty things you could do. Anyway, once you’ve got a nice big user base, you can start to monitor people’s downtime – the time that they aren’t on twitter – people are creatures of habit and probably use twitter at set times through their day. Decide on your Armageddon day and for each account start a good old spam campaign using their twitter account details that you have harvested ostensibly to offer some cool service. Spam DMs and Tweets. Spam away during each account’s downtime so they don’t notice it for a good long time. Then get a few friends to start reporting these accounts to twitter. Pretty soon, suspensions start to happen.

And that’s just the start.

Once again, folks, be careful what you sign up for online – and be sure you use different passwords for everything. It is all too easy to fall foul of evil doers among us.

Hopefully I’ve made you think a bit. And hopefully you’ve left this post a touch more suspicious and cautious than when you started reading it.

2cents on Music

Ashley Morgan is sharing his view of the music industry again……I bet they wish he wasn’t so out of tune with their little agenda. Hahaha out of tune. Getit?

2cents from me:

Recording reasonable quality music in your garage is so cheap these days – I remember 15 years ago when my band recorded a couple of tunes it was a huge investment for us. Nowadays, a computer and soundcard simply slash the price of getting music down. That alone means you can pretty much give away the music.

Give it away, get listeners. Listeners = demand. Demand means you can be sure your gigs will be packed. Go play gigs. Sell T-shirts. Sell live recordings of the gig immediately afterwards. Auction off the bloody guitar you played the gig on. The money is there. I’m pretty sure I read the bit about selling live recordings in Wired, but I’m gonna claim the auctioning off of the guitar as my own idea.

What people are really scared of is that the file sharing gives immediate feedback on how good or bad your music really is. Write a good tune and it will go everywhere. Write a crap tune and no-one will download it.

And that brings into question why you are playing music in the first place. Is it to live large? Do you want the super star Robbie Williams lifestyle? Or do you want to play your music?

There’s an old joke about two guitarist chatting – you know the ones – the guys for whom integrity is everything – playing music from the soul sticking it to the man -
Guitar Dude1: “hey why aren’t you woodshedding”
Guitar Dude2: “meh….it’s such a slippery slope – you practice, you get better. you get better you get more fans. you get more fans, you get a record contract. you get a record contract and they tell you what to play. then you’re the man”
Guitar Dude1: “It’s a slippery slope”

Every neighborhood should have a bazooka

Yes, it was, I seem to remember, far too early to be woken up. Especially given that I was enjoying a rather tasty dream. Pancakes, maple syrup and a very good cup of coffee sat before my fish like dream eyes, tempting me. Just before my fork managed to grab a mouthful of the stuff, I swam up, still flapping my gills, to the sound outside that must have woken the whole neighbourhood.
My goodness they were drunk. Two women were literally rolling around on the gravel out front, pulling each other’s hair.
I shit you not.
I thought that stuff only happened on stupid ibiza gone wild television shows. But no. There it was, right in front of me. Well, not right in front, more like down below me, cause I live one floor up.
A shirtless man paced around the skirmish, along with several other tarted up induhviduals, pretending to try and stop the little display of fisticuffs…..or should that be hairicuffs? or grabihairicuffs.
But they didn’t really want it to stop, did they? I mean how hard is it to pull two people apart. Especially after they have clearly had their adrenaline dump. There was no fight left in them, but they persisted. I have to give them that.
Mr Shirtless actually got a bit excited by all this and punched a car window. Then kicked the car, presumably because the car window hurt his hand.

Nothing else really happened. It was all a little bit of a let down really. No blood, no other violence. The police turned up (actually rather a lot of police turned up) and broke the whole thing up….a domestic of some sorts (I can’t possibly fathom what about though amidst the screams of “you dirty slut” and other such profanities). A young lady with far too many children got in a car and drove away, leaving Mr No Shirt growling. I presume it was his lass. Hopefully now his ex-lass.

In other news Joshua Goodwin has released a rather nice looking wordpress theme called Old Popular Yolk. I think you should use it. I know I would if this blog let me. Yes, it is yellow, even though his blog is not.

I’m starting to subscribe to Kilgore Trout’s theory that every neighborhood should have a bazooka and a responsible adult should know where it is………