Gizmo5 is writing to let you know that we will no longer be providing service starting on April 3, 2011. A week from today, March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to add credit to your account.

Although the standalone Gizmo5 client will no longer be available, we have since launched the ability to call phones from within Gmail at even more affordable rates.

So they bought it so they could kill it. (Folding standalone, not to mention natively mobile applications, into a web application that still relies on platform-specific browser plugins qualifies as “killing,” I think. Or at least replacing it with a less fully-featured solution. And maybe they didn’t specifically buy it so they could kill it, but that’s the effective outcome regardless.)

What would it have cost them to actually release the fully native applications they had developed? Did Google really need to spend $30 million on Gizmo5 just to get in-browser calling functionality? I mean, I hear they have some pretty talented engineers—surely they could’ve done this in-house if they really wanted.

I recently noticed that my Tripod web site had been suspended “because of a phishing attack and or possible identity theft attempt”. I don’t have much more to say about because a casual glance at the site should make apparent that this claim is patently false: for one, I’m pretty sure the site was last touched before the term “phishing” was even coined, and at no point has it ever contained any content that could possibly be construed as a phishing attack.

This both astonishes and bemuses me, since it should be immediately obvious to anyone who so much as glances at the site that it’s not masquerading as any kind of business or requesting any kind of personal information at all. That said, I’m mostly curious as to what kind of response this will get me, and whether anyone will be able to illuminate the doubtlessly ludicrous grounds for the suspension. I would like to see the site put back up since, after all, I didn’t take it down myself, and the idea that it facilitated any sort of identity theft is so laughable a claim that I can’t possibly believe any human could have investigated it.

Hello and thank you for contacting Lycos support. I apologize for the delayed response.

If you have an old site and the script is not up to date, it will be very vulnerable to attacks. In this case it appears as though your account had malicious code inserted, which is not always obvious when browsing the site as it is the site code itself that is the source of the problem. Unfortunately this is the case with your account which is why we have closed it.

If you would like to bring your site online again simply sign up a new account and upload a backup your web files.

I do understand your frustration in this matter but we have no choice but to close any hacked accounts as they threaten the security of all accounts on our server, as well as cause a number of other obvious problems.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please let us know.

[name redacted]
Lycos Customer Service
http://help.lycos.com

Hi [name redacted],

I appreciate your response, but I must confess that I’m confused. For starters, I was not using any server-side scripts of my own on my site. (To be sure, I would have liked to, but the particular scripts I had wanted to use were unable to run on Tripod’s servers because of—ironically enough—security concerns.) The closest anything on the site came to that, as I recall, were some pages created with FrontPage that would have used extensions installed on your servers—but those would have been maintained by Lycos, not me, as I had no access to those server-side components. Thus if there were any malicious code inserted on my site by “the script,” it would have had to have been caused by security vulnerabilities in code that was neither uploaded nor maintained (nor maintainable) by me.

Second, the notion that you must “close any hacked accounts as they threaten the security of all accounts on our server” reads like a weak excuse—I’m not sure whose policy that is, but whoever approved it appears to not understand basic principles of security. Any reasonable server configuration would isolate the security of other users’ accounts from that of my own; else there would be nothing stopping me from intentionally adding malicious code to my own site so that I could maliciously subvert the security of other accounts on your server. I don’t imagine that that would be possible, and if it is, that’s again indicative of security vulnerabilities of your own that are entirely outside my own control. If I am somehow mistaken in the assumption that my site could not actually pose any security vulnerabilities to other accounts on your servers, I would encourage you to forward my comments to whoever would be in the best position to audit your own security practices.

Furthermore, your suggested remedy that I create a new account from a backup is fundamentally flawed: if I were running vulnerable scripts on the first account, they would obviously still be on the second account, since I’ve been given no indication as to how this malicious code (which I haven’t even been able to look at myself) was allegedly added to my site. (Throw in the fact that I wasn’t running any scripts at all and it makes matters doubly confusing.) In addition, creating a new account necessitates using a new web address; since Lycos would still be hosting the site, it’s unclear to me how hosting a potentially vulnerable site at a different address would be anything other than an inconvenience for me and whatever visitors I may have had while providing no benefits to Lycos or “the security of all accounts on [your] server”. Lycos’ policy in this regard seems as though its biggest advantage is that it rewards the efforts of malicious hackers by permanently rendering their victims’ sites inoperable.

Thanks for your time.

In any event, I did a bit of searching and came up with nothing helpful. Exporting a buddy list in Adium is an oft-requested, somewhat contemplated, and ultimately unsupported feature. The new version of AIM for Mac apparently omits this feature, although if you were to search you wouldn’t know it.

I ended up installing Pidgin on my Windows 7 tablet, since I already knew you could export your buddy list as XML using that. But only a brief moment of thought resulted in this helpful nugget of wisdom (one that, I had taken advantage of before, I guess, but had forgotten–hence this post):

cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adium\ 2.0/Users/Default/libpurple/blist.xml ~/blist-backup.xml

And your backup is now in your home folder.

On an entirely unrelated note, I finally fixed got fixed the problems that were going on behind the scenes. The end result is you need no longer register to post a comment (not that I would expect anyone to do the latter, much less the former). The curious thing is that even though I had “required” registration to post comments, and no one registered an account in the interim, 1,000+ spam comments still managed to get through. I guess WordPress doesn’t really do much in the way of effective checking for such things. Oh well, I guess?

If that didn’t convince you I’m a geek, how about the fact that I thought this was worth sharing?

The Associated Press: Yahoo to close GeoCities, other services in revamp

A couple years ago I took it upon myself to get a bunch of my music together and digitize it. I already had some music on my computer, but I had chosen to encode it at low bitrates (128 Kbps, and later 160 Kbps). I figured as long as I was going all out on content, I should go all out on quality too—so I elected to rip my music into a lossless format. This was not, after all, something I’d really want to do more than once, and once you’ve ripped something into a lossless format, it’s relatively trivial to change it all to another lossless format on a whim.

Of course, lossless formats don’t really jive too well with mobile devices, since as a rule mobile devices are limited in terms of storage. Windows Media Player didn’t have an issue with this, since I could configure it to automatically re-encode lossless files into lower quality (and smaller sized) files.

Then I got my MacBook Pro, and predictably took advantage of the opportunity to get a heavily discounted iPod. What this also meant was that I had to migrate my media collection to the Mac, and (by extension) iTunes. This proved problematic.

For one, I didn’t really intend on using my laptop as my primary computer (at least, not at first). I built a desktop PC that I had meant to last me awhile, and it seemed to make more sense to me to use my desktop at my desk, and my laptop on the go and at school. The problem here was that although I could run iTunes on my laptop and on my desktop, I couldn’t figure out a workable (and reasonable) method of maintaining access to my media on both my laptop and my desktop. I toyed with external drives, synchronizing files, copying iTunes library files—nothing worked the way I wanted it to. I wanted a workflow that would be easy to maintain, which meant I wanted things like metadata, ratings, album art to be the same everywhere. I also didn’t care too much for the idea of moving an external drive between my laptop and desktop, or even having to use an external drive on my desktop in the first place. The solution here was to just use the laptop for media.

Another point I discovered was that iTunes, for all of its supposed excellence in integrating with the iPod, doesn’t allow you to re-encode files it syncs to an iPod to a lower bitrate. The one exception to this is if you have an (oppressively small) iPod shuffle, in which case this option is built right into iTunes. For all other iPods, however, you’re out of luck.

The solution I came across here was a set of workflows that allowed me to duplicate my lossless files as lossy files. I then made a smart playlist with those lossy files and had that sync with my iPod. (This didn’t automatically keep my metadata (mainly ratings/playcount) in sync automatically, but one of the workflows facilitates this. If only I remembered to run it.)

Now today I was trying to update my library to feature album art. The first problem here is that in order to get album art from iTunes, you need an iTunes account—something I’ve refused to get because I won’t give Apple a credit card number. I got around this restriction by redeeming a code for some free songs that was readily available online (presumably as a part of some sort of promotion). Unfortunately, however, there were still a number of albums that iTunes (ostensibly) didn’t have art for, which confused me a bit, since I didn’t have any trouble finding a number of these albums in the iTunes Store. (I tried changing the metadata on my computer using iTunes’ clunky editor to match what was in the iTunes Store, but that didn’t work either.)

So then I had to search around for album art, which worked well for a little while—until I realized that I was adding artwork to my lossy files only. Since manipulating album artwork in the first place doesn’t exactly qualify as “fun” or “simple” in iTunes (at least not when you’re doing it on any significant scale), this pissed me off enough to write this blistering critique of iTunes.

There are a bunch of other interface issues that bug me. For example, whenever you edit metadata in iTunes and it takes more than a moment, you get this stupid progress bar—which prevents you from clicking anywhere else in the interface. So you have to wait for it to get your album art copied before you can move onto the next one (read: figure out which one the next one is), which is a pretty stellar waste of time. Podcast support is pretty unimpressive—sometimes I download podcasts without subscribing to a feed, but there’s no way to tell iTunes that those podcasts belong under “podcasts” and not “music” in my library. I really prefer Windows Media Player’s notion of a “Now Playing” playlist, which was an easy way to just pick and choose some songs on the spur of the moment and queue them up however you wanted.¹ I don’t like how any media file that I ever play ends up in my library automatically, to the point that I go out of my way to open files in QuickTime instead of iTunes. And, although this isn’t a complaint specific to iTunes, I’m really sick of companies integrating music stores into music players and not letting the user turn the “store” part off.

And a major part of my annoyance is the knowledge that these issues probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. After all, nowadays it seems that every update to iTunes is just meant to add some new syncing functionality to some new Apple product that I don’t own, to the point that media functionality is utterly neglected. It’s not like my complaints are new, or that I’m the first to express them—it’s just that Apple has been entirely apathetic to them and has practically zero incentive to improve.

Big surprise.

1. Party Shuffle mode is somewhat like this, but it’s more convoluted and less flexible than WMP’s approach.

(The judge also consulted Wikipedia to better understand what “Flash” might be, and he concluded that it is “the name of a file format used to transmit videos over the Internet.” Remember, kids, Wikipedia is only good enough for the federal judiciary to make precedent-setting legal decisions, not for your term papers.)

Veoh Safe Harbor ruling could help YouTube in Viacom battle