Eclectical Engineering

An “alternative entrepreneur” seizes on a popular new communications technology and uses it to promote dubious and potentially dangerous wares; when his drumming gets too shrill, even the government is forced to sit up and take notice, and they promptly shut him down. Undeterred, he moves his operations outside the country and finds that he can actually reach even more people with his pitches, and becomes vastly wealthier. Sounds like internet spam, right? Well, yes it does, but it is also an apt summary of the career of the infamous John Romulus Brinkley, a quack doctor who used the infant technology of AM broadcast radio throughout the first half of the 20th century to advertise his controversial (and medically groundless) treatments to improve male virility. (more…)

To the list of items offered to me via spam promotion, I can now add designer footwear. While the product may be new (to me), however, the M.O. is typical of the criminal drugs/penis/watches spammers that have come to predominate my inbox over the past few years. (more…)

In a 4-3 decision (PDF here) on February 29, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Jeremy Jaynes for violations of Virginia’s anti-spam law. The decision presumably moves Jaynes one step closer to serving a nine-year sentence on the charges. The court rejected Jaynes’ claims (also made to the Virginia Court of Appeals) that his activities were constitutionally-protected free speech, and that the Virginia law represented a excessive restraint on interstate commerce (Jaynes sent his e-mails from neighboring North Carolina). (more…)

If you are interested in getting into the vinyl ripping business, you’ll want a good turntable. The Ion TTUSB is one of many low-priced offerings catering to those who want to move their LPs and 45s (and possibly even 78s) to their computers, CDs, and MP3 players. (more…)

Like most of the other early internet services, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is text-oriented rather than binary, so that the only data you are supposed to find in a raw e-mail packet (after MIME encoding, if needed) are ASCII characters — those being “seven-bit” byte values in the range from 0 to 127. These would seem to be pretty simple and clear-cut rules for everyone to follow, but of course spammers believe that rules are for the stupid. (more…)

Googlepages.com is a service provided by Google that enables its users to set up simple websites. Googlepages is free, and for the most part anonymous (apart from the Google account login). Of course, “free and anonymous” are very well-beloved words to the spammer, so it isn’t surprising that Googlepages has attracted quite a bit of spammer abuse, the kind that Geocities and other established free-web-page services have been getting for many years. This post describes how to spot and report spammer abuse of Googlepages.

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Some spammers set up blogs using Blogger.com and publicize them in their spam mailings; any visitors to these spam blogs (or splogs as they are sometimes unappetizingly called) are generally redirected to the spammer’s main website by code or markup planted by the spammer. This post explains how this sort of abuse can be reported to Blogger.com (and to its related web hosting service Blog*Spot).

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Cartoons in Stereo was the brainchild of Bob Prescott, a prominent sound effects artist from the (g)olden days of network radio (he worked on such high-profile programs as Cavalcade of America and Lux Radio Theater). On this early stereo LP, Mr. Prescott and friends make the many and varied noises, while veteran voice artist and commercial pitchman Cy Harrice (pronounced like “Sigh Harris”) provides the spoken parts for a series of 23 short, minimalistic comic vignettes punctuated by bursts of hyperactive player-piano music. I suppose you could call these “blackout skits” but for the fact that this is a record and you can’t see the lights go down. (more…)

Dan Rowan and Dick Martin were in the comedy business long before Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, the famous 1968-1973 TV series of which they were dual hosts. In fact, the LP “Rowan & Martin At Work,” which appeared in 1960 on the Trey Records label, demonstrates that they had their two-man shtick well down and polished before the age of color TV and go-go dancing. (more…)

I’m returning to the blogosphere after a lengthy layoff. I had previously been using a very minimalist blog system which was agreeably simple, but could not be maintained via web interface. The new system promises to be more convenient to update, so perhaps it will encourage me to post more often. I will open the festivities by transferring some of my older posts (at any rate, the ones that have not become excessively dated).