What do the following companies have in common?

		Intelius	Shutterfly
		MovieTickets.com
Classmates.com			USAirways
ColumbiaHouse		Priceline	VistaPrint
Confi-Check	InQ	RedcastsUSA

Answer:

They’ve all made $10 to $30 million by handing over your credit card information!!

In emails released by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation the companies have been receiving customer complaints for years that they were tricked into signing up for a service they didn’t want.  What really boggles my mind is that these major, trusted, companies ever, EVER, thought it was a good idea to hand over credit card and financial information to a third party advertiser! What in the world were these CEO’s thinking?

Unfortunetly, the list above is only of the companies that made over $10 million from this scheme.  Over 450 web companies have participated in these schemes.  Many for 5 years or more.  Avon, Hertz, Pizza Hut, Tier Direct, Victoria’s Secret, and Yahoo all made between $1 and $10 million by handing over your credit card information to a third party advertiser.

Trust on the internet is a difficult thing to gain and now that I know how little regard these companies have for my personal information, how can I trust them?  I have no choice but to boycott their sites.

It pains me because I have used Orbitz to plan many vacations and have purchased many movie tickets on Fandango, as recently as last weekend.  I’ve seen the pop-up ads but have never signed up for the offers, although, I have been tempted once or twice by getting a free movie ticket or discounts on my next hotel stay.  I have already closed any accounts I had with these services and I encourage you to do the same.

To learn more about how this scheme works I have linked to PDFs provided by the U.S. Senate Committee’s investigative committee.

11.16.09 Exhibits of Staff Report

11.16.09 STAFF REPORT

Representative Documents Part I

Representative Documents Part II

Representative Documents Part III

Information Week has a good article on the deceptive advertising.  I also would encourage you to check out the official website of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation.

For the last few years Joomla! has served me well and I have used the framework as the backend for a number of commercial and private websites. At the end of April I decided to launch a new blog site, www.SloArch.com, and started looking for the easiest way to get a blog up and running. My tech mentor Leo Laporte has been touting SquareSpace.com for a few weeks. I checked out their site, which is amazing, but I didn’t like the idea of paying a monthly fee and I wasn’t planning on giving up my web hosting account with SiteGround, so I looked primarily at solutions that I could host myself.

I had taken a look at WordPress three years ago and I decided to take another look (I also checked out Nucleus, still not impressed).

Wow, WordPress has grown up in the last three years. Bottom line, I used WordPress on SloArch.com for a month and new I had to port this site over. So, for the last 5 days, that’s what I’ve been doing.

Okay, this is why you are here, you don’t care about all that history.

Joomla vs. WordPress

1. Post Editing:

This was probably my biggest frustration with Joomla is the lack of an integrated tag system and the ability to add posts to multiple categories. Since the purpose of this site is really to be a blog, tagging and multiple categories have been something I’ve wanted to add for some time.

WordPress also has a great autosave feature as well as keeping a history of past article versions. I havn’t had a need to go back to a previous version, but the autosave feature has saved me a couple times already. With Joomla! I typically edited my text in an external editor because I was afraid of browser crashes, etc. If you don’t edit site content that often or your posts are usually short then this probably isn’t important.

Joomla! and WordPress both have great WYSIWYG editors and Joomla! has a number of editors that you can use.

Winner: WordPress

2. Plugin System

Joomla 1.5 made big improvements to the plugin system for the CMS. You can now install plugins, modules, components, and templates all through the same interface. Manual installation with WordPress is a bit more complicated, themes need to be uploaded via ftp; plugins and widgets can also be uploaded or installed through the admin interface.

Finding addons for Joomla is a lot easier than with WordPress. Joomla!’s extension directory allows for very easy searching of over 4,400 extensions in a very granular way, you can search by licence, free/non-free, and by extension type. The extensions are also grouped into well organized categories.

WordPress in contrast, has over 5,400 plugins that are organized only by user defined tags. While in theory this sounds great, the tags aren’t as specific or as well assigned as Joomla!’s categories.

Both WordPress and Joomla! have good user rating and comment systems.

The big advantage of WordPress over Joomla! is the ability to search for and install plugins directly from within the administrator console. It is very easy to try out different plugins quickly and all of the plugins are transferred and installed on your site without having to visit the developers webpage or downloading anything to your local machine.

Winner: WordPress

3. Templating

Having templated many Joomla! websites and only two WordPress sites I probably can’t be considered an expert in WordPress templates, however from my experience I have found WordPress’ templating system to be very convuluded. Joomla! templates are contained in one index.php file that then references supporting images, css, javascript, etc. Joomla! also allows for overriding any of the content templates for any of the view types. The biggest strength of Joomla! is it’s module system. The template can define an infinite number of positions for content, usually these are a left column, main content area, right column, header, footer, banner, and maybe a debug position. The user of the template only uses those module positions that they want and this can vary from page to page. Ont index.php file defines all of that!

WordPress on the other hand uses a theme system that applies a template to each page/view type. For example, the index.php file is the default view, but if you want to have a page that has two columns, and one that has one column, these would be two separate templates, index.php, single_column.php. Each view type, archive, category, search, single article, all have their own templates. This is in contrast to Joomla! which uses one template and components to define how the content is displayed.

I personally find Joomla! much easier to modify. If you are a person who just uses out of the box templates then you might find WordPress easier. If you want to move things around and customize your site then you will probably find Joomla! easier.

Winner: Joomla!

4. Software Updates

This was a big reason I switched to WordPress for this site, Joomla! can’t even compete with the ease of updating WordPress. WordPress allows for in place updates of plugins and with the Automatic Upgrade Plugin you can do an in place upgrade of the WordPress installation as well. Friendly alerts tell you when things need upgrading.

Joomla! currently has no upgrade system. Upgrade are handled by manually overwriting files via ftp.

Winner: WordPress

5. Initial Setup

Installation of both Joomla! and WordPress are about the same. Copy some files, set up some basic parameters and you’re ready to go.

Winner: Tie

Final Thoughts

I still think that Joomla! is the best opensource CMS out there. Version 1.5 was a huge improvement and the developer team is working hard to keep Joomla! on the leading edge. What it came down to for me was ease of use. I’m not modifying my template every day (historically I’ve done it every three years) and Joomla! is overkill for a simple blog. WordPress is lacking in some areas as well, creating custom RSS feeds, and having extreme control over content display are two area, but WordPress doesn’t market itself as a CMS, it’s a blogging platform. I will continue to use Joomla! for my corporate sites, but for a simple blog WordPress will be my choice.

Google mashups are nothing new, but the map below has really captured my attention. Lifehacker reports that the map was created by Niman, who identifies himself as a “Biomedical Research from Pittsburgh” on his/her Google profile. The map has been updated rather regularly and has been fascinating to watch over the past week.

When I first looked at the map there were the cases in Mexico and one in Southern California and one in Texas. When I checked back later there were a few more cases in California and a possible case in New Zeland. Today, the flu has spread to Europe, South America, Israel, Russia, Canada, and many parts of the United States. It’s amazing to see how a virus can travel so quickly in our interconnected world. Frequently I am surprised by how small our world is, and watching this map evolve has really reinforced the point.
View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Pink markers are suspect
Purple markers are confirmed
Deaths lack a dot in marker
Yellow markers are negative

So I do a Google search of the number “09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56
C5 63 56 88 C0″ I find a Wikipedia article and go to the page only to
find a message that the article has been removed and blocked from being
reposted! Wikipedia denied me information! I go to Wikipedia to find
the answer to everything…. what is going on?!

Well… it turns out that this number 16 hex pairs number is the HD-DVD processing key that was discovered months ago. This little number allows the unauthorized playback of copy protected HD-DVD’s. So why all the fuss today?

This number is flooding the internet because the AACS, the company who created and manages the HD-DVD copy protection, issued cease and desist orders to Google, Blogger.com, Digg, and other websites ordering that they stop the dissemination of this number. You can see the letter to Google here. Google and Blogger.com forwarded the letter to users of their products that had the number in emails or other data stored on their servers requiring them to delete the information. Digg took a more drastic approach deleting articles and banning users. In response almost every article on Digg now is about the hex number or has the hex number in a comment. People are creating email addresses with the number, people have created pictures with the number, there is a mySpace page for the number!

As far as I know you can’t copy protect a number, I mean I really like the number 23 but can I own it? What has made people so upset it that Google, Digg and other blogging sites have stretched forth the heavy hand of censorship. It’s one thing to be actively encouraging the breaking of laws and instructing on how to do it, it’s an entirely different matter to be discussing it.

Long live freedom of Speech!

We’ll see if Digg and this post survive to see May 2nd.

Update: 10:50pm, I noticed that the story has even made it to The Drudge Report

and of course Gizmodo

Alatorrefamily.com is a collaborative effort and all family members and friends are encouraged to create an account.

Talatorre.org on the other hand is going to transition into my public front. On this site I will post essays, political writings, restaurant reviews, my resume and portfolio and other professional information. I hope in this way I can protect mine and my families privacy. As time goes on this web site will become more specialized and some information may be moved to the new site.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope that these changes will may these pages easier for everyone to use! Merry Christmas!

EDIT June 9th, 2009: Due to lack of interest and support Alatorrefamily.com was taken down earlier this year. It was a fun experiment.

Chain letters come in many forms, most are harmless text messages that ask you to forward them to 10 or 15 people for one reason or another, some chain letters come as Power Point presentations or have other attachments that could potentially contain viruses. The two chain letter types that I receive the most are the “about me” chain letter and the “petition” chain letter.

The “About Me” letter, as I have named it, usually contains a list of questions that your friend has answered about him or herself and you are supposed to answer the questions yourself and then send it to ten people including the person who sent it to you. In this way you show your true friendship and multiply the distribution of the email by a factor of 10! This email isn’t that bad in that it can be fun, but after doing this once the fun is gone and the next 300 times you receive this letter and don’t return it with all your personal info you feel like a jerk.

The “Petition” chain letter usually steps up the anti as far as guilt. The petition usually is for some tear jerking cause like a child with cancer, some hot political issue, or anything that will get an emotional response from someone. The normal MO is to add your name to the bottom of the list and forward it to ten people. If you are the 100th person on the list you are supposed to send the email to some unsuspecting email recipient. This form of email is great for flooding the email box of a particular person which usually results in them being able to receive legitimate emails. Sometimes this email makes crazy claims like for every person that signs this Microsoft will donate $1.00 to the cause, or if you don’t forward the email evil dwarves will eat your cat. Ok, I’ve never seen that last one but I have seen similar threats and incentives that are just as crazy. If you ever receive an email like this DO NOT FORWARD IT for three reasons:

1. The story is probably not true or is 5 years old.
2. The email is designed to flood someone’s email with junk
3. Effective petitions are never conducted via email. If you think about it, every time you forward the email the signed names are duplicated 10 times. To reach the 100 signatures the email will have duplicated to 10,000,000,000 emails and of the 1,000,000,000,000 names on the petitions only 1/100 will be unique. If you were to do a petition via email you would create a website where people would go to sign and only send out a link in the email where people would go. Since I’ve never seen a chain letter like this make it a rule to DELETE the email.

With this said you are probably sensing my frustration. A couple days ago I received a really nice chain mail with a touching message about returning to innocence and how to appreciate life you need trials. Then at the end of the email was a riddle and a message that to receive the answer to the riddle you needed to forward the email to 10 people and the answer would appear on your screen. Well, that ruined my good mood. I knew that people would be forwarding this email like crazy hoping to get the answer and not realizing that to have the answer appear on your screen was a likely as dwarves eating your cat. So, as I have done many times I responded to everyone who the email was sent to with the following message:

For all of you who actually forwarded this to ten people thinking
you’d get the answer…. sad… : ) But here IS the answer
-Link to the answer-
Tim

I sent the message to give people the answer they would most likely want and thereby eliminating the incentive to forward the email. Yes, the email was a little condescending and I didn’t look who sent it or who I was replying to, I just mailed it. Well…… A day later I found out the email was forwarded by a family member who I embarrassed a bit. Ouch. I didn’t mean for that to happen. So, I’d like to publicly apologize and let everyone know that if you don’t forgive me and forward this article to 10 people then evil dwarves will eat your cat.