Yes, way according to Boing Boing. Really? A swedish company via Tankafritt.nu is selling P2P filetrading insurance against being sued by the RIAA for $19/year. This has hoax written all over it to me, but since I don’t speak the language, I can’t verify the translation or any of the backstory.

Here are some of the reasons why I don’t believe this:

- it’s insurance against illegal activity. I’ve never heard of any policy that would do such a thing. How about marijuana insurance. They pay if the chronic is nabbed?

Now before anybody gets wrongly sidetracked, I do realize there is plenty of legitimate P2P filetrading going on, but the RIAA is only going to sue for the illegal variety so this loosely coined insurance policy is essentially insurance against illegal activity.

- not enough premium.
An update at the end of the Boing Boing post indicates the odds of being sued for P2P activity as being 1:1840 [source]. This is high, high, high risk insurance.

Lloyds of London will insure some pretty odd stuff for the right premium, but they usually have very high minimum premiums. Stuff like: insuring model’s lips. $19/year times the number of people who might seriously buy it vs. the risk just isn’t enough money.

- licensed/guaranteed by whom?. Is this an actual insurer or just some company that wants to act like an insurer? The red tape any company has to go through to become a bonafide insurer would most certainly prevent this type of insurance from ever becoming a reality. Who is guaranteeing — or at least certify and regulate — the company’s solvency?

I’m going to point my friend from Sweden to this post. I’m real curious what he has to say. Forser, is this bogus or what?

Stopped by Bloggercon IV a couple times today and as I’d hoped earlier, things got better. Kudos to all the people involved for sharing with the rest of us out here. The IRC chat (yes, I got in when I ttried the second time) had some good flow going as well. Dave Winer and Scoble were there trying to flush out who was “mcD” in the IRC. Interestingly enough, Scoble actually admitted that Mini-Microsoft *is* a coward. Interesting.

Stream was going good, I guess Kevin Marks was running a video although I didn’t check that out. The sound quality of the audio stream was very good. Some highlights included:

- Phillip Torrone “pt” as a discussion leader for tools [mp3]
- Chris Pirillo led a session on users being in charge [mp3]

Looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions. Don’t waste your time listening to the first session today, but the other sessions from what I heard have been interesting.

Some site changes and news for those interested.

Removed, your feedback appreciated
1. The Reuters TV news player from the television category is gone. A recent email informed me that they are about to take that commercial and include ads plus it played on auto-load of the category page which I do not like at all. If any readers really liked this feature, please let me know.
2. Some links from the homepage. Working towards linking primarily/only to reading list (web / OPML) going forward, which will continue to be a dynamic list. It’s easier to maintain a centralized list and I don’t want to use some third party like Blogrolling to manage this list.

Thinking about changes, your feedback appreciated
I’ve been thinking about changing the full post content on the home and category pages to being the title, link and partial content. The concern is purely pagesize oriented. I do realize this creates an additional click for those who just visit the homepage domain, but for those on dialup these pages can be rather long, especially with the pictures and text. For those navigating from RSS they will still go directly to the permalink page which is full text, also the RSS feed will still have full text. My thinking is to get the size of the homepage down so it loads faster which is especially critical to new visitors. There have been times the homepage has been over 300k in size not even counting all the images. That’s way too big for dialup users. For awhile Alexa referred to our page loading speed as “very slow” but we’ve recently been upgraded to “average” with 2.2 seconds being the average load time. I’d like to see that change to “fast” or “very fast” like many of our other sites. Page loading speed is important to me, despite the messy CSS (call that the Windows problem: the result of one too many hacks without starting over).

I am particularly interested in hearing from readers who navigate to the homepage as their regular starting point for this site. Would you like/dislike this change? Please leave your comments below.

Comments update, your feedback appreciated
If you have had some trouble leaving comments at this blog lately — and especially if you have a gmail address — then I have fixed that problem (thanks Matt) with my overzealous comment filtering tool. Even after this comment filtering this blog still receives 250-500+ comment spams per day. Last time I disabled the system entirely it was well over 1,500 a day. Since we have better things to do with our time than delete comment spam, I continue to work on refining our own custom filtering system. My apologies to anybody that is caught in a false positive situation.

If you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up, please consider the following:

1) if you are a first time commenter, those comments are held in a moderation queue. As long as isn’t spam (or looks like spam) and is related to the post, it will likely be approved. Be patient, this can take up to 8 hours or longer if we are on vacation for these first time manual approvals. We check all URLs left in comments and signatures and reserve the right to remove any that point to spam/splog or pron sites. Please do not leave links to pron sites in the comments. We’re trying to be a (relatively) safe for work website. These URLs show up in filters and block the entire site.
2) something in your comment might have triggered our blocking filters. There are combinations of several things — too many to list here (although I’m thinking about creating an image and linking to it with the complete list) — that will trigger our filters. If your comment contains links to any site that has been banned from leaving comments here (those domains that mass comment spam this blog with bots are blocked/banned). Solution: don’t link to sites which are splog/spam and/or questionable in your comments. If we see these comments and the rest of the comment is on topic and sane.

How to contact me (TDavid)
If it’s been at least 8 hours, and it isn’t the weekend or I’m on vacation, and you’ve left an important comment, feel free to contact me about the situation, there might be something wrong. You’ll find my contact email on the homepage on the picture. It’s not linked from here because of email harvesting bots. Just type my current public email address contact for this site into your favorite email client and send.

Last year we started a process of changing public email addresses from time to time. For example, recently my email address for this site has changed. I do this to start over and clean out the spam that catches up. If/when I respond to you personally it will most likely be from my direct unpublished email address. You will be automatically whitelisted to this address and any future email correspondence with me will likely be much faster. I respond to email all the time but the volume is such that I’ve had to setup this slower first contact situation to shield me from spam.

Please give me at least 1-2 business days to respond. I literally receive thousands of emails every day — remember, we have multiple websites, not only this one, not to mention the client websites I work with and work as a technical contact. Thankfully, I do have an assistant who helps manually filter my mail. We also use pretty aggressive spam filtering tools. If your comment is really important or it is a breaking story, call me. Our office phone number is also listed on my picture on the Hmm homepage. Our company name is KMR Enterprise if you do call, so don’t hang up if you hear someone say that. To speak directly to me, just ask for TDavid My assistant is part time in the office so it’s possible I’ll answer the phone myself.

Alrighty, enough of the housecleaning stuff, back to work.

More notes during the Sony E3 2006 press conference as well as reactions and responses:

- shop and purchase content in the PlayStation Shop
- base PS3 online connectivity will be free. No annual fee like Xbox Live charges? Interesting.
- PS3 pricing:

PS3 will go on sale first in Japan on 11/11 at a price of 59,800 yen for a 20GB model, with a 60GB model set at open pricing. The US will get the system on 11/17 with cost set at, respectively, $499 and $599.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment for those who go with the cheaper version is no HDMI output and no built-in wireless (that shaved off only $100?) Why bother? This is reminiscent of the core Xbox 360. Let’s hope these aren’t sold out come November 17.
- The new controller is motion sensitive just like the Wii, which caused more than a few eyebrows to raise, especially when they threw out the words “amazing innovation”

pro-g:

Without a handful of stunning games to talk about, the gaming community is forced to discuss the differences between the console packs and the rather reactionary new PlayStation 3 controller. There seems to be a feeling that Nintendo and Microsoft have a real chance to dent Sony’s seemingly insurmountable lead.

- Microsoft response to Sony Press Briefing

Note: Nintendo E3 2006 official coverage streams live starting at 9:30am PST today.

Man, if only the lady who hit my wife and son 2 1/2 years had had something like this electrical burst window defrosting technique maybe the accident could have been diverted. CNET has the details on this exciting invention:

PETD works by breaking the first two bonds. An electric charge lasting a few milliseconds heats the surface buried in ice just long enough to melt about a micron or two of the surface of the ice. Once the ice is melted, the hydrogen and electrical bonds break. The resulting water then acts as a lubricant, allowing the mass of ice to slide away.

Wonder when this will be available?

Those visiting the website the last 12 hours may have noticed a number of “database down for maintenance” messages. Last night our recent post on 14 money saving ideas for computer users was linked by Lifehacker (thank you). All was going well there with that traffic burst, so I went to sleep thinking no problem.

This morning I woke up to site database error messages and emails about the database buckling. From there I quickly realized we had been front page dugg and as I write this, we’re listed as one the del.icio.us most popular links. Beyond that, this same post is getting linked from other places too. We’ve been slashdotted before and withstood the pounding, but we’ve never had a combination of front page digg, lifehacker and del.icio.us popular link. All this combined for a perfect traffic storm for this blog.

The good news for readers is we will be moving Hmm to its own dedicated server and fixing the pages so most of them are static (which is one thing I have never really cared for about Wordpress). These changes will have a very noticeable change on page loading speed which for awhile, frankly, I’ve been very unhappy about. Some of the category pages, and the home page take several seconds to load sometimes which just plain sucks. I am critical of page loading speed of others and it’s time to turn that microscope on what’s happening here and fix the page loading speed, utilyze more sensible and efficient static pages, etc. Alexa has it rated as “very slow” which is unacceptable.

As for hardware, we already had this on its own dedicated server but it was being shared with some of our other sites, some of which also do a decent amount of traffic, so being on its own server all by its Hmmsome will definitely help. More expenses, yes.

The site going down last night was a loud and clear message that any post here has the potential to bring in an additional burst of more significant traffic and we need to make changes on the backend and the scripts/database to be able to scale to handle this possible increased traffic flow. The site traffic has been growing somewhat steadily anyway, so these are all good problems to have.

There might be some additional limited downtime while the server changes are being made, but we’re going to try and minimize this as much as possible. Thank you in advance for your patience and support and welcome to the many new visitors today.

We are on it.

Welcome to 2006!

Once upon a time at this blog, we did something called Hmm quickies, which essentially were very short posts, mostly one-liners filling up a single meatier post.

These were handy for expanding on several different things happening quickly. No, they weren’t automated and/or linkdumps from del.icio.us, furl, stumbleupon, etc. I already have RSS feeds for those if anybody is that interested.

Not sure exactly why I stopped doing these, but the last one was on December 12, 2003 Hmm quickies #20, nearly two years ago. Let’s get #21 on:

- yesterday there was no WiFi in the RTL conference center area itself, although there was connectivity outside (for a fee), so all my blogging was offline. I have dozens of pictures and a detailed blog post about the Ready To Launch event which I’ll be posting later.
- Russell notices that PSP firmware 2.60 now has podcasting and RSS support.
- turns out Sony might have known about the rootkit in some of their CDs sooner than when it was exposed and villified in blogs, and they claim they were investigating and planning to announce a fix. Yet another strange contradiction to their spokesperson’s initial nonchalant attitude. Oh, and the lawsuits continue, ouch.
- Another ouch: Om points to one of the things about podcasting that has bugged me for awhile: the ease by which some sites hijack podcast feeds.
- And to keep the pain going, Vonage didn’t make the 911 deadline and now might have trouble signing up new customers.
- Yahoo Mail and Alerts (beta) have added a built-in RSS Reader to their invite-only beta mail service. I haven’t checked out the new beta Yahoo mail client but the old one pretty much sucked.
- I installed Office 2003 Professional yesterday morning on my Tablet and Outlook 2003 crashes immediately every time it opens. How useful. Looks like I might be calling tech support when I get some more time (probably not today), if I can’t find a quick solution digging through their support forums and Google with the error report. Argh.

So do you like these Hmm quickies? Should I try to do them more often again? You know, just to mix things up once in awhile? One thing that I don’t like about them is that they end up fitting too many different categories and probably confuse the hell out of the contextual ad stuff. Maybe I should run these posts out in the category without ads (Current Events)?

My wife has contributed posts on and off in the past and has been threatening to do so a little more frequently (a joke, dear). She’s even been talking about possibly starting her own blog. For those reading this blog from Hmm and not in an RSS reader, her posts now have a light pink background, just FYI. Yeah, that’s seriously cliched but I wanted her posts to stand out from others on the website. We might change colors for other authors too. Actually we did this a long time ago when Logspirit used to submit content. Yeah, the color thing might be lame, but visually it’s a quick, easy way to tell who wrote what. Of course we’re open to other reader suggestions?

Surprisingly, some people do not read the bylines.

Also wanted to remind readers that anybody can register, login and submit stories/articles/content to makeyougohmm. We haven’t really promoted this feature that much to readers, but it has actually been an available option for awhile.

I haven’t pushed this that much for two reasons: one, I’ve been working here and there on improving our Official Editorial Guidelines and two, because we aren’t paying for submissions. More on that last part in a minute.

NOTE: All reader submitted posts remain in draft until they are approved or rejected. If they are rejected the word: “rejected” will be added to the working title, and possibly some text to the beginning of the submission about why it was rejected. Readers are welcome to remove the “rejected” notice, rework and resubmit.

Official Hmm Editorial Guildelines:
1) please submit original content only. You can reword/rework/massage something you’ve put on your own blog or published elsewhere, but please no crossposting. A monkey can crosspost or reblog or setup a script to submit. Readers enjoy and respect original content and so do we.
2) copyright of the submited post remains the author. We aren’t paying for this, so we can’t expect to shackle what’s done with it beyond makeyougohmm.com. However, any abuse of the delete function (as in deleting prior published stories) will result in all future submissions being rejected.
3) you may update prior published posts to correct errors and/or add additional information, but please make it clear what is being edited by using strikethru on the original text and adding the word “update” and date/time so readers know what was updated and when. It is important being accurate and making corrections but not altering originally published content with no explanation. Your credibility — and ours — suffers from this activity. Please keep this in mind.
3) use blockquote or double quotes for any third party quoted content.
4) quoted content must contain less words than your editorial and must be linked (attribution is very important), see #1.
5) please disclaim any conflicts of interest in your post. For example, if you are writing about how great Microsoft is and you work for Microsoft, then be sure to mention that.
6) affiliate links are OK as long as you put the following: “(affiliate)” (without the quotes) immediately following the link.
7) link-only submissions will be treated as a lead or something for us to review, they will not be published under the author byline as is unless the link is just amazing and speaks for itself (extremely rare). Hmm isn’t a linkblog, though we do have a linkdump category where links with a descriptive sentence or two are sometimes appropriate.
hotlink images, video, podcasts, etc from your server during the submission process. If we accept your content, we’ll copy the content over to the site and serve it from here so you don’t accrue any bandwidth charges.
9) All editorial decisions remain KMR Enterprises (that’s us) meaning we can modify words, add links, accept, reject and/or edit any submission for any reason.
10) there is no payment for any blog entries submitted at this time, though KMR Enterprises reserves the right to start paying for published submissions at some later, undefined date.

Before anybody flames us for not paying, please understand that we are not fishing for more content here, this blog does just fine the way it currently operates. Ad income and subscribers have been increasing almost every month. Actually, we want to have a way for interested readers and/or other bloggers to be able to submit content here if they want to do so, nothing more, nothing less. If you think this deal which basically boils down to exposure only sucks, then please do not submit. There is no secret, sinister agenda to rape writers and if you doubt I’m passionate about writers not being abused then read this.

My take is, has been, and likely will continue to be: if you want to be paid to blog, then start your own blog and work it. If you aren’t good at self-promotion, your options are learn about the business, join a blog network and focus only on writing, or join a blog network and focus on writing and learning about the business. Initially you’ll make more money blogging for a network but if you do things right and catch a break in a niche that you are a passionate about then you’ll make much more money working for yourself. It’s a now or later (maybe) proposition. No guarantees working for yourself. I love working for myself, even though the boss is a bastard.

Finally, the last time I mentioned this a few people wrote in that they were worried that accepting submissions from others would mean less content by me. That the overall content quality would change and they might need to unsubscribe. Really, that’s flattering, thank you, but I’m still going to contribute as much as I always have here and maybe even more (if that’s possible). Also, we still have editorial control, this isn’t becoming some unmonitored wiki.

If you look on the home page of the website in parenthesis you’ll see the numbers of posts each month were added has been more this past year than it ever has and 99% of the total 662,370 words in 2,657 posts have come from yours truly. The numbers speak clearly: I’m not going anywhere. And because we aren’t paying for submissions I suspect we’ll receive about the same amount of submissions that we received the last time this was mentioned (zero), although a few folks did register so maybe they are meticulously crafting their submissions. Also, this site has lots of different RSS feeds (by category, by keyword search, etc) and we wouldn’t be opposed to offering a feed by author as well.

With all this said, it seems rather arrogant of me to assume that I’m the only one that can come up with things that … make you go hmm, so that’s the primary reason this submission process exists. I hope we will receive some submissions with this request but if not, well, then that’s cool too.

Whatever you decide to do heretofore, thank you for stopping by and reading.

As of 1pm PST yesterday internet access for our local network has been more off than on. Currently we can connect straight to the cable box without a router and get internet, but even that doesn’t seem to be very reliable. I thought, hmm, maybe it is a bad router so I plugged in a different one (have two other ones here) and can’t get internet through either of those. This may not make any of you go hmm, but it is making me go hmm quite a bit.

Any thoughts/ideas?

Update 11:06am PST: Got a few of our machines working on the network, but connectivity is still slowwwwww.