slamboard

Conspiracy Theory is a term that has been effectively made innocuous. You should try to look past the generality that is put forth about how conspiracy theorists are all nuts and that the theories are all wildly implausible. The fact is individuals and corporations WILL conspire when it is in their interests.

You may have conspired at some point. Are you a parent? Have you been telling a small child about Santa Claus? Is your spouse backing you up?

This animated short was aired during a live broadcast of Saturday Night Live, but edited out of subsequent reruns. GE owns NBC.

Lorne Michaels has stated that he had the controversial piece removed because it didn’t work. There is, of course, a theory that he bowed to corporate pressure. I wonder if this would be on YouTube if NewsCorp owned it?

My title is probably not a question that business executives ask themselves very frequently.

I was inspired to use this title for two reasons. I figured that I might get some accidental search engine traffic (not that ethical, probably something that Jesus would not do). The main inspiration for the title is this succinct and well produced short educational video that introduces the topic of business ethics. It is presented by Jesuits.

I don’t want to be accused of cherry picking intelligence for this story. Actually there is no story. I used Google’s own search engine to see if anyone had looked into this possibility. Late last year Loren Baker connected enough dots to make for a fairly sensational report. He put a question mark at the end of his title as well.

He did find web pages on Orkut that were ideologically supportive of Al Quaeda and that were monetized with Google Ads. Supposedly click fraud was rampant and unchecked. Google estimates that $1 billion dollars per year is lost to fraudulent ad clicks. I saw no estimate as to how much of that is comprised of organized crime by terror organizations.

The ideology of individuals in these organization is such that any type of lying or stealing perpetrated towards an infidel is not considered morally wrong. At the time of the report, there were forums that openly encouraged members to repeatedly click the ads.

Diet scams and email based fraud can also potentially be supporting terrorist organizations.

Heidi Diaz has decided to, in her words, come clean on the Kimkins website. She is no longer claiming to look like any of these after photos. I couldn’t help but notice that the recent photograph of the real Kimmer that was added to the website today looks a bit vertically stretched. I am curious as to what other people think.

Please feel free to leave comments on this blog. I have had to use full moderation, but I will be approving as often as possible.

You might have not noticed that iPhone went on sale in the UK recently. I didn’t. I’m sure it was a very life changing day for thousands of technophiles and sheep-like consumers within the UK.

There are some headlines hailing the launch as disastrous, one authorized dealer, Carphone Warehouse had a technical problem that stalled the complex transaction process. People also hailed the sales tally as underwhelming. The service provider, O2, is pointing out that it is the biggest sales weekend for a handheld device in the nation’s history.

I think the negativity was inevitable because of the simple fact that people are not lining up to be the first iPhone owners ever. In fact, the German launch occurred 18 hours earlier.

I think I might convert the audio in this YouTube video into an mp3 and play it on my headphones while I am sleeping.

This guy really does have a point. There were voices in Kevin Costner’s head back in the 80’s saying basically the same thing. If you build it…

There is some very bad hacking going on related to popular MySpace pages. I would advise people to simply stay away from the site.

Security and functionality exist in an inverse relationship…

– Exploit Prevention’s Chief Technical Officer Roger Thompson

The current situation does not involve American teens hacking passwords and replacing your text with the word gay. This is from a Chinese malware site and software is placed on your computer that makes your computer prone to future attacks. Pages of popular musicians are the main targets. Users that have typical protections on their computers are asked to download a codec that is not a codec.

I saw a really funny website that made it look like Paul Newman had his own line of salad dressings and it gave me an idea for a weekly theme. I have to confess that I have a habit of starting weekly themes and then abandoning them. This could be one of them. I want to believe that is won’t be.

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Imagine pulling up to a gas station in a strange town and stepping out of your car to find that the display on the pumps includes a local map from Google with directions to some key points of interest. That sounds pretty cool. Lots of people are reporting on how cool it is. Some people, me included are a little lukewarm about this. Apparently to initial version will allow the owner to choose the points of interest based on their own criteria. You can expect directions to various places that want your money. You might not get directions back out of town.

Source: Information Week

Most sites that were hyping the toxic toy that is a big story today have already made changes. Right at this moment, this site is still selling them in the UK. If the text is still unchanged when you visit, you will get to see how people convinced parents and kids that little beads ‘that magically join with water.’

This just in…THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MAGIC!!!

Here is a US site that has a big RECALL notice up, but still has the promotional copy saying that they are MAGIC!!!

Just because the reactive agent that caused the chemically coated beads to stick together was water, consumers could be lulled into thinking that it was an innocuous toy. Wake up you idiots!!!

Here is the CNN Story on the Toxic Beads: Bindeez / Aqua Dots.