Cal Tech and MIT have had a fun rivalry going for a few years now (or rather the practice of hacking between the two schools increased during my undergrad years). Knowing that I wasn’t too surprised when I received a link to mitrejects.com and saw the end result.

It’s a relatively harmless and humorous little joke, but I wonder how the Cal Tech administration will respond. More interestingly, I wonder the Cal Tech administration can do. I doubt there is any law on the books anywhere that mentions “defamation via domain name.” My guess is that Cal Tech will look of the owner of the domain name and ask them nicely to stop redirecting it to caltech.edu. The joke may end there, but if the owner of the domain name politely declines the request, I expect that Cal Tech will look into legal options before ultimately realizing that the mostly likely option for resolving the issue will be to issue a request or “take-down notice” of some sort to the domain registrar for the domain mitrejects.com. At that point it would not at all surprise me if the domain redirect was killed by the registrar, trumping the wishes of the actual owner of the domain name.

It’s a realistic possibility, and it begs a couple questions:

1. Should there be laws preventing this sort of internet bullying/pranking?
2. Should your domain registrar really be able to force you to accept terms of use that cede your control of the domain to them?

Note: this is all entirely speculative, and potentially completely wrong and inaccurate. I however, don’t think it’s a bad guess.

I saw this album cover meme a long time ago, I just didn’t put the result together in a single image and share it until now.  I thought my result was interesting because it came out to a seemingly interesting and coherent result, and also because the picture that I got is of the Maracana stadium in Brazil.  It’s a rather historic stadium that I’d definitely like to see a game in during the 2014 World Cup.  Instructions are copy-pasted below:

1. The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random) is the name of
your band.

2. The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random
Quotations page (http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3)
is the title of your album.

3. The third picture in Flickr’s Interesting Photos From The Last
7 Days (http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/) will
be your album cover.

Note: We recommend you check whether the creator
of the image has allowed for your use via creative commons
provisions.

4. Use your graphics application of choice to throw them together,
and post the result.

Image is from flickr user rbpdesigner.  The image wasn’t embeddable so I used a screenshot of it.  This goes against the creative commons recommendation, but I decided I used a work around.  That’s how the internet goes sometimes.

Today Google has announced they’re running a domain name server free and open to the public.  The Google blog post talks about how Google feels compelled to improve the speed and quality of domain name servers because it will help make the internet a speedier and happier place for everyone.  That very well may be true, but I would assume there’s also another side to this not mentioned in the blog post.  While Google may offer a great DNS for you to route your visits ESPN.com, Amazon, or Facebook through, they’ll probably also now have a guaranteed way to know every single site and page you visit.  Google probably has lots of good ways to get most of this information from you already (through their existing services you probably use), but as a domain name server maps the name of every URL you type to the actual server hosting that site, this should guarantee they get all the information they want about your browsing habits. I can’t imagine that Google is not using this information to their advantage in some other way as well.

I’m sure there will be plenty of people that will immediately begin using the Google Public DNS immediately thinking it’s the greatest thing since slice bread, just like there is always a group of people that line up to buy the newest Apple gadget.  This may be the best domain name server created, but you may want to stop and think about what other benefits Google may be reaping by providing this service.

Privacy is not dead on the internet, it is however very easy to unknowingly sacrifice.

Random thought, would it at some point be good for the Google homepage graphic to be Google with the two Os replaced by binoculars?  Maybe that wouldn’t portray the right image .

A couple weeks ago I noticed traffic coming to this site from the search query “how to grow facial hair”. That got me curious, so I checked out the search query, and apparently I was the 21st link on google for that search term. I’ve since dropped to the fourth page.

Over the past few weeks my friend, and fellow MIT student, Akash G. Shah and I have been working on a paper for a class here at MIT. The class is called 6.805 Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier, and focuses on internet policy and privacy rights. We completed our paper, Time for Change: Why the Age of Digital Mail Requires New Legislation, yesterday.

If you have any interest in privacy on the internet, you might find it worthwhile. We had some good interviews, illustrated some interesting scenarios, and did some preliminary analysis. The main idea is that email is no longer just text based messages. Everyday people use email more and more like a digital filing cabinet, storing large quantities of personal, senstive, and privaate data. That information should remain private, and people expect it to. Currently laws that regulate electronic communications are not adequate to protect the privacy of Americans. This is why we feel it is Time for Change.

I’ve been an avid user of Pandora and Last.fm for over two years now.  Both are great online music services that have gotten increasingly popular over time, but I’d always used them for slightly different purposes.  Pandora I’ve always used as an alternative music source when I’m separated from my music collection.  Picture sitting at your desk at work with your headphones on, that’s me on Pandora pretty much every day at work.  When I get home from the office and back to my Powerbook I open iTunes and launch Last.fm, tracking my listening habits on my personal music collection.

Recently I’d been craving a solution that would link these two great products and increase the utility of my Last.fm account by including in its tracking all the hours of great music I’d found and been listening to on Pandora.  Last week I found it, the Last.fm Firefox extension at Yerblog.com.  With a quick install this extension allows you to send all the songs you listen to on your Pandora account to be scrobbled (tracked) on Last.fm.  Now the awesome discovery power of Pandora is combined with the statistical analysis and recommendations of Last.fm.  Combined with the recent release of both the Pandora and Last.fm iPhone applications, which make both of these services completely mobile, hardly ever again will a song you listen to go untracked.  Maybe you really can have your cake and eat it too.

I think this might be the best tweet I’ve ever made.  I would be impressed if I could make that determination only minutes after tweeting it, but I really think it might be.  It’d be awesome to get some feedback regarding anybody’s thoughts on this tweet.

so i signed up for plurk to check it out, and here’s the second thing that happened. I made my first plurk, then went to check out the my account section and i get this:

web 2.0 is pissing me off lately. so my first plurk was “campo thinks plurk is a knockoff”, prove me wrong plurk, prove me wrong.

i was thinking it over and came up with this map of what a person’s relationship status as listed in their facebook profile actually means in real life. Leave a comment and let me know what you think

single -> i’m not dating who you think i’m dating, and i want you to know it

in a relationship -> i’m probably in a relationship

engaged -> i’m engaged, or maybe i’m joking

married -> i’m joking, or maybe i’m married

it’s complicated -> it’s not complicated, i’m joking

open relationship -> my girlfriend and I find this funny

(blank) -> it’s complicated