Shyzer.com

If there’s one thing in politics that’s actually worth following these days, it’s the whole Net Neutrality Act and how the major ISP’s are lobbying most of the Republican’s to defeat it. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that Net Neutrality is good when so many large websites and actual Internet players come out in support of it. Google, Yahoo, E-Bay, Myspace, Craigslist, Amazon and countless other major websites that are dependant on their users to keep them in buisness have all come out in favor of Net Neutrality. And why shouldn’t they?

For those of you who don’t quite understand what’s at stake here, it boils down to this. Let’s say I’m a huge fan of Swedish fishing shows or African cooking articles. Without the Internet, I’m stuck with only cable TV and my local print media and I doubt either of them would have much material on Swedish fishing or African cooking. But thanks to the Internet, I can watch Oleg’s homemade podcast on Swedish fishing and read Kimbabwesaquanda’s blog on African cooking. Hooray for hobbies!

But if Net Neutrality is defeated, my ISP suddenly has a say. Verizon, Time Warner, Adelphia, Comcast, or whoever else might provide you with Internet might decide that they don’t make enough money from Oleg’s or Kimbabwesaquanda’s websites and as such, restrict the amount of bandwidth they’ll allow to flow to those sites. Now all of a sudden when I try to go to their websites, they load painfully slow or in some cases, not at all. In essence, the Internet would cease to be a forum where any and every user, regardless of money, could sell or offer their services. Instead, with no Net Neutrality, ISP’s could auction off the Internet to the highest bidder.

And don’t be fooled into thinking only small blogs would be effected by this. Time Warner owns CNN. Well, what’s to stop them from blocking all their users from going to msnbc.com and foxnews.com so that now all their users are forced to use their news service? How about this: TW also owns Sports Illustrated, so what’s to stop them from blocking ESPN.com? Or what if TW, who owns AOL and thus AIM, blocked customers from using MSN or Yahoo Messenger, forcing people to use AIM. And the examples don’t stop with just TW. Verizon could block any cell phone competitor’s website. Comcast could block VH1 or MTV’s websites and force me to go to E! Entertainment’s. The list of possibilities is endless thanks to the number of assets these giant corporations own. I simply picked on TW because not only are they the biggest, but this past April, their AOL asset blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com - an advocacy campaign opposing the company’s pay-to-send e-mail scheme.

Most supporters of Net Neutrality claim that if my ISP starting throttling websites, then I should switch to an ISP who doesn’t. That’s fine and dandy in theory, but in reality, how many ISP’s can I pick from? In 99% of the country, there is only one or two ISP to choose from and if I don’t like either of them, tough luck. In fact, website throttling is already happening in Canada, where the situation is actually much worse than here in the states. Most major Canadian ISP’s pinch off bittorrent traffic so that their users can’t download anything and one such ISP, Telus, blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a labor dispute. China isn’t the only country with banned websites people; it’s slowly but surely coming to our shores. Sites like Save The Internet are trying to spread the word, but I find that not enough people realize what’s actually at stake here for the longterm development of the Internet.

To put it to you another way, if the current bill in Congress passes and your ISP decides that I don’t pay enough money to them (which I can assure you I won’t), then they will throttle your bandwidth to Shyzer so that you can’t access it from your home. And I don’t know about y’all, but a world without Shyzer simply isn’t a world I want to live in.

Oh, and comments are on for this post. I wish I could have it automatically let y’all know whether they are on or not without having to click the comments button, but until I figure out how, this is how I’ll let y’all know.

The Awesomest Site of the Week award hands down goes to Ask A Ninja.com

I’ve had absolutely no motivation or desire whatsoever to write or post lately, but I make no apologies for it. I’ve been in one those “I hate the world” type moods over the past few days, where any little event had the potential to set me off and ignite a constant barrage of insults to every human being within shouting distance. So you can understand why sitting down in front of my computer and trying to type a witty or humorous story sounded slightly less than appealing.

Thankfully, that mood has passed and I’m back to my normal self. Unfortunately for you, however, I honestly don’t have much to type about since I’m busy working on a post that will be go live come March 15th. So, for now, I leave you with a few cool links that I’ve stumbled upon lately.

The Olympics are now over and while most people thought they were boring or whatever since American supposedly did horrible, I found them captivating as always. I still don’t understand how people can’t enjoy the Olympics, but I’ll try and not go off on that tangent right now. Instead, have a look at two of my favorite Olympic commercials, since we all know I’m a huge fan of awesome commercials and even a bigger fan of well used instrumental music in commercials. And for an interesting side note, as of now, Shyzer is the only place on the Internet where you can download both of them, but I’m sure that will change soon.

Exxon Mobile Dreams Commercial

Nike Jumpman Let Your Game Speak Commercial

Moving on, think about all the trash you’ll soon talk in your newly formed Fantasy Bass Fishing League. I think it’s safe to say ESPN is running out of new ideas.

I’ve already ordered a Phone Spoofing Card and can’t wait to have some fun with it. Who knows, maybe I’ll even record the prank phone calls I made and never put them on Shyzer like I did a year ago. (Waynus and Clay, I don’t want to hear a word from either of you!)

As I was going through my bookmarks in an effort to organize them, I found one sending me to the World Beard Championships. I have no idea when I bookmarked that page, but upon looking at some of the contestants, I swear one of them is just a photoshopped image of me. I’ll see if anybody else can figure out who I’m referencing to in order to see if other people can see the resemblance or if it’s just me.

And finally, as part of Shyzer’s ongoing, let’s say “Award Winning,” Public Service Links, I give you Get Human. It’s a giant, continuously growing database of how to quickly get a human operator on the phone when you call certain companies. Most of the time simply pressing zero won’t work, so this site shows you the exact buttons to press so that you can quickly get in touch with a human who can actually help you with your problem.

I’ve just been informed by the script coder that I fucked up in a simple copy and pasting of the script. Go me. The Poke Button should now work properly, so commence Poking.

I’ve been reading the blog of one of the guys who was involved in the whole Facebook Cake Party I posted on last month and he recently came up with a pretty nifty script for all you Facebook lovers out there. If you are currently logged in (and admit it, you know you are), then click the button below to send me a poke.

If you have a site of your own, you can snag the code yourself from Legatissimo and join in the giant Pokefest.

If you ever need somebody to come over and completely break your modem, give me a call. Saturday evening I was trying to tweak things and I somehow severed our connection to the Internet, so we’ve been without it (gasp!) for the past 48 hours. It honestly felt like I’d lost my right arm and for two ghastly days, my siblings and I were forced to “interact” and “talk.” *shudder*

With it now restored, I feel complete again. Don’t ever do that to me again, Internet.

If you haven’t heard of Facebook.com by now, you’re obviously (A) Not on the Internet more than an hour a day, (B) Not a college student, or (C) Have absolutely no friends and spend all your time brooding and plotting to blow up your campus. If you happen to fall into one of those categories, then I’ll be kind enough to give ya a quick rundown about the site so that you too can seem hip and cool and feel like a young kid again. Started back in late 2004 by a Harvard student, it’s basically a college social networking site that is the ninth most visited website on the Internet, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Open only to people with college e-mail addresses, you can create an account, link up with your friend’s accounts, upload and share photos, join groups, and “poke” people in a somewhat sexual manner, among countless other things. I joined back in October of ‘05 and since then it’s added another 4.6 million students and received a $13 million dollar investment by a group of Silicon Valley wizards. Also since October of ‘05, I’ve spent way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many hours on it. At one point, I was logging in 10 or 20 times a day to check up on things. I even have my own Goob Fanclub Group.

One day I might tell you about the time I became a Facebook God and had unlimited powers on the site, but that’s not what this post is about (Although I’m sure Fellner can tell you all about how depressed I was when I was suddenly stripped of my new found powers). No, this post is to share a little story about a group of kids one upping the local police.

Not every college is on Facebook, but all the important and big ones are. On most campuses, statistics place the Facebook saturation rate somewhere between 50-90% and recently, college officials have caught on to this. Since registration only requires a college e-mail address, they too can create accounts and make fake student pages with the real intention of spying on students. There have been a few reports of people being busted for drug and alcohol use thanks to pictures they’ve posted on their Facebook profile. A student at Fisher College in Boston was expelled last year for his online criticism of a campus security officer. Officials at the University of California Santa Barbara, said they would discipline students living on campus who posted information or photographs on their profiles that involved illegal activity like under-age drinking. At North Carolina State, RAs wrote up 15 students seen consuming alcohol in photos on Facebook. The list goes on and on.

And then there are the students at George Washington University who decided to fight back and launch a “Facebook Attack.”

It all started last year when a party was shut down by campus police. Students found it odd that the cops had known about it and then began to realize that the only place they’d heavily talked about it was on Facebook. So, a few months ago, they decided to strike back. They planned another party and talked about it only on Facebook, therefore ensuring that if the cops came this time, the students were being spied upon. They created a group, left tags on each other’s boards, and talked non-stop for weeks about how awesome their “Beer Bash” was going to be.

So imagine the look on the police officer’s faces when they burst through the doors only to find a group of kids standing around eating cake and cookies with the word “Beer” painted on them in icing. Luckily for you, though, you don’t have to imagine. Pictures of the party surfaced on the net soon after and I’ve stuck them in the newly reformatted (although not yet finished) Shyzer Gallery. Have a look here., so Google around for them. My absolute favorite is the last one, which contains the stunned look of one of the cops. I just wish I could have been there.

This whole topic raises an interesting issue, though. I used to tell Fellner I couldn’t wait until the Presidential elections of 2024 or beyond. I always thought it was interesting to imagine how sites like Myspace, Livejournal, and the such could come back and bite a politician in the ass. Bush and Kerry and Dean might be a little too old to have run a website while they were growing up, but my generation isn’t. When it comes time for my fellow peers to start running for office, people are going to dig up what they wrote in their blogs, what they posted on message boards, what they said in chat rooms. Everything, and I mean everything, put on the Internet is archived somewhere. Whether it be in Google’s cache or archive.org or a server’s backup in downtown Atlanta, chances are if you want to find an Angelfire site from 1999, you can, especially if you have the resources most powerful news agencies have. We make such a big fuss over what our politicians have maybe said in an interview or possibly said in a speech. Now think about having daily writings from an angst-ridden teenager who went on to clean up his act and run for political office. Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever typed and posted on the Internet. Now imagine seeing that run as a headline in the New York Times or USA Today. I’ve kissed any possible political career away with Shyzer, but that’s fine with me. For other people my age, they might not be ready to write off a certain career choice already and yet they might have already done so without even knowing it.

But Facebook is bringing this scenario to us in the present day, even if it’s only in a smaller scale. Reports are now surfacing that big-time companies and possible employers are getting into Facebook to check out prospective employees. Like I said, all it takes is a college e-mail and any bigwig in a Fortune 500 company surely can call up his alumni rep and get a college address to his old school. Ten minutes later, he’s pulling up Brad Johnson’s profile on Facebook and finding pictures of Johnson’s Johnson on there, right next to another one of him drunk and passed out in his dorm and reading about his “appreciation of the festive greens.” And just like that, there goes Bard’s chances of landing that internship.

On-line privacy debates are nothing new. From the recording industry suing Internet Providers for ISP records, to the Bush Administration’s attack on pornography, to employers being able to read their employees e-mails - It’s all ongoing. But the recent rash of Facebook incidents shine light on the new question involved. Where does the privacy line lie with minors and those releasing their pent up, youthful expressions and indiscretions?

Looks like we’re lumped together with the porn peddlers, the illegal downloaders, and those who are lazy on the job. Good company.

Now I just can’t wait for those 2024 Presidential Debates.

[EDIT]This post is amazingly outdated at this point. Most of the info below is no longer valid, but the gist of the post is still the same. If you have a few bucks and a few friends, you can get a free iPod. If you’re still interested after reading this post, click one of the image above and get started![/EDIT]

I’ve never liked scams. In fact, I have yet to find anybody who genuinely thought being scammed out of money or time could be called an enjoyable experience. Which is why I tend to take almost everything I read on the net with not just a grain of salt, but a whole damn truckload of salt.

So as you can imagine, when I saw a site offering free iPods, I laughed and moved on. Maybe I should have done a little more research back then.

My sudden shift in attitude came earlier this week while I was talking to some fellow clan members. I’m sure many of you don’t know, but there is an on-line video game based on the Matrix coming out this fall. As you can imagine, people began making clans and websites in preparation for the game once it finally came out. One such clan even went so far as to make an extremely difficult test and application process to weed out the idiots, which means that those of us in the clan are pretty tight-knit and don’t try to screw with each other. Therefore, when I saw one of them posting that his friend had actually gotten a free iPod from some website, I decided to listen to him and do some research of my own.

Well I’ve done my research can say with a straight face that this looks to be a legit operation here. The site is located over at www.freeipods.com and is run by a company called Gratis Internet. They specialize in online pay-for-performance acquisitions and are even a member of the Better Business Bureau. I’ve been able to go back and trace many of their older offers they ran and frankly, there are tons of satisfied customers and only a few people that talk of being disappointed.

But enough about all of that. I’m sure you are sitting there saying to yourself, “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DAMN IPOD?! HOW DO I GET IT?!” Quite easily. In fact, it only takes three simple steps.

First, create an account at freeipods. (But don’t do it yet you idiot! Wait until you’ve read of all this before you run off all half-cocked thinking you’ve got everything under control!)

Second, you choose one of the links on freeipod’s site, click it, and sign up with THAT company. (Calm down you idiots! No, you don’t need a credit card or have to pay a dime if you do the E-Bay offer!)

Third, you get 5 other people to do it.

So why would I be making this long-ass post if that was all you had to do? I mean, couldn’t you have just found that information on freeipod’s site? Of course you could have. But could you have found this easy ass guide I’m about to give you on their site? No, I didn’t think so.

Being the cheap poor person that I am, I quickly realized that there might be some hidden charges here. I mean, you never know what a company will just start charging you when you sign up for a new account with them and as I scrolled down the list of links you could click, I marked them off. AOL will give you a thousand free months but of course they want your credit card. Columbia House will dump mounds of CDs in your lap, just as long as you buy five for $35.00 a year later. E-Bay will….wait a minute.

E-BAY! See, I’ve been selling and buying things on E-Bay for years and if there is one thing that I learned early on, it was that you need not a single credit card to make an account and start buying things on E-Bay. And what’s this I see? All you have to do is make an account and “bid” on something? You don’t have to actually “win” the item? Oh this is gonna be sweet…

That’s right. Freeipods gets a referral bonus from E-Bay for every basic account created! All you have to do is give them your name, e-mail, and address and you are in! Once through with that, you just have to become the highest bidder on an item. Notice I didn’t say win. For instance, I did a quick search on E-Bay for digital cameras and found hundreds of them starting off at 0.01 cents. I made a bid of 0.25 cents, became the highest bidder, and was done. Of course, somebody came behind me and bid $50.00, meaning I didn’t win the digital camera for a quarter, but that’s the beauty of it all. That’s what is supposed to happen!

“But Goob,” you might be saying, “E-Bay won’t let you use a free e-mail account like Yahoo of Hotmail. What should I do?” Well that’s easy. Go to Yoggin.com or Big Puns. Or heck, if you own your own website, just make up a new e-mail account and use that!

That’s it! You’re done! Now all you have to do is get five friends to do it! Without much effort, I got a fellow clan member to sign up and do the E-Bay offer within minutes of asking him. In fact, I planned on just going down my buddy list and getting four friends to do it for me as well before I realized that I should share the wealth. Why get my friends to help me when I could easily help them get their own iPod as well.

Which is where this whole post comes into play. I want to help everybody get an iPod so this is what we are gonna do. I still need four more referrals since I decided to wait and ask people here in my post. My referral link is right here [link has since been removed], so click it and THEN make your account. I’ll get credited with a referral, you’ll have your account, and everybody wins. But like I said, I want to help my friends get five referrals as well.

So, if you click my link and sign up, say something in the comments of this post! Let me know you signed up using my link and then go ahead and post YOUR referral link. I’ll post those here on Shyzer and send them to all my friends until YOU have your five referrals. I’ve got plenty of clan members who are waiting for the rest of us to sign up before they sign up so that they don’t lose people a referral and honestly, if you think about it, how hard is it to get five people to do this for you? I’m looking at my buddy list right now and see 10 or 15 people who I know would take five minutes out of their lives to do me a favor, even if they didn’t want an iPod or not. So do me the favor, click my link, do the E-Bay thing, and then leave a comment with your referral link so that I can help you!

Here’s a few tips you might want to consider when making your accounts: Make sure YOU USE THE SAME HOME ADDRESS for signing up for E-Bay as you used for signing up at freeipods.com. This makes the verification process quicker and you will get credited sooner. If you are waiting to be credited on the e-Bay offer, you may or may not get credit for it until after the auction you bid on is over. So if the auction you bid on lasts for a week, don’t expect the e-Bay offer to be credited to you right away after bidding, give it awhile. And finally, it’s best not to have your referrals signed up using the same IP address as you. So getting someone in your house, using the same internet connection as you, signed up as your referral is a BAD IDEA. They will check to make sure they are indeed unique referrals and if they suspect that you’re cheating, then no IPOD for you. And it goes without saying, don’t try to sign up 5 extra times pretending to be your referrals. At least, not from your own home. =)

A great site for tons of information and links (including multiple sites where people photoed the iPod as it arrived at their house) is over at Forever Geeks. I suggest anybody who wants further proof to go check it out.