Anti-SOPA Blackout Day. LNN Declares TheOatmeal.com The Winners

I know that I have no right to do this and my blog is not widely read enough to do this but it is Anti-SOPA Day when many sites are doing something to protest the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act aka Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011) laws in the USA.

Wikipedia shut down for the redirecting people from the regular homepage which looked like this (notice the notification at the top?):

To this:

That’s awesome and I fully support their protest of it because those laws are just plain silly but I think The Oatmeal with its usual irreverence totally won the explaining what SOPA & PIPA are and why they suck game with this animated GIF (a type of image) – also available at http://theoatmeal.com/sopa – on their page:

Wikipedia: You did a damn good job! You made it extremely noticeable and had sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Sorry though, Oatmeal totally won. Mainly because they used humor for their awesomeness and because they encouraged people to share the humor. I mean that literally, at the bottom of The Oatmeal’s page it says “P.S. Please pirate the shit out of this animated GIF.” Therefore, I think I am doing my part for the move against SOPA and PIPA by putting that image of awesomenss up for all y’all to grab.

If you want to know a bunch about SOPA and PIPA check out this TED Talk below by Internet writer and NYU professor Clay Shirky called “Defend Our Freedom To Share (Or Why SOPA is a Bad Idea)”:

Here is the direct link to it http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/1329.

How Long Could I Survive On The Surface Of The Sun? The Oatmeal Has That Answer!

There is a ridiculous questionnaire on The Oatmeal website where they ask you 5 questions which seem to have nothing to do with each other or how long one could last on the surface of the sun before arriving at an answer. Below is the answer for me. How long can you survive?

Created by Oatmeal

If you want to know how long you can survive go to The Oatmeal for yourself and take the quiz here: http://theoatmeal.com/quiz/sun_surface

The BCC Option In Your Email

This post was updated & edited to include the cartoon from The Oatmeal (seen below) on January 5, 2011.

I recently got an email from a member of my shul (Jewish word for synagogue) who didn’t have a reason to know my personal email address as I’ve never emailed them and they’ve never emailed me before. The email was about the launching of their new business. Now while that email in of itself could be considered spam its content is NOT what this post is about.

This post is about people’s seeming lack of ability to use the BCC line instead of the TO line when sending a mass email. If you do not know what BCC means allow me to translate the abbreviation. It means “Blind Carbon Copy”. What this means is that every address you put in that line/box marked BCC is hidden from every other address you put in that box. I can only assume that this person who emailed me got my address from someone else who didn’t use the BCC and that is how your address spreads around the world.

That is also how your address gets to spammers and spyware mailing lists. Let me explain how that works. If one of the +150 people who were recipients of this email decide to hit the Forward button and send it to a bunch of their friends without using the BCC box and they further don’t take the time to delete my and all the other email addresses from the list at the beginning of the forwarded message my email address just got into another untold number of people I don’t know’s address books anywhere in the world. This is especially true if some of those people decide to repeat the forwarding process in the same manner. Now my email is out there and if one of those people gets a virus or spyware or is themselves a spammer guess who just made the list of people to email? Me and every other one of those +150 recipients of the original solicitous email. (Which, remember, was essentially spam in the first place).

To quote Wikipedia: “It is common practice to use the Bcc: field when addressing a very long list of recipients, or a list of recipients that should not (necessarily) know each other, e.g. in mailing lists.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_carbon_copy for more as it really does explain a lot about BCCing.

Maybe the problem is that people who aren’t technologically inclined and/or weren’t brought up using email simply don’t understand what they’re doing when they don’t use the BCC line and email en masse. I will try now to further explain it using more Baby Boomer/run of the mill technological concepts (as I jokingly did in a Twitter conversation – a tweetversation? – with @r_tania_n last night):
Would you want someone to start posting your phone number and address all around the world on walls in public places? Think about the guy from Lifelock who in commercials puts his Social Security Number on a cube van sidewall and has it driven around town. The reason the commercial makes a point is because usually this is info you don’t want everyone in the world to have. The same goes for your phone number(s). Sure most of our house lines and even lots of cell phones are in the phonebook and available on the internet in numerous places but we still don’t necessarily want people to have it stored in their address books (or written in their personal phonebook like my mom has kept for as long as I can remember near one of the phones in the house). This would be especially true if you knew telemarketers has webcams set up to rove the cities looking for phone numbers for them to call. There’s a reason countries have set up National Do Not Call Lists (American DNCL Canadian DNCL).

In conclusion please, people; please learn to use the BCC line & teach others who don’t know how to use it to use it too! (Or send them to this blog to teach them & get me more traffic).

[Above Picture via The Oatmeal “If You Do This In An Email I Hate You” Post here]