DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Three bits of old-world fun:

Look up your telephone exchange at the Telephone EXchange Name Project. Then you can tell people your phone number using the code words that went out of fashion in the 1950s, e.g. PEnnsylvania 6-5000.
This site has a compound retro-cool factor. Not only does it describe something retro-cool… it is, itself, retro cool. Its list of official “Ma Bell” exchange names was published on the web in 1996. Had it been online a few years earlier, there wouldn’t have been a “line” to be “on.” (No, nobody remembers pre-1994 USENET but me.)

See the “future we were promised” in the exhibit of futurist and illustrator Art Radebaugh. Especially appealing are the hip cityscapes in the “Lost Portfolio” exhibit. One of those may end up on my wall at some point.

And just to round out the trio, here’s the Google homepage from 1998. Note: it still works!

I just realized Google does telephone-number lookups. Type in a phone number, and it shows you the holder. Example: 202-456-1111 (look at the very top of the results list)

Here is Google’s description of this feature: Google PhoneBook

Wouldn’t you know — they even have an opt-out! “Have your residential or business phone and address information removed from the Google PhoneBook”

Check out the Chronicle’s Year in Pictures — 12 galleries of their best shots from last year.

(You might wish to resize your browser window to obscure that horrible flashing advertisement on the right side.)

One of the worst things about the Internet is that owning a domain name requires that you publish personal contact information in a public directory, where every con artist and scammer in the world can access it. Within a few days of registering a domain name, expect the flood to begin: junk mail and spam, pushing mortgage scams, diet pills, herbal viagra, porn, “easier” web hosting, and a load of other unappealing crap, delivered to every address you’ve provided, whether physical or electronic.

I recommend to everyone that they provide fake physical-address data, because there appears to be no benefit to using a real address. Domain registrars will send an email when the domain is up for renewal; if you’re certain they can email you, or if you watch the expirations yourself, then there really isn’t any reason to give a real address — so long as wrong-thinking legislators don’t make it illegal, anyway.

But, one’s email address is still exposed. Until now: Dotster, my favorite registrar, recently announced a service called Spam Shield.

Here’s how it works:

• Rather than publishing the email address you provide, they publish an address generated for you. Any mail received at this address gets forwarded to your real address…
• after it passes spam filtering.
• And then the addresses are all changed every 10 days, effectively expiring any address that has already been harvested by the spambots.

This is a service I’d pay for, but I don’t have to — at the moment, Dotster offers it for free.

There was a time when Linux was not just an operating system, but a ticket to Wall Street success. Remember Red Hat, Slashdot, Corel, and the leader of the acquisition-and-IPO pack, VA Linux, whose stock opened with a record-setting gain of 700% and hovers now at NASDAQ’s delisting point, $1/share. (A plot of LNUX share prices so effectively encapsulates the term “dot bomb” that it would send Edward R. Tufte into spasms of joy.) At the time of those acquisitions and IPOs, all sorts of companies were touting Linux, even if it was only peripherally related to their core business, in hopes of pumping up their own image (and share price).

So it seemed like a time warp today to learn of a company called Linux Motor Corp. They look like just-another hosting company (which, from what I can tell by the “pervasive thinning” in the hosting industry over the past two years, has not been a sound business model for a long time either), but dressed up in “open source” robes in hopes of favorable treatment by analysts. But I’m not an authority on these things, so forget my impressions and focus on the issue at hand: linuxmotor.com is run by spammers.

I received an email spam from Marc Gomez of Linux Motor, promoting the company’s web-hosting options. The message was sent to one of my domain-registration addresses. This implies that Linux Motor is harvesting email addresses from “whois” records — a traditional spammer technique for email-address collection.

Now for the irony: if you want to host your website at Linux Motor, you have to agree to their Terms of Service (local mirror), which state in part:

As a provider of Internet network services and management, Linux Motor considers it an obligation to put an end to Spam.

The policy continues with some great stuff: immediate account termination for spammers, to pick one example. They take a strong stand against spam. So I have to wonder, why doesn’t Linux Motor follow this policy themselves?

I’d suspect that some marketing guy acted on his own in launching this spam campaign, except that the name on the spam belongs to the CEO of the company.

Also here’s a confusing sight that tends to cloud Linuxmotor.com’s endorsement of Linux and Open-Source software: not only do they offer Windows 2000 (note: not open-source) as a server OS, they list it under the heading “Linux Hosting.” Elsewhere on the page they list Windows 2000 under “Linux Support.” Err, what? Is this a simple page-design mistake, or evidence of misleading and opportunistic branding?