Perhaps you’ve heard that there’s a threat looming on the horizon.  A pair of dark clouds hanging over our favorite websites.  The dark clouds are called SOPA and PIPA.

If you haven’t heard about them, allow me to bring you up to speed.  You see, content providers are scared that their content is being copied online.  There are laws in place to deal with this, but they want more laws.  Tougher laws.

Under SOPA and PIPA, not only would copying copyrighted content be a crime, but linking to it would be a crime too.  It doesn’t even have to be you posting a link.  If you own a blog and a commenter leaves a link to a site that contains a copyrighted image, your blog can be shut down.  Not only that, but any ad network or Paypal accounts can be shut down too.

You might think that your site would be immune to this shut down because you would defend yourself in court or take down the offending link and/or content when you are notified about it.  However, the shut down provisions can take place BEFORE any court hearing.  Yes, you are guilty before being proven innocent.  After your site is taken down, then you can defend yourself against the charges and *maybe* get your site brought back online.  (Think of the “fun” that a malicious individual could have faking copyright infringement claims to take down blogs he/she doesn’t like.)

To imagine the effect of this, picture every blog having to police every link that they and their commenters post lest one lead to a site with a single infringing image.  Now, picture Twitter or Facebook having to do this.  Imagine Google needing to not only filter out Google+ but their normal search results as well.  After all, one of the links they index might have an image that someone else claims was wrongly posted.  Google and dozens of other Internet companies will need to make these decisions on the fly.  If they make one wrong move, you could say goodbye to services such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube.

Speaking of which, YouTube is always a source of entertainment: Animals acting cute, people acting out strange stunts, and kids singing pop songs.  Well, strike that last one.  If you post a video of your kid singing a copyrighted song, you could end up behind bars for 5 years.  You read that right.  Five years of jail-time for a YouTube posting.

Now, you may have heard that SOPA was killed.  When people heard the news, they began to celebrate.  This celebration was, sadly, premature.  SOPA hasn’t been killed or even shelved.  Instead, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith plans on continuing work on SOPA next month.  The claim is that this break is due to “Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks.”  Personally, though, I think this was a delay tactic to try to get the outcry to die down.  Even if it is killed, though, we will need to remain vigilant.  Legislators love taking controversial bills, breaking them apart into different pieces, and sneaking them in attached to other pieces of legislation (the more “must pass”, the better).

Lest you think that all of this will, at least, somehow stop piracy, it won’t.  The site takedown only keeps the domain name from pointing to the site.  If you know the IP Address, you can still get to the site.  This will hurt you and me as normal users won’t remember your site’s IP address.  Pirates, however, will still be able to connect to their destinations just fine.

Maybe you are wondering how the tech companies allowed these bills to get this far.  Simple: They were not only not consulted, but actively excluded from the discussions.  Only pro-SOPA companies were allowed in.  Meanwhile, during hearings, Congressfolk seemed to reveal in their ignorance of how the Internet worked.  They said that they aren’t “nerds” and that discussions of Internet security were a “waste of time.”  They ignored experts saying that this would break the Internet.  Apparently, not knowing how something works isn’t a barrier to passing a giant legislation package regulating it into oblivion.  Is it any wonder that the bill wound up so one-sided?

So what can you do?  Contact your state Senators and Representatives and tell them to vote NO on SOPA/PIPA.  Make your voice heard now or you might not be able to make your voice heard online later.  (This site is a useful tool to see where your Senators/Representatives stand on SOPA/PIPA.)

(I’ll post my own words about this issue tomorrow.  For now, see this video and infographic from http://americancensorship.org.)

Disclaimer: Both the video and infographic are from AmericanCensorship.org.

As part of my stand against a serial cyber-harasser, I’ve been warning individuals and companies that she targets.  Her pattern, when it comes to companies, is to claim that her searches for business registrations came up blank.  She claims that this is proof that these companies are not licensed and, therefore, frauds.  These aren’t tiny companies, either, but some pretty big, even international, companies.

Her method appeared, to me, to be fatally flawed.  She was relying on the Better Business Bureau’s search tool.  The problem here is two-fold.  First of all, businesses don’t need to register with the BBB.  It’s voluntary.  Secondly, it isn’t a business license search.  It’s a business *review* search tool.  You can use this to find out if a business had complaints filed against it to the BBB, but you can’t use it to find every licensed business in the US.

As she claimed to be unable to find these registrations, I began to wonder.  Could I?  I pride myself on my Google-Fu and wondered just how long it would take me to find an organization’s business registration.  Once I was consistently able to find them, I figured I’d blog about my method.

For our examples, let’s take a few of the supposedly unregistered businesses: MomSelect, Bendon Publishing, and PictureIt Creations.  (I picked these at semi-random.  She’s targeted many more businesses than this.)

First, we need to visit the sites and find out in which state they are located.  Bendon’s Contact Us page mentions Ohio, PictureIt Creations’ contact number is in a 734 area code which is in Michigan.  MomSelect is a bit more complex as their web page mentions that they are part of BSM Media Inc.  Therefore, we should really look up BSM and not MomSelect.  BSM’s contact page lists Florida as their state.

Now that we have our states, we need to find each state’s business registration search website.  Luckily, I found a website called SecStates.com that listed all of the appropriate pages.  Some of them were outdated, though, so I tracked down the updated links and tested all of them.  Here’s the list:

NOTE: I couldn’t find a license search site for the District of Columbia or Virgin Islands. (EDIT: Thanks to usvirginislands and Sandra Foyt for finding the link for the US Virgin Islands.)

Now that we have the list, we just need to go to each state’s website to search for the businesses.  Let’s start with Bendon Publishing.  Searching gives two results: one (filed in 2001) that was canceled and a second (filed in 2003) that is active.  By the way, Bendon is listed as a “Foreign Corporation”.  At first, I thought this meant that they were based outside of the US.  However, all this means is that they are registered outside of Ohio.  (In this case, Delaware.)

Easy, right?  Let’s try PictureIt Creations now.  Searching Michigan’s database gives us this registration.  Ok, so we’re two for two now.  What about MomSelect / BSM Media?  Searching for “BSM Media” gives this result.  Three for three.

You can use this to find nearly any registered business in the United States.  Go ahead and give it a try.

Graphic derived from building and binocular clipart from OpenClipArt.org.

Everyone gather round.  It’s story time.  Today, we’re going to hear the story of the Maccabees.  You see, a long time ago, the Syrians ruled the land of Israel.  The Jews were allowed to go about their business until Antiochus Epiphany came to power.  Antiochus decided that the Jews should all worship the way *HE* told them to worship.  Or else.

Some of the Jews went along with the order.  They dropped their old religion and began worshiping Zeus because it was easier than standing up to the king (and his army).  The Maccabees, though, refused to change their beliefs simply because someone threatened them.  They believed that they had the right to worship as they saw fit and they were willing to fight for that right.

And fight they did.  The Maccabees gathered a group of Jews who believed similarly.  They were outnumbered and outgunned (in a manner of speaking – guns weren’t used back then), but they had the advantages of surprise and knowledge of the terrain.  They used these to drive the Syrian army away and reclaim their religious freedom.

This story is chock full of lessons.  Usually, people take the obvious moral of religious freedom from it.  The Syrian king was wrong to impose his religious beliefs on others. People should be able to worship whatever god they want (or no god at all) however they choose.  Recent events, though, have led me to take a slightly different lesson from the story: Don’t back down to bullies.

Antiochus was a bully, albeit one with an army at his disposal.  He wanted to set the rules for others to follow and, if they didn’t follow it, he demanded they be punished.  He couldn’t stand to see people doing things that he personally didn’t approve.

Many of the Jews, when faced with the bully, backed down.  They gave in and just did what the bully told them to do.  This is the quick and easy path.  (Sorry, the geek in me couldn’t help quoting Yoda.)  The Maccabees didn’t give in, though.  They stood up to the bully.  They refused to let the bully silence them or dictate the terms of their lives.

As a victim of bullying growing up, I promised myself that I would never let myself be silenced by bullies again.  Once I became a father, I knew that I wanted to teach my sons not to back down to bullies also.  This doesn’t need to mean physical violence, but it also doesn’t mean you should cower in fear.

Recently, I found myself sitting in silence.  A bully that had targeted me in the past had turned her attention to others and I didn’t want to speak up lest she turn her eye back to me.  I wasn’t cowering in fear, as this particular bully has no power over me.  Still, I just didn’t want to have to deal with her antics again .  Then it struck me: Would the Maccabees have done this?  More importantly, do I want to teach my sons to keep quiet when someone is bullying someone else?  The answer to both is a resounding NO!

Over the past 18 months (off and on), I’ve been the target of a bully.  I won’t go into her history too much.  You can read about that elsewhere.  Instead, I want to talk about her current activities.  She’s begun targeting bloggers, specifically review bloggers as well as blogger networks like MomCentral, MomSelect, Business2Blogger, and MyBlogSpark.  She’ll claim that they are fakes, will demand they take down their blogs, and will try reporting them to companies.  Amazingly, some companies are listening to her!

In this woman’s mind, all of these blogs and networks are run by a group of 4 or 5 people to steal products.  Her evidence?  She was told this by God.  Yes, she is a self-proclaimed prophet of God.

You can read more about her here:

http://blogs.babble.com/momcrunch/2011/12/19/bloggers-targeted-by-woman-claiming-gift-of-prophecy/

http://mombloghate.com/9/bully-profile-dawn-gordon/

As I said before, I’m through staying silent.  If you’ve been threatened, please speak up.  If you haven’t been threatened (yet), please send this information to every blogger you know.  Spread the word.  Let’s send the message that we bloggers don’t take kindly to bullies and will protect our fellow bloggers if threatened.

For quite awhile, I’ve teased on Twitter that I was working on a big Twitter application.  I didn’t reveal the name except to a select group of beta testers.  Well, today that “select group” is widening.  Today, FollowerHQ launches.

First, some history.  As I gained followers on Twitter, I would get e-mails that Twitter would send to me letting me know about my new follows.  Some people decide to automatically follow back, but I’m not of the opinion that this is useful.  I tend to be more selective in who’s tweets appear in my timeline.  So I would open up each e-mail, open up the link to the person’s profile page, examine the last few tweets as well as the person’s information, decide whether or not to follow the person, and then move on to the next person.  This was fine when I’d get 20 new followers in a week.

Unfortunately for this process, though, I began getting more and more people following me.  It became more and more of a pain to manage these new followers and I fell further and further behind.  Of course, the more people I needed to go through, the less I wanted to spend the time pouring through page after page.  I wondered if there was an easier way.  Being a programmer, I decided to build an easier way.

Thus, FollowerHQ was born.

What FollowerHQ Does:

FollowerHQ will, after you authorize it, check who is following you.  It will compare this list to the people you are following.  You will then see 4 tabs: You Aren’t Following Back, Not Following You Back, Dropped Friends, and Ignored.  There is also a fifth tab called Export.

• You Aren’t Following Back – These are people who follow you, but you aren’t following back.  You can choose to follow these users or ignore them on a case-by-case basis.
• Not Following You Back – These are people you follow, but who don’t follow you back.  You can keep following them or stop following them.
• Dropped Friends – I’ve seen this happen quite a few times.  Someone realizes that they aren’t following someone anymore.  They didn’t unfollow the person.  It just happened.  FollowerHQ will compare your following list against the list of people you were following the last time you logged in.  Any dropped follows will be listed here.  These might be people you decided to stop following or they might be mistaken drops.  You can re-follow these people or continue to not follow them.
• Ignored – These are people from the first queue who you’ve chosen to ignore.  You can stop ignoring them or just leave them in the listing.
• Export – I’m a big fan of keeping your data yours so this tab lets you export your user lists to import into your favorite spreadsheet program.

In each tab (except for Export), you can search and sort through the listings.  You can even take actions on multiple users at once.  For example, if you spot a bunch of spam bots following you, simply check them all and click the “Ignore Checked” button.  They will all be moved to the Ignore queue.

FollowerHQ Pricing

For now, FollowerHQ will be free.  I’m not going to rule out setting up some pricing scheme in the future.  Should FollowerHQ become popular and/or require more time and effort to maintain, I would need to offset the time/money spent on it, of course.  (Let’s face it, I’m *hoping* this becomes popular.)  However, even if there is some sort of payment plan in the future, I’ll always keep a free version around.

Enough talking, though.  It’s time for everyone to go play with FollowerHQ.  In case you haven’t already guessed, you can find it here: http://www.FollowerHQ.com/.  I’ve also registered the @FollowerHQ Twitter account.

Enjoy and let me know what you think of it in the comments below!

NOTE: I also want to thank my beta testers for all of their work finding bugs, suggesting new features and putting the application through its paces: Alena29, blogdangerously, CutestKidEver, dadofdivas, DadStreet, geekbabe, Kissyfur19, LindaCarmical, SandraFoyt, simplycathi, slpowell, and TheAngelForever.

As you read this, I’ll be offline celebrating the holiday of Sukkot.  It may be a more minor holiday than Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur, but I like celebrating these holidays.  Now, I’m not Orthodox.  I do things like take photos, watch TV and the like.  One thing I don’t do, though, is use my phone or computer.  I use the holiday as time off from anything work-related (which includes all computers as I program websites for a living and phones as I could otherwise take calls from work defeating the purpose of being “off”).  Instead, I spend the time with my family.  The forced time offline means that I interact with my family more.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you regularly take vacations from social media/computers?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #109

On Thursday, I wanted to go to sleep early.  I was tired and NEEDED my sleep.  But I didn’t.  I was too enthralled with watching the reactions from the fallout between Brand Link Communications and TheBloggess.

In case you are the single person online who hasn’t heard about it yet, TheBloggess was pitched by PR firm Brand Link Communications to run a piece about one of the Kardashians in pantyhose.  Now, TheBloggess’ blog is many things, but it is not about celebrities and what they wear.  This wasn’t the first bad pitch she’s gotten.  In fact, she gets so many that she has a dedicated page to send them to.

Normally, PR firms will either not contact her back or will apologize and/or remove her from their lists.  This time, however, they replied in a bit of a snippy manner.  At this point, I’m sure TheBloggess would have just shrugged and gone on with her life.  She would have, that is, had Jose from Brand Link not hit reply all and used quite a colorful phrase to describe her.  From this point on, the situation spiraled out of control and not in a positive way for Brand Link Communications.

What does this have to do with Yom Kippur?  On this Jewish holiday, we realize that we’re going to be judged for the things we’ve done in the past year.  To make amends, we traditionally apologize to people we’ve wronged.  An apology doesn’t always make everything better, but it can go a long way towards repairing all sorts of relationships.  However, these apologies need to be sincere.  Just saying “I’m sorry, but I’ll do it again” or “I’m sorry if you were offended” isn’t enough.

When Jose realized his mistake, his response should have been an unequivocal apology.  Something along the lines of: “I’m sorry.  I messed up both in my language and in the match between the original pitch and your blog’s content.  I’ll look into ways to better target pitches so that you receive pitches that your readers will actually find useful.”  This would have helped smooth things over and we would likely have never heard about the interaction (a good thing in hindsight).

Instead, Jose sent an “I’m sorry but…” reply.  He even went so far as to blame TheBloggess for starting the mess and to tell her that she should be thankful that they send content her way.  As if, without PR firms, TheBloggess would be a nobody with nothing to write about.

TheBloggess replied with soon-to-be-immortal (and hopefully emblazoned on a shirt) words: “Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy.”

What happened next was quite a demonstration.  TheBloggess blogged about the situation and many of her 160,000 followers on Twitter started tweeting about it.   The story was picked up on by none other than Wil Wheaton (1.8 million followers) and Neil Gaiman (1.6 million followers), and Perez Hilton (3.9 million followers).  Obviously, there’s likely some overlap in followers, but needless to say that this story had millions of people worldwide viewing it.  It was a very public affair and very bad for Brand Link.

At one point, Jose (who has since deleted his Twitter account), tried defending his actions as trying to defend Wil Wheaton.  Then he claimed his account was hacked and finally, he mentioned that he had apologized to TheBloggess.

Could this have been avoided?  I was thinking about this during Yom Kippur and realized there were many times that Brand Link could have apologized and made it all go away.  After the original pitch and TheBloggess’ response, they could have apologized.  (And not had someone commit Reply-All-icide.)  After the Reply All, Jose could have been proactive, realized what he did and quickly followed it up with an apology (and not just a “I’m sorry if you were offended, but…”).

Once TheBloggess posted her blog post, however, the quiet person-to-person apologies needed to be big public apologies.  At that point, they didn’t need to satiate one angry Bloggess, but a few thousand (if not hundred thousand or million) folks.  There are many lessons to be learned from what happened between TheBloggess and Brand Link Communications, one of the big ones is how *not* to apologize.

Few people know that, at one time, I wanted to be a cartoonist.  I even had a highly successful comic strip that I drew during college.  If you define “highly successful” to be “one of my friends liked it” and if you define “drew” as “It was about planets because I could draw circles and that was about it.”  Another career option cruelly cut short due to small details like lack of talent.

Fast forward to the present day.  I’m a big fan of web comics and love seeing the drawing talent that people possess.  One of the people I’ve most recently found, is JC of TheAnimatedWoman.com.  Head on over and see some of the wonderful posts and drawings that she’s done.  On second thought, read the rest of this post first and then go there.  I guarantee that, once you’ve browsed to her site, you’ll spend hours laughing at her wonderful posts and drawings.

A few months back, she posted a “how to draw” that involved lines.  Then, on Sunday, she followed this up with another one-liner post.  Inspiration struck.  So here is my attempt to follow her instructions.  Sure, my lack of skill might have gotten in the way a bit, but I couldn’t at least give it a try.

First, I started out with some lines.

Then, I added some eyes.

The arms and legs began to add some personality.

Next, came the dialog.

Finally, I added some color elements to give it some zip.

  Not bad, if I do say so myself. I don’t think I’ll quit my day job, though.

Today marks a very special occasion.  (Well, by the time most people read this, it’ll be yesterday, but I’m going to publish this just before midnight so it’ll technically be correct on the day.)  Twelve years ago, on September 12th, I had just come home from Rosh Hashana services.  After being offline for two days, I was ready to spend some time on the computer.  I signed on, figuring I’d waste a couple of hours and then go to sleep.

Little did I realize that, at the same time, B was on her computer.  She had forgotten that she even had a chat window open.  When she noticed it, she glanced at the people in the chat room.  My name must have caught her eye as did the “Nice Jewish guy looking for a nice Jewish girl” tagline that I had added a couple of weeks prior.  She sent me a message.

As we conversed, I knew right away that there was something different about her.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew that something special that made her stand out from other ladies I had met.  Not only did we like many of the same things, but I didn’t feel nervous around her at all.  That was very odd.  I usually would get so nervous that I’d say or do something wrong that I’d freeze up and do nothing.  With B, however, I didn’t worry or freeze up.  Talking to her (and later being around her) just felt natural and right.

Long, late night chats became long, late night phone calls.  This turned into a face-to-face meeting that we couldn’t bear to end.  (We drove my parents, who had accompanied me to the outlet mall but then made themselves scarce, crazy by continuously delaying leaving by “just 5 more minutes.”)  Those all-too-infrequent meetings turned into a marriage proposal (aka squashing bugs) which B accepted.

All because of a forgotten open chat window and an entry into a chat room “just to kill some time.”  Happy Day-We-Met-Online Anniversary, B!

I’ve been thinking a lot about fairies.  You see, NHL recently discovered The Fairly Oddparents thanks to Netflix/Roku.  And by “discovered”, I mean I showed it to him knowing full well that he’d be hooked.  Of course, being the TV geek-in-training that he is, he immediately went on a quest to watch all of the episodes there are.

If you aren’t up to date on your NickToons, here’s the quick run-down.  Timmy’s a little boy who has it rough.  He’s unpopular in school, has parents who frequently ignore him and has a babysitter who terrorizes him for fun.  Luckily for him, he’s assigned two fairy godparents – Cosmo and Wanda.  Their job is to help him be happy until he’s good enough to not need fairies anymore.  At that time, he loses his fairies, loses his memories of them, and they get re-assigned to a new miserable kid.  They grant him wishes with comical results while trying to keep their existence a secret.

At one point, while listening in on one of the episodes, I wondered about the guy who did the voice for Timmy’s dad.  It’s a pretty distinctive voice and I wondered if I had heard it anywhere else.  Being a TV Geek, I loaded up IMDB and browsed on over to the Fairly Oddparents page.  I didn’t see Timmy’s dad right away, so I looked up a few of the other voices.  That’s when I noticed two things.

First of all, Timmy’s parents and godparents are voiced by the same people.  Cosmo’s voice and Timmy’s Dad’s voice are by Daran Norris while Wanda and Timmy’s Mom come from Susanne Blakeslee.  This adds quite an interesting wrinkle to the show since his fairy godparents often act as replacement parents (for better or worse) to Timmy.

Secondly, I began to notice a pattern with some of the voice actors.  A few of them also voice characters in another series that the boys like: Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!

This series, aimed at a younger set, is about the adventures of a yellow being (exactly what he and his friends are isn’t clear) named Wubbzy who likes having fun, his friends Walden (who likes reading/studying/science), Widget (who likes building things), Daizy (who likes gardening).  All of these characters, except for Widget, share voice actors with Fairly Oddparents characters.

Wubbzy might be fun loving on Wow! Wow! Wubbzy, but on The Fairly OddParents, Grey DeLisle plays Vicky, the babysitter from hell.  While Wubbzy would love to play a game of kickety-kick ball, Vicky would love to play a game of kickety-kick Timmy.

Timmy Turner is your average kid with a miserable life (save for his fairy godparents).  He likes the usual boy activities such as watching TV, playing video games and reading comic books.  His voice actor, Tara Strong, also voices Daizy, the aforementioned gardening lover who also likes rainbows and lollipops.  They do seem to share an affinity for pink, however.

Carlos Alazraqui voices Denzel Crocker, Timmy’s fairy-obsessed teacher.  Mr. Crocker, when a boy, had Timmy’s fairy godparents.  Since growing up, however, he’s become a man obsessed with 1) proving that fairies really exist and 2) using their magic to take over the world.  He’s deduced that Timmy has fairy godparents and constantly tries to lure them into traps.  He’s actually been successful a few times, but Timmy always prevails and Mr. Crocker’s memory is wiped, though the crazy remains.  Meanwhile, over on Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, Carlos plays Walden, a well-adjusted figure interested in books, science and art.  No sign of craziness at all.

I debated whether or not to share this information with NHL.  On one hand, he would surely appreciate the linkages between the two shows.  On the other hand, would it spoil the magic of the shows to know that people give voice to these characters?  I decided to tell him.  As expected, he loved the linkups and was curious what others there might be.  Given his recent excitement over seeing the “last” Fairly Oddparents episode (the last one available on Netflix, at least), it hasn’t reduced his enjoyment of the show at all.

Have you spotted any interesting cartoon crossovers?

Don’t forget to enter my Hot Wheels Nitro Speeders giveaway!