I’m catching up on a few days of blog reading while I switched to a new machine. Here’s a few things that jumped out at me:

• Goodbye TechTV. Leo writes about the last day of Call for Help and leaves some thoughts on the merger. Personally, I have no idea what kind of crack Comcast/G4 is smoking. From all I can see they’re doing their best to alienate most of the TechTV audience. One thing I always liked about TechTV was that they had stuff for everyone. G4 feels like it is targetted towards the 15-25 year old crowd. At first I thought it was kind of charming, but it quickly got on my nerves. Biggest missed opportunity? Not bringing over a Call for Help and not bringing over a Tech Live, a daily tech news show. Rumor has it their own weekly news show will be going daily, but not until July. I dunno, I’d think if you suddenly owned a network like TechTV, which has been experiencing strong growth in the past year, you’d want to keep some of that audience.
• Kasia talks about The Day After Tomorrow. This is one I kind of want to see just for the special effects. From everything I’ve heard the movie itself was pretty lame beyond that.
• Neil Gaiman talks about Fred the Unlucky Black Cat being sick and inspires a small poem.
• Derek has found that Alpha-Bits may be no more. Dammit, I used to love those (even though I’m more of a Special K guy myself these days).

That’s it for now, time to get out and get some fresh air.

The most recent i, cringely is about how people are making new versions of the firmware for some of the new Linksys 802.11g boxes, specifically the WRT54G. I’d noticed the other day that the access point I’d gotten recently, the WAP54G seemed to be running linux also, so did some searching to find out if they were similar. It seems that they are and Sveasoft had just recently released new firmware for it too. It’s pretty slick being able to connect to your access point from the command line. The only real issue is that it doesn’t have as much memory as the WRT54G, so it doesn’t have quite as many features, but the important ones are there, including some bandwidth management tools (something I think these boxes should have anyways).

What I’m thinking about now is getting a WRT54G for our gateway, this will give wireless to the back of the house and the back porch, and using the new WAP54G as a repeater for the front of the house, just to get complete coverage.

Freedom to Tinker mentions a company called readnotify.com that also uses web bugs, but also uses IFRAMEs, which cannot be disabled by just turning off remote image loading. There’s also a mention of how these places can put tracking bugs in Word Documents.

readnotify.com is an email tracking system that uses Web bugs (like didtheyreadit) and also uses a trick involving IFRAMEs (unlike didtheyreadit). The IFRAME trick cannot be disabled by the standard countermeasure of turning off remote image loading. There may not be an easy way to disable it in today’s email software, short of turning off HTML email entirely.

Worse yet, readnotify offers a service that lets anyone put hidden tracking bugs in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other OLE-compliant document formats. When somebody opens a document containing one of these trackers, the time of the access is reported, along with the accessor’s IP address (which often reveals their geographic location) and some configuration information about their computer. [Freedom to Tinker]

So my question is, is there an easy way to turn this stuff off in Word/Excel? And I guess I’ll have to see if Mail.app supports IFRAMEs.

Dan Gillmor mentions a service called DidTheyReadIt and some of his concerns about it.

DidTheyReadIt and Civil Behavior

A company launching a new application claims it can tell senders of e-mail whether the recipient has opened it, and for how long (and even, in many cases, the location of the reader). “Creepy” doesn’t begin to do justice to this concept. [Dan Gillmor]

I’d just heard of another service like this called Point of Mail. How do these services work? Easy, they embed a 1×1 image into your message when you send it. So if the person reading the email has a mail reader that supports html, it will grab that image from their site. This isn’t anything new really. Spammers others doing mass emails have been doing this for ages. It’s a way to get a rough idea of how many people read your messages (and can be handy for pruning email lists).

Dan Gillmor calls it creepy. I agree, but also have problems with how they are selling this. First off, it is easy to block. Just turn off html or image loading for your mail program. I did this ages ago because I just don’t trust html based mail. Plus I don’t always use Mail.app for reading mail. Sometimes I use pine, which doesn’t support images at all. Yet there is nothing on their site about things like this. In the end, this ends up being a potentially very unreliable service for someone.

Oh, and one last thing about pointofmail.com. They have this nice open webmail gateway called sendnow.

pointofmail offers you a world’s first web mail service that allows you to send an e-mail right away with no username and password needed. You can send e-mail from anywhere – using your e-mail as a reply address or even stay anonymous.

It’s easy to use, free, fast, time-saving. You can send email from anywhere. No long-time logging with username and password. It is perfect when you are not near your computer.

Tell a friend about this exiting and revolutionary service and get confirmation when your recommendation was read.

I wonder how long till their SMTP servers are listed on RBL and similar places.