The above video is very informative. Everyone should help to fight companies from taking over the internet.

Well, over 24 hours and almost 1000 unique hits (that’s a lot for my site) later, the truth is revealed. Turns out, it was just some 23 year old guy from Florida, named Mike, playing a trick on the masses of the internet.

Eon8.com was a work of pure genius. It accomplished exactly what it set out to do; act as a social experiment to guage the reactions of the masses. Whether or not you felt let down after the whole thing finished, is up to you. But I for one, think it was a great hit. It was a wrench thrown into the machine of mundane internet browsing. People all over the world were posting on forums, IRC channels and AIM chat rooms trying to figure out exactly what was going on. And I’ll be the first to admit, there were some pretty obscure ideas thrown around, but all in all, the major consensus was that it was probably a viral marketing campaign.

Applying occam’s razor, the advertising bit was probably the reason for the whole thing, but something about it didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t have advertising written on it. Maybe if there were a bunch of AdWords posted on there, I could have understood, but it didn’t have that kind of large-scale “HAHA we tricked you!” feel. Oh well, in the end, no one was adversly affected by the whole thing, save for a few sleep-deprived geeks. Whether or not you’re pissed is up to you, but I for one can accept the fact that I was an unknowing pawn in Mike’s social experiment. No harm, no foul.

If you would like to read up on the history of www.eon8.com you can see my previous post, eon8.com — WTF!?!

By the way, if anyone’s interested, you can get some merchandise at cafepress.

Here are some screenshots from the resulting page:

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A screenshot of the deployment page of eon8.

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Eon8.com stats since 2005.

Here is all the information which was posted under the “Reveal the Truth…” link in the above picture:
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UPDATE!!! Eon8 has been deployed!! Read about it here!!

So, browsing online tonight, I ran across eon8.com. If you ask me, the whole thing kinda creeps me out. But then again, I’m somewhat of a conspiracy theorist.

Ok, so here’s what I’ve gathered from different sources on the internet:

1. The site includes a countdown timer to 12 midnight on July 1st 2006 (00:00:00 2006/07/01)
2. The site logs the ip address of all users and any http referers that link to the site
3. An MD5 hash of a date and time are then created and stamped on the site when a visitor displays the main page.
4. The Distribution List contains MD5 hashed dates as well. (Maybe… the last one usually isn’t the correct length for a hash, i.e. 32 characters)
5. IP addresses of visitors are probably logged and displayed on a world map using red dots for indicators.
6. Speculated that the dots on the map correspond to nuclear power plants/missle silos.
7. There are several links on the main page which forward the user to protected areas of the site.
8. The server is running Apache 1.3.33 at a colocation hosted by The Planet.

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Do you think it is possible to create an AIM client using Perl and AJAX? On the x10hosting forums someone started a thread about creating an online AOL Instant Messenger client. He cited WebAIM.net and AIMonPSP.com.

I then realized that Perl has functionality for connecting to AOL’s servers. I once made an AIM bot using perl (I really wish I still had that code :/ ). Then I thought… well, it the server is doing all the work, how do we get the information to the client? AJAX? Might work. Could be kinda slow. Would definitely have to work out the kinks. WebAIM is based on Java. While that is all well and good, it still requires a client download. AIMonPSP uses a server based approach, but it has to use META refreshes to get its information. Not so fast. I was thinkin’ well, why not AJAX. From what I know of AJAX, this isn’t the best use of it, but it could be a nice proof of concept.

Oh well, as of right now, I’m up to my eyeballs in Night Light, my soon-to-be-released distribution of Linux. I’m having a lot of fun and I’m learning a whole lot about how Linux works. Now, if I could only learn this much about cars….
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Ok, so I came across this on Digg. Originally, it was an mp3 of a guy trying to cancel his AOL account. It started out simple enough… he called up John at AOL Customer Service and asked to cancel the account. Somewhere along the line, John thought it would be a good idea to try to convince Vincent to keep the account because it was still in use. Check out the MP3 or the transcript below.

<<BEGIN CALL>>
Customer Service Representative: Hi, this is John at AOL. How may I help you today?
Vincent: I want to cancel my account.
CSR: Sorry to hear that. Let’s pull your account up here real quick, can I have your name please?
Vincent: Vincent Ferrari
CSR: K Vincent, and as privacy and security, can I have the last four digits of your payment method please?
Vincent: <>
CSR: Alright, thank you very much. Ok. You’ve had this account for a long time.
Vincent: Yep.
CSR: This is quite a bit. What was the cause of you want to turn this off today?
Vincent: I just don’t use it anymore.
CSR: Do you have a high speed connection like the DSL or cable? Read the rest of this entry »

Being home from school and not having started my job yet, I find myself with a lot of time on my hands. Obviously this is something that I definitely didn’t have while at school; projects, homework, female-obligations (Hey, I’m not complaining!). You get the idea. But since I’ve been home I’ve started playing around with WordPress, my blog software. I found that it has some pretty spiffy features…

Plugins: Now, WordPress is notorious for it’s plugin support, and this isn’t news to me. I’ve had several different plugins installed from day 1, but I’ve recently found some cool new ones. Particularly akismet, a spam control plugin, Counterize, a stats plugin, and most of all, Widgets. Wigets are pretty sweet, more on that later.

Akismet is a pretty big plugin to control spam in the comments. I’ve been getting a lot of bot-spam on the site lately. Some days, I would get 2 or 3 notifications about comments posted to the site. Invariably, I knew they were all spam, but I would have to visit the site to delete them. Bummer. While akismet is included with the WordPress install, I never activated it. I’m glad I did though. It has caught everything so far.

Counterize is a tiny plugin which keeps track of visitor statistics. You know… hits, pages viewed and referrers. The usual stuff. I had tried to get an AWStats plugin working, but because of the way this host is setup, I couldn’t get it working. Oh well… I like Counterize because it incorporates with WordPress very nicely, and I can see all the site stats from the Admin panel.

Widgets: These things are really cool. By recoding my sidebar slightly, and enabling the Widgets, I can now move the sidebar sections around super-easy. There is an interface in the admin panel which lets me drag-and-drop the sections where ever I want. I can also modify their contents on the fly, add new sections and incorporate cool WordPress features I didn’t know existed.

Needless to say, I’ve been making slight improvements to the site over the past few days. I also created a “Projects” section. This will be home to information about the Java projects I have worked on for class. They were pretty big, so I want to be able to document them online.