LookIt

Facebook atrophy

Talking about "Facebook suicide" was all the rage about a year ago, but it misses what I suspect is an even larger trend, "Facebook atrophy". That is what happens to millions (if not tens of millions) of Facebook users who are the long tail. Most of us only log into Facebook when someone wants to be our friend, which is often (thankfully!) about once or twice a month, cause about five pageviews, then get on with our life. I'm sure we are listed as "active users" in their advertising portfolio, but we are barely worth counting. We probably don't even have much of a positive network effect.

This hit me in the face yesterday when I did one of my rare logins and noticed that my list of friends includes someone who died over a year ago. Yes, he is still my friend in that I think of him often and appreciate him, but things like this makes me less inclined to believe in Facebook's numbers.

Proposal for signing the DNSSEC root

The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is soliciting comments on signing the DNSSEC root. Ignore the caption on the page: this is not about DNSSEC deployment, which is already happening just fine. It's about who gets to sign the root zone.

A handful of us DNSSEC dweebs wrote a response that emphasizes the technical need to start signing sooner rather than later, and strongly supports signing by either of the parties who are already trusted to put information into the root — IANA or the root zone operators. My name is on the From: line simply because I was the one to email it to the NTIA. I wrote the first draft of the document, but other signers did some serious editing before we turned it in.

We hope that this will help NTIA feel more at ease about moving forwards quickly without agonizing about all the different people who want to hold the keys.

Spam from John McCain

I know that most people won't vote against someone just because they are a spammer, but if you are one of the ones who might, your choices are now limited. Yes, I'm sure it was really from his campaign:

Received: from sm3.johnmccain.com (sm3.johnmccain.com [64.203.105.83])
        by balder-227.proper.com (8.14.2/8.14.2) with ESMTP id mA43aqAG031098
        for <[email protected]>; Mon, 3 Nov 2008 20:37:03 -0700 (MST)
        (envelope-from [email protected])
Received: from unknown (unknown [192.168.201.181])
        by sm3.johnmccain.com (Postfix) with QMQP id 7F7B91CCE23
        for <[email protected]>; Mon,  3 Nov 2008 22:36:52 -0500 (EST)
Errors-To: <[email protected]>
X-Bounce-Track: <[email protected]>
From: "John McCain" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: Make History Tomorrow

Humorously, not only are they spammers, but they don't seem to understand marketing, either. Note that they sent this out a little before midnight on Monday. That would mean that essentially no one would read it until Tuesday, voting day. Now note the content of the Subject: line. Oh, and that friendly To: line.

If he wins, I certainly hope he hires better technical and marketing help with my tax dollars than he has with his political contributions.

Update. Man, the GOP marketing team is even more clueless than I thought. Today, they sent out a follow-up spam saying "On behalf of Senator McCain, Governor Palin, and all our GOP candidates, I want to extend my sincere gratitude to you for your generous support of the Republican National Committee this presidential election year." Do they not understand that more than half the people on their spam list will not have given them money, and we will think even less of them? If McCain was really the maverick that he said he was, he would disavow these obnoxious rubes.

I'm not voting today

...because I voted absentee a few weeks ago. And, at least in California, it looks like there are a lot folks like me. This has allowed me to hang up, with impunity, on people who call me to tell me how to vote, and to toss email from friends whose purpose is the same.

As a side note, I have had much less of the latter type of advertising this year, thankfully. I'm hoping it is because people who got so much of it four years ago and didn't like it are thinking twice about whether to create it themselves this year.