August 2013

feeling the spam pressure

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Am continuing to think about Anil Dash's analysis of how Google destroyed the web as a place for discourse by its Adword-monetization of links: "Inevitably, spammers arose to take advantage of the ability to create high-economic-value links at very low cost, causing vast damage to the ability to use links as a purely informational exchange."
This hits me personally as a living rellc of the old blogosphere. Just by dint of surviving and having a certain number of links pointing here, I'm a magnet for spammers trying to hijack my URL for profit. This is increasingly beyond the ability of an individual with only modest tech skills to deal with.
The latest outrage is bots trying to guess my p-word through tens of thousands of login attempts. I added a plugin that blocks some but not all of these. I also have some pharma spam code (invisible to the public but not the Googlebot) that experts can't seem to get rid of.
If I pack it in it will be because of this BS. As Quentin Tarantino said about digital filmmaking, "this isn't what I signed on for."
It would be easy enough to start up again on a new domain (I did this once) but I resent having to do it because of Google's profit model.

"Al Gore Sighs"

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"Al Gore Sighs" [2.3 MB .mp3]

Made this political musique concrete a few years ago for a group project I was invited to participate in and then rejected from as soon as this hit the curator's inbox!
Al Gore won the first Bush/Gore debate in 2000 by virtue of having a greater intellect than a head of cabbage. Then, media mavens decided a few months later that Gore lost the debate, because of his audible sighs while Bush was speaking. The debate was still up on one of the network websites so I recorded some of the sighs and made a music piece with them.
It unfortunately also includes some soundbites of Bush lying about, among other things, whether private banks would give citizens a "better rate of return" on their Social Security dollars.