How Mysterious the Internet Is

Okay, so I’m reading this article from this morning's USA Today...

...and somehow, based on that, USA Today or the great and powerful internet or, I don’t know, God himself concludes that I might be interested in these other articles as well:

But of course. One logically would conclude that anyone who’s interested in a topic such as, say, the nature of the God of All Creation, the Ground of All Being, the Omniscient Omnipotent Alpha and Omega will likewise be interest in “Celebrity Birthdays” or “Surprising Origins of Everyday Phrases.”

I mean, what else?

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Two Unfortunate Trends

Of course, there's way more than two--but two that have caught my attention lately as I browse the interwebs are these, each of them annoying in its own way:

1. Multi-Page Lists

If you're going to give me a list of Ten Important Things Your Doctor Is Too Stupid to Know So You're Probably Doomed, then for crying out loud, give me the #@$%! list! Don't expect me to click a link or two, then bring up Item One with a row of icons below it for Items Two through Ten. I can pretty much guarantee you, I will run out of patience before Item Three. Indeed, I might well call it quits at Item One, when I see all of the scrolling and clicking that awaits me, and just take my chances with my doctor. If you're going to give me a list, give me a list--Items One through Ten, right there in front of me.



2. Pointless Videos

I enjoy a funny, poignant, provocative, or entertaining video as much as the next guy, and maybe even more. But the interwebs today seems plagued with a plethora of pointless videos--by which I mean videos that could just as easily been written pieces. A recent CNet Downloads Dispatch included a link to their list of Top Five Worst Downloads. Fun! So I click on the link and am taken to...a video. Which means first, a commercial. Already, I could have skimmed a written list during the commercial sponsorship. There was nothing wrong with the video, and the presenter was charming enough, but neither was there any reason for the video to be a video. The graphics consisted mainly of screen shots of the software dogs zooming in behind the presenter. There were no demos or anything else that required a video presentation. So it amounts to a time-sink: I could have read the copy and looked at screenshots in half the time it took to play the video. And I wouldn't have had to shut off my music to do so.

In both cases, the intent to me seems to be to pad, to dally, to make something small seem bigger than it is. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the reason for that is to keep eyeballs on a given site for a longer time, so as to please advertisers. If there are many people like me, however (and experience teaches that there aren't), these sites may in fact be losing audiences by being dilatory time-wasters. In which case, the trends should go away. Sooner would be better.

Some "Help"!

Lately a very intrusive "service" from Qwest has infected my computers. I've been able to "opt out," as they say, on my iMac, but not on the Dell laptop I sometimes use. The fact that I never "opted in" to this "service" in the first place seems to be neither here nor there.

The "service" in question--Qwest Web.Help redirection service--theoretically "helps" you find a URL when your browser isn't able to. In fact, it hijacks your browser.

Veteran web-users will remember a time when you absolutely had to enter the whole big long http-colon-slash-slash-dubya-dubya-dubya-whatever-dot-com in order to get anywhere. Then came whatever version of the wonderful old Netscape Navigator browser, whose authors decided that maybe, just maybe, a browser could be smart enough to decode the Domain Name Server information without your having to take it by the hand. You type in, say, "blogger," and presto! a few seconds later you arrive at http://www.blogger.com! Amazing!

Internet Exploder, of course, continued to insist on the whole string for quite some time, which was a big part of the reason I dumped IE--or, as I still think of it, Aieeee!--many years ago. Following the demise of Netscape Navigator, Firefox continued the smart tradition, and for that and many other reasons has long been my browser of choice.

Well, thanks to Qwest Web.Help, internet browsing has taken a giant step backward!

For now, typing "Zap2It" (my favorite TV listings service) into the URL field gives me this:


Charming, no? The worst part is, Qwest Web.Help can't find anything unless you type in the whole URL, or at least the name-dot-com part of it. Just like web surfing in the 1980s!

Or, perhaps more accurately, Qwest Web.Help won't find anything. And why? Well, look at the screenshot. All of those "helpful" results--only the third on the list being the actual website I want, incidentally--aren't there by accident. They're all "sponsored" links. "Sponsored" as in "paid advertising."

In short: Qwest's "help" involves their hijacking my web browser so they can make money on top of the fee I pay them every month for my DSL.

Gee, thanks, Qwest.

You will note, in small letters way off to the right-hand side of the screen, a link titled "Opt out of this service."

"Service." Right. He said with a sneer.

Well, not very easy. For one thing, to click the link does not, as you might expect, actually opt you out. Rather, it takes you to the following, eerily familiar page:




Yes, it's virtually the same page--got to keep those paid listings in front of your little eyeballs, you know--except that now you have a box telling you what the "service" that you never wanted does (it slows down your browsing experience so that you have to look at some ads along the way, that's what it does!), and then gives you another link to click on to, theoretically, "opt out."

But not so fast, buckaroo! First you have to look at this:



That's right, you're still not to the opt-out, um, option! Once again, they're telling you you can opt out "at any time"--instructions that must have been written by someone who never visited the Qwest Web.Help website. This is beginning to be a bit like Hotel California, no?

Okay, buried in the number-four position on the list is "Can I opt out of this service?" The answer would seem to be a resounding no, but I gamely click on it anyhow...and get yet another link for, supposedly, opting out!


This is truly and blatantly designed to prevent people from opting out of this idiotic imposition, and whoever at Qwest thought of this idea should have a special little corner of hell reserved for them.

Actually, I think there ought to be a law against this sort of thing, and I am seriously contemplating making such a suggestion to my congressional delegation (one of whom won't give a hoot, since he has over and over demonstrated himself to be in the hip pocket of "Business Interests," but the other two might at least give it some consideration).

Okay, having come this far one might as well play it out. I click on " opt out of this service" (again)...and...




Yep. No opting out going on quite yet! Instead here's yet another description of the "service" and yet another "opt out" link. What are we up to by now? I can't count that high!

Well, surely by now the "opt out" link must do something, no? So I click on it...and here comes this little gem:


Yes. We have at last reached the end of the trail, despite Qwest's best efforts. And what is our reward? Why, Qwest can't find the domain! Now, let's think for a moment. What is the domain that Qwest can't find? Well, the message says "Unable to determine IP address from host name for www.qwest.net."

Um...Qwest can't find its own address??

That's certainly how it appears. "Qwest DNS servers were not able to resolve the hostname presented in the URL," it says. "Check if the address is correct," it says.

The "hostname presented in the URL"? http://www.qwest.net/web.help/?confirm=1.

Qwest can't find its own address.

And they're the people who are going to "help" me with this wonderful "service" that I never asked for and which they won't let me opt out of.

Some "help"!

Dumb, or Just Annoying?

Some years ago, when I was experiencing technical difficulties with my then-provider of e-mail, I opened up a Hotmail account. Today it's primarily a spam-magnet, but I keep it alive with a couple-three newsletter subscriptions and generally check it every week or ten days.

There are many reasons that Hotmail is the least favorite of my freebie e-mail accounts (it's slow, it's clunky, it fills up with Microsoft junk mail, etc.), but at the top of this list is this: It has a stupid sign-in procedure.

Yeah, yeah, I can have my Mac, or Firefox, or Hotmail itself remember some of the sign-in stuff, at least for awhile. But I prefer not to do that. Which means that whenever I sign into Hotmail I have to let them know I'm signing into Hotmail!

Here's what I mean: When I sign in to my Yahoo! Mail account, I type my username in one box and my password in the other. When I sign into my Gmail account, I type my username in one box and my password in the other. Heck, when I check my ancient Netscape Mail account, I type my username in one box and my password in the other even though it's now AIM Mail or something else these days.

Get the pic? Then riddle me this:

How's come when I sign into Hotmail, I have to add @hotmail.com to my username?

I mean, at the top of the page it says MSN Hotmail. Below that it says MSN® Hotmail® is changing... to Windows Live™ Hotmail®. (I'm thinking some of those proper nouns might be trademarked or registered with the U.S. Patent Office. But it's just a guess.) At the side of the page it says WindowsLive Hotmail. Above the sign-in fields it says Sign in to Hotmail.

In short, it seems to know that it's Hotmail.

But if I foolishly type my username instead of the whole address, it says Please type your e-mail address in the following format: yourname@example.com. Need help signing in?

Um, no, I don't need any help...but it seems the folks at MSN/Windows/Live/Hotmail do, for yourname@example.com implies that they have suddenly and inexplicably forgotten who they are.

This surpasses what I had some years ago considered to be The Dumbest Thing in E-mail, when AOL swallowed up Netscape. One fine day I received notice that I would have to change my username, which I had had for years and years, because it "conflicted" with a username at AOL. That piqued my interest, since my Netscape username was the same as my old and long abandoned AOL username. So I sent e-mail to that AOL address...and it came back with a no-such-user notification.

So that was dumb. But the Hotmail deal is dumber.

And while I'm at it, here's some similar but unrelated cyber-dumbness:

I have long since lost track of the number of times, in filling out this or that form, survey, etc., I am asked to input my date of birth. Fine, but ever since the turn of the century, the request--nay, demand--is always that it be in the form "mm/dd/yyyy." Now, stop me if I've said this before, but the yyyy part is silly. See, there is no one alive today who was born in 1856, nor is there anyone alive today who was born in 2056, so if I were to fill in, say, "56," would it not be pretty safe to assume I mean the 20th century version? I realize that now we do have among us people who were born in the 2000s...but, in the first place, I'm not sure too many five-year-olds are entering the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes online; and in the second place, I'm not sure too many 95- or 100-year-olds are either, so I think it would be safe to assume that someone who filled in "02" as date of birth was not born in 1902 and probably not born in 2102 either.

I'm sure there's a perfectly swell computer-y explanation for having to indicate which century I was born in. That doesn't make it less silly, however.