Category: Technology

Since the law went into effect in September 2005, price fluctuations caused by disruption of gasoline supply caused by Hurricane Katrina caused gasoline to be sold for more than $3.00 a gallon in Honolulu, with significantly higher prices on the Neighbor Islands.

Like many, I love Wikipedia and its various offshoots (Wikinews, Wikitravel, etc.), but I’ve rarely felt the compulsion to use its raison d’etre function of editing entries (or creating news ones, even) myself. But one look at the above sentence, from a Wikinews item about “Hawaii legislature reaches agreement to suspend gasoline price cap”, and I think you can understand why I finally felt compelled to jump in.

Three “caused” in one sentence is I think you will agree a bit much to bear (especially three in a mere 11 word stretch!). But in addition to that it struck me that the last “caused,” as in “price fluctuations […] caused gasoline to be sold for more than $3.00…” seemed, how shall I put it, too causative? Actually, the more I looked at the sentence the more f*cked up it seemed, especially if one considers the fact that Katrina occurred in August of 2005, yet the way the sentence is written, it is not Katrina but the law going into effect in September 2005 (“Since the law went into effect….”) that is the catalyst for the price increases. As the law this article is about aimed to cap prices, not have them spiral out of control, one’s head does start to spin a bit. And isn’t “…caused gasoline to be sold for more than $3.00…” clunky to say the least?

Oh well, I limited myself to getting rid of the “caused”s (succeeded — or not? you be the judge — in getting rid of all three) and changing the tense to the perfect aspect, but even so it felt a bit weird and unsettling to make these changes and hit Save. I mean, who am I to correct someone’s grammar. I don’t even know if bad grammar (in my eyes) is warrant enough to make a change at Wikinews. (It does seem a tad pedantic). And does my change constitute a “minor edit” or not (I didn’t choose “minor” but one can hardly say my change was “major,” can one?)? I think it’s safe to say I’ll pay less attention to the grammar and word choice in the future when I read these. Lord knows I don’t have the time to edit and hand-wring over every Tom, Dick or Harry entry. In the meantime, below is my edit:

Since the law went into effect in September 2005, price fluctuations due to the disruption of gasoline supply in the wake of Hurrican Katrina have resulted in gas prices of more than $3.00 a gallon in Honolulu, with significantly higher prices on the Neighbor Islands.

Did I change too much? Did I change the meaning of the sentence? Maybe you can login to Wikinews and edit my edit?

I got the following email today through my site feedback link:

I am interested in buying text link promoting my internet
pharmacy off of your website. The links would not have to be in a very
prominent place on the website, as I am not looking for traffic from your
site. I am looking to increase my PageRank in google. I am looking to place about 5 – 10 links. If interested please contact me [email address].

I took a look at the website for the domain that was in the email address, and came across a company called DPMG that bills itself as “World Leaders in Internet Business Development.” On this company’s “Our People” page, I found the guy who sent me the above email, one Dan Legal, whose title is “Traffic Generation Specialist.” (How that takes me back to my dot.com days, with all their silly business card titles.) According to the blurb about Dan, “finding new ways of generating traffic is his expertise.”

DPMG, who claims to have Wells Fargo, UPS, and Expedia.com amongst its clients, puts forth their company mission in these breathless words:

As a businessperson, you know how important it is to SUSTAIN your growth, to MAINTAIN your success. In the up-and-down world of the Internet, this is incredibly hard to achieve. Do you want to know what will sustain your e-business?…TRAFFIC! And not just any traffic, but qualified traffic.

DPMG believes it can achieve its mission, by CONSISTENTLY providing you with QUALIFIED TRAFFIC for your e-business. It is so simple. No hoaxes, no “smoke-and-mirrors’.

The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms defines “smoke and mirrors” as:

something which is intended to confuse or deceive people, especially by making them believe that a situation is better than it really is

I’ll let you be the judge on whether or not DPMG is fulfilling is “mission.”

Interestingly, this email came a day after I read a Slate article from earlier this week, “Digging for Googleholes”, which details some of the ways in which Google‘s vaunted search algorithms have started to backfire and make the search engine less useful than it used to be, and produce what author Steven Johnson calls “Googleholes.”

Last week I had my own experience of how Google can be “taken over” by companies like DPMG for their own ends, and render Google all but useless for those of us searching for information rather than a product to buy. I downloaded a software program via P2P and got bitten in the butt for it because hidden within the download was one of those pesky “dialer” programs that attempts to dial 900-number porn sites in places like the Cayman Islands, with hefty per-minute charges. My firewall software blocked its attempts to connect, but naturally I wanted to get rid of the blasted thing as soon as possible. Neither Norton Anti-virus nor Lavasoft’s Adaware were doing the trick (and I wasn’t able to delete the file either), so I went in search of others who might have had a similar problem.

I did a Google search for “aconti virus”, and as I started to page through the results, which were top heavy with German sites (the Aconti Dialer is the product of some German company), I started to notice sites with URL’s like

trojan-scanner.755.us
spyware-nuke.755.us

By around page 6 of the search results (eg. results 51-60), these 755.us subdomain results are practically all that’s listed. In fact, out of the 127 filtered results shown for my query (filtered meaning that Google takes out the results that are “very similar”), 74 of them were for the 755.us domain! Not surprisingly, they all redirect to the same site, which is an ad for a “spyware removal” software product. I sent an email to Google about this last week, but haven’t received a response nor have the search results been adjusted (if they can be).

(Just in case anyone similarly infected with this Dialer trojan should happen upon this post, I used Anti-Trojan to sucessfully remove the blasted Dialer.)

There’s been a lot of talk in the last couple of months about Google’s search results being diluted by blogs, but at least from where I’m standing at the moment, I’d have to say that a plethora of blog results may not be Google’s biggest problem.