Enterprise: Belated Respect for Tradition

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I just watched the “United” episode of Star Trek: Enterprise: the sequel to “Babel One,” making for a memorable two-part story arc. It’s my thought that if more episodes of the first two seasons had been like this one — with as much respect for the history of the Trek storyline as Archer’s respect for Andorian tradition — the series would not have been cancelled just yet.

That said, I’m eagerly looking forward to the rest of this last season of Enterprise: there’s a clear focus on restoring Trek continuity with multiple references to events and personalities in other series, and for the upcoming “Mirror Universe” episode, even a complete rebuild of the USS Defiant, the TOS-era Constitution Class vessel from “The Tholian Web.” Too. Cool.

Beset on All Sides

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Nothing beats coming home from work and finding out that some vigilante has posted a comment to your weblog with the personal information and contact numbers of a number of people at SMS.ac (deleted), then finding a message on the answering machine from SMS.ac’s legal office requesting information on that commenter (answered), then opening up MovableType and finding about forty new trackback spams posted to various old entries (deleted and trackback turned off). This is why we can’t have nice things.

Update on SMS.ac Spam

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(Continued from this entry: Spam from SMS.ac.)

Update: Joi Ito received an empty legal threat from Kevin Jones at SMS.ac. Kevin Jones also left a message on my answering machine asking for information on vigilantes who had been posting SMS.ac executives’ personal info in my comments. I’ve noticed GMail and Yahoo Mail are now automatically marking all SMS.ac invitations as “spam,” and shunting them directly to the Junk Mail folder. Heh.

Responding to complaints, “Sean” from SMS.ac (that’s where his IP resolves) comments (here and elsewhere) that there’s a PDF guide on the registration page explaining the spammer script Address Book Synchronizer. I’m trying out the signup now, and finding several usability-related problems with the whole process:

  1. Documentation is a PDF, and not a very good one. Not everyone has Adobe Acrobat Reader, and of those, there are even fewer who will slog through the whole PDF than will even bother to read the fine print on a web form, even one that asks for a password.
  2. Take a look at this form:
    Step 2 of SMS.ac registration
    The instructions say: “Enter your Hotmail login to see who’s connected and automatically bring your friends into your SMS.ac address book.” It isn’t open-ended; it makes the registration process look as though you have to enter your Hotmail/Yahoo password. Of course, you can click NEXT while leaving the password blank, but the flow of the process doesn’t make this option evident: users will most likely fill out the form simply because they see it there. Here’s what they see next:
    Step 2 confirmation
    “Per your request?” This is definitely deceptive phrasing; at no point has it made a request to import all contacts. Note also how the explanation puts ‘Next’ in quotes with a capital letter, while ‘manual selection’ is left lowercase and unquoted, with the corresponding button set unobtrusively to the lower left. Maybe I’m just being paranoid; perhaps it’s just a case of poorly written copy and badly designed flow. Or do they really not want users selecting the option which sends less than the maximum possible amount of spam?
  3. In truth, I see nothing wrong with offering invitations for a service; I’d even venture to say there’s little wrong with an invitation whose From: address is the same as the user’s. Gmail does this. The problem is with subtly leading the user into a crawl of his address book and contact list, then repeatedly hammering the found targets with invitations while the user has no idea that his name is being stamped onto multiple messages, multiple times, to multiple people.
  4. Sean of SMS.ac, though annoying in his smugness, is right: this is the internet (or more appropriately, the hinternet) — people who aren’t careful end up with adware, spyware, trojans, spam, and popups. Responsible companies try to protect their users from their own naivete. SMS.ac, however, appears to exploit it, and should therefore be avoided.

In the feedback thread, “Sean” then goes on to insult other commenters — an object lesson straight from SMS.ac on how not to endear the company to past and potential clientele when you’re out astroturfing on weblogs.

More from Russell Beattie.

Enterprise Cancelled

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Star Trek: Enterprise is cancelled. And good riddance to bad rubbish. This cancellation comes about four seasons too late, considering that the hammer should have fallen as soon as the words “Temporal Cold War” were uttered. It could have been good: they could have built a show about the newness of adventuring into an unexplored galaxy — instead, this awesome potential took a back seat to convoluted time travel plot lines and a messy divorce from the continuity of the original series. Sadly, the abrupt end comes just when Manny Coto is picking up the pieces and fulfilling the show’s earlier promise as a true prequel to Classic Trek. The series was just getting good when they cut it down!

So farewell, Enterprise. When all is said and done, I can’t say I’ll miss you all that much, though I’ll certainly mourn this passing much more than I did Voyager’s.

(And farewell to Captain Jonathan Archer, a pathological liar who can’t seem to get out of any predicament without staging some kind of elaborate acted fiction to fool aliens into one Corbomite Manuever after another. Not to say that Scott Bakula did a bad job of the character: he’s a talented actor and a fine addition to the captains of Star Trek. If you ask me, the fact that he performed so well on the one-dimensional writing that plagued the first three seasons puts him on the level of William Shatner and Patrick Stewart. I don’t know about Avery Brooks, though, since I never watched any DS9.)

Flash back to May, 2001, when news of the upcoming prequel series first came out.

Spam from SMS.ac

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When I started getting repeated and persistent SMS.ac invitations from old friends — and even from an ex-girlfriend — I knew something was up, so I looked into it; you may have noticed the related links I posted to my del.icio.us spam tag. More details now from Joi Ito and Community Mobilization.

The gist of it is that when you sign up with SMS.ac, it apparently asks for your Hotmail/Yahoo Mail password, spams people in your address book with invitations appearing to come from your own name and email address, then continues to send those invitations even if you are not actively inviting people — and even if you unregister from their service. The invitations do include an “unsubscribe” link, but since when can you trust unsubscription links from a spammer?

SMS.ac, if it is indeed a legitimate service, is getting off on a seriously wrong foot here. I can see how their suits may have thought it would be a cool “feature,” but now I’m marking all email that appears to be an SMS.ac invitation as junk, and warning other people not to use it. Needless to say, I won’t be signing up at all.

Update: Comments on this entry are now closed, and the topic continues here: Update on SMS.ac spam.

Notes on Camerata Trajectina

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Sunday night, the Dutch music consort Camerata Trajectina performed at the National Gallery, with a repertoire of popular Dutch songs from the 17th Century. It was a lovely evening of early music, both sacred and secular, instrumental and vocal, with majestic performances from Saskia Coolen’s recorders, Louis Peter Grijp’s lute and cittern, and the surprisingly versatile — and whimsical — tenor voice of Bernard Loonen. I must make special mention of Saskia Coolen: she is one of those rare recorderists who brings out an unprecedented power and clarity one hardly expects from such a small, humble instrument; so much so that it brought tears to my eyes.

I could write on and on about the rapturous polyphonies of the evening, but instead of exhausting my vocabulary of superlatives, I’ll let you enjoy browsing the raw, cluttered notes I was taking in the programme. Just click on the image below to see the full spread:

Camerata Trajectina programme notes

(105KB JPG image. The arrows indicate changes in the sequence, and “vdg” stands for viola de gamba.)

Nominated but deRandomized

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Evangelical Underground seems to have nominated me for a weblog award in design. Yay! The thing is, I just killed the CSS randomizer to overhaul some of my code, so I’m not sure the design for which I was nominated is the same design that’s up right now (01/01).

Why’d I kill the randomizer, you ask? I’m tweaking the CSS in each one so I can post photos as wide as 400px without breaking the layout. Look for the random layouts to come back sometime next week.