Dan Weinreb’s blog

TrI recently read How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, by Allen Raymond and Ian Spiegelman” Raymond was a Republican operative, famously responsible for a denial-of-service attack on the Democratic HQ during a campaign in New Hampshire. (Speigelman is the ghost writer.)

In all fairness, if Raymond is telling the truth, most (but not all) of Republicans did not know he was doing this, and probably would not have sanctioned it. Given how harsh he is on the Republicans, I’m inclined to believe this claim.

The book is coyly written as if it were a mea culpa, whereas it’s also bragging. Of course he takes pot-shots at former colleagues, especially the ones who participated in the attack and left him hanging out to dry.

I’m not saying that Democrats are angels, but it seems to me that their unethical actions tend more towards putting friends on the payroll and such, rather than actually making our democratic/republican political system more corrupt.  The latter is far worse.  If more and more of our citizens lose faith in our political system, we lose social capital that is hard to regain.

Perhaps because I just read this book, I am predisposed to think that the following story from AlterNet is plausible: Conservatives have been gaming Digg:

First paragraph: “A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.”

If this be true, it’s alarming. Could it apply to other sites such as reddit (whose story about this has many of the screen names used by the Republican operatives)?

I was unable to find any corroboration; just lots of links the story, including on Digg). I also could not find any answer from Digg. If anyone reading this sees one, I’d be much obliged if you’d add a comment to this essay with a pointer thereto.

I was unable to find a reply at Digg’s web site, although I did find links to a bunch of very interesting stories. I tend to avoid Digg, reddit, et. al., because they are too good! I get distracted from what I’m really trying to do. Empty, casual browsing is so much less spiritually satisfying than browsing for deeper reasons.

Thanks to my wonderful friend and former co-worker Paul Harsha for bringing this to my attention.

My Sony Vaio laptop has a touchpad that lets you control the mouse position.  There are two nice buttons on it to do click-left and click-right.  Unfortunately, if you touch the touchpad, even very lightly, it does a click-left.  More unfotunately, I seem to do this fairly frequently when I am touch-typing at high speed.  I’m still not precisely sure why, but I don’t care.

I want to disable the touch-the-touchpad features.

I looked all over for some way to control the touchpad, with no luck.  I tried downloading software from Sony that might have such a thing; no luck.

So I tried Sony eSupport.  My computer is not under warantee, but they say you can have 15 free minutes.  I asked to go into a chat session, and got into one very promptly.

It took a long while, but I finally got an answer: because I upgraded to Windows 7, there is no way to fix the problem.  I said, OK, just show me how to disable the whole touchpad; I’ll just use a mouse.

The service person said, yes, I will do that for you.

The service person then went into this long and complicated routine to be able to operate my machine remotely, which involved installing an app, installing a java applet, etc, etc.  She ran some “Omni PC Health” thing, which claimed that my computer was horribly screwed up, running at only 40% of its performance, and was infected with malware.  Then she started telling me (this is via chat) of the wonderful virtues of their paid support, and how it would rid me of all these terrible problems, fix my horrible (but entirely unspecified) malware problem, and so on.

In short, the purpose of Sony’s “free support” is to scare people into paying money to Sony.  This is fraudulent marketing.

There was a satisfaction survey at the end.  I explained all this (briefly) and told them they ought to be ashamed of themselves.  They should.