Someone close to me, for the past 2 years has been proud to be a SuicideGirl. It was a well deserved honor, for Inocencia (Her SG Name) is an amazing and wonderful woman. From early on she was quite fond of the community of awesomely talented and empathetic individuals. Although with time, she began to get the feeling that the staff, particularly, Missy, were somewhat 2 faced.

One day, Inocencia, came across a website offering pornography content, licensed content you could "lease" to use on your very own porn site. For some reason the girls in the sample pics seemed awfully familiar to her. She then realized the pictures she was looking at were actual SuicideGirl pics, without the familiar SG logo, she was looking at pictures of her friends! How did this happen, she thought? With a little investigation she actually found out that SuicideGirls had actually sold the content for that exact purpose. This was absolutely appaling to Inocencia, she submitted her pics to a web community of like minded individuals, who appreciate the girls as art, not as meat.

Angry at this fact, she decided to vent, to whom else, but all of her friends on SuicideGirls. She made a "Journal" entry mainly venting how she felt and that she felt betrayed by Missy. Lo and behold, not 2 days later, Inocencia goes to login as she regurlarly does and she is redirected to "Renew your membership" page.

What ???

She asked if I could log in and see what was up, I agreed.

Once logged in, I went to her profile and was floored to see that she was "Archived". I ran a quick search through the boards, and found a posting by Missy, it read "For private reasons Inocencia has requested to be archived". What? She requested to be archived? This was absolutley ridiculous!

So, I in turn decided to post on my "Journal" a little message of what I thought of this, mind you I am a paying member. This was my post:

"Actually, Inocencia DID NOT request to be archived, she was archived without so much as an email notification. The most likely reason is that Inocencia reported on her blog that SG is actually licensing their content to PORNOGRAPHY SCUM in order to generate revenue. The truth of the matter is that SG is no longer run the way it was started, it has become a money hungry machine who does not care about the people it tramples along the way.
Inocencia was repeadetly asked to modify or altogether remove her blog entries, what happened to free speech?
It's a sad truth Missy, why do you lie, Inocencia never asked to be archived."

Not 4 hours after my entry, I decided to check if I had received any comments, after login I was unable to reach my profile page. I checked in my account settings, and this is what I saw:

Well, so much for free speech and open minds. I absolutely love what SuicideGirls was when it began, now I'll just sit and wait for the death of this souless abomination.

SuicideGirls
2001-2006
R.I.P.

Update October 17th 2007

Read what other BS SG is pulling on a photographer, geez Missy do you have a soul?
http://apneaticmedia.com/

Just announced, CNN has just launched a new department, I-Report and it's recruiting the entire world to become reporters!

They even include a ToolKit which gives some trade secrets for taking the perfect photo or video.

The proliferation of video devices and computers should make for a very interesting experiment. I beg to wonder how much CNN will censor or shape the reports submitted by users to their own agenda.

So, have you heard of LinkieWinkie? An enigma, wrapped inside of a puzzle that calls itself a social experiment.

"a very altruistic little site and loves to be talked about." - Quote

A spider of some sort that crawls the blogosphere in search of mentions to itself. Using it's uknown logic, it then adds links back to the reference on it's home page.

When you run a WHOIS lookup you get this:

Registrant:
   Denise Russell
   33 Kirby Drive
   Telscombe Cliffs
   Sussex
   BN10 7DY
   UK  
Record created on 22-Jun-2006

So we can deduce that the "creator" of this little project hails from the UK and this domain was registered fairly recently. It seems to have developed quite the following based on its traffic stats in a very short time, perhaps just all the blogos-buzz.

Yes, I'll bite as well, I'm interested to see where this leads and curious as to the amount of traffic I'll receive if my link does make it on to the home page!

I'll report any findings back here, Cheerio!

Other sites where LinkieWnkie is mentioned:

http://arteccentrix.blogspot.com/2006/07/what-is-linkiewinkie.html
http://thisbiochemicallife.com/2006/07/26/what-the-hell-is-linkiewinkie/
http://www.senserely.com/james-the_meaning_of_linkiewinkie.php
http://rumboard.com/2006/07/linky-winky/
http://thepinkpanther.typepad.com/pinkie/2006/07/follow_up_linki.html

PS:

http://www.linkiewinkietracker.blogspot.com/
http://postmodern-living.blogspot.com/2006/07/linkie-winkie-take-3.html

One fundamental problem with driving these days has to do with accountability. People can do whatever they want as long as a cop doesn't see it regardless of the type of headache they are causing other people.

Well, if you cause trouble, draw a few eyes, or are a great driver then you are likely to show up on Platewire. Platewire is a site that allows you to enter the plate number of a car that you came across on the road as a flag, hazard, flirt, or award. If you don’t have a pad and paper handy in the car you can always call-in a plate number and retrieve it later.

Blinklist.com (beta)

"BlinkList is a social bookmarking service built on ajax. It is very buttoned up and has some excellent features. It also has an all-star team with deep experience." - TechCrunch 07/2005

Being an application developer, I pride myself on a deeper understanding that I have with web applications that I interact with daily. To a certain degree, I catch myself making assumptions about web apps and their implementation, overall due to the fact that I have witnessed major growth and advancement over the past decade. One point on which I expect from any decent sized membership based app, is that my password be encrypted. Simple MD5 will do, so long as it is not clear text.  When developing any membership system, encryption should be one of the first considerations.

Unfortunately, today I was saddened to find that a site I frequent BlinkList(beta), did not feel the need to encrypt my password:

Not only do they not encrypt a users password, they are displaying in a debug statement. Not my idea of a solid application.

They also still tag on "Beta" to their name, I know some development shops have some drawn out development lifecycles, but a year, and still in beta?

Another major flaw which is quite glaring, is the fact that they are calling in-line SQL query from inside of code, stored procedures are there for a reason, use them!

I'll have to admit, although LAMP based web apps have become quite popular in the last few years, there is nothing like building applications using OOP in a managed environment like Microsoft.NET or J2EE.