Lies and Disinformation

Petco

We were in our local Petco a couple of months ago to pick up a few bits and while I was there I saw that they had some young pythons in a glass tank. I stopped to take a closer look at the snakes and I noticed a small red speck above one of the snakes' eyes. As I looked, the red speck moved. Then I noticed lots more red specks all over the snakes. They were infested with mites.

We mentioned this to a manager and she seemed concerned but since then we've been in the same Petco several times and nothing much seems to have changed - the place is still not as clean as it could be and I've noticed that rats, mice, guinea pigs and other small animals scratch themselves more than is normal, and they still have too many to a cage. At the time I just assumed that our local Petco was an isolated example.

This morning I was googling for pet supplies and I came across this site which in turn links to this one. It makes for pretty horrific reading but to sum it all up, it's plainly obvious that Petco neglects the animals they sell because it's cheaper to let animals die of disease, hunger and thirst than to pay for treatment to keep them healthy. It stinks. Kate and I will never be going into another Petco and if you're in the US and have pets, we urge you to read the linked pages before you consider buying from Petco.

Check out Kate's words on this subject here.

Microsoft

The April edition of Scientific American has an interesting article about spam and what's being done about it. There's some good stuff about spam filtering but then it goes on to describe Sender ID. And that's where it goes a bit pear-shaped, because (1) it mentions only Sender ID and does not even acknowledge the existence of CSV and DomainKeys as alternatives, and (2) it says that Sender ID is "a new industry standard" - which is a total crock because Sender ID is not a standard and never will be as long as it needs a license agreement from Microsoft.

And who are the authors of this masterwork? Why, none other than three guys who work for (you guessed it) Microsoft.

In other words the whole article is nothing more than a disinformation piece to try to trick readers into thinking that Sender ID, a Microsoft product, is not just an Internet standard (not true!) but is also the only antispam technology (also not true!). Hey, if they fool enough people that Sender ID becomes a standard (even an unofficial one) that's another great big pile'o'cash from the developers of all the mail servers that will be forced into paying fees to implement the licensed technology.

I don't know who Scientific American had review this piece, but whoever it was either has little or no knowledge of the current state of anti-spam, or works for Microsoft.