Friedbeef’s Tech

“The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly.”

Why? “…to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold.”

Here is a random sample…

Hey mister ad agency - are you afraid yet?

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Do you ever get those annoying ‘PayPal’ e-mails requesting account information or a credit card number? Most people just glance over them and delete them. However, there are still many in the world who cannot differentiate these ill-intentioned e-mails from genuine mail, and naively enter their account information. It’s really unfortunate.

This illegal, ill-willed tactic is called ‘phishing’. Cyber-thieves send out millions of fake e-mails seemingly from PayPal (or a financial institution, etc..) in an attempt to con the recipient into entering personal and financial account information on the cloned destination site. Most can spot these from a mile away, but many non-techies and newbies have trouble distinguishing genuine corporate e-mail from a cleverly disguised phishing campaign.

But one website is fighting back. It’s called PhishTank. Visitors can do one of two things. They can either submit a suspected phishing link or check to see if a given link is genuine or a phish.

The site launched in October. Since then, over 50,000 suspected phishes have been submitted by over 9,000 users. Pretty respectable stats.

To track the progress of the site, be sure to visit the PhishTank blog. There is also a PhishTank API.

This an excellent example of how the web 2.0 trend of user participation and contribution can aide in the fight against an unworthy case, in this case phishing. It will be interesting to see how other new web trends and technologies will be used in the fight against cyber-crime and mischievous behavior.

Kudos to PhishTank.

This post was contributed by Aidan Henry, an Internet strategy and marketing consultant from Victoria, Canada. For more brilliant commentary on the Web 2.0 scene, please visit his site at MappingTheWeb.com - a 9Rules blog.

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I can’t imagine my music without iTunes, and neither can I imagine my desktop without widgets. So here they are in no particular order…

I give you the top 5 iTunes Yahoo Widgets :

1. iTunes Companion

iTunes Companion is a highly customizable, highly functional iTunes remote which searches for missing album cover art for your current iTunes track at amazon.com and downloads it to your hard drive.

Among other things, the Widget also searches for song lyrics which are then saved right into iTunes, and can be read from your iPod.

2. iTunes ezrate

Do you have a large library of iTunes music? Do you want to leverage the ratings feature to create useful smart playlists, but are frustrated with the tiny rating toggle in the iTunes interface? If so, Itunes EZRate is for you.

Use it in conjunction with an iTunes control Widget or the compact mode for a minimalist view that focuses on rating all of your favorite (and least favorite) tunes.

3. Sleep Music

With SleepMusic, you will now be able to fall asleep and wake up in music! You can set the time when you want the music to stop, restart or even just decrease in volume, so you can even use SleepMusic as an alarm clock!

Since the Widget acts on the master volume of the computer, you can use it with every music players (Winamp, ITunes, etc.). In fact, with any program using your speakers!

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