Posted by
Eric – September 8, 2009
Marketing experts have run out of unique adjectives to describe their life changing products and services. Nothing better illustrates this than when the advertising genius wrote the press release for the Trail of Tears Pow Wow. The title reads in bold print:
22nd Annual Trail of Tears Pow Wow September 12-13
Alright, We’ve established as fact that there have been 22 pow wow festivals and that these spectacular events occur annually. The punch line comes at the end.
The public is invited and urged to come join this once-in-a-lifetime Native American Pow Wow experience.
I’m guessing experienced marketing gurus have a massive dictionary of auto-complete phrases loaded into Microsoft Word. Some can wield it better than others and the really bad actors pop-in random phrases they haven’t used in the previous six months.
With this in mind, go have an excellent once-in-a-lifetime experience at the 22nd Annual Trail of Tears Pow Wow.
Posted by
Eric – July 23, 2008
Given that New Wave Communications is now looking to track it’s customers. I’m going to show you how to limit the usefulness of the information they can collect. The specific system used by New Wave relies on browser cookies to identify customers. Since cookies are very necessary for a lot of functionality on the web it is not possible to disable cookies completely. However, it is possible limit the lifetime of cookies to a single browser session. Doing this makes tracking via cookies far less useful since the tracking system won’t know from one session to the next that you’re the same person. One side effect that you should be aware of is that if you use cookies to save any website passwords making all cookies session-only would delete them each time you closed the browser.
In Mozilla Firefox 3 it is far more obvious how to do this than in Internet Explorer. I briefly tried looking through IE’s settings but was not successful. The steps are Edit –> Preferences –> Privacy tab then under Cookies you will see “Keep until: <dropdown menu>”. Click on the dropdown menu and select “I close Firefox”. Note that to the right you can click on Exceptions and allow/disallow cookies on a per site basis. For example, if you wanted to stay logged in on a specific site across browser sessions but delete all other cookies.
Posted by
Eric – July 21, 2008
For several months I’ve been noticing splash advertising when a page I try to load is redirected elsewhere. The advertising itself was bad enough but now New Wave Communications has announced they will be allowing people to opt-in to be tracked. In exchange, customers will recieve more “customized” advertising and maybe some service discounts provided by New Wave.
Simultaneously, Security Now! is running a series on the Phorm system for ISP-based advertising (SN149 – SN153).
