Kit's Blog

When I decide to makes something cool and two unpleasant surprises

     Well... at least cool looking anyway. I made a little animated gif which I think looks pretty fucking awesome. And no, I'm not going to tell you where I got it from (though I'm sure a few of you out there recognize it).

     In other news it looks like google may FINALLY be adding my site to their index (after battling them for almost a year about it). The clincher seems to have been my comment on a recent article which I'll explain in a bit. The important thing is that the site was added at all, which means that it will be scanned on a regular basis, and that more than likely I'll be getting at least a bunch more visitors. Maybe not tons, but that's just because it has a very low page rank right now. With any luck I'll start being linked to by the people who find this site, but I won't get my hopes up because that would make me feel like I expected everyone to love the way I write and such (and a note to people who don't like this stuff: I don't think my site is for everyone, and my writing style may not float your boat, so if you don't like it, I'm not too sad). So Basically I'm hoping for an increase in readership (or at least "gamership" on scuzzstuff). And now onto the unpleasant surprises:
     So out of the 6 email addresses I own, one of them is from hotmail. It's by far the oldest, and I'm unwilling to rid myself of it because too many things I've used may still have that as my primary email address. When I attempted to login yesterday I found a new page informing me that I had to assure them that I agreed to many new agreements that I had yet to read. It was too late that night (and unfortunately too late tonight) to read the whole of the 6 agreements that I was agreeing to. It also informed me that since this was a legally binding contract that I had to be at least 18 to be able to agree to the terms. Well fuck! I'm not 18 and therefore am invalid to be able to agree, but I found that I was able to use the MSN Messenger to log into my email account without agreeing to the terms (if I tried to log in through hotmail.com it persisted in asking me so I knew I hadn't unwillingly agreed), and so I'm doing that for now. But here's what concerns me:
     1) What brought about these new "agreements"? It seems to me like they'll have some embedded greater stupidity like if you are found to also have a gmail account they reserve the right to cancel your account without notice. But it could very well be that they just needed to update their contracts. This one now includes the familiar "this agreement is subject to change without notice" so you could be told that you are legally in trouble with Microsoft for accessing their products with firefox and not know it until they arrested you.
     2) Why so many agreements? And why age 18? It seems like there is some serious legal work being done behind the scenes at Microsoft and I'm more than a bit curious what.
All of this is merely speculative, so you can pretty much disregard all the ramifications. Just pay attention to the fact that something big is happening at Microsoft.

     The second unpleasant surprise came when I recieved the link to this article. It seems that my general predictions about google are coming true. This is yet another step in google's takeover of the net: A "google browser" (codenamed GBrowser) and a google "internet cmputer". Both of these would simply extend google's hold over the internet world and quite honestly this is really beginning to freak me out. If google releases all these products and they are able to handle the load and they remain RELIABLE and SIMPLE, then google will win over 90% of the internet market who don't use their computers for more complex needs. God damn I hate it when my paranoias are right...

And, here's part 3 to hhgttg: