Wired subversion

I don't want to get into too much coverage of other blogs here -- gets kind of incestuous. At the same time, what should a weblog be if not a chronicle of one's activity online?

Yesterday evening I witnessed something interesting that took me back to the early days of the Net when all sorts of wacky guerrilla stuff went on (here's a static and relatively unwitty example but the only one to be archived). Even now I sometimes read about how some institutional or major site is hacked and the index page is replaced with a subversive message, but I've never seen it live.

Yesterday's was no illegal hack. What happened was that an article in Wired magazine -- or SONY Wired SONY, as it is now known -- linked to content on the host server of a Tartu blogger. Instead of providing a link to the content that readers could click at their own discretion, Wired followed the practice of "embedding" the content (meaning that the target page opens automatically in a frame within the webpage).

Since Wired is well-read and the content was a rubbernecker's delight (transcript of a suicide note), the Baltic server's use went up suddenly, threatening to swamp it.

I think embedding is neat. (Snap previews, on the other hand, are annoying to me.) I don't know how embedding plays with copyright laws (it's sort of like appropriating content). But to me, it's clear that if you choose to embed content, there's a caveat emptor -- if the content of the embedded link changes, so does the look of your page.

What was interesting that instead of choosing to "monetize" the opportunity (a word I hadn't really heard) and put up ads, the blogger put up a message that tore the Wired staff a new one for using up his precious bandwidth without so much as a warning. Very 1960s, very revolutionary. So what if apparently one reason was that he didn't yet have a Google Adsense account up and running.

Personally, I would probably only deviated from Flasher T's action by making the embedded page refresh to a link to the same Wired page. Just to see what would happen. If the universe would be thrown into an infinite loop or something. Or tried to look down the deep well of recursive embeds, to see what was at the bottom.

Sh*t and such, cont'd

Ouch -- this is the price estimate for hooking our building's sewage to the mainline -- $10,000 plus. What's up with the price for refilling the site -- more than labour and equipment rental combined? Expensive dirt?