Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Update - ISC West takes action on booth babes

Last year, I posted some observations about the clothing (or lack thereof) at one of the booths at the ISC West trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For some people, the use of scantily clad people in that one booth detracted from the professionalism that one would expect at a business show.

For other people, the criticism was ridiculous - "You guys clucking at this should take your skirts off" was one reaction.

Well, I learned a couple of new things this week.

First, the attire of the one company's "staff" at the 2017 show was against show regulations. 2016 guidelines prohibited "[a]ttire of an overly revealing, suggestive nature" such as "[t]ops displaying excessive cleavage."

Second, the people running ISC West have stated that they WILL enforce the 2016 prohibition in 2018. This was communicated to the Institute for Professional Video Management, along with the comment "It’s very important to us that our attendees feel comfortable during their experience at the show."

While this doesn't take care of the entire issue - it's best if booths are staffed by people that know the products - it at least takes care of the most offensive part of the 2017 display.

Incidentally, this change is not restricted to the computer technology world. Booth babes are also disappearing from the Geneva Motor Show, and #MeToo is cited as a possible reason.

However, it appears that there are still booth babes at the SHOT show.

Sunday, March 18, 2018

(empo-utoobd) My long-term Plan C to reverse the @YouTube TOU #4 Section H permanent disabling of my account

For the background of this, see the posts from 2009, 2009, 2013, early today, and a little later today.

Briefly: one day in 2009 I discovered that my YouTube account had been permanently disabled. I was told at the time that the account "has been found to have violated our Community Guidelines" and that "[w]e are unable to provide specific detail regarding your account suspension or your video's removal." (In essence, you read our Community Guidelines and figure out what rule you broke.)

Four years later I learned additional information: namely, that I allegedly violated TOU #4 Section H. From what I could make out, it sounds like I had constructed automated scripts or something.

As I stated in 2013 (and again less than 24 hours ago) the only problem is that to my knowledge I never did violate TOU #4 Section H. I don't even know how to construct automated scripts or whatever it was that I allegedly did.

Basically, I hadn't addressed this with Google since 2013. But I figured that after five years, it was time to launch a second appeal of the permanent disabling of my account.


Impressively, Google moved quickly to review the entire situation, including the circumstances surrounding my permanent disabling nearly a decade ago. This is remarkable, since Google had to review a ton of information, including information that I don't even have about my alleged violation.

So, less than six hours after I launched my appeal, I heard back from Google.

Hello,

Thank you for your account suspension appeal. We have decided to keep your account suspended based on our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service. Please visit http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines for more information.

Please do not respond to this email. Replies to this email will not be processed. Please refer to our Help Center for more information.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Team


Oddly enough, I actually received LESS information in 2018 than I did in 2013. At least in 2013 I was told what part of the terms I had alleged violated. This time around, I was merely told that Google had "decided to keep your account suspended based on our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service."

I still don't know what I allegedly did.

And it's not worth Google's time to even discuss the specifics to me. After all, there were over 500 million YouTube channels in 2012. Why spend time worrying about one relatively unknown person who is unhappy? I guess I should feel thankful that Google even spent six hours reviewing the case.

I have to say I'm not especially shocked that my appeal was dismissed. In fact, even before my appeal was rejected, I began wondering what I should do if it WAS rejected.

Hence, this thread, which consisted of links to two items.


The first was a tweet from a woman named Kylie Jenner. If you haven't heard of Kylie Jenner, let's just note that she has a sister named Kim Kardashian. And she has two mommies, but that's a whole other story.

So what did Kylie Jenner tweet on February 21?

sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad.

Now if I were going to tweet something like this (which I wouldn't; I don't use Snapchat), I'm not sure that it would cause much of a ripple. But that tweet from Ms. Jenner has resulted in over 75,000 retweets, and over 370,000 likes.

And what else? Well, that brings me to my second link.

Snap (SNAP) stock closed down 6% on Thursday after the reality TV star said she is no longer using the app. The plunge wiped about $1.3 billion off the company's market value.

While Jenner's effect on Snapchat's stock price was subsequently questioned, you can bet that Snapchat internally paid very close attention to Ms. Jenner's issues. And I'm sure that someone discussed it with Evan Spiegel.

I don't think that Sundar Pichai spent any appreciable time examining the ramifications of the suspension of my YouTube account.

And if I decide to launch yet another appeal of my suspension in 2023, I don't think that Pichai or his successor will spend a lot of time on it either.

Or will he?

Because, you see, if I begin to execute a long-term plan now, I can GUARANTEE that my YouTube permanent disabling will FINALLY be reversed.

I'll admit that my idea is not original with me. I stole it from Steve Martin.

You.. can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You say.. "Steve.. how can I be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes?" First.. get a million dollars. Now.. you say, "Steve.. what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my door and says, 'You.. have never paid taxes'?" Two simple words. Two simple words in the English language: "I forgot!"

Martin's technique works...just as long as you get past the "get a million dollars" part.

My long-term plan to reverse the permanent disabling of my YouTube account also has two steps.

The first step?

Become more famous than the Kardashian/Jenner family and the Trump family COMBINED.

Once I achieve that first step, and get to that rarefied plane where people hang on my every word, and a single word from me can make or break empires...well, at that stage, the rest is easy.








Because, you see, when I reach that level of fame, and I decide that I want to talk at the World Trade Center (not too far away from Wall Street) at 9:15 on a weekday morning (right before the U.S. stock markets open), and I would like Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, and Donald Trump to ask me questions...they WILL come. (And Putin will be so sad that I didn't invite him...but he won't be able to do anything about it.)

CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

And Donald Trump will be groveling before me, telling me that I'm the greatest genius of all time.

I'll just smile.

And because the world wants to know everything about me, Oprah Winfrey will ask me what TV shows I watch.

I'll respond, "Well, to tell you the truth, I don't watch much TV."

(At that time, future stock prices on the companies owning the major television networks will plummet.)

I'll quietly continue. "Since I live in the West Coast, just about everything is on tape delay except for sports, and I don't really like to watch things that happened three hours ago."

(And just like that, NBC will immediately start broadcasting "Saturday Night Live" at 8:30pm in Los Angeles.)

But I'm not done yet. "I love sports. I'd watch the Dodgers if they were on TV, but of course most people in Los Angeles can't see the games."

(Within five minutes, the Dodgers would sign a deal allowing every over-the-air TV station in Southern California to carry every Dodgers home and away game live, without commercial interruption.)

Having satisfactorily answered Oprah's question, I can turn my attention to Kim Kardashian's question.

"So, what online services do you like?"

"Well, Kim," I'll respond, "I love online services. Perhaps I don't use Twitter as much as Donnie-boy here..."

(Twitter immediately files for bankruptcy.)

I continue. "...but there are other social services that I love. One of the services that I loved the most was FriendFeed. Too bad Facebook shut it down."

(As I continue speaking, Mark Zuckerberg will place an urgent Messenger message to Benjamin Golub. "Do what you can to get the FriendFeed servers running again. NOW!" orders Zuckerberg.)

I continue talking. Billions of people are hanging on my every word. The slightest comment, positive or negative, about any online service will make or break careers and reputations.

Finally, after a couple of minutes of this, Kim will ask the question that I previously ordered her to ask.

"But you haven't mentioned YouTube," she'll say.

And I'll smile.

"YouTube doesn't want me to use its service," I'll say quietly, in my best aw shucks voice. "I guess I'm not all that important to YouTube."

During the next minute, as Donald, Oprah, and Kim pour adulation on me and my wisdom, Google's Tiger Team will pour through its warehouse of data, looking up the super-secret private number on my mobile phone.

And as the interview concludes, and the U.S. stock markets prepare to open for the day, my phone will ring.

And the CEO of Google will be on the other end of the line, preparing his or her abject apologies for the years that I was unable to use the YouTube service.

Problem solved!








Yes, the scenario above is entirely possible, once I get past that first "fame" step.

In the meantime, if you want me to like or comment on your videos...it ain't happening. Sundar doesn't want me to.

(empo-utoobd) Well, they got the appeal

This was an auto-generated message that I received a half hour before my post went live, but I might as well document it.

Hello,

We have received your account appeal and will get back to you as soon as possible.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Team

(empo-utoobd) It's been almost five years - might as well try again

So I've been mulling over my mysterious 2009 YouTube suspension again - the one where my YouTube account was permanently disabled and it took me four years to even find out why.

Hi there,

This account was found in Violation of TOU #4 Section H:
http://www.youtube.com/t/terms

"You agree not to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, "robots," "spiders," or "offline readers," that accesses the Service in a manner that sends more request messages to the YouTube servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional on-line web browser. Notwithstanding the foregoing, YouTube grants the operators of public search engines permission to use spiders to copy materials from the site for the sole purpose of and solely to the extent necessary for creating publicly available searchable indices of the materials, but not caches or archives of such materials. YouTube reserves the right to revoke these exceptions either generally or in specific cases. You agree not to collect or harvest any personally identifiable information, including account names, from the Service, nor to use the communication systems provided by the Service (e.g., comments, email) for any commercial solicitation purposes. You agree not to solicit, for commercial purposes, any users of the Service with respect to their Content."

Sincerely,
The YouTube Team


So I've launched another appeal, again stating that I wasn't a script kiddie or whatever I presumably was.


Incidentally, back in 2013 I wrote the following:

If you see this post years after I wrote it, or if you're not a sports enthusiast, I should explain that Ryan Braun is a baseball player who vehemently denied for 18+ months that he violated baseball's drug policy - until yesterday, when he suddenly admitted that he had violated baseball's drug policy. I wanted to make the point that I'm not going to subsequently admit to using some type of automated spider, especially since any attempt of mine to prove that I could even launch an automated spider would be a laughable failure. No, I am not a script kiddie.


While I'm waiting, I took the opportunity to read any new news on permanently disabled YouTube accounts since 2013. Most importatly, I found this thread that explains (better than Google did) what TOU #4 Section H actually is.

rewboss said:
TOU #4 Section H is about gaming views. It says you're not allowed to use any bot or other automated system to artificially inflate your view count or generate likes, comments and so on.

Basically, this is what YouTube is accusing you of. To YouTube, it looks like lots of your views came from a bot or a click farm of some sort. What's now happening is that you've appealed, and people at YouTube are taking a second look to try to figure out whether you really did cheat. So far, in some cases they have decided that there's no good evidence you did cheat.

If you actually did buy views, likes and comments, you've been lucky; if you didn't, you've been unlucky. But it may be difficult for YouTube to determine whether or not you cheated, because of course these fraudulant services try to make their activities look legit. That may be why it's taking YouTube so long to investigate.


Which is nice to know, but parts of the rest of the thread are bizarre - things about some accounts being reinstated, and some not reinstated, and empty accounts being permanently disabled, and Adsense issues. For example:

One of my youtube channels show - "Monetization on this account has been disabled due to invalid click activity" - How is that even possible if they reinstated that channel saying that I have not violated TOU #4H, and today they reinstated another channel of mine, few hours after Adsense was disabled.

(Incidentally, I never did monetize my YouTube account. From what I recall - and again, this was nearly a decade ago - I only had one YouTube video that was publicly viewable, so there wouldn't be any point in monetizing my YouTube account.)

However, this thread includes references to a number of appeals in a single month (because multiple channels were involved), so I guess my "appeal every five years" strategy should be safe (although possibly not productive).

Oh, and this appeal thread ended with...well, this:

I was suspended again few days ago and they reinstated my account yesterday - the 2nd time..
Can stuff like this happen again ?


Saturday, March 17, 2018

From gaming to tomatoes - non-trendy Pomodoro in Slack

So I was recently checking out an online information service associated with one of my games, and the service mentioned something about routing alerts to Slack channels.

Which was just the excuse I needed to try out Slack.

Yes, I never got around to trying out Slack until 2018. I am not trendy.

So I started setting things up, creating a one-person Slack workspace for me, myself, and I.

Well, there's also my good buddy Slackbot. If you're non-trendy like I am, "Slackbot" responds to queries from you and provides you with information. For example, you can use a /remind command to remind you to do something at a particular time. (In this case, I directed the reminder to my #random channel.)


One minute later, the reminder appeared in my feed.


In addition to native Slack commands such as /remind, you can integrate apps into Slack. For example, you can use a Twitter app to bring selected tweets (e.g. tweets from a specific Twitter user) into Slack, or you can input tasks to your Todoist account via an app, or you can query Foursquare about available types of restaurants (or whatever) in a particular location.

So I'm exploring various apps, and I run across...Tomatobot.

Hi, I'm Tomatobot. I'm a simple timer for short, distraction-free tasks, and I can join your team in Slack.

Simply add my (sic) to your Slack team, then your team can type /startwork and I'll help them stay focused.


But why a tomato? Why does the work last for 25 minutes? Well...because.

The Pomodoro Technique was invented in the early 90s by developer, entrepeneur, and author Francesco Cirillo. Cirillo named the system "Pomodoro" after the tomato-shaped timer he used to track his work as a university student. The methodology is simple: When faced with any large task or series of tasks, break the work down into short, timed intervals (called "Pomodoros") that are spaced out by short breaks. This trains your brain to focus for short periods and helps you stay on top of deadlines or constantly-refilling inboxes. With time it can even help improve your attention span and concentration.

From https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique

As I write this, I have not yet experimented with the Pomodoro Technique, but I should have a chance to do so Monday. And since I've successfully adapted the Eisenhower Matrix for my work needs, perhaps I can adapt the Pomodoro technique also.