Take me out to the ball game…

Somewhere in the heart of America, a group of boys is walking alongside a chain-link fence, kicking up a cloud of dust with worn-down cleats. Their hands and shoulders bare the weapons of battle: faded brown gloves, aluminum bats, and a baseball whose red seams spray outward like the wayward hairs on their heads. The boys act out the epic plays of the day, their jubilation undaunted by the crisp October air or the knowledge that this ritual will soon disappear for the long winter months. But that thought doesn’t cross their minds as the setting summer sun casts its last rays upon their backs before dusk comes; no, only this very moment matters.

When I was growing up, I played several sports as many children do, and the game I loved more than any other was baseball. When I say that, I mean it; I lived baseball from about age 6 to age 14. I watched the Reds on television, went to games at Riverfront Stadium, collected baseball cards, and the whole shebang. Even now, my baseball cards are in albums in my closet. If I close my eyes, I can see myself diving in the outfield to make a catch, exchanging a smirk with my friend while he walked to the batter’s box to face my pitching, or sliding into home plate safely for the only home run I ever hit. The scent of the summer air, the nervous excitement before a game, and the satisfying jolt that ran up through my arms when I hit the ball on the sweet spot of the bat are all fond memories of my youth, inexplicably delightful to those who never played the game.

My enchantment with baseball ended with two particular events, but only one of them is relevant here: the 1994 player’s strike which caused the World Series to be canceled. Among other things, baseball owners wanted a salary cap to try to even the disparity among the teams, and the players’ union refused to accept any sort of salary cap. You can read more about the affair here and here. After the ’94 strike, I awoke to the reality that professional baseball, in many ways, was simply not the same baseball I had played. Professional baseball was a business.

Major League Baseball has grown in popularity and revenue. For example, an article in Forbes noted that 2007 marked the fourth consecutive season that Major League Baseball broke its yearly attendance record. In 2007, team revenues grossed $5.5 billion. Players are making more and more money as well. According to an article on MLB.com, the average salary for a professional baseball player is now over $3 million, which is up from $512,804, the salary that CBS Sports reports that players made in 1989. Baseball stars make outrageous sums of money. Alex Rodriguez, an admitted steroid user, made $33 million in 2009, for example.

The unbelievable salaries, the steroids scandals, and the constant changing of uniforms and hats (merchandising) are all facets of professional baseball that stain an otherwise enjoyable experience. Yet, somewhere behind the marketing stunts, the monstrous egos, and the juiced megastars lies the game I used to play. Numerous films and books have tried to capture the spirit of baseball and the fondness it leaves in its fans. Sometimes, when I watch a game, the excitement of the moment captures even a jaded fan like me, and I forget what I dislike about the business of professional baseball; namely, that it is a business.

I’ll take “business ethics” for $1000, Alex.

The Internet provides an immense resource for businesses, entrepreneurs, and customers alike, and it does not discriminate. The Web does not favor the honest businessperson more than the dishonest one, or vice versa. Businesses can engage in all sorts of legitimate or shady practices, and unless people take the effort to inform themselves about technology and the way “businesses” try to victimize them, they may fall for a scam.

Recently, someone (or possibly a script) left a comment on one of my posts, leading me to conclude that it was a spam comment which was posted solely to hawk the company’s products. The comment itself was two sentences long and included a link to another site. That this blog received a spam comment is somewhat surprising, given that it only has a few posts and so forth, but I’d like to take the opportunity to remind everyone to keep up their guard when dealing with other people on the Internet.

When I first saw the comment, I figured it was probably a spam comment, but I decided to check it out, just to make sure. Their web site contained no address, phone number, e-mail address, or any other kind of contact information for the company or any agent of the company, so I checked the e-mail address that the woman entered in order to post the comment to see if a student had left the message. Since it was not a student, I checked out the profile that the person had on Yahoo. The profile listed a different name, a male’s name even, allegedly someone from New York.

Since the person claimed to be from New York in the profile, I searched the New York Secretary of State’s “Business Entities Database”, and it did not find any records of the company whose name was on the spam link that they posted in the comment. Needless to say, I was not surprised when the search on the secretary of state’s web site returned no results.

I put in the I.P. address of the person into this site’s query box to find out from where the comment originated, and, lo and behold, the e-mail did not originate from the United States at all. No, the I.P. address is assigned to an internet service provider who is apparently on the third floor of the the Ebene Cyber Tower in Ebene, Mauritius. In case anyone doesn’t know what or where Mauritius is (Don’t feel bad; I didn’t either), it is an island located off the southeastern border of the African continent. Many of us may know that Africa is the home of the “419” scams.  Incidentally, the Wikipedia page for the Ebene Cyber Tower links to scams that come from the building, but I cannot link to some of them because of the nature of the scam.

In summation, using a normally female name , a person, whose Yahoo profile lists “her” as being a male from New York and whose I.P. address clearly originates from Mauritius, posted a comment, advertising a product for some company, whose web site listed no contact information. A Google search of the name of the product revealed similar or exact duplicated comments on other blogs.

The whole point here it to draw attention to the fact that unethical people roam the Internet, looking for victims, because the Internet provides almost complete anonymity.  I would not buy a product or even use a free product from any untrusted source, such as an amateur-looking web site that did not have a legitimate, verifiable address. It is easy to create a web site today and claim to be a business.  Businesses need to earn trust by establishing their legitimacy and reliability, and I don’t trust random, anonymous people and businesses on the ‘net. Unfortunately, many people do trust complete strangers and buy from spammers, which is the real reason that spam is such a problem. It is profitable.

Digital Books

Via Slashdot, I came across this article which notes that Google is in the process of setting up a service to sell books in digital format to customers.  Google is late to the game in regards to offering “e-books,” the established competition being Amazon and its Kindle device and others such as Sony’s e-bookstore.  Google hasn’t announced any pricing structure, although it stated that it will be taking 55% of the profits, and customers will be able to access the books offline but only after accessing it online one time.

I have to admit that I don’t particularly see the attraction of e-books overall.  Portability is not particularly a factor with regard to paper books, except for multi-volume sets or extremely thick books like medical reference books.  Also, looking at the screens of computers, cell phones, or other similar electronic devices is simply inferior for reading for long periods of time when compared to reading a physical book.  Advances in e-reader technologies will narrow the gap, but I can’t see myself reading primarily digital books any time soon in the future.

The other obvious problem is that digital books will come with all kinds of digital “rights management, which I have discussed in other posts.  Activation, one-time only downloads of purchased books, and other annoyances will be part of the experience, no doubt.

Years ago, I bought sheet music online, and somehow or another, I lost the songs.  When I went back to the web site and signed in to re-download the songs, the web site informed me that I had already downloaded them (or accessed them, I don’t remember the exact wording) and thus could not download the content for which I had paid.  That’s one big reason why I hate DRM so much; it punishes honest people.  I was lucky that it was only sheet music and not some actual important item.

Businesses exist for one reason primarily: to make a profit.  Keep that in mind.  Artificial limitations on digital products, such as limits on how many times you can “activate” a product, download an item, access a product or service, or any other restrictive measure are all ways that businesses will try to make you pay for the same things over and over again.  No thanks, not for me.

Updated Comment Policy: All comments now need approval.

Due to receiving a spam comment on the blog, all comments are now subject to my approval before they will be posted on this site.  So, don’t expect your comment to show up immediately, and, if you are a spammer, don’t bother posting a comment at all.  I will approve comments based upon the policy set forth in my introductory post, but I will not approve comments that are simply advertisements, especially those of a suspicious nature.

There’s advertising on the Internet?

The only thing more depressing than the content and obnoxiousness of most advertising today is having the knowledge that somewhere, probably in a big city, people are actually responsible for creating that particular piece of propaganda, probably while congratulating each other on how clever they all are. Instead of providing useful information about a given product, modern advertisements are, in large part, lies that seek to coerce, through psychologically manipulative means, people to buy low-quality products (with planned obsolescence, of course) that they don’t need. Perhaps the worst part is that it is pretty much unavoidable.

It didn’t take too long before advertisers realized they could spread their poisonous messages all over the Internet, just like they had earlier corrupted radio, public television, cable television, satellite radio, newspapers, video games, movies, sports telecasts, sporting events, and magazines, to name a few. Web advertising has morphed from blinking text to banners to pop-ups to Flash movies. For obvious reasons, I will not link to any examples of the abominations of which I have just written.

Much to the dismay of scheming advertisers, people can filter out internet advertising if they find the right tools and read instructions on how to use them. Firefox is a browser that allows for people to write “extensions” that provide extra functionality not available in Firefox. Some of these extensions even block advertisements, and people have written filter lists that contain rules for certain ad-blocking extensions to use in order to block as many ads as possible in a way that is transparent to the user. Another approach to ad-blocking works by mapping certain web addresses to a person’s local computer in a particular file so that when a web site requests a connection to that web site, the computer will try to connect to that site on the person’s computer rather than the actual web site, thus preventing the advertisement from even being downloaded.

Although I could write a really long rant on advertising and may do so at some point, I don’t object to the idea of advertising but only if advertising means simply to provide information about a product to potential customers. Without advertising at all, I’d imagine it would be difficult for many businesses to succeed at all because no one would ever hear about the products, and this means that people would not be able to find products that they really do need. I cannot stand the in-your-face, constant barrage of transparently condescending advertising that feeds on the emotions rather than that gives useful information about a product or service, and thankfully I can avoid most of it while I’m browsing the Internet.