Simple Puzzles Lead to Simple Math

Oh man, I’ve been waiting on this Manchester Orchestra album release for quite a while now. After hearing “I’ve Got Friends” by complete accident—a click-through from another YouTube video—two years ago, I grabbed a copy of the full album that spectacular single came from. As it ended up, Mean Everything to Nothing is one of those rare albums that I’ll put my full support behind. It’s perfect—every note, from beginning to end.

I liked it so much that I got my hands on the preceding album, Like a Virgin Losing a Child, which was unbelievably underwhelming. Seems around this time these Atlanta natives were more focused on being the next Death Cab for Cutie and not forging their own path. I still don’t listen to that album because, well, it’s just not that good.

So over a year ago, as I began the anticipated countdown to what would eventually be titled Simple Math, I read that Andy Hull (lead singer) said that the band’s intention was to make albums that were consistently better than the last, and if they were not happy with the results, they’d just split up. That’s a lot of pressure to put on your band after releasing one of the greatest albums of the decade!

Now they’ve leaked their own album a week ahead of the official release date, on the Columbia website. Fans need to put together a puzzle that reflects the geometry-inspired cover, placing objects representing individual songs in the correct order on the provided spaces.

The album’s opener, “Deer,” is an acoustic ballad reflecting Hull’s experience in the music industry, an introduction to the highly introspective album. The second track, Mighty, introduces the rest of the band, featuring much of the sound that we remember from Mean Everything. Inventive guitar sounds and a steady, comfortable rhythm drive the melody of this track, but it’s no “Shake it Out.”

Other parts of the album, including the light and bouncy “Pensacola,” show a different vocal side of Hull not seen since Like a Virgin Losing a Child. It becomes apparent very quickly that Hull is moving forward in an autobiographical manner. “April Fool” marks the point where the album really kicks off and starts moving with the feel that lead guitarist Robert McDowell has really tried to keep up his end of the deal and progress musically, taking chances in ways he never has before. The album’s climax, “Apprehension,” paints a portrait of shameful excess:

How could I misconceive I was owed something radically radiant?

Overall, it is clear that the band has definitely taken steps to expand their repertoire, and this album feels a lot more light-hearted than their last two full-lengths: Less tortured screaming, more happy melodies, but most importantly, strange bits that really work, like the orchestral hits in “Pale Black Eye” or the haunting choruses of “Virgin.”

I’m still not entirely sold on it, but it took several tries before I listened to all of Mean Everything to Nothing anyway. Maybe Simple Math is a step up from the masterpiece, and it hasn’t occurred to me yet; either way, I’d hate to see the band split up over a clearly well-planned and well-written album. Follow @torqtorq

The (Likely) Accurate Location of bin Laden's Pakistani House

[UPDATE, JULY 2013: The originally reported location is inaccurate, and there is still no placemark in Google Earth. Scroll to the end of this article for the correct location.]

Thanks to a placemark in Google Maps, the house where Osama bin Laden was (allegedly) killed today can be found. Of course, you have to wade through the pile of inaccurate placemarks first.

To find it:

1. Search for "Abottabad, Pakistan" 
2. Head north on the road marked Karakoram Highway, or N35
3. Turn right onto Awami Road
4. Almost exactly halfway between N35 and Kakul Road, north of Awami Road, is the compound

Conversely, you can just search for these coordinates:
34° 11′ 15″ N, 73° 14′ 33″ E

Here's what it looks like in Google Earth:

So what leads me to believe that this is the correct one? Here's what the news reports have to say about the compound:

• 18-foot-high walls
• Surrounded by relatively rural area
• Eight times larger than surrounding houses

You may not see all of this in this picture, but we can deduce from these shadows that the wall around this house is huge. It's definitely more rural than the city areas denoted by other Google Maps placemarks, and it's probably not visible from Awami Road.

It doesn't appear to be eight times larger than surrounding houses, but remember that this house is probably pretty tall. We'll have to wait for images from the ground to confirm that this is the place the U.S. military raided earlier today.

UPDATE:

CNN is now reporting that this house, one of the others suggested by the online community earlier this morning, is the correct building. However, this structure fits the "eight times larger" description even less than my suggested building. It does fit the description of being relatively new, as it is not visible in Google Earth's 2001 aerial photos. I remain skeptical because this doesn't seem consistent with the building shown in news videos released so far today, so I'll await further confirmation before declaring an exact building as the correct one.

You can find this location with these coordinates:
34° 10′ 10″ N, 73° 14′ 33″ E

[UPDATE, JULY 2013]

I decided to revisit this article to see if the location I had originally identified is accurate. Turns out I had a whole year to do it, since the compound was destroyed in April 2012. Take a look at these two photos (one from CNN, one from Google Earth) from May 2011, just a few days after the compound was raided and bin Laden's face was bulleted:

In both images, the smaller, angled-roof building across the street is visible. Then, just under a year later, the compound was destroyed even though it was only a few years old. I'm sure conspiracy theorists are frothing over that one. Here are two more pictures, both from April 2012, from the same sources:

Yep, totally flattened. If the news is correct, and they probably are, then this was definitely the place where Seal Team Six delivered lead justice to bin Laden. Mystery solved! Follow @torqtorq

How to Block Fast Windows Antivirus 2011 Annoyances

Anybody who’s a big fan of Google Image Search has probably noticed a major nuisance lately: The fake Fast Windows Antivirus 2011 scan. In the past couple of weeks this annoyance has become more prevalent while searching for images that would otherwise be safe to view. Many people want to know how to stop it from showing up or how to get rid of it altogether.

The fake scan has been causing panic in one of two ways among those who don’t understand exactly what’s happening:

1. Some people believe this is a real scan and panic, thinking that their computer is infected with multiple viruses (and might end up clicking on the provided link to install antivirus software).
2. Others immediately recognize this as a fake but worry that a virus is being loaded onto their computer anyway.

Here’s how you end up in this situation: First, you do a Google Image Search and results are shown; you click an image to see a preview and, since Google loads the full web page in the background, the page is redirected to http://avar-antivirus.cz.cc which triggers a browser alert. The alert looks like this:

All other tabs in that browser window are disabled; your choices are to minimize/maximize the browser window or click OK. Clicking OK here is safe, as we will discuss later.

You are then redirected to a page with the title “Fast Windows Antivirus 2011” which features a fake Windows Explorer window, and a fake progress bar counts its way from 0 to 100%. Along the way, multiple “viruses” appear in the progress window.

When it’s done, the webpage prompts you with a fake Windows Security Alert that features two actions: Remove all and Cancel. Clicking either will prompt you to download an executable file which is a virus.

 

At this point you should either navigate back by three or more pages or close the browser tab. Doing so will trigger yet another alert which looks like this:

In this case, clicking OK is also safe.

The end result is that no harm will come to your computer unless you install that executable file, which you must be prompted to do. As long as you don’t authorize that installation, your computer is uninfected. However, it’s a serious nuisance. I decided to take a closer look at the source code to figure out what’s happening here.

The initial popup does this:

window.resizeTo(0,0);
window.moveTo(width1,height1);

alert('Windows Security has found  critical process activity  on your PC and will perform fast scan of system  files');

It resizes your browser window to 0 by 0 pixels and triggers a standard alert with the above text. Your only choice is to click OK, but there is no consequence; it just allows the browser to proceed. At this point, whether immediately or hours later, you can navigate away from the page without damage being done to your computer.

Why is this happening?

The group that is behind this most likely has a web crawler which checks Google Image Search for popular pictures, archives them, and then repeats them over several domains (the most common one I’ve seen is ichthus.org) so that your search results are clogged with dozens of these images that send you to the fake virus scan page.

What can you do?

The very first thing you can do is navigate away from this page, but the most important thing you should do is avoid installing that executable file.

However, there’s more; you can block this website altogether so that attempts to load this page will show a browser error, like this:

This way your browser won’t be resized, you won’t have to deal with the redirects taking you back to the page, viruses trying to install, etc. You do so by adding a line to the hosts file on your computer. Here’s how it’s done:

In Windows:

• With Notepad, open the hosts file found here: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
• Move the cursor to the bottom line and enter this text:

127.0.0.1 avar-antivirus.cz.cc

• Now save the file.

In Mac OS X:

• Open the Terminal (found in the Applications/Utilities folder)
• Type sudo nano /private/etc/hosts
• Move the cursor down to the bottom line and enter this text:

127.0.0.1 avar-antivirus.cz.cc

• Now hit CTRL+X and press Y to save the changes.

Both methods perform the same action in different operating systems. Now when your computer tries to load avar-antivirus.cz.cc, it’ll send your browser to 127.0.0.1 which is a local IP address with nothing attached to it. Instead of sending you to the fake virus scan, you’ll just get the harmless error.

This method is a temporary fix; most likely this group will begin redirecting you to other domains. When this happens, you can use this same method to block that URL as well. Hopefully soon something more permanent will be done about this issue. Follow @torqtorq

Google Adwords Makes Great Post-Modern Haikus

Anyone who’s written ads for Google Adwords will know what I’m talking about when I say this, but writing these things is like creating bizarre, post-modern haikus.

The format is simple: Three lines. Title, description, description. The lines have character limits of 25, 35, and 35 respectively. The idea is to convey a deep, spiritual experience for Google users as they search the web for anything and everything.

At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re for. I never click on them myself.

So let’s look into some of these ad haikus! We’ll start with a web search for something basic: “Free stuff.” Immediately, we’re greeted with this classic poem of grand exuberance:

How I Get Free Groceries
Thanks to this website, I never
have to pay for groceries again.

After searching for merely “divorce,” we’re treated to this tale of unrequited affection:

Stop Your Divorce
Find out how to stop your divorce
or lover's rejection. Official Site

“Lonely” returns an equally passionate account of the quest for adulation:

Sexy Baltic Ladies
Pretty women from Baltic countries
are looking for true love

And finally, who knew that the decidedly unsexy search of “pest control” would yield such beautiful results:

Raccoon Removal & Control
Effective, Immediate, Long Lasting,
Raccoon Control Techniques.

So as you can see, writing these ads requires a little bit of talent; you must choose the best words, and the flow of your text could mean the difference between someone not clicking on your ad, and someone accidentally clicking on your ad while reading it.

Feel free to submit your favorite ad haiku! Follow @torqtorq

I Kindle You Not, Here's Some Advertisements

Amazon’s Kindle was a groundbreaker when it was released. Reading books on a screen that’s large and easy on the eyes without having to carry around a big hunk of wood became a possibility.

However, it was only a matter of time before they broke ground on advertising, too. Now you can pay for your Kindle and enjoy advertisements anyway, like this full-page ad for Visa that collapses down into a banner ad along the bottom of the screen.

At least these ads are in the book browser; let’s just hope that these ads stay out of the books themselves. Yes, magazines have long held an amazing amount of advertisements—generally every other page—but they’re also paying for paper, ink, and shipping. Your subscription or purchase price pays the staff and the office’s utility bills, and the ads pay for the physical product. Book costs, however, mostly go to the materials, and not so much to the author, editor, and publishing house staff, so there's not much need to recover funds within them with ads. That's why you never see ads inside of a paperback novel.

I can't blame Amazon for trying to fit in unobtrusive advertisements where they can. Jeff Bezos is a marketing genius, and I generally support his methodology. If this helps keep the price of the Kindle down, I say go for it, especially if it means that more of them can be donated to schools and other causes.

However, if your e-books start carrying ads that blink on the screen while you’re trying to concentrate on the story, you might just consider going back to the old-fashioned pre-1984 lug-around edition of your favorite novel. Follow @torqtorq

The Future of Social Media is Basically Simple.

Say goodbye to the days of company/product names with a dropped “e” in the suffix. There (hopefully) won’t be any more names like Tumblr, Flickr, or Blippr in the near future. That's because the new trend involves naming things after extremely basic concepts instead.

One can only assume that the use of those intentionally misspelled names over the past couple of years was to help secure more unique and accurate search results; after all, a search for “flicker” on Google reveals 35.5 million results. They might have considered using an alternate spelling because whoever owns flicker.com would be sitting on a goldmine, waiting for the company to purchase it, and the company didn't want to waste the money.

But wait—flicker.com redirects to flickr.com, and the first two of those 35.5 million results are flickr.com, so that can’t be the reason for the dropped "e." What’s going on here?

It turns out that those misspellings were merely hipster-friendly—or should I say “hipstr-friendly.” (As a side note, visiting hipstr.com shows that the domain is for sale, waiting for a hip new social tool to jump on it.)

Sorry, craig@hipstr.com, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s going to be buying your domain anytime soon.

Nope, to make it in the 2011 social media world you need to pick the most basic term you can think of and model your entire business on top of it. For example, Square is a new credit card-swiping device that plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone. Basic enough for you?

Now you might think that doing a search for the term “square” would lead you to millions of the vague destinations that the 1 billion Google results provide, but the company’s SEO is so fantastic that they’ve secured the very first result. They even beat out the Wikipedia article for the geometric concept itself, though they had to buy squareup.com instead of square.com (which is owned by Japanese video game company Square Enix, who are surprisingly NOT forwarding hits to their official domain.)

Another example is the mobile photo-sharing app Color (proud purchaser of color.com for $50,000) in which users within a certain area anonymously provide each other with pictures taken in the immediate vicinity. No doubt purchasing this domain pushed their search result rankings through the roof, but I suspect some spectacular SEO optimization is in play here as well.

Even AOL jumped into this trend with their mobile music-sharing app called Play, though at 2 billion Google search results, the app not appearing in the first five pages of those results, and the eponymous domain owned by a UK media distribution company, this simple name might be a bit less successful than the others.

Why the basic names? A bit of Internet feng shui, I assume. We’ve gotten sick of this hipstery crap where we drop letters; in fact, dropped e’s are the new CamelCase. It's fresher than numbers-as-letters. You’ll notice we don’t share our photos on flick3r.com. Nope, that one's netsquatted by AT&T, ultimately sending you to the Yellow Pages.

So if you want to fit in and see your app purchased by Yahoo for $25 million, you'll need a basic name. Just think of the most basic concept you can come up with, and then dumb it down into an even more basic idea. As part of my public service, I’ll provide some ideas now:

• Letter: A nano-blog service
• Look: A photo-sharing app with eye tracking that shows a new photo each time you look at it
• Move: Location-tracking app that you actually intentionally sign up for
• Path: Similar to Move, but encourages others to follow you—physically
• One: Movie/Music/etc. critique website where reviews consist of a single word
• On: WiFi device that tells you if you left certain appliances running and can start your car via your Letter nano-blog
• Space: App that lives in the cloud. Do you really need to know more to decide whether or not to invest?

Those should provide you with enough anonymity that you’ll need to invest hundreds of man-hours in SEO and publicity, but once that ball gets rolling and people throw you in with Color and Square, it’s only a matter of time before AOL wants to merge with you. Good luck on your IPO!

UPDATE: There's actually a new photo sharing called Path. Can you believe it? Follow @torqtorq

It's Just One More Reason to Not Use GoDaddy

The web hosting and domain registration giant has been around for almost fifteen years, demonstrating both industry influence and staying power. Since 1997, GoDaddy has been headed by the same person: Bob Parsons. In an industry where the CEO turnover rate is shorter than most presidential terms, some might term this remarkable.

Perhaps it’s that singular vision provided by the founder that has made the company so successful. Managing more than 45 million domain names, the company dwarfs other registrars with its market share, controlling over a quarter of the market.

Customers love the company’s unconventional and sometimes irreverent attitude, employing IndyCar driver Danica Patrick and T.V. trainer Jillian Michaels, among others, as “GoDaddy Girls.” In fact, it’s not uncommon for bizarre, random, and sometimes slightly inappropriate humor to appear on their website.

Now many—most notably the animal rights group PETA—are disturbed by the CEO’s most recent controversy. A video featuring Parsons hunting elephants in Zimbabwe was released, in which the corporate heavyweight tracks, shoots, and poses next to an elephant in the poor and sometimes famine-stricken country.

What would you do if you had all the money in the world? It’s not uncommon for extremely wealthy individuals to pursue rare hobbies out of the reach of the common man. I actually expect this kind of behavior from people of his caliber. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s part of an underground group of elite moneymakers who gather to dine on endangered animals regularly.

Parsons defends his actions, in typical spin-it CEO style, by carefully explaining a real tear-jerker: These elephants, majestic and awesome as they may be, are careless brutes who don’t understand boundaries, tearing through local villagers’ fields and trampling their crops, significantly reducing the available food for the already poor Zimbabweans. He’s doing them a service. It’s charity, really.

Not only is this dead elephant no longer destroying crops, it’s also readily providing meat for the villagers as well. It’s a win-win situation for everyone!

Except, of course, the elephant—and GoDaddy.

Parsons’ body language suggests a giddy hobbyist, excited about his kill. Clearly, he didn’t pose with his elbow propped up on the elephant’s lifeless torso, grinning like a maniac, because he felt the self-satisfaction of charitable actions toward a lessthan-fortunate community. And yet, when the video leaked, and the accusations and boycott-talk began, this is exactly the defense he provided.

He has a good point, though. Elephants trampling crops is a serious problem in this part of the world. The common theme in this area is that a living elephant means human starvation, while a dead elephant means plenty of available food. If you were starving, which would you choose?

The problem is that it’s highly unethical to kill all the elephants, which would need to happen to completely stop the problem with this method. Furthermore, this is the elephant’s natural habitat, which humans are also living in. The two should probably learn cohabitation. They’ve survived this long; maybe they should consider having less people? Birth control maybe?

Bob Parsons is a legitimately successful businessman who deserves the right to spend his hard-earned money in whatever manner he likes. I can’t fault him for that. But if the real reason for his actions is to protect the food supply of local villagers, then why did he spend so much money to fly over there and hunt down elephants? Couldn’t he have donated money for a gun and bullets to someone already there?

There is a certain amount of skill involved in killing an elephant. They’re massive creatures who are not downed easily. By Parsons’ own admission, this was his fifth elephant kill, and not on this trip alone. Obviously, he likes killing elephants!

This is nothing new. Big game hunters have been around forever, hunting lions and other creatures considered relatively rare. It’s a bit of a taboo subject, but it happens. There’s no denying that. But in many cases these creatures are considered immediately dangerous to life. Think jaguars that literally stalk humans in the woods and leap out of the darkness to stab their sharp teeth into the necks of their poor victims.

The elephants don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not acting out of spite, or even survival. They’re just walking where they shouldn’t. Could money be spent to divert the elephants’ paths? Possibly. Did Parsons look into this as an option? No. He obviously likes killing elephants!

Would we feel the same way about his actions if we were talking about him shooting deer in the woods in the United States? Probably not, and those deer don’t even trample our crops. So what’s the big deal?

My issue with this is that he’s lying. He should admit the enjoyment he gets out of killing elephants. He is spinning his controversial hobby as charitable work. Thanks, CEO of an American company, for solving our problem manually with a shotgun!

I usually run far, far away from any subject that PETA touches, and I’m not going to back their suggestion that consumers boycott his company. There are hundreds of other reasons to avoid their terrible service like the plague, anyway.

But if you feel the slime oozing out of his statements on this subject, it’s just another reason to not use GoDaddy. Follow @torqtorq