John Bresee

I’m way off the back on this but I had to to jot it down. UStream launched their iPhone app recently and it’s simply one of the coolest and scariest pieces of technology I’ve ever seen. The app turns your iPhone into a realtime broadcast device. Your camera films and transmits whatever lies in front of it.

You have to see it function to feel the impact and realize how our lives have changed forever with this one application. Lets say you get pulled over and are concerned about how you are going to be treated. Flip on the app, spin the phone to face the side window and broadcast in real time your experience. Officer Friendly is, unbenknownst to him on live TV.

When you visit their site it is astonishing to see what streams are currently live. Endless litters of puppies under heat lamps…and and audience of 25 people watching them sleep. And the watchers happily chat with each other.

The scary side is that, even though the technology for video phones has existed since the 60s, but most people don’t want to be seen most of the time. Broadcasting our lives is uncomfortable and yet  you no longer get to decide whether somebody’s iPhone UStream camera feed is catching you at any given time and broadcasting it to the world. Giving up your privacy is scary. Giving individuals the power to broadcast is amazing. The world will never be the same. Rictus.

Oh, and the application is beautiful and works seamlessly, shouting out to (I can’t say the sill word tweeples) twitter, broadcasting your location and allowing you to chat with your audience at the same time. Truly brilliant development.

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As a relative newbie in much of the spam world I find myself Mayberry-like ignorant in the massively abusive world of bulletin board attackers. I naively ran my comments section on this blog, pretty open because nobody comes here but my son, who’s four and…only then when he’s sitting on my lap.

So I was surprised that 2,600 spammers were doing everything in their power to help the world get rich quick and do so with astonishing manly prowess. It took me about an hour to ding all the spammers and in doing so I lost the fifty excellent comments from my reader(s?).

And I then I started dorking around searching for a something that could handle the spam load without the word Barracuda in the title. I’m sure that there are many happy ‘Cuda users but it must be a world that is Windows 3.1 centric.

And then I found WP-SpamFree and it’s amazing. I have no idea how it works (first sign of a great product…it’s none of my business how you get rid of spammers, the less I kn0w the better) and yet it hums along dinging would be mass marketers left and right. I’ve rarely been so happy with a product. And this one was, I think, free or one of the many excellent flavors of open source that passes for free. Or maybe I’ll get a bill in 30 days, fine with me. Nice work over there at H6 Web Geek.

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