There has been a growing trend of states passing legislation redefining what constitutes a “local business presence,” widening the definition in order to grab a slice of online sales. States usually require that businesses with a physical presence within their borders collect sales tax from buyers—unless that state does not have a sales tax, in the case of New Hampshire. Out-of-state businesses are not obligated to unless they have a physical presence in the state in question. What the states have been doing is defining members of affiliate programs as a physical presence, so if a Mainer puts Amazon affiliate links on his or her blog, Amazon must collect sales tax for any sales they make to Maine residents. Understandably, this is something online retailers prefer to avoid, as it complicates accounting.

Below is the message sent to members of the program:

Greetings from the Amazon Associates Program.

We’re writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account will be closed and your Amazon Services LLC Associates Program Operating Agreement will be terminated effective October 6, 2013. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional Maine state tax collection legislation passed by the state legislature and signed by Governor LePage on June 5, 2013, with an effective date of October 9, 2013. As a result, we will no longer pay any advertising fees for customers referred to an Amazon Site after October 6, nor will we accept new applications for the Associates Program from Maine residents.

Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to October 7, 2013, will be processed and paid in full in accordance with your regular advertising fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of October 6, 2013, any final payments will be paid by December 31, 2013.

While we oppose this unconstitutional state legislation, we strongly support the federal Marketplace Fairness Act now pending before Congress. Congressional legislation is the only way to create a simplified, constitutional framework to resolve interstate sales tax issues and it would allow us to re-open our Associates program to Maine residents.

We thank you for being part of the Amazon Associates Program, and look forward to re-opening our program when Congress passes the Marketplace Fairness Act.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Associates Team

Checking Headers

You can use cURL to see the headers sent in a request. I use this all the time to see if the headers I’m trying to send in a script are working right.

$ curl -I http://www.google.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2012 02:45:58 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
(...)

Sending POST Requests

I was working on a project recently that involved receiving POST requests from a client script running on another server. Since there was no convenient HTML form to use to repeatedly test changes made to the API, I ended up using cURL. Sending POST data is a simple matter of passing an argument that looks something like a query string.

curl http://example.org/url-to-recieve-post-request -d "name=Gandalf&type=wizard";

Spoofing User Agents

You can edit the user agent sent along with the request, which is another thing I’ve found useful in testing.

curl http://example.org -d "name=Gandalf&type=wizard" --user-agent "WordPress"

Downloading Files

While my first instinct is usually to use wget to quickly snag a remote file, that particular package isn’t installed on every system. I don’t believe OS X includes it by default (though that’s nothing Homebrew can’t take care of), for example. cURL can also be used to quickly download and save a remote URL to your current directory.

curl -O http://wordpress.org/latest.zip

The only reason necessary is suspicion of a “cybersecurity threat,” which is so loosely defined as to include the use of anonymization tools like Tor and VPNs, or using GPG to encrypt your emails. Perhaps even BitTorrent. Basically, anything that somebody could deem “suspicious” is enough justification for a business to monitor your internet usage and report their findings back to the Department of Homeland Security.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a frequently asked questions page about CISPA, for more in-depth information, as well as a form to contact your senators. Since the bill passed the House, it’s up to the Senate to strike it down. President Obama issued a statement of his intent to veto a bill that would “sacrifice the privacy of our citizens in the name of security,” but senatorial opposition is still needed.

CISPA stands for The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a cybersecurity bill written by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) (H.R. 3523). The bill purports to allow companies and the federal government to share information to prevent or defend from cyberattacks. However, the bill expressly authorizes monitoring of our private communications, and is written so broadly that it allows companies to hand over large swaths of personal information to the government with no judicial oversight—effectively creating a “cybersecurity” loophole in all existing privacy laws.  Because the bill is so hotly debated now, unofficial proposed amendments are also being circulated and the actual bill language is in flux.

“Cyber” bills of any kind are pointless, even when they’re not harmful. There is no crime that can be committed using a computer that is not already sufficiently covered by existing legislature. There are no laws specifically for “ski-mask-robbery” or “battery-with-an-encyclopedia,” and neither should there be “computer-thievery” or “internet-fraud.” You don’t need “cyberbullying” laws, for example, when you already have laws against harassment, assault and battery, slander/libel, et cetera.

Of course, the real “first blogger” is hard to pin down. While it may have been Winer, Justin Hall’s Links From the Underground, which launched in 1994, is also a contender.

Meanwhile, TidBITS.com is over 21 years old. It wasn’t exactly a blog when it was started in 1990 as an “online newsletter and Web site” about the Macintosh, but it has slowly adopted that format. It’s one of the oldest still-updated websites on the internet.

As for domain names, the first one to be registered with a .com TLD was Symbolics.com, followed shortly by the other 99 oldest domains registered from 1985-1987.

The first website on the first web server ever would, of course, be info.cern.ch. The original page that was hosted there has been replaced over the years, but it’s still something of a historical landmark. Incidentally, the trend of hosting websites on a www subdomain was accidental, and caused by the CERN site.

Unfortunately, Google’s changes have been affecting legit blogs. One noteworthy example is Cult of Mac, a blog that aims to provide “timely news, insightful analysis, helpful how-tos and honest product reviews about Apple and Apple-related products.”

Cult of Mac has experienced the opposite of Google’s goal: their content has largely disappeared from Google’s SERPs, while content farms and spam-blogs scraping Cult of Mac posts have been pushed to the top.

A lot of our traffic came from Google, which is why the changes are so serious. I’m already seeing a big drop-off in traffic. Over the weekend and today, the traffic is half what it normally would be.

I’m pissed because we’ve worked our asses off over the last two years to make this a successful site. Cult of Mac is an independently owned small business. We’re a startup. We have a small but talented team, and I’m the only full timer. We’re busting our chops to produce high-quality, original content on a shoestring budget.

Indeed, Cult of Mac does break a lot of stories. Along with the Boy Genius Report, Mac Rumors and 9 to 5 Mac, they together are the source of the lion’s share of Apple-related reporting. It’s strange that Google’s algorithm would red-flag them as a content farm. Perhaps it is a result of “splogs” scraping their content; maybe a glitch in Google’s secret algorithm is causing one of the spam blogs to be marked as the original source for some reason or another?

Many people commenting on the subject, whether in editorials, podcasts or discussion forums, would bring up the subject of how strong the users’ cracked passwords were. There were a large percentage of users with weak passwords like qwerty, password, 123456, or monkey. Yes, they are obviously weak passwords. However, I think it’s wrong to use them as an example of bad user-end security practices.

I, for one, would never use one of my more secure passwords for an account on a blog or discussion forum. I would be likely to come up with a throwaway that I would never use on a site where I would care if it were compromised. Considering that Gawker’s readers are probably a little more tech-savvy than your grandparents, why assume that they wouldn’t take the same approach? Given Gawker’s security breach, I think it’s a well-justified method to use.

Also, the AppStorm main page has received a redesign. It’s simple, matches the rest of the site, and I like the icons along the top.

It’s certainly an interesting idea, though I wonder if it might take away from the blogs a little bit? The Tuts+ blogs pay a lot of money upfront to their regular authors, but infrequent contributors could be more attracted to the promise of recurring sales.

Google Becomes “Topeka”

Referencing Topeka, Kansas’ changing of their name to “Google, Kansas” for a month, Google changed their name to “Topeka” for April Fools’ Day.

Envato Launches GIFtuts+

Envato, famous for their TUTS+ network of blog, announced their newest site: GIFtuts+. Complete with several horrid animated GIFs, Comic Sans and Papyrus, the announcement links to an actual gif.tutsplus.com domain.

HootSuite Goes 3D

To my knowledge, the joke didn’t go beyond an announcement and a retweet campaign promising “early beta access,” but the idea was pretty good. And bonus points for the Owl logo with 3D glasses.

YouTube Text-Only Mode

It costs a lot of money to run YouTube. Help them save money by using the new text-only mode. YouTube saves $1 per second in bandwidth when you view videos as text.

The Secrets of the Universe by Sheldon Cooper, Ph.D

BookAdvice.net reviews Dr. Sheldon Cooper’s new book. Be sure to click the “REVIEW” link for the full review…

UniXKCD

The popular web comic XKCD changed their homepage to a Unix command line, including many of the expected commands, but with humorous responses. You may still be able to see it here, and the Reddit thread has a cheat sheet of available commands.

Clicky Twitter Updates

You like Foursquare. You like Clicky. Why not combine the two? Exactly what we were thinking! Every time you visit a site with the Clicky tracking code installed, we’ll automatically tweet out from your Twitter account which web site you are viewing. Combined with Foursquare, not only will all your followers know WHERE you are every second of every day, but also what you’re doing on the internet – every second of every day!

Clicky Blog: Check in at your favorite web sites – automatically!

Reddit: Everyone’s an Admin!

Reddit’s elaborate April Fools’ Day event was to throw a bit of chaos into the community…by giving everyone admin privileges! For 24 hours you could actually ban users, vote stories up or down multiple times, edit other users’ headlines, etc.. (I think they kept a separate database of the edits, and used some JavaScript magic to dynamically apply them after the original content loaded.)

World of WarCraft Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number

Blizzard posted a series of fake announcements, including the “Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number,” which tells everyone just how awesome your armor and other gear is.

As part of the upcoming stat-system revamp, we plan to introduce a new tool that will let World of Warcraft players know exactly where they stand in comparison to other players: the Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number. With this new system, you’ll no longer have to wonder about your perceived or actual worth as a player. Your Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number, automatically derived from the quality of the gear you currently possess, will be placed on your character sheet and in the Armory, and also displayed over your character’s head in-game as an easy-to-read bar-like object that steadily grows as you acquire loot.

Google Maps Australia – Aussie Directions

Google Australia updated their Maps service to give more…interesting driving instructions.

MOO: Double sided Business Cards: Reinvented!

MOO.com, famous for their double-sided business cards with a different image on each card, announced their latest offering: double-sided cards with the image on the back instead of the front!

Kodak: Aromatography

Imagine seeing an image of a field of wildflowers and the experiencing all the delicate and complex aromas that accompany the visual experience.

It’s no longer just a dream, thanks to recent breakthroughs in Neuro-Optic-Nasal-Sense Imaging*

GMail: Today’s Vowel Outage

The official GMail blog has been updated with news of a vowel server failure that affected the web front-end of the email service for most of the day.

At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter ‘a’ for a subset of users. As error rates escalated, the strain spread to other datacenters. We worked quickly to avoid a cascading failure of the entire alphabet by implementing a stopgap solution that limited the damage to the letters ‘a,’ ‘e,’ ‘i,’ ‘o,’ and ‘u.’ As a result, we’re experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage. (We’re still investigating whether the letter ‘y’ is impacted and will post an update here shortly.)

Ben and Jerry’s Ice Screen™

Ben and Jerry’s brings you the amazing new “Ice Screen” technology that lets you sample ice cream online by licking your screen.

• 30 Websites That Make A Lot Of Money Online
• 30 Blog’s That Make A Lot Of Money Online

Can you guess which website has the highest annual revenue? Google! They make $21,800,000,000 a year…or $691.27 per second. Amazing, isn’t it? Amazon is second on the list, followed by Yahoo, then eBay, MSN, PayPal, and then iTunes. NYTimes.com comes in thirtieth, with a whopping $175,000,000, which is nothing to sneeze at.

On the blogging side, TechCrunch is leading with $200,000 in monthly earnings. Mashable comes in second with a comparative value. Envato’s Tuts+ Network comes in at #8, with Smashing Magazine right behind. Quite a few recognizable names on the list.

If you’ve wondered what your favorite blogs and businesses make, these lists should give you a rough idea. Quite fun to look at.