This post contains no spoilers

The new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked four days before its release.

The copy of the book is just photos of each page, but there it is for everyone to download.

Scholastic purportedly spent $20 million to keep leaks under wraps, but all it took was one untrustworthy person with a digital camera and lots of time to spare.

One wonders if it was worth the money at all. As Schneier says in the link below, people are probably going to still buy the book.

[link]

Update: The publisher has not yet confirmed, nor have they denied this is the true version. A few weeks ago there was a fake leak that caused a bit of an uproar.

The LA Times has more:

“There are multiple versions of what appear to be official copies of the book on the Internet, and they all look very convincing, but they are conflicting,” said Lisa Holton, president of trade publishing and book fairs at Scholastic. “Our goal is to take down all this different material, and by taking it down we’ll never know whether any of it was real until you read it yourself on Saturday morning.”

Salon has more:

How did “Potter” get out? I have no idea. One account fingers a Canadian fellow named Byron Ng who says he stumbled upon the cache after some intrepid Web searching. But it’s a complete mystery who posted the pictures. The person’s fingers can be seen in some of the shots, and there’s an occasional glimpse of a brown shoe. All you can tell is that the person is white and has a taste for drab carpeting — not to mention extremely good connections.

I got a few requests to explain the flowchart in my previous post a little more, to give a few details as to how I integrate everything I do on the Internet.

So here goes nothing.

Let’s start with the central point of my Internet adventures: Gmail. Everything happens here. Everything. Gmail isn’t just my email client, it’s a very good record of everything I do on the Internet.

I primarily use Google Talk for chats, so if I need to remember a conversation, it’s usually there. That’s the beauty of Gmail. It’s a personal database. Search Gmail from Firefox.

I have 5 email accounts filtered into one central Gmail account that I’ve had since the second week Gmail launched. I’m only using 20% of my storage (though, that percentage is growing quickly as of late, and you’ll see why in a bit). Chances are, if you’ve ever contacted me, it’s sitting in a Google server somewhere.

But Gmail itself is a little unruly if you wish to dump tons of data into it. I’m one of those weirdos that likes to have his inbox empty at the end of the day, so I find myself constantly labeling and archiving messages, even though I had several prefilters set up. That’s where Lifehacker’s Better Gmail firefox plugin comes in handy.

I had previously been using a smattering of Greasemonkey scripts I found on Userscripts.org, but it was difficult (and a serious pain) to keep everything up to date.

This customizable plugin helps increase work flows and I’ve installed it on every machine I use. But there’s two features that make it a killer plugin: Google Calendar and Google Reader integration within Gmail. Say goodbye to Outlook.

It gets better. Using RSS and a little trick with Yahoo! Alerts where I email myself RSS feeds, everything I share in Google Reader gets emailed back to me. I filter it out of my inbox, tag it and when I have a vague recollection of some obscure blog post, I just search my Gmail account.

And that link blog from Google Reader gets pushed elsewhere too. A few recent reads end up on my link blog, but they all also get pushed onto my Facebook profile via Mario Romero’s Google Reader application.

I use the same Y! Alerts trick for just about everything with RSS, including but not limited to del.icio.us and flickr. And I can push information back out to flickr, Facebook and Backpack using Quick Contact emails set up in Gmail.

Most of this communication happens in the background as I passively push a button or two to bookmark items for future reference. I hardly use Gmail to actually make one on one (or even one to many) communications.

That’s where Facebook comes in.

After much wrangling, I’ve finally convinced all of my friends to join Facebook. All of them, and quite a few acquaintances too. I think of Facebook as a media hub. Where I use Gmail to collect massive amounts of data I think is relevant to me, I use Facebook to push that media saved in Gmail I think might be relative to at least one friend. I do this through a fairly simple series of Platform applications:

Note that I have Facebook send me a ton of email (all of it processed and filtered before it reaches my inbox) and so the cycle begins anew.

This is how I spend my day moving personal data around.

I was at the Live Earth show this weekend, and I, like many others at Giants stadium, noticed the plane hovering above carrying the banner which read:

DON’T BELIEVE AL GORE DEMANDDEBATE.COM

Members of this supposed grassroots org handed out the blue balls seen bouncing around the audience. They read: “I’m more worried about the intellectual debate” which is a half-assed attempt at attacking the Live Earth message.

I finally decided to check out the site, and I have to say, it’s a pile of crap. There’s nothing on the demand debate site that says what we should be actually be debating.

Nowhere on the page is it mentioned who the site’s creators are. Nowhere. I did a whois lookup and found only this:

Domain Name: DEMANDDEBATE.COM
Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com
Name Server: YNS1.YAHOO.COM
Name Server: YNS2.YAHOO.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 18-jun-2007
Creation Date: 16-apr-2007
Expiration Date: 16-apr-2009

A commentor here notes:

demanddebate.com is registered to Steven Milloy, a well-paid shill for big oil and big tobacco. “Demand Debate?” More like “Deliberate FUD.”

DemocraticUnderground found a more complete whois:

Domain Name………. demanddebate.com
Creation Date…….. 2007-04-17
Registration Date…. 2007-04-17
Expiry Date………. 2009-04-17
Organisation Name…. Steven Milloy
Organisation Address. P O Box 99800
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. EmeryVille
Organisation Address. 94662
Organisation Address. CA
Organisation Address. US

Admin Name……….. PrivateRegContact Admin
Admin Address…….. P O Box 99800
Admin Address……..
Admin Address…….. EmeryVille
Admin Address…….. 94662
Admin Address…….. CA
Admin Address…….. US
Admin Email………. contact@myprivateregistration.com
Admin Phone………. +1.5105952002
Admin Fax…………

Tech Name………… PrivateRegContact TECH
Tech Address……… P O Box 99800
Tech Address………
Tech Address……… EmeryVille
Tech Address……… 94662
Tech Address……… CA
Tech Address……… US
Tech Email……….. contact@myprivateregistration.com
Tech Phone……….. +1.5105952002
Tech Fax………….
Name Server………. yns1.yahoo.com
Name Server………. yns2.yahoo.com

Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited

WHOIS Underlying Registry Data:

Whois Server Version 1.3

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

Domain Name: DEMANDDEBATE.COM
Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com
Name Server: YNS1.YAHOO.COM
Name Server: YNS2.YAHOO.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 18-jun-2007
Creation Date: 16-apr-2007
Expiration Date: 16-apr-2009

>>> Last update of whois database: Sun, 8 Jul 2007 10:42:28 UTC < <<

The National Review confirms this here with this quote:

DemandDebate debuted at Live Earth (New Jersey) with four aerial banners (each with different messages questioning Gore and global warming), and T-shirts and beach balls bearing the message, “I’m more worried about the intellectual climate.” We had two six-man teams distribute T-shirts and beachballs inside and outside the stadium.

You can see what the Tees and balls look like at DemandDebate.com.

Attached is a photo of one of the aerial banners. Reportedly one of the banners was shown on NBC.

One pilot was listening to Al Gore on XM radio and timed a low pass to drown him out. The stunt apparently worked as we got lots of hate e-mail from Gore accolytes who complained that they couldn’t hear Al Gore.

The beach balls were ubiquitous on TV, and found their way on stage.

According to the Bergen Record, Live Earth performer John Mayer spent most of his post-performance press conference lamenting DemandDebate.

DemandDebate.com had 7,500 page hits over the weekend. Live Earth bloggers — including The Nation — were livid about DemandDebate.

I’m not sure where National Review got the quote from, since their Planet Gore blog seems to be the only place on the internet feauring anything from the above block quotation. However, the pieces seem to fit.

So there you have it. Steven Milloy, accused shill for the tobacco industry and quasi-science commentator for FOX News Channel staged this silly little diatribe.

The real issue with this isn’t whether or not we should be debating the merits of global warming.

Just clicking through the demanddebate.com site, I’ve noticed quite a few dirty tricks pop up.

A link to coverage of demand debate pulls up a negative music review of the concert by Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck as if its one sentence line about demanddebate had anything to do with the article as a whole. It doesn’t.

Under the kits section of the site, a few movies are listed to offer as alternatives for teaching about global warming. Astroturfers have always liked to wedge an overall debate where there is virtually no debate within the scientific community regarding the overall theory. Think teaching creationism in science classes as a “balanced” alternative to teaching evolution.

Lastly, the site requests donations and appears to have plans to sell merch “soon.” Problem is, the only contact information on the site is a single Web form, so it’s not clearly apparent where your money is actually going.

I also found this interesting–yet uncomfirmed–tidbit:

A gatecrasher, in the form of a small airplane pulling a banner, asked the audience not to believe Al Gore and to demand debate at www.demanddebate.com (word has it from an anonymous Nation stringer that this airplane was spotted flying over Jacob Riis park in the Rockaways hours before the show — no word if Cheney has a pilot’s license).

I haven’t found any direct connection to a specific lobbying firm in D.C. or anywhere else, but I’m betting it took quite a few bottom feeders and neck-bearded mouthbreathers with money to pull this off.

The plus side is that the media hardly paid any attention to it. Maybe we’re starting to see the flaws in the “every story has two sides” argument?

God, I hope so.

Please support the “Internet Radio Equality Act” (S. 1353) so my work day doesn’t suck as much any more. I’m sick of my favorite internet radio stations “going silent” in protest of recent rate hikes.

Regards,

Zac Echola

I already hate MySpace because it’s a really, really bad application. But now they’re taking notes from another site I generally hate, Digg, with MySpace News. Except, in typical MySpace fashion, they’re doing it in a completely retarded, annoying and inept way, unlike Digg.

When someone links a site, through Digg, email, whatever, I want to go to that site. I don’t want a giant banner of the top of the page. But unlike other shitty sites that still do this, MySpace news doesn’t even give you the option to remove that damn frame.

If there’s a link on a site for http://www.whatever.com/blog/boring-post.php, I want to go to the URL http://www.whatever.com/blog/boring-post.php. I don’t want to go to http://news.myspace.com/toms-favorites/kitten_pictures/1230498712/.

It’s a flagrant brand push on content that isn’t even theirs. At least Google News, Yahoo News, and other sites that piss Sam Zell off, take you to the intended URL. MySpace just blatently steals content and slaps their branding all over it under the guise of “social news.”

I’m surprised the link icon actually even links to the intended URL, instead of the myspace page.

Boy, I can’t wait until they add another frame with annoying match.com advertising or talking “shoot the emoticon” flash ads.

Man I hate Tom. What a jerk.

Good thing the idiot “community” on myspace doesn’t give a shit about “news,” as evidenced by the lack of votes for the dumb stories on the news homepage.

At least every once in a while on Digg, you can find something interesting that doesn’t have anything to do with World of Warcraft, Steve Jobs, or Steve Jobs/World of Warcraft mashups.

I’ve been out of my mind busy the past week, so I haven’t had much of a chance to blog, but I’d like to touch on CNN’s use of citizen “journalists” for the VA Tech shooting today.

Cell phone footage is pretty cool, but I’m not comfortable giving random people (who may or may not have been close to the scene) a platform for hearsay and factual errors during regular news coverage. People called in to CNN and told their stories, but most of those stories seemed far-fetched and contradicted the fact we knew at the time, which wasn’t much.

All in all, the story has been developing rather slowly. As of this post, I don’t know the gunman’s name, yet I know the names of all the people who thought first to turn on their cell cams and Web cams when there was a rampaging lunatic on the loose.

What’s going on here?

More on this later.

Lorne Michaels: “I think that YouTube is great, because if you do something like ‘Dick in a Box,’ someone in Pakistan can see it.”
(New York Observer).

Perhaps no other network show has gotten more out of the free video-sharing Web site than Saturday Night Live. Indeed, at the very moment the long-running program seems to be emerging from a years-long slump, producing sketches—not just lip-synch bloopers—that people actually want to share, discuss, and watch again and again, YouTube has been there, doing more to re-establish the show’s cultural relevance than any honcho at NBC.

If you have never seen the skit before, you can watch it in my video section here.

What’s funny to me is that this whole Zell vs. The Internet, et. all meme didn’t blow up until the Washington Post published the story.

It was first reported in Zell’s own paper, The LA Times, where I talked about it here.

How does this bode, on a purely metaphysical level, for the future of Tribune Company?

Deep Jive Interest made some great points here (also in my link blog [RSS]) about Google making news a commodity.

I plan to touch on this and why bloggers may have linked to the Post article later tonight.

Stay tuned, friends!

Edit: Fixed the RSS link for my link blog.

I am…underwhelmed.

The idea of Joost fascinates me. But the execution of the service drives me nuts. I don’t like that it takes over my screen. I don’t really like the content to choose from…yet.

I also have serious questions about how Joost will offer local news.

Network affliates are already up-in-arms about their networks subverting the affiliate model and giving away primetime programing away via iTunes or their own sites (ABC has a player for affiliate Web sites, so you if you missed LOST, you might be able to watch it on your local ABC station Web site). Though, online revenue share for TV stations is probably worse off than newspaper revenue share.

It will be interesting to see how local TV stations will handle the disruption caused by the Web.