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Tynt Insight: The worst thing in the entire world

<@Crash> China's Wang wins third gold medal at short track
<@Crash> Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/olympics/2010/?eref=sinav#ixzz0ghvk2qyP
<@Crash> WTF?
<@Crash> I didn't even copypasta that part!
<@Crash> I was all hooray for China's Wang, but that came out too
<@Crash> That shit's just fucking rude now.

More and more companies are integrating software called Tynt Insight (formerly Tynt Tracer, a name I’m sure was changed because of the creepy connotations) with their websites. It’s free, and it’s pretty easy to install: all you have to do is include one extra JavaScript file on each of your web pages and it’ll automatically do its thing.

So what is its thing, exactly?

The ostensible purpose is copy/paste tracking. In short, it tracks what text and images users are copying from your web site. Tynt’s website talks again and again and again and again and again about how what is copied and how often it’s copied can provide valuable information to the webmaster. It’s a magic technology that produces WOW ACTUAL NUMBERS, so I can see the attraction, but I don’t really see the value in knowing what headlines people are copying to make penis jokes about.

Really, what use is there in being able to say, “2,500 people have copied text from my blog“? It’s a completely meaningless number. It means even less than visitor numbers or Alexa rankings, which, while easy to obsess over, do actually have marginal utility.

The reports of what’s being copied from your web pages could potentially be useful, I suppose. If you need JavaScript to tell you that people are copying the summaries from your articles to show others, more power to you. The rest of us will just have to figure that out on our own.

I’m pretty much outside of the target adopter group for Tynt Insight, though, and this clearly appeals to others a lot more than it does me.

<@CHz> The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is considering action against a producer of "The Hurt Locker" who sent multiple e-mails urging academy members to vote for his movie in the Oscar best-picture race and "not a $500 million film"
<@CHz> Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/entertainment/academy-ponders-action-against-locker-producer-who-sent-e-mails-soliciting-oscar-votes-85688222.html#ixzz0gulgCN6w
<@CHz> f'in copyjacked

I don’t really mind the idea of a website knowing what I’m copying from it. It’s definitely creepy, and as I explained above I don’t know why someone would care, but this doesn’t keep me awake at night. Google Analytics is I think much more invasive, and I let that do whatever it wants to, so yeah, I’m pretty much okay with this in theory.

But I was curious about what information they track, so I checked out their privacy policy. Here’s the relevant part, in its entirety:

When you use TYNT Products, we will collect the following information:

  1. The Internet domain and IP address from which you access the TYNT Products;
  2. The type of browser and operating system used to access the TYNT Products;
  3. Screen resolution of your monitor;
  4. The date and time you access the TYNT Products;
  5. The page you are visiting with the TYNT Products;
  6. If you linked to a TYNT web site from another referring web site, the address of that web site.

By using the TYNT Products, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed both within and without the United States of America

By using the TYNT website, you agree to the preceding uses of your information in this way by TYNT.

Browser, OS, and screen resolution are pretty much par for the course as far as these things are concerned. I don’t see at all why Tynt needs to know these things, but that just ties back into my opinion that the whole thing is useless. If you’re the kind of person whom Tynt Insight excites, then you’ll probably find the demographic info useful too.

Do note that the policy doesn’t say they won’t use your IP address to track what you specifically are doing, doesn’t say they’ll delete your identifying information at any point in time, and doesn’t say they won’t give away or sell your information. And I’m sure there’s quite a bit more that it doesn’t say. They know which sites you copy text from, and therefore which sites you visit, and they can do whatever they want with it, whenever they want.

If this bothers you in any way, well that’s your toughie, because Tynt offers no way to opt out. According to their technical FAQ, they’re currently “investing considerable effort into developing a feature that will allow users to block Tynt software across all the sites that are using it.” I’m glad they felt this was an important enough issue to spend time on, but I’m dismayed that this was apparently not important enough to address before they let their tracer loose. Nothing builds a rapport with your users like saying, “we’re going to track you, and we’re working on a way for you to opt out, but until then we’re just going to track you.”

Thankfully, since Tynt Insight is just one JavaScript file, it’s blockable with any sort of ad blocking browser add-on, like NoScript and Adblock Plus for Firefox. The request URL is something like http://tcr.tynt.com/javascripts/Tracer.js?user=userid&s=somenumber, with userid and somenumber filled in with different values depending on the site. I’d recommend casting tynt.com and all of its subdomains into a black hole and forgetting about it.

<@CHz> http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702911/Security-Appears-Unannounced-At-Infinity-Ward-Studio-Heads-Missing-Staff-Freaked-Out-.html what the eff
<+Tails> "Infinity Ward studio heads Vince Zampella and Jason West reportedly met with Activision this morning and have not been seen by Infinity Ward staff members since.
<+Tails> Read more: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702911/Security-Appears-Unannounced-At-Infinity-Ward-Studio-Heads-Missing-Staff-Freaked-Out-.html#ixzz0h1AkEOSa
<+Tails> lol the copied link

I’ve intentionally avoided talking about Tynt Insight’s second, and far more visible feature, but the IRC logs I’ve been using as section separators illustrate it. Whenever you copy text from a page running Tynt Insight, it automatically adds an attribution link back to the webpage at the end of what you’re copying. It does this silently, so you only know it’s happened after you paste the text somewhere else.

Let me rephrase this. Tynt Insight modifies a system behavior without telling you or asking for your permission.

I’m not even going to explain their reasoning behind doing this, because this is indefensible. There is no planet in the universe on which this is acceptable behavior.

And, just like the data tracking, they don’t yet offer a way to disable this. From the technical FAQ again:

Q. I don’t want Tynt Insight to add a link when I copy and paste. What can I do?

A. We’re currently working on providing users an option to opt out of Tynt Insight. If you’d like to disable Tynt Insight immediately, you can use an ad or script blocking tool to disable Tynt Insight.

No.

No no no no no.

Here, FAQ guy, sit down. I want to talk to you for a second.

First, you are fundamentally changing the behavior of my web browser without my permission. This is not something you do and then make users opt out of. This is something you make opt-in. The onus is not on me to tell you not to pollute my clipboard; it is on you to not do it without asking me.

Second, why is this not a feature already? Why was this not a feature before you launched? Either no one in the company thought about this beforehand, which is embarrassing, or no one cared, which is reprehensible.

Tynt Insight is the worst thing in the entire world. Leave my browser alone.

2010-03-03 binary
network Comments (0)

“The Farmer”

The Farmer (1887?)

(hover over underlined words for annotations)

Once on a time he used to plough
And rise at dawn to milk the cough,
And drive with merry song and laugh
To pasture Brindle and her caugh.

Then for the pigs he’d fill the trough,
And for the market he’d be ough;
Sometimes, his mare would bruise her hough
Against a fence-post or a rough.

And there he’d switch her with a bough
To teach her better anyhough.
He planted wheat to make the dough,
Which, in drought, was hard to grough.

In winter, when his work was through,
A little sporting he would dough.
He’d wander with his gun and shough
And aim at crows he couldn’t knough.

Sometimes he’d hunt along the slough
For birds that do not live there nough,
And shoot a seagull or a crough,
Which he with joy would proudly shough.

From swamp land, watered by a lough,
He made good pasture for his stough,
By laying here and there a sough,
While perspiration wet his brough.

Sometimes a snake that shed it slough
Would scare him so he’d run and pough
Till stuck knee-deep within a slough,
He’d yell until he raised a rough.

But rough work makes the farmer cough,
And, careless hough much people scough,
He lives on boarders rough and tough,
Whough vough theigh dough not eat enough.

- Oil City Derrick.

About “The Farmer”

The Reno Gazette-Journal runs a small feature called “Today in History,” where it reprints something that was published on this day in a previous year. It’s usually a blurb from an article or an advertisement, no more than a paragraph, but it’s usually pretty fun to read, especially when they go with some old-timey stuff.

In Wednesday, February 24th’s edition, they reprinted an ad that originally ran in 1890. I wanted to show my friend Colin the ad, but I didn’t feel like typing it all out, so I hit the Googles with a phrase from it to see if it was present somewhere on the internet. And, luckily for me, the NEGenWeb Project exists. They have a pretty rad library of transcribed and scanned books, journals, atlases, etc. published in Nebraska. One of them, the special “immigrant issue” of the Nebraska State Journal (now the Lincoln Journal Star), published on June 5, 1887, contained the same ad. You can see the ad on this page, under the header “TO WEAK MEN.”

Because it was available, and also because old newspapers are awesome, I read more of what they’ve put up on the site from it. On the same page as the ad was a poem called “The Farmer,” credited to the Oil City Derrick, a paper which is now simply called the Derrick. There’s no information on the poem beyond that, such as who wrote it, or where it was originally published (if it wasn’t the OCD). I could only find one other record of the poem: it was also published in the November 19, 1887 edition of the Tuapeka Times of New Zealand. That site has a scan of the poem, which I used to supplement the NEGenWeb transcription, because the latter seems to have numerous typos.

I thought the poem was hella awesome, so I decided to print it here. Colin rightfully pointed out that the wordplay is pretty similar to Ogden Nash’s, although Nash was born at least fifteen years after “The Farmer” was written. All of the annotations are mine.

2010-02-25 vacuous Comments (0)

Guide

There’s this one guy on the internet named Peter Hosey who recently started a blog feature called “Ship-It Saturday,” where he’s posting projects that are basically done save for maybe one or two niggling things, in the interest of just getting them done I mean seriously come on. I’ve been thinking about it since he started, because I have one project in particular that’s been basically done for an embarrassingly long time, but which somehow has remained unpublished for a staggering dearth of good reasons. I mean seriously, come on.

No longer.

Presenting Guide.

Guide is a small game I wrote to teach myself JavaScript. Puzzle, web-based, check the hell out of it. I guarantee you’ll be challenged. Feel free to leave comments, bug reports, and death threats as comments on this post. Especially death threats.

2010-01-23 binary
reflexive Comments (0)

VGM composers works lists

Ages ago, for the VG Frequency blog, I wrote a series of posts spotlighting some lesser known composers of video game music whose works I greatly enjoy. Each of these posts contained a list of the games they’d composed music for, just as a flat text file.

Since writing those posts, I’ve become really unhappy with those lists. Aside from some inaccuracies, which would be easily fixable, my main problem with them is that they’re inadequately sourced. As a result, there’s no way to tell which games were included because they were 100% confirmed to have music from the composers, and which games were included because a generally reliable site on the internet listed them.

I’ve recently been in contact with someone who’s been corresponding with one of the composers I wrote an article on. The information he’s received from the composer has inspired me to redo those lists, updating the information and overhauling the presentation. So, my site now has a new section, the VGM composers works lists. I’ve only redone the first two of the five so far, and I’m not sure when I’ll get around to the other three, but check it out, and let me know what you think (especially if the pages are broken in your browser, because there’s some JavaScript magic in there).

The content is still basically the same at heart, big ol’ lists of video games, but every game contains a source for its inclusion on the list, and the color coding makes it much easier to differentiate between games with concrete information and the ones with a possibility that the composer wasn’t involved at all. I think these changes make them much more reliable resources than they were before.

2009-12-08 harmonic
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Old Mac CDs #3: Fall ‘93 Macintosh Promo CD

This installment in the series will be a special one for a couple of reasons. First off, this is not a CD that I or my family originally owned. Unlike the CDs in the previous two installments and the ones I intend to cover in the future, I snagged this one from a college professor who was cleaning out his office.

Second, this is not a CD at all, because the Fall ‘93 Macintosh Promo CD (barcode T0592LL/A, catalog number 9140864 on the spine) is actually two CDs (CDAC-043300 and CDRM-1094130).

Walk with me, I’ll explain everything on the way.

Fall '93 Macintosh Promo CD front cover: a way-cool experience for the eyes, ears, and mind.
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2009-11-22 binary Comments (0)

Invariant

Last night, I had a problem with Xcode not recognizing a provisioned iPhone. After some fiddling and a screen sharing session, the problem was fixed with a hardware reset to the iPhone.

Apple and its products, like most of our world, have changed over the past thirty-three years, even over just the past decade. A garage computer kit manufacturer has turned into a multinational producer of computers, software, and mobile devices; computers have changed fundamental hardware and aesthetic designs; and operating systems have gained color, multitasking, and Unix certification. The iPod, originally not a personal computing platform at all, has turned into a fully fledged platform for application development, all while having a significant impact on our culture.

And yet, the past will never truly die. We live in a time where encyclopedia articles are written and updated minutes after events happen, and where nerdish collectors indulge their nostalgia for all to see. And despite all the progress and change we make, sometimes the solution is exactly the same as it was more than twenty years ago: turn it off and back on again.

I’m about six months late with this post, but happy twenty-fifth anniversary to the Macintosh. You changed the world.

Flash 8 and JavaScript are required to watch the video inline.

2009-07-08 binary Comments (0)

Old Mac CDs #2 Gaiden: HyperGlot ICON Resources

This is another followup to the The Macintosh Demo Applications CD Version 1.1 post. It’s the last one, and it’ll be really quick, I promise.

One of the demos, or demo groups, rather, was for HyperGlot Software Company, who made several language-learning applications. I peeked at the ICON resources for the general HyperGlot demo; the demo was written with HyperCard, so these ICONs are used as small images for buttons, like the icon for a pause button. And these images are, well, let’s go with “precious.”

HyperGlot Demo's ICON resources open in ResEdit's resource browser

It would take far too much space and time to explain why each and every one of these icons is a work of art, and really their fabulousness speaks for itself, so I’m going to leave the commentary track to the reader. If you pinned me down and forced me to choose my absolute favorites, they would be 9539, 10191, 11555, 19141, 21021, 23357, and 26905. But they are all equally masterpieces.

2009-04-06 binary
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Old Mac CDs #2 Gaiden: Finder icon masks

This is an ancillary post to my previous one on The Macintosh Demo Applications CD Version 1.1, based on an observation I made while preparing the icon images for the application list. Before I begin, I need to provide a brief overview of file icons in the classic Mac OS, starting with I believe System 7.

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2009-03-17 binary Comments (0)

Old Mac CDs #2: The Macintosh Demo Applications CD Version 1.1

Well, I’ve actually gone ahead and made a second installment, which officially makes “Old Mac CDs” a feature!

This one is another Centris 610 CD: The Macintosh Demo Applications CD Version 1.1 (CDRM-1044940)

The Macintosh Demo Applications CD Version 1.1 disc

Continue reading ›

2009-03-16 binary Comments (0)

small update

This blog now has a profile page.

For the first time since its registration three years ago, quiteajolt.com has content.

Also, Interjacent Porphyry has been back in business for a couple of months, but I forgot to make a post announcing it.

2008-12-16 reflexive Comments (0)