Blog

Today we learned about the value of properly setting white balance, how zooming is bad, and how CRTs love to flicker.

PlentyOfFish has ads on their site. Nothing new there. What is interesting, however, is that these ads include those for the sale of counterfeit drugs as well. This includes illegitimate “male enhancement” drugs, counterfeit birth control pills, and fake cholesterol-reducing products.

I’m astounded, especially as the advertising handled by PlentyOfFish, and not though some external intermediary. The latter would be more excusable, as it would presumably outside the control of PoF.

This first screenshot is of the advertisement in question, located at the top left of the page.

And this is the website that it points you to. You might be familiar with this template if you check the links that spammers send you:

One more reason to use the much superior OKCupid.

Ottawa was hit with a magnitude 5.5 earthquake today. The epicenter was just north of town.

I was in the office at the time. The first rumbles started, and then it really started to shake. We evacuated the building. At home there’s no damage; one of my two monitors tipped over from its stand and knocked over one of my external drives; that’s about it.

It was kind of interesting to be outside at the time, seeing everyone else on the street being on at the same time.

Two nights ago, I just couldn’t sleep. So to pass the time, I decided to create a fake profile on PlentyOfFish. I took a picture of an 18 year old model from an adult entertainment website, slapped on a description from a PhD student in Toronto, and waited.

It didn’t take long. Within minutes I had 5 messages. Within 5 hours, this character had received more messages than my legitimate account on PoF had had in two years. Here are some of the golden conversations.

(more…)