If you haven't read my rants about advertising and ad blockers, you should. Rarely does an ad convince me ever to buy something, but recently something managed to get around the ad blocks and filters to appear in front of me, and I screamed out "Take My Money!!!" Yeah. They got me. They got me really good.

I blame Dan Shapiro...

Ad blocking tools have become popular in the recent months, especially with Apple allowing ad blocking apps in IOS. Having been a dot com pioneer in advertising, I'm going to delve into the realities of ads and ad blocking. It's not pretty, and it will no doubt upset some people in the ad industry.

But first, let me tell you a little story...

It's been a while since I put anything up here. Things got really busy in 2014. We moved the servers around and things were offline for a while thanks to a security upgrade that got delayed by life. Oh yes, and we had another baby. That was a year ago. Babies are much more fun and much, much messier than servers and blogs. Now I've found a few hours to put this back online.

It shall be all downhill from here... :)

A open letter to Jean Todt, president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA),

Dear Jean,

I have some experience in the world of sound, both as a musician and a record producer. I also have some experience attending Formula 1 races. Regarding the recent criticism of the new rules and lack of loudness of the F1 cars, I applaud the reduction in engine noise levels for this season, and I think Luca Di Montezemolo's analysis that it is the "music of the engine, not the noise" that needs to be addressed is spot on. But louder is not better.

Jonathan Mann sings "Don't blow up the Internet." Why? Because the FCC is about to axe-murder net neutrality. No really, Goodbye, Net Neutrality; Hello, Net Discrimination.

The surreal world that is the United States Intelligence Community has recently released a statement over the Heartbleed vulnerability as a rebuttal to an article from Bloomberg. The government's statement is as follows:

Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before April 2014 are wrong. The Federal government was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL until it was made public in a private sector cybersecurity report.

There are a number of issues I'd like to point out from this (aka the bleedin' obvious)...

Tomorrow, March 7th 2014, is the scheduled IPO for Coupons.com, Inc. For those interested (or not), here's my 10 cents on why the SEC filing is a little on the conservative side (they always are). It says Coupons.com, Inc. has never been profitable since they began in 1998. While that's true, it isn't completely true. In another lifetime, Coupons.com was once profitable, under the brand name CouponNet, and I have every confidence that Coupons.com, Inc. will be profitable too.

20 years-ago, I registered a couple of domain names - Coupon.com and Coupons.com. In fact, I had to fight hard to register Coupons.com because, back in 1994, Network Solutions were only registering one domain name per applicant. After carefully explaining that coupons.com was the plural of coupon.com, and that Network Solutions would find themselves with an intellectual property dispute if they registered it to someone else, they reluctantly registered the domain name to me. In December of 1994, I put the first downloadable coupon on the web, which was for a British pub in the Los Angeles area (not exactly a surprise for those of you who know me).

Bruce Schneier says that the NSA is too big and powerful and that it's time to break up the agency:

Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA's missions.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/20/opinion/schneier-nsa-too-big/index.ht…

In an earlier blog post, I covered the effect of the NSA on the attorney/client relationship. Now the American Bar Association has woken up and is taking the matter seriously. Apparently, it took the revelations that the NSA was spying on an American law firm in order for the ABA to put on their super hero cape and type up a letter.

Yes. You can fly with your guitar as carry-on. And it's the law. In 2012, President Obama signed into law the ‘‘FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012,’’ which, along with provisions for enhancing runway safety and easing restrictions on transporting lithium batteries, contains the following text:

SEC. 403. MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.
(a) IN GENERAL—Subchapter I of chapter 417 is amended by adding at the end the following:

‘‘§ 41724. Musical instruments
‘‘(a) IN GENERAL—
‘‘(1) SMALL INSTRUMENTS AS CARRY-ON BAGGAGE.—An air carrier providing air transportation shall permit a passenger to carry a violin, guitar, or other musical instrument in the aircraft cabin, without charging the passenger a fee in addition to any standard fee that carrier may require for comparable carry-on baggage, if—

‘‘(A) the instrument can be stowed safely in a suitable baggage compartment in the aircraft cabin or under a passenger seat, in accordance with the requirements for carriage of carry-on baggage or cargo established by the Administrator; and

‘‘(B) there is space for such stowage at the time the passenger boards the aircraft.