Old white man sits down.  Old white man swirls his glass.  Old white man tells us about all the things he can smell and all the things we can taste.  Old white man reminds us how much better his taste and smell senses are than ours.  He then rates the wine and tells us to either buy, or not buy.

Personally, I hate those videos.  They’re boring.  They’re tired.  They make me cringe.

Look, finding wine gifts is hard enough without having to try and guess what the flavor of the week so to speak is going to be when it comes to major critics.  I like being able to see what the winemaker has to say about the wine, or at least someone from the winery that is half way engaging.  All of that is really true, even when I’m looking to buy a wine to put in with gift baskets.  Personally, I don’t think content creation and videos for wine have to be so stuffy.  I know there is a lot of concern over how hyping wine sales up a bit is going to bring in a younger audience, but with all the ID checks both in person and during deliveries, are we really worried about our 16 year olds buying $40 per bottle wine through the mail?

In Thailand the internet is a dangerous tecnology. The Freedom on the Net 2011 report listed Thailand as ’not free’. It is easy to see why. On September 19th 2006 the Thai army staged a successful coup. The fifth order of the new regime was to appoint a new head of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT). This lackey quickly set about blocking websites critical of the coup. By October 2,475 websites had been blocked. By January 2007 the number increased by 500% to 13,435. The main reason for blocking these websites was criticism of the new regime.

Thailand still has a lese majeste law that covers all forms of publication including spoken utterance. Anyone found guilty of commenting critically of the King can be arrested by the remit of the lese majeste law and put in prison. All pleas to judges over this law have fallen on deaf ears – old, young, Thai nationals and foreigners have been imprisoned for many years under this catch-all law.

It is not only the individual webmasters, bloggers and those who tweet who are liable for arrest – also ISPs are arrrested.

The reasons to block websites are not just to protect the good name of the King of Thailand, but also to prevent distrurbing the peace or endangering National Security. Really this means endangering the rule of the junta.

So if you are on holiday in Bor Saen in Phang-Nga, Changmai, Phuket, Koh Chang, Krabi or anywhere else in Thailand beware of what you write on the internet. Comments are monitored and although the government is now democratically elected it is able to get you locked up if it can construe your comments as being against the King.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol  HTTP is an application protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems

Which is entirely true however most of us will just recognise it as the way you start virtually every website when yoy type in the address.  In reality it is the communications medium of the internet – it is based on a client-server model.  The client is the browser (IE, Firefox etc) and the server is the web site that you’re trying to download.  Requests are sent using HTTP to the server which responds and supplies the requested information if available.   The clever bit about this communication medium is that it operates across all sorts of operating systems and computers – HTTP allows all sorts of devices and computers to communicate using a common protocol.

But if you read various websites that are concerned about privacy and anonymity online like this site – http://www.onlineanonymity.org/ , then you’d realise there’s an important issue with HTTP that we should all be aware of.   The problem is that HTTP has no concept of security or privacy at all, in fact everything is exchanged in clear text.  So anyone who views any communication across HTTP would be able to read all of it without problems.  

So the websites you visit, any text you enter, account names, passwords and anything are all visible to anyone.  There is of course a secure version of HTTP which is a little better – HTTPS is still not the most secure protocol but at least it provides some level of encryption and protection for communication.

However, Google is a big corporation and it seems no accident that its search engine seems to favor other big corporations such as Amazon.com over smaller businesses. It is also noticeable that in the field of travel that a few website entities such as Agoda, Lonely Planet, Trip Advisor and Booking.com seem to be near the top for nearly any search you care to make for holiday destinations. Unless people are aware of this they tend to think that the choices provided by these websites are the only choices available when it comes to booking a hotel room, hiring a car or buying an airplane ticket.

With travel the web is manipulating people into thinking that supposed luxury hotels offering Jacuzzis, room service and satellite TV are offering the best holiday experiences. In places like Thong Nai Pan in Thailand this not always the case. The accommodation in expensive hotels is tightly grouped. The satellite TV often has only a couple of channels in English and the resort restaurant charges more than a restaurant back in Europe. The major players on the internet are not telling travel consumers about other accommodation options like private villa rental in Thong Nai Pan. This often offers real privacy, facilites to cook and a better opportunity to experience the true natural beauty of the area.

The mission to sell what can be expolited for a commission is making many websites no better than travel agents and is making the internet as monolithic as the mainstream media. We need to educate people on how to use Google to allow for these biases on the internet.

When you begin to look deeper you’ll realize a few things pretty quickly.  First, most of the wine gift baskets for sale are coming from the same places.  They have the same wines.  The same chocolate.  The same crackers.  Boring, boring and even more boring.

Plus, the quality level isn’t even that high.

Secondly, you’ll realize that even after sorting through page after page of Google results….the average gift basket is being sold at hundreds of different stores.  Finding a gift basket site which is actually creating and packaging their own gift baskets, as it turns out, is incredibly difficult!

From a safety perspective I find the whole process to be a major problem.  If these retailers or simple websites aren’t actually doing the business themselves, how can we realistically expect them to be performing all the checks that are legally required to happen from the shipping of wine?

Both of these arguments are probably true, but unfortunately there is a dangerous downside to the idea of online voting – it opens the possibility for electoral fraud on a grand scale.

Uninformed proponents of this practice utter platitudes about designing secure systems to ensure the online voting process cannot be hacked, hijacked, corrupted or otherwise interfered with; but this, quiet frankly, is not possible.

Billions of dollars are spent each election cycle on choosing the President of the United States.  There is ample money out there that has a strong desire to see a certain candidate win office.  By opening the process up and allowing the Internet to be involved in the vote, the combination of dollars in play with ego filled hackers  is a situation that is rife for trouble!

I strongly advocate keeping the voting process as manual as possible in order to ensure the sanctity of precinct results across the country!

Social Security numbers are hardly ever needed so only give it out sparingly. But you have to trust these websites and brokers to some extent. When looking for the right flats to rent.  The best way to search is anonymously through the online multiple-listing services. They allow you to get in there and see an apartment before you go and waste time driving to it. It also means that the service itself verifies that the apartment is real you can see when it was added how many views the apartment listing has had and all kinds of other information that allow you to determine that this is not some kind of rouse. It has been scary in the past as a young, beautiful, blonds real estate broker to know what types of situations you’re getting into. But if you trust the system you can find the right people.

When shopping online for consolidation loans you should make the following considerations:

Is the website a well known brand? Is it financially regulated or is it linked to a bank or charity?

Does the site have a privacy policy? Look around the site and try and find their policy on what they will do with your information once it has been submitted, this is especially important if you do not want your details such as email address and telephone number to be sold to a third party.

How much information do they need? Never give more than the basic information out to anyone on the internet; this would include card pin numbers, online banking login details such as PINs, passwords and user ids.  No reputable broker or financial association will ask you for this information.

Following these basic principles should help you consolidate loans online with ease and most importantly, safety!