Hello and welcome to the gail.com FAQ.

Q: Why isn't there any content here?
A: All personal web content is hidden on back pages to conserve bandwidth.

Q: Interested in selling gail.com?
A: Sorry, no.

Q: How did you manage to get gail.com?
A: My husband registered it as a birthday gift back in 1996.

Q: How many times a day is this page visited?
A: In 2011 this page received 3,016,618 hits, which is an average of 8,264 hits per day. Two-thirds of those hits were from unique IP addresses. Occasionally, we get Redditted and get several tens of thousands of visitors over a day or so.

Q: I think you're infringing on my trademark...
A: You can't have an exclusive trademark on a common word or name. My husband and I successfully defended ourselves against an attempted domain coup d'état in 2006; see WIPO Case D2006-0655 for more information.

Q: Don't you know that you could throw some ads up and make money?
A: Yes, thank you, I know.

Q: Wow, you have a great website, can you suggest others like yours?
A: Yes, here's one of my favorites: http://purple.com

Q: Gail, what is your take on the CISPA bill?
A: Like SOPA and PIPA before it, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) attempts to further errode our rights on the 'net. Also like SOPA and PIPA, we should do our best to inform ourselves and others, and kick this bit of evil to the curb before it can even come to a vote in Congress.

In short, CISPA is a very broad and loosly written law that allows any private company to give any and all data it has collected on you and give it to the government without any kind of judicial oversight. This is some seriously scary Orwellian stuff our own government is trying to implement, and it needs to be stopped.

To start educating yourself about what's going on, please read this great Wired article about the massive data center the NSA is building in Utah to house and data mine your personal data (e.g., telephone calls, e-mail, credit card charges, etc.) This article was written by James Bamford, who literally wrote the book about the NSA back in the early eighties. Once you've read the article, head over to the Democracy Now website and watch the interview with William Binney, who worked for the NSA for almost forty years and provided Mr. Bamford with some of the information for his article. Want to help do something about this knuckle-headedness? Head over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation website and learn how to help.

 

-Gail (faq at gail period com)