Internet

Egregious Spam Operator faced litigation today from the largest US ISP' today including Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink and Yahoo. Under the new law that President Bush signed in December these activities wre cited in the compliants

  -- Deceptive solicitations for a variety of products including
       get-rich-quick schemes, prescription drugs, pornography, instructions
       for conducting spam campaigns, banned CDs, mortgage loans, university
       diplomas, cable descramblers and other common types of unsolicited
       e-mail
    -- Use of open proxies (sending spam through third-party computers to
       disguise their point of origin)
    -- Falsified "from" e-mail addresses (spoofing)
    -- Absence of a physical address in the e-mail
    -- Absence of an electronic unsubscribe option

LAS VEGAS, Mar 3, 2004 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX), the owner of the UNIX(R) operating system and a leading provider of UNIX-based solutions, today announced it has filed suit against AutoZone, Inc., for its alleged violations of SCO's UNIX copyrights through its use of Linux.

SCO's lawsuit alleges the following:

* AutoZone violated SCO's UNIX copyrights by running versions of the
Linux operating system that contain code, structure, sequence and/or
organization from SCO's proprietary UNIX System V code in violation of
SCO's copyrights.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Nevada, requests injunctive relief against AutoZone's further use or copying of any part of SCO's copyrighted materials and also requests damages as a result of AutoZone's infringement in an amount to be proven at trial.

The company will discuss this announcement as part of its regularly scheduled conference call related to first quarter earnings, scheduled for Wednesday, March 3 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time. To participate on the call, individuals may dial 1-800-818-5264 or 1-913-981-4910 and use the confirmation code: 141144. Alternatively, a listen-only live web cast is available at http://ir.sco.com/medialist.cfm. Call participants are encouraged to dial in 15 minutes before the scheduled start time.

From Ferengi

With the Browsen I met the following URL:

http://www.sandoba.de/article-491-vorteile-gegenueber-open-source-systemen.html

Therein it means among other things:

I don't know how we got on the list, but the recent bulk mail from SETTEC is eye-opening (it's not your usual spam.) The featured product :

for Mar. 7-8 'Defensive Driving' at the Crowne Plaza Hotel - Saudi Arabia

March 16 - 17, 2004: Stipulations and Provisions of the New Unified - Meridian Heliopolis
More than half the mail is in Arabic script, which I don't read. The company is however located in "Agooza Police Tower, Nawal St., Agooza, Giza, Egypt "

I guess in any group of people, you have those that can be considered pompous. I don't think there was an overriding level of  it though. I didn't make it into the speaker sessions, but I'm sure all the speakers gave a fine show.
The exhibition hall seemed sparse. It was graced by a short list of grandjunction, ebay, microsoft, google, and maybe about 10 or so others. One of the exhibits had a 4-ft robot that roamed the exhibition area. I couldn't figure out what they OR microsoft were doing there - the microsoft team didn't staff their booth when I was there.
Next year I guess I should schedule into the speaker sessions.

On the way to O'Reily's Etech, the train was late coming into the station by half an hour- which was a good period to knock through all the necessary calls. I don't know why it was late but I suspect it had something to do with the freight train that cruised down the tracks at a leisurely pace at about the time our scheduled passenger train was supposed to be there.
On the way out of the station I picked up a copy of the Southern California Computer User from the rack in the station. These tabloid computer papers have all gotten thinner over the last 2-3 years as the hardware has become commoditized. It is a quick flip through the 50-odd pages, all the way back to the last page where I ran into James Mathewson's Outfitter column. This week he wrote about the Wal Mart economy. In this column, Mathewson echos a growing chorus of voices about the wal-martification of the American economy. He writes "All I know is that the Wal-Mart economy is not sustainable in the long term. Sooner or later, it will hit the wall."  What are the opposing arugments to this? Mathewson writes of local merchants, and the impacts upon them. Lots of questions raised, but no answers.
I think the direction of internet search is a part of this equation also. search engines with the power and scope of Google, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, and highly probably Microsoft give power to consumers  to digest lot and lots of data. Purchasing data empowers the consumer to make a smart decision - for the same identical item, the lowest price is always available to the savvy search engine user. Let's not forget the search engines' aggregation of catalog data  - content that has been crawled with a robot and re-purposed to  suite the engines' mission. But what of the local merchant? It's extremely painful for them to service this market. As I've written before, unless the local merchant goes with a Walmart business model - that is of high-volume and low margins, they may as well not try to compete. The argument that many posit is that local merchants are positioned to service the local business because they are closer to the consumer. But the problem with that argument is the frequency with which the consumer wields the on-line pricing as a club to get lower pricing over the counter.

Lextext reports on the FCC ruling, sought and received by Pulver.com, to their favor. VOIP - voice over internet will remain free of regulation - at least for now. Only time will tell the permanence of this decision. Don't forget the tax-free internet-transaction world, that rail is probably nearing it's end. Read the ruling here:

click to download fcc-ruling-on-voip.pdf You will need acrobat.

The row over internet naming and numbering standards (thanks to Lextext) is all about economics. The shots across the bow are clear indicators that discussion is not what's necessary, it is some forms of action - that is if you believe the technical leverage delivered by the web is to remain intact and continue to grow. Otherwise, the discussions are the harbinger of the balkanization of the World Wide Web into regional and other demarcated zones.

I'm pleased to join Battelle and others in W3's Recommendation document RDF/XML. This is really just the beginning, and should represent the (hopefully) eventual demise of dirty data.

I call data 'dirty' when the factoid or data point doesn't have digital (and in many cases - human readable) categorization. Data scrubbing is required, along a food chain making that is usually supposed to making use of it.The data conundrum is the velocity of its creation. We're alway making more and more data; it's obvious current data creation rates overload intended channels. Any guesses as to the velocity of adoption of the new recommendations? And how about it's evolution? 

We'll check tomorrow!

The Register reported "Senator Lamar Smith of Texas - chairman of the Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee - yesterday produced from nowhere extensions to the 1946 Trademark Act that would make giving false contact information for a domain name a civil and criminal offence.

His bill (HR 3754) was discussed today at 10am.." Thanks to Lextext for the link.

The argument for this is put forth under intellectual property and trademark positions. It's an egregiously bad interpretation of those laws if passed. Trademark holders have strong and enforcable channels to go after domain squatters.

My 5th grader's class was having discussions on the political scene, and comments were made that 'Democrats want big government'. In this case, it's the opposite; this bill has no redeeming value.

Google doesn't need Orkut. For marketable demographics, Google needs a killer-app/business model with demographics built-in and Orkut isn't it.
When you have all eyes on your every move, every litle thing you do is magnified. Orkut is a keen and simple example of this.
Is Orkut as a killer application? Email is a killer-app, as are instant email apps AOL IM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger. Each counts tens of millions of registrations. Talk to any media buyer, and they will tell you  the registered-user counts are highly inflated and discountable due to a)churn of the users, b) users with phantom accounts, c) users that open accounts and never do anything with them beyond the initial-use surge. But after all these discounts you STILL have tens of millions of users that volunteered 'some' level of demographics. These media buys worth doing because $50K-$500K a month is being bought. Orkut seems to make sense as another AdWords channel but that's about it.
I would heavily discount any of the social networking applications from having mass market penetration capabilities. Believing they do is delusional and smacks of a Silicon Valley  'build it and they will come' mindset. Orkut.com states Orkut is an "online meeting place where people can socialize, make new aquaintances and find others...". Online socializing is terribly inefficient, which is why I believe the mass market will continue to use the social platform of choice: Shoes toe to toe.

Google's advertising offerings are now one-month into the official soft-launch of their revamped Advertising Sales product and service matrix. Prior to January 1, 2004, an advertiser spending $5,000 per month would warrant a Google Account Representative. Afer January 1, advertising accounts are assigned a Google Rep only if they spend $10,000 per month. ("Full service for large advertisers" at http://www.google.com/ads/).
The ad placement on the page is now in full swing. Prior to January 1, 2004, large advertisers contracted with Google to secure 'Premier' positioning at the top of the results. These contracts were generally annual in nature, and assured the advertiser the top advertising slots in a browser-wide width. These premier slots are now open to all AdWords customers. Adwords buyers prior to January 1, 2004, secured space in the column to the right of the search results. After January 1, 2004, AdWords buyers now rise to the browser-wide slots when their PPC price puts their ad on top of the AdWords results for that search result page.

Playboy and Netscape have settled their differences, it's been widely reported. I think a certain party didn't want (legal) precedents set.  While poking around in others' stuff on the subject, I ran repeatedly into librarians voices, and in particular the American Library Association and their Privacy Related Page. Thanks to the redhead librarian at infozo.info for the ALA link.

This and other similar instances have made me realize that the library community is getting quite 'out there' on any number of issues, from the Patriot Act, to censorship issues. Kudo's to them for taking stands.

Shanness writes regarding the use by Diebold of the DMCA in their lobby to further digital voting platforms.