March 2008 Archives

After weeks of reading stale talking points and recycled speculation about how Microsoft's attempted purchase of Yahoo will play out, I saw something in the New York Times about the takeover bid that I hadn't even considered -- China may have a say in whether the deal goes through.

From NYT's John Markoff:

Microsoft’s hostile-takeover attempt against Yahoo may encounter an unexpected hurdle in August after a Chinese antimonopoly law takes effect that will extend the nation’s economic influence far beyond its borders.

The law, which goes into effect on Aug. 1, is intended to strengthen an existing set of antitrust regulations the Chinese originally established in 1993. It will make China a third sphere of regulatory influence, matching the power of the European Union and the United States, according to legal specialists in this country and in China who have studied it.

Formally enacted by the National People’s Congress last year, the measure gives Chinese regulators authority to examine foreign mergers when they involve acquisitions of Chinese companies or foreign businesses investing in Chinese companies’ operations.

Markoff explains that Yahoo has a $1billion stake -- or about 40% ownership -- in China's largest e-commerce business, Alibaba.com. (Yes, that really is the name of the Chinese company. I linked to it in case you want to check for yourself. The web is a melting pot, I tell you.)

What I find most interesting in the article is the strong implication that the multinational corporate world is unprepared for these kinds of scenarios. China passed its first antitrust laws in 1993, while the Internet has been an international commercial entity for about as long. Yet, according to Nathan G. Bush, an antitrust law specialist based in Beijing:

“Multinational corporations will need to develop strategies for all the markets they operate in. And China is a big market.”

And this quote from another expert:

“I don’t think anyone has worked through the issue of where an Internet merger should be reviewed, given that it truly is a World Wide Web,” said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University.

Well, I'd say it's time to get cracking, wouldn't you? Otherwise, we're looking at chaos here. Especially since "there are potentially dozens of jurisdictions that could claim oversight in such a deal because of the global business interests of the two huge companies," Markoff writes, though he only goes on to cite one -- South Korea.

Memo to Microsoft: If you have to start flying attorneys to Togo, it's time to walk away from the deal.

At our house, we have a little saying we shout out every time our digital video recorder chokes, sputters, and stops playing our recorded show: Comcast sucks!

We also say that when we get the monthly Comcast bill. What happened to that legislation whereby we could buy just the few channels we want, and dump the 200 we don’t watch?

Comcast’s backhanded ways are in the news again today. Andy Patrizio of Internetnews.com has an excellent story on the latest development,  “Comcast, BitTorrent Pass The Digital Peace Pipe.”

It’s a complicated story regarding networking and bandwidth. The bottom line is that the nation’s largest cable TV and Internet provider had been surreptitiously throttling back the Net usage of certain users. This led to pissed-off users, unintended consequences, and an investigation and hearing by the Federal Communications Commission.

As Patrizio reported:

After months of accusations, denials and foot stomping on the part of users, cable giant Comcast and the peer-to-peer file sharing company BitTorrent have reached an agreement that supports file exchanges on the Comcast broadband network.

The issue surfaced last summer when Comcast subscribers began to notice a degradation in their BitTorrent uploads. Further investigations by individuals were later confirmed by the Associated Press: Comcast was sending out signals to disrupt the uploads of BitTorrent transfers.

The controversy expanded as Lotus Notes users realized they were also being throttled back, and other Internet service providers (ISPs) admitted that they too throttled excessive traffic use. The FCC even held hearings, and Comcast became the whipping boy among net neutrality advocates.

The problem is, Comcast’s reversal on BitTorrent doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t prevent the future blocking of traffic or really embrace emerging innovative applications.

Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, a media reform organization, said this about the agreement:

[W]ith Comcast's history of broken promises and record of deception, we can't just take their word that the Internet is now in safe hands. This doesn't change the urgent need for the FCC to take action.

The issue of net neutrality is bigger than Comcast and BitTorrent. [The deal] does nothing to prevent other phone and cable companies from blocking. Innovators should not have to negotiate side deals with phone and cable companies to operate without discrimination. The Internet has always been a level playing field, and we need to keep it that way.

 

There's a good article over at Network World that confirms what we've known for awhile, based on reader traffic at Intranet Journal: Microsoft SharePoint is emerging as an incredibly popular web development and collaboration  tool:

"I have not seen anything like this since the early days of [Lotus] Notes," says Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group. "The talk [around SharePoint] is getting strategic now and people are talking about it as a middleware decision."

The NW article says Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 is "the fastest-growing product in the company's history," citing its versatility and adaptability as major factors in the product's popularity.

From our end, we've noticed for more than a year that our SharePoint content on Intranet Journal was among the site's most popular, month in and out. We've responded, publishing articles designed to help enterprise developers.  I've linked to a few below:

Managing The SharePoint Learning Curve

Understanding SharePoint Branding Options

When You Need A SharePoint Designer

An Introduction to Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server

Whether you're a SharePoint veteran or just learning, we're sure you'll find Intranet Journal's coverage helpful.

It happens every year, like clockwork. The NCAA basketball tournament begins, triggering frenetic activity in  workplaces across the country.

I don't mean the typical office betting pools, where employees try their hand at predicting the outcome of college basketball games involving teams they know nothing about, other than their records and where they're seeded. I mean in the offices of public-relations companies trying to persuade media outlets to give their clients some free publicity warn businesses about the huge loss in employee productivity caused by illegal wagering and game-watching!

Here's one email I received the other day, with all identifying elements removed:

With march madness in full swing, companies are set to lose over $1 billion in lost employee productivity. With employees spending an average of 13 minutes a day looking at scores and streaming games to their computers, IT administrators will face an increase in email traffic, network bandwidth management issues and a rise in potential network security breaches. To help ease this IT headache, IT managers should seek  to tighten email security and closely monitor bandwidth, making a decision early on whether to ban streaming or not, in addition to ensuring that their security solutions are correctly configured.

First, 90% of the employees who were interested during the first weekend of the tournament don't care anymore because their first-round bracket is in tatters, their bold underdog picks back on their respective campuses, binge drinking and watching the Sweet Sixteen on TV along with the rest of us.

Second, how exactly do we arrive at this "over $1 billion in lost employee productivity" figure? I'm sure it was chosen because it's a nice, round alarming number, but there are some shaky assumptions built into it. For example, maybe that 13 minutes a day that employees allegedly average looking at scores and streaming games is coming out of YouTube, blog and porn time. So that'd be a wash. Plus, $1 billion really isn't that much -- it's not like you can buy an investment bank or anything with that kind of cash. Well, not without a little help.

Third...actually, I don't have time for a third item. I just got pinged about a new ESPN podcast on Xavier. Gotta go.

Over at Datamation.com, Mike Elgan has a brilliant take on the debate over free Wi-Fi in cities.

Elgan’s elegant point is that trying to provide free wireless Internet access for all in a city (like Houston) is a losing proposition. His column, “How Free Wi-Fi Hurts the Poor,” nails it. It’s the best argument I’ve read on the matter.

Here are some snippets:

Years ago, we imagined the construction of citywide Wi-Fi in major cities across the country. The idea was that everyone would be able to log on from anywhere -- the park, the bus, even apartments and houses in poorer neighborhoods. That dream is quickly fading as it becomes clear that building costly wireless network infrastructure where nobody uses it is a lousy idea. …

The City of Houston and others working on such schemes will most likely squander a lot of public money on Wi-Fi infrastructure that few people will use. People won't start using Wi-Fi just because it's free. Too many poor families don't have the knowledge, motivation or even the computers they need to start using Wi-Fi. Is the city going to provide all that, too? …

The solution? If cities want to motivate poor people to use Wi-Fi, they need to merely subsidize its use.

It’s a matter near and dear to my heart. I use wireless networks all the time. I hate paying the T-Mobile bill at Starbucks, but until Starbucks offers the service for free, it’s the best bang for the buck.

Free wireless at your typical Internet cafes is not as reliable. Plus, where I live, the college students clog the free Wi-Fi cafes. And the free citywide network I’ve tried -- MetroFi in Santa Clara, California -- is frustrating. I don’t know where the hotspots are, so I’m always dealing with a weak wireless signal. It’s just not a solution a serious Internet user can tolerate.

As Elgan puts it:

Mayors of America, listen up: Great Wi-Fi exists wherever people with expense accounts congregate. If you want to replicate that success, just replicate the expense accounts – don’t build the service yourself. Doing so is a recipe for disaster.

 

I used to think that keeping a laptop in a locked car, especially the trunk, was safe. Not that you want to store it in there long term next to the motor oil and emergency flares, but who goes to the trouble of breaking into a locked trunk?

This is of course just another example of my misguided faith in the human race, and two stories today really hammer home the security point. CNET News.com reported that a National Institutes of Health laptop was stolen -- out of a car trunk -- and it contained “seven years worth of clinical studies on 2,500 patients.”

According to the News.com report,

The computer was stolen in February from the trunk of a car driven by a lab chief of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, but officials did not notify the patients of the theft until Thursday, saying they didn't want to spread unnecessary alarm, according to The Washington Post.

The laptop contained seven years worth of clinical studies on the patients, including their names, ages, medical record numbers, and MRI reports. Social Security numbers and physical addresses were not on the computer, according to the NIH.

That laptop theft is part of a security-breach trend that, despite a public outcry, is still on the rise.  The San Jose Mercury News reported today that the loss of personal data was up again in 2007.

Experts say the number of reported "breaches," where sensitive personal data such as credit card numbers or financial information is lost or stolen, increased more than 40 percent last year.

"We think people are going to learn from their mistakes, but they aren't," said Mary Monahan, senior analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, a Pleasanton research firm.

According to Monahan, 446 breaches were reported in the United States last year, exposing a total of 128 million records. In 2006, 312 breaches occurred, compromising 20 million records.

It just goes to show you that you need to be careful out there. Encrypt your personal data, keep your laptop near you when traveling, and if you need to stick your laptop in your trunk, throw a German shepherd back there too. 

 

To pretend by now that there's no such thing as being addicted to the Internet seems somewhat silly. We all know people who spend way too much time logged onto a computer or handheld device, to the extent that we think it's unhealthy for them and adversely affects their lives.

Of course, it's never us. No, we stay online for hours on end for only important things, like visiting our favorite web sites (again and again) or catching up on our email (which is 90% spam) or checking our favorite blogs (which are updated less and less frequently) or even blogging ourselves (though we have absolutely nothing to say).

The point is that making the general observation that Internet addiction exists is easy. Defining it can be a lot tougher. But the American Journal of Psychiatry is stepping up to the plate. From the Ottawa Citizen:

Compulsive e-mailing and text messaging could soon become classified as an official brain illness.

An editorial in this month's issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry says Internet addiction -- including "excessive gaming, sexual pre-occupations and e-mail/text messaging" -- is a common compulsive-impulsive disorder that should be added to psychiatry's official guidebook of mental disorders.

Like other addicts, users experience cravings, urges, withdrawal and tolerance, requiring more and better equipment and software, or more and more hours online, according to Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

Dr. Block is lobbying for "Internet addiction" to be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the psychiatric world's official dictionary of mental illnesses. The latest edition of the DSMMD is slated to be released in 2012, but a draft soliciting public comment is set to be unveiled next year.

I go back and forth on the whole issue. As I said at the top of the post, to deny that some people are "addicted" to the Internet in one way or another is a futile argument. But when you get down to specifics, how do you define it? For example, I'm an information junkie. Before the Internet, I would begin nearly every day by reading the newspaper. On those rare days when I couldn't, I felt as if I were missing something. Was my newspaper habit an "addiction"? When I couldn't read one, was I going through "withdrawal"?

And what about Dr. Block's assertion that requiring more and better equipment and software for your Internet use is part of the addiction? Isn't that really more about wanting better performance? (And if not, does that mean dial-up is a gateway drug?)

I'll grant Dr. Block that when people "lose all track of time or neglect 'basic drives,' like eating or sleeping" (or one's family or job), well, that's certainly not a good thing. But who hasn't stayed up late surfing the 'Net, to the detriment of their sleep schedule? When does that behavior cross over into unhealthy, or an addiction? And are we now talking about an Internet addiction scale?

I'm glad we have until 2012 before the official DSMMD dictionary is published, and for two reasons:

1) We're a long way from consensus on this issue.
2) I find vigorous public debate absolutely addicting.

Raise your hand if you’ve never hit Send on an email, and then realized later to your horror that you sent that email to the wrong person. Or persons. Or everyone in the company. Not many hands raised out there, I imagine.

It’s one of the curses of the email age. You know the drill: You mean to send an email to your friend Jim Johnson, but the email program auto-completes the name Jim, and you don’t notice it. The wrong Jim gets the email that says, “he’s a very lonely man,” (something I actually wrote and mis-sent), and viola, the office atmosphere is compromised.

Eric Spiegel of Datamation.com warns of this embarrassing scenario in his column today, “Ten Pet Peeves About Workplace Emails.” The mis-sent email he describes? "Must be nice to be a slacker and get away with it."

I get a lot of stories from my reporters, and I hate subject lines like “story #1.” So my favorite on the Spiegel list is:

1. Unclear Subject Headings -- Most of us have a very full inbox and just don't have time to open every email the moment it arrives, let alone that same day. A survey of IT managers conducted by Ipsos-Reid (funded by RIM, the makers of Blackberry) found that they receive on average 48 emails per day, with 39% classified as time-critical. With this constant onslaught, you are more likely to immediately open an email with the subject "Water pipe burst in data center -- need assistance!" rather than "Data Center." Be informative in your subject heading, especially when quick action is being requested.

Spiegel should have called it his Top 11 peeves, because at the end of his column he describes another situation that will smack you in the chops if you’re not careful:

I actually experienced a more damaging embarrassing slip recently when I forwarded an apparently innocuous email to a customer, only to realize after the fact that in the long appended thread there was some unflattering, internal bickering about the very same client. Always check the entire thread before forwarding or be ready to eat some crow.

 

I guess Good Friday is an appropriate time as any to blog about a hacking book by a self-described Christian hacker.

No Tech Hacking was written by Johnny Long, a professional hacker, security consultant and author. He gets a lot of help from a number of special contributors, who he duly notes, and is donating proceeds from the book to AOET, an "organization that provides food, education and medical care to children left in the wake of Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic."

Not much in the book is going to blow your mind or be a real surprise, but Long's entertaining style makes it a fun and fairly quick read. He covers a lot of familiar territory, including perhaps the No. 1 hacking technique, Social Engineering (tricking gullible people), the venerable (if distasteful) practice of Dumpster Diving (self-explanatory) and Shoulder Surfing (also self-explanatory).

More interesting is a chapter on Physical Security, which covers ways to pick locks and bypass infrared motion sensors, and another called Google Hacking, to which Long previously devoted an entire book. This section isn't exactly "no tech," as Long points out, and reviews the use of Google to find "medical, financial, proprietary and even classified information."

The purpose of the book isn't to arm black hackers with more weapons, Long says, but rather to create awareness among businesses and consumers about the many threats that can imperil their networks and data. There's a companion web site here. The book is published by Syngress.

If you just can't read enough about Apple, the latest edition of Wired is an absolute must. (I guess that's sort of redundant; I mean, can there be a relative must? But what the hell, I get paid by the word. I really do. And double for italicized words!)

The lead article, How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong, details how Apple got everything right by doing everything wrong. It's 3,500 words long, so on an economic basis alone, I wish I had written it.

More interesting to me, though, were a couple of accompanying pieces. The first, Breaking The Rules: Apple Succeeds By Defying 5 Core Valley Principles, is about how Apple succeeds by -- just kidding, I don't repeat jokes. Here are the five rules Apple breaks, according to Wired:

1. Embrace open platforms.
2. Communicate to the outside world.
3. Don't exploit your market-leader status.
4. Treat your customers with respect.
5. Don't wire transfer more than $10,000 to a front for a prostitution ring, and then ask your bank to break it into smaller amounts. (Sorry, this is a New York State governor's rule.)

The second sidebar, Management Techniques From the Dark Side, is a "list of counterintuitive, suspicious-seeming and downright evil management techniques that actually work." The list is long and interactive -- readers can vote on each technique and even submit their own -- but I quickly lost interest after I saw this headline in the "Most Popular" box next to the text:

Blu-Ray Porn, Mechanized Masturbation and Upskirts at Japan's First Sex Show

I bet even the Apple fanboys jumped ship for that one.

BitTorrent -- which just a couple years ago was talked about in hushed terms by those who downloaded movies and songs (mostly illegally) -- is having its coming out party.

 

If you’ve never heard of it, BitTorrent is a popular way to do file sharing on a peer-to-peer network. It involves downloading little bits of a huge file from a bunch of different computers connected to the P2P network. It’s a much faster way to download files.

For those of us who grew up in the original Napster era, the first time we tried BitTorrent was a revelation. A huge movie would now download so fast, especially if it was a popular flick with lots of people serving it up on the network. It was one of those, “why the hell didn’t we think of this earlier” technology.

BitTorrent is the type of technology that could really move the needle in the entertainment world. Right now it’s still too inconvenient and complicated for most people to download a huge movie file to their computer, especially compared to the simplicity of getting Netflix movies in the mail. If we’re ever going to make downloading movies attractive to the non-geek, technology like BitTorrent needs to be brought into the mainstream.  

 

And that is starting to happen, as CNET News.com reported today: 

Following closely on the heels of Norway, Canada's public broadcasting service is adopting DRM-free BitTorrent distribution for a major prime-time show.

On March 24, CBC will use BitTorrent to distribute this year's broadcast of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. This will make Canada the first country in North America to release high-quality, DRM-free copies of a prime-time show using the popular P2P file-sharing technology.

Later in the article, there’s an interesting view of the future of digital rights management.

 

While plenty of TV networks have experimented with offering shows online for free, it is CBC's use of DRM-free BitTorrent downloads that is the most interesting. Guinevere Orvis, one of the interactive producers on the show, told me that the motivation for this choice was their desire for the "show to be as accessible as possible, to as many Canadians as possible, in the format that they want it in." As for DRM, she said: "I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it." She added that "if it's bad for the consumers, it's bad for the company."

 

Michael Geist, a copyright guru and law professor at the University of Ottawa, hailed CBC's move, writing on his blog that "this development is important not only because it shows that Canada's public broadcaster is increasingly willing to experiment with alternative forms of distribution, but also because it may help crystallize the net neutrality issue in Canada."

 

Stay tuned to see if Hollywood and the U.S. TV networks get the picture on BitTorrent and digital rights management.

 

Calling it a "watershed moment" in mobile Internet usage, search giant Google said Tuesday that the number of people accessing the web via their mobile phones has accelerated dramatically in recent months.

Yes, Google tied this claim to its announcement of new software that places a Google search box on the home screen of phones running Microsoft Windows Mobile. Still, it makes sense to me because this product release is exactly the kind of thing that makes Internet surfing easier for mobile phone owners.

Similar versions of the search software which Google introduced for Blackberry users in December and certain Nokia phones in February have sped up the time users take to perform Web searches by 40 percent and, in turn, driven usage.

This correlates with something I was told by a high-ranking Monster.com marketing executive I met this weekend at my nephew's school's production of High School Musical. (He played male lead Troy Bolton. I'm telling you, the kid nailed it -- review to come.) The Monster.com exec told me in an exclusive interview -- OK, an informal conversation during intermission -- that the company is working feverishly to adapt to the surge in mobile phone web usage. She also said she was impressed by my nephew's vocal tone and range, but that some of the choreography in the dance scenes was sloppy.

Then there's this from the European Union:

[M]obile Internet 3G services doubled last year to 88 million users, some 20 percent of the EU's population.

And this (via Newsday.com):

Brandon Lucas, who directs MySpace's mobile initiatives, said he expects about half of the social network's traffic to come from mobile devices in the next few years.

And this (from news service AHN Media):

A recent study revealed that nearly half of the Japanese population has at least once taken their mobile devices with them to the bathtub.

Which, while not directly bolstering the case in point, is another kind of watershed moment.

The Semantic Web got a big boost last week from Yahoo, which plans an unprecedented level of support for Semantic Web standards.

If you’re new to the term, Semantic Web is the name used by the internet industry to describe the next phase of the web's development. It essentially involves building web-based connectivity into any piece of data -- not just a web page -- so that it can "communicate" with other information.

As Andy Patrizio reported for InternetNews.com:

Yahoo announced plans to support various Semantic Web standards in a bid to complement its open search platform. It's designed to help make search more contextual and present results relevant to the user.

Yahoo also disclosed more details on its plans to open its search engine to third-party developers. A part of this strategy involves Yahoo Buzz, which lets users rank links and news articles in a similar fashion to news aggregator Digg.

Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo Search, announced the Semantic Web support in a blog post. He said Yahoo felt that by supporting Semantic Web standards such as microformats and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), it could offer a better, more complete search for consumers.

Semantic Web buzz is also coming from other quarters. Just before the Yahoo announcement, world wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee said that its search rival Google could be superseded as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology. The article, in the Times Online, offers a unique view of future applications:

"Using the Semantic Web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web," Mr. Berners-Lee said. "Imagine if two completely separate things -- your bank statements and your calendar -- spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money.

"If you still weren't sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you would know not to claim it as a tax deduction.”

If you’d like to hear more of Berners-Lee’s thoughts, we at Jupitermedia are lucky to have him as a keynote speaker at our upcoming Linked Data Planet tradeshow and expo this June in New York (the show will also take place in Santa Clara, California, in October). Also, check out more coverage of this growing technology at SemanticWeb.com.

 

OK, maybe that's not exactly what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said to reporters Monday. But his dire, if vague, warning about what could happen to the Internet if Microsoft succeeds in purchasing Yahoo reminds me of the scare tactics commonly employed on the presidential campaign trail.

In fact, just a few days ago presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, in response to a suspiciously friendly question at a town hall meeting near Philadelphia, said that yes, indeed, he is worried that terrorists might intensify the violence in Iraq in order to swing the November elections against the man the terrorists most fear, John McCain.

On Monday, Google's chief executive hinted that Microsoft's proposed $44.6 billion purchase of Yahoo could mean the end of the Internet as we know it:

"We would be concerned by any kind of acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft," Schmidt told reporters. "We would hope that anything they did would be consistent with the openness of the Internet, but I doubt it would be. ...

"We are concerned that there are things Microsoft could do that would be bad for the Internet."

Don't get me wrong. As surely as George Costanza invented "it's not you, it's me," Microsoft wrote the book on  FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). So to some extent, turnabout is fair play here. But I don't think anyone, even the Redmond Machiavellis, believes for a minute that a Microsoft-Yahoo union would create an unstoppable Internet colossus. Microsoft has been groping for an effective Internet strategy for years, while Yahoo has become increasingly marginalized by Google's spectacular success as well as its own ineffective and confusing strategy.

So given the reality on the ground, it's clear that Schmidt's comments can mean only one thing: Google is running for president.

We've all made mistakes that have cost us during job interviews -- mispronouncing an interviewer's name, making an inappropriate comment, showing up egregiously late, etc.

But a survey by CareerBuilder.com of more than 3,000 U.S. hiring managers and HR pros uncovered some truly mind-boggling gaffes. Reuters reports some here. Among the more stellar examples:

• Candidate told the interviewer he was fired for beating up his last boss.
  

• When an applicant was offered food before the interview, he declined, saying he didn't want to line his stomach with grease before going out drinking. (Note: One hopes the candidate at least would score some points for pragmatism.)

• Candidate asked the interviewer for a ride home after the interview. (Note: Offering gas money might have helped.)
  

• Candidate answered cell phone and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a "private" conversation.

The Reuters story fills out a top 10 list of interview blunders, along with a sampling of the most common interview mistakes. It's a fun read, and a good reminder that you never know who's going to walk through the door.

Is Google becoming overwhelmed by its own success?

I'm talking about Google the web search engine, not Google the search-engine company. The reason I ask is that more and more frequently I get a "server not found" error when I try to access the Google web search page. Not when I do an actual search from the Google search page, but when I merely try to access the web search page.

This happens whether I use Firefox or Internet Explorer, or any of the three computers at my disposal. I hardly ever run into this problem when doing a Google News or Image search -- it's almost exclusively restricted to the Google web search function. And it's at the point where it happens every day now.

I've tried searching Google to get to the bottom of it, but typing in the phrases "server not found" and "Google search" gives me more than 4,600 returns that don't seem to directly address this problem. By then, of course, the search function is working, so I forget about and move on to other things. Until it happens the next day.

Perhaps it's time for Google to invest in more servers -- or 'fess up to its sadistic little joke.

It's pretty amazing how the Internet has changed journalism  -- and sex scandals. In previous sex scandals, you might have to wait a few days before some photog tracked down the woman and snapped a shot of her as she ducked into a building.

Then you’d have to wait for some reporter to dig up details about her. In the Internet age, you just go to her MySpace page. You copy a few choice pictures, read her bio, listen to her so-called songs, see how many “friends” she has.

In case you’ve been in a cave, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's high-priced hooker "Kristen" was identified yesterday as Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Her MySpace photos have been all over the news. She’s originally from Belmar, New Jersey, where she was raised as Ashley Youmans, according to reports.

On the coverage front, the New York Post has been amazing on this story. Today I clicked a link on the Post’s site and got to hear a little bit of one of Ashley Alexandra Dupre’s lame songs. (Things move so fast in the Net age: A radio station I listen to was playing a snippet of one of her songs today.)

Call me a twisted, cynical journalist (and former page one headline writer), but one of the things I enjoy more than a sex scandal is a great sex scandal headline in a newspaper.

The Post made me laugh with “Ho No!” when the scandal broke. The whole thing reminds me of when I lived in London in the early 90s. Back then, there was a politician named Paddy Ashdown. He was caught in an affair. One of the papers, the Sun, ran the headline, “It’s Paddy Pantsdown.”

(The genius of the Internet, part 27: I banged "Paddy Pantsdown" into my search bar and found a picture of the Sun's front page from February 1992.)

Another London paper ran a huge picture of the prostitute (which they also call a “kerb-crawler”). Next to her picture was the big headline “I’m the tart.”

I always thought "neutrality" was the key to "network neutrality." Then again, I'm not the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The guy who is -- Kevin Martin -- says "balance" actually is the key. David Needle of internetnews.com reports:

"The challenge is to find a balance to where the Commission should act," said Martin. "It shouldn't be inherently partisan," he added in reference to what he called extremist views in both the Republican (no regulation) and Democratic (excessive regulation) camps.

What a relief, because if anyone is going to take a non-partisan approach to the issue, it'll be a guy who served on the Bush-Cheney Transition Team and was Deputy General Counsel for the Bush campaign.

Back to inews:

Martin said he believes his tenure has been marked by a "lighter regulatory touch," but that doesn't mean action won't be taken where needed. He noted, for example, the FCC already took action three years ago, when it fined a small telecom firm (Madison River Communications of Mebane, N.C.) for blocking Voice over Internet Protocol traffic.

Madison River Communications? Three years ago? You trust-buster, you! No wonder the Verizons of the world are so eager to spy on Americans for the Bush Administration. This guy's bringing the pain!

Not only is the Eliot Spitzer prostitution story one of the juiciest in quite a while, it also has quite a few high-tech angles:

• New York Gov. Spitzer (aka Client 9), you may recall, was a crusader against online fraud. (He was also known for his high-profile crusades against Wall Street and the insurance industry.) He took on Double Click, Direct Revenue, sued "Spam King" Scott Richter, and investigated PayPal.
   
• He championed a new tax policy that would have required online retailers -- including big guns like eBay and Amazon -- to begin collecting state sales taxes. After an outcry and legal challenges, Spitzer later rescinded the new tax policy.   
   
• An intricate bank reporting system helped nail the New York governor. ZDNet blogger Larry Dignan takes a detailed look at this information system, called the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.   
   
• Finally, thanks to the magic of the Internet, you don’t have to rely on the New York Times for the Spitzer story. You can go to the New York Post’s site, and revel in their latest great headline: “Ho No!”

 

Datamation.com has launched an excellent new monthly column on all things wireless.

Aaron Weiss, Datamation’s resident Wi-Fi Guru, will answer your burning questions about small-scale Wi-Fi deployments. In this episode, he covers bridging robots, hotspot sharing, and DD-WRT repeaters.

As someone who has two wireless networks in my house but barely knows how to work them, I know I’ll be reading the column. Plus I frequently work in wireless Internet cafes and Starbucks, where I have to wrangle with a T-Mobile account.

One of the questions this month hit home for me. My next-door neighbor has asked to use my network, and I’ve wondered how I could create a hotspot. Here’s the question that interested me:

Q: I just setup wireless in my house using a Linksys WRT54G. I'm thinking of sharing the cost of it via hotspot to my neighbor. How can I manage and control this hotspot? Is there any free hotspot management firmware available and how do I use it?

You’ll be happy to know the hard-core wireless geeks are also represented, with questions like: “I'm a graduate student working on autonomous control of multiple robots.”

Happy reading.

 

One of the favorite pastimes in any organization is complaining about tech support. "They're taking forever to fix this, they said they fixed this but it still doesn't work, they never showed me how to use this, blah blah blah"...

At one time or another, I've been one of those "blah blah" people. In general, though, I have great respect for tech support pros and am fully appreciative when they help me solve a problem. Further, most of the times they are courteous and patient with me, even if they may be rolling their eyes on the other end of the telephone at my technological ineptitude.

Indeed, that might be the hardest part of the tech pro's job: Customer relations. It must be somewhat grating to be trained as an elite, multi-certified "firefighter," only to spend most of your time rescuing kittens from trees (User: "Every time I try to type the letter "L", I get a "3" instead. Help!" Tech pro: "Sounds like your Number Lock key is on...Look on the top row of your keyboard.")

So it's nice to see David Pogue of the New York Times giving some props to our beleaguered tech-support colleagues, along with transcripts of some truly pathetic requests for help from hapless users.

An interesting survey by consulting firm Deloitte (reported here in CIO Update) concludes that the best way to attract IT talent to your company is by giving prospective workers what they really desire -- which basically is more flexibility and freedom. 

Yet, the survey says, most companies (71%) still think throwing money at candidates is the best way to lure them into the fold. Here are some excerpts from the Deloitte report, which you can view as a PDF file here:

[T]he majority of technology and telecommunications companies continue to rely on financial incentives and other traditional approaches for luring and retaining talent. These outmoded techniques might work for awhile, but they don’t address the long-term problem.

For today’s workers, hefty compensation packages and fancy retirement plans just aren’t as appealing as they used to be.

Probably true, though I think it depends on exactly how "hefty" and "fancy" we're talking.

What they really want – more than anything else – is to control when, where, and how they work. They’re happy to work hard, but want to do it on their terms.

While some tech companies are finally "getting it", Deloitte concludes, "most still have a long way to go to meet the needs of today’s workers."

Meanwhile, the more than 150 tech and telco companies surveyed cited "retaining key talent" and "developing leadership talent" as the two most important people/talent objectives. Tied for least important were "increasing workforce diversity", "compensating for inadequate skills" and "retirement of the Baby Boom generation." (Based on how its handled the Social Security program, I'd say the federal government also considers retirement of the Baby Boomers to be a low priority. Glad we have some alignment here.)

Perhaps most troubling about the survey results is the apparent lack of skills assessment. More than half of the responding companies said they either haven't defined a list of critical skills for future growth or are just beginning to do so. Only 27% said they have this crucial planning exercise covered.

Too bad we don't know which companies fall into the latter category. Those are the ones I'd bet on.

There’s a complicated new intellectual property rights bill working its way through Congress. And while I support artists making money from their work, this piece of legislation, proposed in December, sounds like it needs some reining in. 

A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee has already done some adjusting, as CNET’s News.com reported today:

To avoid having a copyright bill favored by the music industry become mired in controversy, a U.S. House of Representatives panel has agreed to remove a section that would have dramatically increased fines in copyright infringement lawsuits.

Under the original Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (the PRO IP Act), a defendant accused of unlawfully downloading each track from, say, the best-selling 22-track Janet Jackson album Discipline could be forced to pay $30,000 in damages per song. That's $660,000 -- far above the $30,000 maximum damages-per-compilation that current law allows.

The fines for song downloading is one thing. A potentially more dangerous part of the legislation involves whether law enforcement can seize equipment that may have been used in the illegal downloading. According to the News.com story, the bill …

… would allow federal officials to seize property, including computer equipment used to commit intellectual property crimes or obtained as a result of those proceeds. An amendment adopted Thursday, however, attempts to narrow that enforcement power, saying the government would have to establish that "there was a substantial connection between the property and the offense."

That's designed to address concerns that the forfeiture sections "could ensnare materials and devices that would have only a fleeting connection to the offense," said Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairman of the intellectual property subcommittee.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said she was concerned that the change wouldn't address the possibility that innocent people could find their property seized if a convicted pirate used it to commit crimes without their knowledge. (At least one defendant in a peer-to-peer lawsuit brought by the RIAA was sued because someone else was using their Wi-Fi access point.)

As I said, artists deserve to make money for their work, and piracy needs to be curtailed. But let’s hope this legislation ultimately reflects a thorough understanding of the technologies involved.  

 

Never mind fast foods, American Idol or meth, the real addiction afflicting more U.S. consumers than ever is to their cell phones.

According to a newly released survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Americans would have a harder time giving up their cell phones than any other technological tool, including the Internet and television.

In fact, for the first time since Pew began conducting the surveys, Americans deemed their cell phones as more important to them than their landlines. Cell phones were the only tech tools cited as virtually indispensable by more than half of the survey respondents. Here's the list and how each item rated as "very hard to give up":

Cell phones -- 51%
Internet -- 45%
Television -- 43%
Landline telephone -- 40%
8-track tape players --  38%  (just kidding)
Email -- 37%
BlackBerry or wireless email device -- 36%

While it's certainly noteworthy that cell phones top the list for the first time, the results actually are pretty close. (If a presidential primary were this tight, nobody would be dropping out.) Of the six tools listed by Pew, only two -- landlines and TV -- declined from the 2006 survey.

My personal list is slightly different. Here's my "can't live without it" order of preference:

Internet
Cell phone
Email (grudgingly)
Television
Landline
BlackBerry or wireless email device (don't have one, unless you count a laptop)

To each his own addiction, I guess.

At my son’s school, some teachers are very anti-Wikipedia. For instance, he is not allowed to use the popular online collaborative encyclopedia as a source for his report on Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I use Wikipedia a lot, and I’ve always thought the criticisms leveled against it were overblown. The fact is, there’s always going to be some opinion involved with a huge encyclopedia, and if you have your wits about you, you should be able to tell when something is a legit entry.

But a story today -- detailing some of the ugly, behind-the-scenes dealings of those who run the site -- is making me wonder about the integrity of Wikipedia.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle and Associated Press:

Jimmy Wales, the Internet whiz famous for creating the online, user-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia, is facing allegations on two fronts that he abused the trust of the community he helped build.

Former Wikipedia employee Danny Wool is alleging that Wales misused money from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that oversees the site.

At the same time, Wales has been hit with concerns that he inappropriately tinkered with a Wikipedia entry on behalf of a girlfriend, a television news commentator, whom he abruptly dumped last week.

Some of the juicier, only-in-the-Internet-age details are buried toward the bottom of the Chronicle story:

The financial allegations surfaced after Wa