Last week, Tim O'Reilly wrote about Business Week's article on the importance of Amazon Web Services to Amazon.com's growth in 2003 and beyond. This API is something that CTDATA has used extensively, beginning with our foray into used books, and continuing through our recent launch of Operation Gadget.

Tim believes that Amazon.com and Ebay are vast network operating systems that enable e-commerce. Therefore, he thinks that companies who get into developing Internet applications that leverage data from these sites will increase their own revenues as well as Amazon's or Ebay's.

We believe that Amazon Web Services represents a major growth area for e-commerce, that's why we are investing in it. We expect our plans in this area to become clearer to the public in 2004. In the meantime, we recommend that people interested in e-commerce growth areas read Tim O'Reilly's article, and the original BusinessWeek article as well.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CNET News.com is reporting that Amazon.com will enlist celebrities like Michael J. Fox and Bruce Springstein to promote exclusive content available on Amazon's web site during the holiday season. Undoubtedly, a campaign like this will give a boost to sales taking place through Amazon.com. Most analysts expect their sales to be very strong this season, resulting in the first annual profit for the company.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "One of the hottest book concepts that O'Reilly and Associates has developed recently is their so-called Hacks Series. Far and away the most interesting of these books, in my opinion, is
Amazon Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools which is now shipping at Amazon.com."

"Anil Dash pointed out that the Amazon Hacks web site has also gone live over at hacks.oreilly.com. This site is useful because it outlines the hacks that are published in the book and gives the reader community an opportunity to talk about each of them. Some of the hacks are published on that site, as sample chapters of the book."

"It's great to see that more than half of the book is devoted to money making opportunities in conjunction with using Amazon.com. This is one of CTDATA's favorite recent pastimes. Hacks 49-58 are about Selling Through Amazon. The Amazon Associates Program is explored in Hacks 59-75. And, Hacks 76-100 are practical uses of Amazon Web Services in PHP, Perl, Python, VBscript, and VB.NET."

"The Amazon Web Services hacks look like they will change the game for AWS developers. At some point, a few of these hacks are going to take money out of low-level practitioners hands. Look for services like ScoutPal to have to upgrade their feature sets in order to continue to charge used book sellers meaningful fees."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently, large internet service providers have been working on challenge-response systems that ask the sender of an email message to answer some sort of question or interact with a web application before email will be delivered to a protected email address. Many journalists expect that a huge number of disparate systems, all performing the same basic task, will be deployed in the near future.

On CNET News.com, Declan McCollough predicts that challenge-response systems will wreak havoc on list servers and other legitimate forms of communication. According to the article:

Challenge-response systems, ironically, share some characteristics with spam: In small quantities, both are only mildly annoying to the recipient. But as quantities increase, they make it more difficult to use e-mail at all. MailFrontier.net is a good example: It prevents its users from signing up to mailing lists unless the list operator manually intervenes to answer the challenge, a process that is exactly backward.

We agree. As soon as we can, CTDATA will notify subscribers to our websites' headline services that we will unsubscribe anyone whose mailbox automatically challenges email from our sites.

Our users opted into receiving these emails, and it makes no sense for challenge-response systems to invalidate all of the decisions that email users previously made on well designed and well behaved Internet communications systems.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier today, Slashdot pointed out a Baltimore Sun article that says some employers are fighting to keep track of every resume they receive because U.S. federal law can be construed as requiring this approach at companies with 15 or more employees.

This would be a serious concern for companies who use Monster.com to search for employees with technical skills; It's generally assumed that each company that posts a job requirement on a service like Monster receives hundreds or even thousands of resumes from all over the world.

But, a lot of people we know in the Information Technology industries receive SPAM from companies trying to place H1-B visa candidates. If resumes of this sort are received by people at mid-sized businesses or even larger companies, does anyone really think that they have to be passed on to a Human Resources person and kept on file?

Why do newspapers like The Baltimore Sun wait until the depths of a recession before publishing articles like this? Had we known that laws like these existed, we might have wanted to develop database applications to track job candidates.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times reports that many consumers and small businesses with insecure computers on broadband connections unwittingly serve as relays for SPAMmers. It is somewhat surprising that the Times laid so much of the blame for Internet insecurity on so many users in the North America and Europe, when it's so easy to cite poorly-configured servers in some Asian countries known for lax computer security procedures.

Yet, the Times says that a major part of the open relay problem is caused by the insecure configuration of client-level proxy servers such as AnalogX Proxy. According to the aricle:

AnalogX Proxy, a free proxy-server program that has been downloaded by more than a million people, is automatically in the open state when it is first installed. Mark Thompson, the author of AnalogX, said he had rebuffed the requests of many antispam activists to distribute the software with the security features already activated because doing so would make it harder to set up.

"The biggest plug for the proxy is it is really easy to get it running," he explained. Mr. Thompson said he did try to achieve a compromise by revising the program to give people a warning about security problems every time it starts.

Even so, Wirehub, a Dutch Internet service provider, says that 45,000 of the 150,000 open proxy servers it has identified as sending spam appear to be using AnalogX.

The idea that a Dutch ISP has 150,000 open proxy servers ought to scare people to death. Then again, how many open wireless LANs are there in densely populated areas of the Netherlands?

Open wireless LANs, in the hands of the right people, are just as dangerous as open proxy servers. The big difference is that the abuser needs to be physically near the WLAN access point.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ever notice that you can find a lot of people's phone number simply by going to Google and typing:

first_name last_name, city, st

Replace "first_name", "last_name", "city", and "st" with the name of the person and their home city and state. I don't know how they do it, but I can find many listed residential phone numbers this way, and some business phone numbers as well. Addresses are generally included with links to MapQuest and Yahoo! Maps.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fortune had published a feature article on Amazon.com in its May 26 edition called Mighty Amazon. In it, Fred Vogelstein discusses the Amazon Marketplace, part of Amazon where third parties can sell new and used goods, side-by-side with Amazon's own offering. Vogelstein suggests that in spite of fear that it would cannibalize Amazon.com's own sales and hurt future chances for profitablity, Amazon Marketplace has been wildly successful:

Selling partners' used and new goods next to Amazon's own has become a cornerstone of its offerings... Amazon earns about the same profit margins selling on commission as it does selling retail. In addition, the company doesn't have to advertise that its prices are lower, because consumers themselves can now compare prices from Amazon and other vendors....

The other benefit of Amazon's so-called marketplace strategy is that the revenue is almost pure profit. Amazon earns a commission instead of a markup for third-party transactions and incurs no inventory or warehousing costs. Almost 20% of Amazon's unit volume is now sold through others. Another dividend that Bezos counted on: Indirectly sold goods slow the need to add warehouse capacity.

The Amazon Marketplace is clearly a win-win for buyers, sellers, and Amazon. CTDATA participates in the Amazon Marketplace as a buyer and a seller. We have made thousands of dollars selling used books in the Amazon Marketplace.

We have also made purchases that ended up saving us 20 to 50 percent on books and DVDs that we would have purchased in the new market previously. As Jeff Bezos suggested to Fortune, the existence of the Amazon Marketplace has resulted in us buying more products from Amazon.com than we otherwise would.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over on Scripting News, Dave Winer addressed the issue of referer log spamming, a technique that pornographic web sites have started using to advertise themselves. Referer logs are automatically generated reports of where visitors to web sites are coming from. When referer logs are not abused, they are an indication of where links to a given web site can be found.

Many weblogs now publicize their referer logs, mainly because they can. It helps give third parties an idea of the so-called flow that a web site gets. However, referer logs can be abused because the browser being used volunteers the referer data to the web server, and this is something that can be forged. This is how the pornography sites are manipulating the referer log on scripting.com.

Winer says, "A couple of weeks ago we finally figured out why porn sites add themselves to referer pages on high page-rank sites: to improve their placement in search engines. Last night at dinner Andrew Grumet came up with the solution. In robots.txt specifically tell Googlebot and its relatives to not index the Referers page. Then the spammers won't get the page-rank they seek."

For an illustration of the sort of referer log spam Winer is talking about, check out the middle third of the Scripting News referer's page. But, don't go there if you are offended by slang terms for human genitalia.

Porn sites operators may be evil, but they often leverage web technology in the most subtle and sophisticated ways. They really have analyzed popular web services, such as search engine spiders and SMTP, and figured out how to use them to marginally increase traffic to their sites.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "A number of news sites (including Slashdot) have started reporting that various major ISPs are blocking mail that appears to originate from mail servers running on DSL subnets. I didn't think of this initially, but, what are you supposed to do if you have more than one Linux machine in your house and you forward the mail for the root user to a single email address for review?"

"At my place, I have two Linux machines running on a DHCP subnet that have .forward files in the root user directory. Now, these mails forward to a ctdata.com address, which is our own server and it's colo-ed. So, this isn't a big problem for me at the moment. But, other people who spend less money on their infrastructure than we do might be running into problems already."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "The Washington Post reports in Thursday's edition that 42 percent of Americans do not use the Internet according to a recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project."

"They don't call lack of Internet access The Digital Divide for nothing. I don't want to embarass anyone, but, will the members of my family who shall remain nameless consider joining us out here, at least for a few moments a day? It would be a lot easier for us to communicate if everyone truly used email."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A number of web sites are reporting that Apple Computer is in talks with Vivendi Universal to buy the Universal Music Group. Apple is reportedly offering between $5 and 6 billion for the company that markets the music of 50 Cent, U2, Shania Twain, and Luciano Pavarotti. According to the article:

Defying conventional wisdom, {Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs} apparently is betting that music is finally on the verge of becoming a profitable presence on the Internet. Apple has been quietly testing a service that some music business insiders believe could pave the way for widespread online distribution of songs.

People who have tried the service, expected to debut by the end of April, say it makes downloading and purchasing music as simple and non-technical as buying a book from Amazon.com. It allows users to buy and download songs to their computers with a single click and to transfer the music automatically to their portable MP3 players.

If a transaction like this were to take place, imagine the huge changes that it would cause in the entertainment industry. Think also of the implications for the personal computer industry.

A deal between technology and entertainment companies may be what is necessary to pull the music industry out of its steep decline. But, the changes that would have to be made to the music industry would go beyond the way music is distributed. The entire recording company management, record production, and musician promotion processes would have to be re-engineered. After all, Sony hasn't solved the problems with its record business, and it's a technology company.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, Jakob Nielsen published an article in his Alertbox series that makes the case for building intranet portals, and offers the unique argument that portals can actually reduce intranet costs. This is interesting because previous corporate portal construction efforts involved tying together departmental web sites. This article suggests that the portal itself could be a standardized publishing environment instead of just an integration platform.

This is really worth considering, in light of recent corporate IT cost rationalization efforts. Many departmental web sites were expensive and poorly executed. Perhaps a new centralization effort gives departments of medium to large corporations another chance to build usable web-based information systems.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal reported on the launch of an English language web site by al Jazeera, the Qatar-based cable news network.

We looked at the web site, http://english.aljazeera.net/ at 6:00am Eastern time today, and found that the site was overloaded with traffic and did not offer very much more than news headlines and a one or two sentence summary of major war news stories. It is not really offering the alternative view of the news that we were led to believe it would. At this time, we do not recommend expending the effort to try to read it.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Winer pointed out an article in The New York Times about a South Korean on-line news site that has gotten as many as 20 million page views per day by touting itself as an alternative to establishment journalism. Apparently, OhmyNews is the place that Koreans turn to for information about breaking news and on-going controversies. Examples of major stories that have been covered recently include the Taegu subway bombing and the accidental death of two Korean school girls hit by a U.S. Army patrol vehicle.

One of the most interesting parts of this article is the extent to which OhmyNews incorporates reports from its user community:

Although the staff has grown to 41, from the beginning the electronic newspaper's unusual concept has been to rely mostly on contributions from ordinary readers all over the country, who send dispatches about everything from local happenings and personal musings to national politics.

Only 20 percent of the paper each day is written by staff journalists. So far, a computer check shows, there have been more than 10,000 other bylines.

The article also talks about a grading concept that OhmyNews has developed to help readers understand the degree of editorial review that each story on the site has received. This may be similar to the score applied to comments on sites like Slashdot, except that this scoring applies to the stories themselves and it is applied by the site editors, not the readers.

The number of page views recorded by OhmyNews is staggering when the size of the South Korean population is taken into account. In a country of 40 million people, this web site gets as many as 20 million page views per day. It appears to be written entirely in Korean, so relatively few people outside South Korea are regular readers.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Slashdot pointed out an article on ZDnet that related the main points of a talk by Stephen Dugan about problems in the current implementation of Border Gateway Protocol. The talk took place at a Black Hat Security Briefing on Thursday in Seattle.

The key points in the article were that:

• BGP has a number of security holes that stem from the implicit trust that routers running BGP have for each other, and
• architects proposing BGP changes to the Internet Engineering Task Force are not funded sufficiently when the magnitude of the technical problems they are dealing with is taken into account.

We do not need to look back very far to see the potential impact of BGP-related problems on the Internet infrastructure. In January, we reported on the widespread routing failures that took place during the SQL Slammer worldwide network attack. These were attributed by some analysts to widespread BGP session loss and problems with the Cisco Express Forwarding algorithm in low memory or extremely high traffic conditions.

The other obvious issue underlying any possible flaws in BGP is the homogeneity of routing on the Internet. How many practical high-performance routing alternatives really exist to BGP for Internet Service Providers and large corporations?

Earlier last week, an astute Slashdot reader pointed out the fact that one of the 13 root DNS servers changed from BIND to NSD. This was done "...to increase the diversity of software in the root name server system, the lack of which is widely considered to be a potential vulnerability. The nsd software... has no design commonalities with bind, the currently prevalent DNS implementation." If administrators of core DNS servers are acting proactively, shouldn't other administrators of critical infrastructure also evaluate their options?

You have to wonder if all of the core services and protocols on the Internet, except for basic transport, should have widely deployed alternatives. And, if such alternatives don't exist, isn't the entire U.S. telecom infrastructure at risk of a well-crafted attack?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jason Kottke has written an insightful deconstruction of Google from a business perspective. His piece begins:

With their acquisition of Pyra and new Content-Targeted Advertising offering, it should be apparent that Google is not a search company. What they are exactly is unclear, but their biggest asset is: a highly annotated map of the web.

This timely and well-written article could easily form the basis for a larger article in a major business publication. It's highly recommended.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another interesting article in The New York Times says that ComScore Media Metrix released revised visitor statistics for major web sites in the fourth quarter of 2002. The reason stated for doing this was a flaw that the statisticians detected in their new methodology, initially released in October.

The article goes on to explain how Media Metrix was sold last year as a result of financial problems at Jupiter Media Metrix. In the course of selling the Media Metrix operation to ComScore, the companies had to deal with the settlement of a patent dispute with Nielsen/NetRatings. This resulted in the need to develop a new methodology.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this week New Scientist reported that a researcher at Cornell had developed algorithms to detect word bursts in text documents and that these bursts may help to identify trends or new ideas. The article suggests that the new finding in this research has to do with the rate of increase in mentions of a term.

Although this represents the results of new research, some work has already been done in this area. Google produces a report on search trends that they call Google Zeitgeist. This is a weekly or monthly snapshot of recent search queries, not a time series analysis.

Some webloggers cited the New Scientist article as another justification for Google's acquisition of Pyra, but that seems unlikely for a number of reasons that have been discussed here previously.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "Google has provided a great service to the Internet community by implementing its PageRank technology to help identify the most relevant information on the web. Google describes PageRank as follows:"

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search.

Dave Aiello continued, "The only issue I have with PageRank is that it doesn't provide a way for me to indicate that I do not agree with a link that I place on my website. If I am criticizing something in an article on my site, I would like to be able to link to it. But, under the PageRank algorithm, that counts as a sort of endorsement of the information pointed to by the link."

"I think that PageRank could deal with criticism fairly easily, if it could be expressed in the markup of pages. I would say that links coded normally could be considered positive references to the object page, but links coded with some sort of additional meta data could count as negative references."

"I'd be interested to know if other webloggers think that a system like this would work, and if it would be helpful in identifying information appearing on the Internet that is technically flawed, factually incorrect, or in some way reprehensible."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An article by Iljitsch van Beijnum on OnLAMP.com called Network Impact of the MS SQL Worm does a great job of explaining the impact of the SQL Slammer worm on three networks with different Cisco routers.

In van Beijnum's experience, some Cisco routers lost their Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions. When that occurred "the router was unable to advertise the network's IP address ranges to the rest of the world, with the result that these addresses became unreachable." This was compounded by problems with the Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) algorithm on routers that did not have enough memory. Consequently, the author recommends that packet forwarding algorithms be studied from a worst-case perspective.

Van Beijnum also gives documents some of the steps he took to log and, later, filter the network traffic generated by the worm. So, the article gives insight into how an experienced network manager researches and solves network problems as they occur.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "Yesterday's massive denial of service attack, while aimed at Microsoft SQL Server 2000 servers, exposed a lot of other holes in infrastructure, and lacks of redundancy or robustness. I want to cite a few examples from CTDATA's infrastructure because I think they will be illustrative:"

1. Lack of meaningful DNS diversity: At the time of the outage, CTDATA's servers had primary and secondary DNS servers located in the same colocation facility. This is a bad idea because yesterday showed that all of the routes from any one facility to the Internet may be overwhelmed with traffic simultaneously, even if they go through different ISPs.

   
   

2. Lack of local mail relays for critical network services: The network monitoring service that we run does not have an SMTP server on the same subnet. This means that we depend upon one of the SMTP servers that we are attempting to monitor to email our outage alerts to us.

   This also became an issue for our firewalls, because they mail their logs to administrators as they fill up. When huge amounts of traffic hit the firewalls, many events were logged, filling up the memory quickly. Those logs could not be emailed because of the network failure. So, we probably lost a good amount of information about the attack as it was occuring.
   

"Although our firewalls prevented the attack from reaching our servers, we still experienced total loss of connectivity for about 10 hours. The connectivity loss is attributable to routers at ISPs upstream from our servers. Those routers simply went down when massive amounts of traffic hit them. When CTDATA's servers came back on-line, I received over 700 email messages within an hour, mostly from servers that had the ability to queue their error and alert message in memory until the email servers came back on-line."

"I object to articles like Massive Internet Outage was Preventable from the UPI because it gives people the impression that attacks like these are predictable, easy-to-understand, have straightforward solutions, and only have obvious side effects. Nothing could be further from truth."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "Derek Vadala notes that business appears to be up at LinuxWorld Expo in New York, taking place this week at The Javits Center. This is very good news."

"In talking to Tony Iams, a scheduled speaker at LinuxWorld, I wondered aloud if it would be worth attending. It turns out that I am too busy to go because one of my clients inserted a project deadline that I am trying to honor. But, based on the lack of pre-show buzz from friends in the industry, and the terrible website that was put together for the show, I concluded that the show was going to be depressing."

"Now it appears I may have come to the wrong conclusion. I'll be looking for more information on attendance and vendor support, and if I see anything else that appears significant, you'll see it here."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In one of the more interesting recent articles published in a mainstream U.S. newspaper about the IT industry, The Washington Post has profiled Symantec's managed-security service headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. According to the article:

The four-year-old operation, which includes special monitoring and "data mining" technology, was created by a local start-up called Riptech. Last year, California-based Symantec paid about $350 million to buy Riptech and three other electronic-security firms (Recourse Technologies, SecurityFocus and Mountain Wave) that had developed proprietary anti-hacker technology. Symantec merged Riptech's operations with its own and now has four similar centers -- in Britain, Japan, Germany and San Antonio.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times reports that a three-member panel in Oslo City Court ruled that Jon Johansen had not broken any laws by using or distributing DeCSS and that he is free to view any DVDs he purchased leagally in any way he chooses. This is a major setback for the Entertainment Industry, which argued that the mere existance of software to decrypt DVDs was an open invitation to digital piracy.

However, the court found that Norwegian law treats a DVD purchased at retail as the purchaser's property, and not merely a license to view the content of the DVD on a player certified by the Motion Picture Association of America and similar industry trade groups. As a result, according to Aftenposten, "Johansen and his defense attorney Halvor Manshaus won on all counts, with the Oslo court ruling that Johansen did nothing wrong when he helped cracked the code on a DVD that was his own personal property."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a great article in The New York Times today called Online Retailers Try to Flourish Year-Round. Deep in the article is some great information about research that Erik Brynjolfsson from the Sloan School of Management at MIT did, comparing Amazon.com with local bookstores and superstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders:

Judging by what consumers spent in 2000 online for books they could not buy offline, Professor Brynjolfsson said the value of the Internet's product selection in this category alone was between $731 million and $1 billion. While consumers often enjoy lower prices online, he said, "the big benefit is getting access to goods you wouldn't otherwise have."

Professor Brynjolfsson takes his point one step further, arguing that the value of greater product selection over the past decade or so — which the Internet has hastened with its nearly endless product offerings — has gone unnoticed by statisticians.

This point is particularly salient regarding venues like Amazon Marketplace. This is the area of Amazon.com where third party sellers offer both new and used versions of books, CDs, DVDs, and other things consumers want. Quite often, this is the place to find an out-of-print book that came out five years ago. Many of these books are more valuable now than they were when they were in print, due to their scarcity. This is exactly what Dr. Brynjolfsson is getting at.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "My subscription to Forbes resumed Saturday. I found out that the reason I had not received a magazine in about two months was that my address had never been updated since I moved in June."

"One of the more interesting articles I saw in that first issue was a column by Rich Karlgaard, Forbes' publisher, called Can Software Startups Succeed? This is really interesting because I have been discussing the same thing with some of my friends. Some of his suggestions to the leadership of small software companies also seems quite valuable at this point in the market:"

• Forget trying to be mission critical. No CIO in America is going to bet his company on a little-known startup.
• Avoid like the plague the phrase "total solutions" when describing your product.
• Don't compete on price; compete on speed.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The San Jose Mercury-News reported on Friday that The Business Software Alliance and the Computer Systems Policy Project intend to take on lobbying groups representing the Entertainment industry over the issue of Digital Rights Management. The recording and motion picture industries have relentlessly pursued the introduction of very strong copy protection at the hardware and operating system levels of all sorts of digital devices, including PCs aimed at consumers.

According to the article, the lobbying groups for the computer and electronics industries, "hope to convince Congress that strict copy-protection legislation that sets technological mandates would stifle innovation, harm consumers and threaten an already suffering tech industry."

It will be interesting to see how much influence the Hollywood Establishment loses in Washington, now that both houses of Congress are under Republican control.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that Internet access at schools in Prince George's County, Maryland, was slowed by a peering dispute between America On-line and Cogent Communications Group, a smaller Internet Service Provider. Cogent provides Internet access to several educational organizations including school districts and George Washington University.

Peering is the term used by Internet Service Providers for providing reciprocal network access to customers of affiliated ISPs. These peering arrangements allow small ISPs to provide their customers with nationwide and international network access.

Many peering agreements have come under pressure recently as a result of the economic downturn in the USA. This is what happened in the case discussed in the Washington Post article. A similar thing happened to CTDATA in November as a result of a dispute between our colocation provider and the company that provided bandwidth to them.

It is virtually impossible for conscientious Internet access buyers to perform a comprehensive due diligence analysis of their providers. Peering agreements can change without notice to the end customers and they can be broken just as easily. This is one situation where the Internet would benefit from more governmental oversight.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earier today Slashdot pointed out that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts gave a speech that focused on the threat Personal Video Recorders represent to the cable industry. Roberts reportedly said that downloading TV programming to a hard drive in the consumer's home threatens the life blood of the of TV entertainment.

The cable industry is pushing hard to roll out video on demand to check the spread of satellite television services and recording devices like TiVo. But, the free timeshifting of televised entertainment is the biggest development in broadcasting in the last 10 years. It will be very difficult to get users who have already adopted TiVo or ReplayTV to surrender their new-found freedom.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Monday, Mike Landberg of The San Jose Mercury News revisited some technology predictions he made in October 1992 that were published in the same newspaper. It's an interesting article because he was uncannily accurate with some of his predictions (DVD, Direct Broadcast Satellite, and three-bedroom homes in Los Gatos that cost $900,000).

Probably his worst prediction was the notion that consumers would pay for the information they retrieved using their computers. But, looking back on the stock market debacle of the past two years, and ahead to the possibility of AOL Time Warner shifting magazine content to AOL's proprietary service, you have to ask if his prediction might turn out to be more accurate than it appears to be today.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "For the past few business days, I have been investigating E-commerce Platforms for a client. My bias, particularly in this economy, is toward low cost, feature-ladened solutions. So, I am doing a lot of research into Open Source products."

"Red Hat acquired a small company in 2001 that had led the development of an Open Source E-commerce Platform now known as Interchange. Red Hat began offering Interchange as a product called Red Hat E-commerce Suite, and it was reviewed quite favorably in early 2002 by a number of magazines and websites, including ZDNet. So, I was surprised when I could not find much information about the product on www.redhat.com."

"Using Google, I located the key maintainers of the Interchange project at www.icdevgroup.com. There, I learned that Red Hat stopped offering Interchange as a product in June, although that has not affected the availability of the software."

"I wanted to point this out for a number of reasons. But, the main reason is that I want it to be easier for people who are researching Interchange to determine its status as a commercially-supported Open Source solution. It is not clear to me at the moment that any company is offering enterprise-level technical support for Interchange, but the community support that it has had for years is still there. As I do my first implementation of Interchange, I will try to report on the helpfulness of the Interchange support community."

Update, 12/05/2002: The Interchange Developer Group discussed the issue of Red Hat support for the project on their website on October 26. When this article was initially published, this was not apparent.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Washington Post called Monday's Distributed Denial of Service Attack on the 13 root DNS servers "the largest ever attack on the Internet." You could have fooled us, because the story never got close to the front pages of the mainstream media, given all the attention devoted to the sniper who is besieging the Washington, DC area.

Many of us in this country, including the police and newsmedia, are now fairly dependent upon wireless email devices like Blackberry pagers and Handspring Treos. These wireless devices are endpoints that depend upon data being routed to two or three different proxying servers between the time an email reaches your mailbox, and its successful delivery to the client device. If the attack that took place on Monday had been successful, communication to these devices would have been delayed or disrupted.

The media would still have their mobile phones and satellite uplinks. The police would still have their mobile phones and two-way radios. But, we suspect that a wireless email disruption would have had a profound effect on an intense criminal investigation like this one. This is a reason to take the concept behind the National Infrastructure Protection Center more seriously.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft has been caught red-handed in an attempt to manufacture a person who switched from using a Macintosh to using a Windows PC. The scam was exposed and documented in a little over three hours by the collective observational skills of readers of several prominent weblogs.

2:49 pm: The investigation began on Slashdot where the story Microsoft Tries a "Switch" Campaign documented an alleged first person account of a freelance writer who switched to Windows. Authenticity of the article was immediately questioned, because the freelance writer was shown in a photo, but not named.

3:02 pm: A Slashdot reader posts a comment pointing out that photograph that Microsoft used on its web page also appears on a Getty Images web site. Getty Images is a well known provider of stock photography.

4:56 pm: Dave Winer of Scripting News points to the controversy, lamenting the fact that Microsoft removed the web page from their site.

5:30 pm: Dave Winer reports that several of his readers provided links to screen shots of the Microsoft web page or cached copies of the web page.

Update: Now, the Associated Press has jumped into the fray. But, instead of confirming the entire ad is a hoax, they have run a story claiming that the AP identified the actual person who gave the testimonial.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday's New York Times contains an article called Site for the Truly Geeky Makes a Few Bucks that is entirely about Slashdot, one of our favorite websites. There are a few tongue-in-cheek quotes from Rob Malda, as if he would ever say anything out of character for publication. Jeff Bates plays the straight man in the article, acting as if he is the only member of the Slashdot management team who gets the nuances of the business.

There are also a few gratuitous comments from industry experts who are there to give the article gravitas. What makes their presence in the article funnier is that they seem to have gotten their experience at defunct web sites. This must make them qualified to put Slashdot's success in perspective.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "I guess I shouldn't be surprised that The New York Times reported yesterday that Forbes ASAP has ceased publication. This was one of the first magazines dedicated to the so-called 'new economy' that is now so out of favor. The most interesting comment I've read about this story is on Werblog by Kevin Werbach."

"Commenting on the notion that there will be another boom in the business cycle, and new magazines will be born to cover it, Werbach said:"

That's absolutely the wrong way to think about things. It's true that business is cyclical, but it's not a perfect sine wave. You could have said during the 1972-74 bear market that stocks would come back, and you would have been right. They came back... starting in 1982. The period between 1994 and early 2000 was extraordinary, the likes of which we may never see again in a lifetime. I'm an optimist about the future, both in terms of technology and business opportunities, but we have to put out of our minds the notion that the current doldrums are but a temporary pause.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "I noticed that Dave Winer has been speculating that Google has tweaked their PageRank algorithm because his site isn't number one when you search for Dave anymore. He then went on to point out a whole discussion thread where people who refer to themselves as search engine optimizers are complaining that Google is monkeying with their livelyhoods. I agree with Dave Winer when he says:"

When people {who do search engine optimization for a living} say they're taking food out of their family's mouth, I think they should get a real job. Depending on the vagaries of an algorithm programmed by engineers at a VC-backed Silicon Valley dotcom-vestigial company is not a good idea. A bit of friendly advice.. Don't tell the loan officer at the bank that's how you're making your mortgage payments.

Dave Aiello continued, "Search engine optimization makes selling used books on Amazon.com look like a straight-forward way to make money."

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Register reported that Microsoft has purchased the Patent library of Liquid Audio. This provides the company with another suite of Digital Rights Management (DRM) patents that may make it easier for them to control the distribution of copyrighted entertainment in the future.

The scary part of this story is the price reportedly paid for the patents: $7 million for 20 or more U.S. and foreign patents. Seven million dollars is a very low price, considering what Microsoft will probably be able to charge in the future when it uses its formidable library of patents in conjunction with the newly acquired ones.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots of websites are pointing to the fact that Google has announced that the beta test phase of its Google News project has officially ended, and it is now considered production-quality. Google News can be found at http://news.google.com/.

As Rob Malda said on Slashdot, the most interesting aspect of the Google News site is that it is built in an entirely automated fashion using technology derived from its PageRank research. The site is definitely worth scanning on a periodic basis.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dave Aiello wrote, "Over the past few days, I've been looking at Amazon.com Web Services, with the idea of using them to quickly answer some questions about books that come up at my office on a daily basis. The Amazon.com web service interface provides a lot of useful information about the books that Amazon sells, but not everything that I need to find out. So, I began to wonder if I could write a program to get that information from Amazon as well."

"This type of program is a special-purpose web client. It connects to a web site in much the same way that Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Mozilla does, but it retrieves the information programmatically, rather than interactively. Search engines use web clients that digest entire web pages and follow HTML links-- they're called spiders."

"Amazon's Conditions of Use say that you are not supposed to run spiders against its website. But, I believe I've found a number of situations where spiders are being permitted, either because they help promote Amazon, or they are of great value to a company affiliated with Amazon. Read on for more details...."