Slashdot Mirror

Its volunteer-edited web directory formed the basis for early search offerings from Netscape, AOL, and Google. But 19 years later, there's some bad news. koavf writes: As posted on the DMOZ homepage, the Open Directory Project's web listing will go offline on March 14, 2017. Founded in 1998 as "Gnuhoo", the human-curated directory once powered Google and served as a model for Wikipedia.
A 1998 Slashdot editorial prompted Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation to complain about how "Gnu" was used in the site's name. "We renamed GnuHoo to NewHoo," a blog post later explained, "but then Yahoo objected to the 'Hoo' (and our red letters, exclamation point, and 'comical font')." After being acquired for Netscape's "Open Directory Project," their URL became directory.mozilla.org, which was shortened to DMOZ. Search Engine Land predicts the memory of the Open Directory Project will still be kept alive by the NOODP meta tag.

The site was so old that its hierarchical categories were originally based on the hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups. As it nears its expiration date, do any Slashdot readers have thoughts or memories to share about DMOZ?

Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop. But in many other areas, including Web servers and supercomputing, Microsoft is just one player among many, and often a weak player at that. On the gaming side, despite the latest xBox getting all kinds of media buzz as "the" console to buy, Sony's Playstation outsells the xBox at least two to one, and many analysts expect Sony to widen that gap even more when Playstation 3 comes out in the Spring of 2006. On the Internet, MSN and MSN Search are so far behind AOL and Google that it isn't funny. And even on the desktop, Linux keeps getting stronger, while Mac OS X is commonly accepted as more reliable, secure, and user-oriented than Windows. So why do we keep saying Microsoft is a monopoly? Microsoft (Slowly) Moves Away from Monopolistic Behavior

If a major IT user tells a Microsoft salesperson that he or she is thinking about switching to Linux, Microsoft will usually come back with a cut-price offer, something the company never used to do. Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price, which is not monopoly-style behavior.

This does not mean Microsoft has suddenly adopted a "let's all love one another" attitude.I believe Microsoft is getting more concerned about interoperability not out of goodness, but because of market pressure. But in the long run, as long as Microsoft stops treating every other operating system and file format as some sort of devilspawn, life is a little easier for those of us who would rather not use their products, and that's what really matters.

Microsoft Explorer No Longer Rules the Online World

A majority of desktop computer users may still run Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, but it no longer has 95% market share. In a 2002 book, and again last year in an online article, I warned Web designers not to make IE-only sites, just as in the (distant) past I'd warned them not to make Netscape-only sites. Some listened. Some didn't.

Firefox adoption may have slowed in 2005, but it certainly hasn't stopped. Opera has become enough of a force that we hear rumors about first Google, then Microsoft, buying it. In any case, whether MSIE is currently running on 90% of all desktops or on only 70% (as a few surveys indicate), it is becoming less popular every month. Now Microsoft has decided that Explorer is no longer fit for Mac users, so its market share will drop even more. Sure, there's a new version of Explorer coming out, but it isn't going to help the millions of "legacy" Windows users who don't want to buy XP. If they want modern browser functionality, they must switch to Firefox, Opera or another non-Microsoft browser.

'The Network is the Computer'

I don't think this is quite true today, if by "the network" we're talking about applications delivered over the Internet instead of over well-maintained LANs. Back in October I explained why I don't think Internet-delivered applications are quite "there" yet. More recently, Salesforce.com had an outage that angered many of its (claimed) 350,000 subscribers. Worse, ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright pointed out that Salesforce.com compounded the problem, and possibly made users leery of all Internet-delivered applications' claims of "99.9% reliability," by poor communication with its users.

Most of the Web 2.0 (and even Web 3.0) stuff that's getting so much hype these days is not OS-dependent. You can run things like Google Maps on Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and even Windows, using any standards-compliant browser you choose.

Even Microsoft is trying to get into the Web 2.0 game. I got a press release from their PR people that included this sentence:"And if you enjoy taking a drive to check out your neighborhood’s Christmas lights visit this great Windows Live Local developer application at http://msnsearch101.com/searchmap."

I found this online utility's behavior strange and primitive, not nearly up to the standards of Google Maps and some of the mashups based on it. "Ah," I thought, "that's probably because I'm trying to use it with Linux and Mozilla." So I turned to my one Windows (XP) computer and checked the site with both Firefox and Explorer. For some reason the map background didn't load at all in Firefox, on Windows, and its behavior in Explorer, on Windows, was just as clunky as it was in Mozilla, on Linux.

If this is supposed to be a sample of what Windows Live Local can do, I don't think Microsoft is headed for any kind of monopoly -- or even much market share -- in the online map business. Not only that, it makes me wonder how good their promised Microsoft® Office Live is going to be. If even a quarter of the rumors we've heard about Google and Sun joining up to produce a Webified version of OpenOffice.org are true, I suspect Microsoft is going to be a distant also-ran in the (inevitable) Internet-delivered office software business, too.

Hundreds of Thousands of Competitors

It's fun to play the "Google is cooler than Microsoft" game and talk about how Google, not Microsoft, has become the hot place for top-end programmers to work if they want to make their mark on the world, but even Google can only hire a tiny fraction of the world's software development talent. There are over 100,000 Open Source projects on SourceForge.net (which is owned by the same company that owns Slashdot), and SourceForge.net is but one of many Open Source and Free Software hosting services out there. There are literally millions of programmers working on Free and Open Source Software, plus countless others working on personal proprietary projects.

We've all heard -- probably too many times -- the old saw, "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare." This may or may not be true. But it is certain that if you put millions of programmers in front of millions of computers and let them do whatever they want, some of them will turn out brilliant, world-changing work. Even if 999 out of 1000 of our putative programmers work on established projects or never finish what they start, that still gives us thousands of potential world-changing software projects, most of which won't be developed by Google (or Microsoft) employees.

I've been to India, and the smartest programmers I met there weren't working for outsourcing mills but worked for themselves. I'm sure there are plenty of self-employed programmers in China, Brazil, Kenya, and almost everywhere else on this planet, too, and there are certainly plenty of them here in the United States. And, all over the world, millions of programmers have day jobs doing routine work for corporate employers to put food on the table, and do their "real work" at home, at night.

Neither you nor I nor Google's management nor Microsoft's management know what might be going on right now in the mind of a brilliant Saudi woman with a computer science degree who can't work outside her home because her country's laws keep her from mixing with men who aren't related to her. There may be a poorly-dressed young man coding furiously in a Beijing Internet cafe, while you read this article, whose new operating system will make all current ones obsolete -- and you may not learn about his work until it shows up in a Chinese-made $100 laptop computer.

When Bill Gates and his friends started Microsoft, it was one of very few companies that sold nothing but personal computer software, and the others were so small that Microsoft managed to buy most of its competitors -- or at least license their best work or hire away their best programmers. Back then, programmers were scarce and expensive, as were the computers they programmed on. Now there are both programmers and computers all over the world, linked together by the Internet. The Internet not only helps programmers collaborate with each other across geographic boundaries, but allows them to distribute their work without shipping physical products.

The only reason to have a software company's employees work in an office these days is control, both of employees' schedules and of what they work on. Self-motivated geniuses have no need of offices and may even resent being asked to show up at one on a regular schedule, which means that many of the world's best programmers will never work for Google, Microsoft or any other company. Instead, they'll start their own software companies or, in many cases, Open Source-based consultancies.

So Microsoft doesn't face a few dozen competitors, as it did in the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands. And these competitors are spread all over the world. This kind of competition is a lot harder to co-opt, buy out or fend off than competition from a single company, a la Netscape, or even from a group of companies as substantial as IBM, Sun, Oracle, and their computing industry peers.

Competition has Forced Microsoft to Improve its Products

Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.

A true monopoly would not need to make these improvements in its products. It would give you whatever it wanted, at whatever price it wanted to charge. It would not be selling cut-down versions of its products at cut-rate prices in developing countries -- many of which, you may note, are rapidly turning into "software developing" countries.

Without Linux, combined with Apple's move to BSD-based Mac OS X, I doubt that Microsoft would have put much development effort into Windows. They sure didn't do much with Explorer between the time they crushed Netscape and the time when Firefox started making a big splash, did they?

The U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft wasn't about the company being a monopoly (which courts agreed that it was at the time), but about illegal misuse of that monopoly. That case was settled in a way that left Microsoft essentially unharmed, but with a judge overseeing its actions for five years, a time period that is going to end before long.

The Age of the Software Monopoly is Over

IBM tried to create a monopoly in the business desktop computer business, but failed to hold onto its market-leading position as dozens, then hundreds, and later thousands of competitors made better/faster/cheaper PCs. Even today, while Dell is the world's largest personal computer vendor, if you add up all the market share reports from major computer vendors in this C|Net article, you'll see that they account for around 60% -- not 100% -- of total sales, with smaller companies getting the rest. (And some of those companies are *really* small, like the one-man Bradenton, Florida, shop where my sailing buddy Gene just bought his latest home computer.)

The personal computer hardware business has become totally demonopolized, decentralized, democratized, and internationalized. If you have enough mechanical ability to assemble components neatly (and enough sales ability to get people to buy what you make), you can get into it yourself with a very small investment, just as Michael Dell started out reselling computer components and assembling systems in his college dorm room.

Starting a software business takes even less investment. If you're a competent programmer -- or you have a friend who is a competent programmer and you are a whiz-bang marketing person -- you have everything you need to get going. You can either produce and sell proprietary software or customize (and probably install and maintain) Free or Open Source Software for corporate clients. If the Internet is your primary sales and distribution channel, you don't need to live and work in expensive IT business hotbeds like Silicon Valley or Boston, either: JBoss, for example, is based in Atlanta, Georgia; and Digium, the company behind Asterisk, is in Huntsville, Alabama.

There are software businesses springing up all over the place. Most of them are tiny, and few of them will ever get big enough that analyst firms like Gartner or IDC will track their market share (or even notice them). But there are so many of them being started that, in aggregate, they are becoming a more significant market force than any single big software company, even Microsoft.

This doesn't mean Microsoft will be replaced next year by 100,000 startups. The company will still be around, it will still get lots of press, and -- assuming it embraces (but does not keep trying to extend and extinguish) Open Standards -- it will still be a powerful force in the software world.

But no matter what Microsoft does, it will never have a software monopoly again. Nor will any other company. The barriers to entry in the software business have become too low for that to happen, and too many skilled software developers are learning that they can earn at least as much working for themselves as they would by working for big software companies.

Small is Beautiful was a fine book title in 1973. Today, it's a fine description of the software industry's future.

-----

Have something important to say to the Slashdot community? Email roblimo at slashdot period org the complete article (or an article proposal).

The Real Nick W writes "Threadwatch reports that millions of pages are being Google Hijacked using the 302 redirect exploit and the ODP's RDF dump. The problem has been around for a couple of years and is just recently starting to make major headlines. By using the Open Directory's data dump of around 4 million sites, and 302'ing each of those sites, the havoc being wreaked on the Google database could have catastrophic effects for both Google and the websites involved."

makne writes "H. Ertas, a Turkish editor of the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) has been sentenced to 10 months in prison after being found guilty of editing a category about the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). Ertas's lawyer, Suna Coskun, explained that his client had worked as a voluntary editor at the Open Directory Project during his studies at the Euphrat-University and had been responsible for the Kurdish category. At the same time he became interested in Kurds and undertook his own research into the subject. As a voluntary editor, he had sorted the directory submissions but could not be responsible for their content. Therefore there could be no penalty under international law, according to Coskun. His activities could in no way be understood as 'support for a terrorist organisation' and thus Ertas' release was appropriate. The court sentenced Ertas to 10 months in prison and a fine of 416 million Turkish lire ($293). The sentence is not eligible for probation." (Read on for more.) By email, makne writes "I don't know the editor personally, but the editor was first arrested two years ago, then released on parole until now. Members of the editor community have tried to help him in any way they can, with no apparent success. The editor resigned from the ODP in 2002."

Makne also provided this link to a summary (from the Kurdish point of view) of earlier attempts to stifle Kurdish sites, including a campaign to have DMOZ's then-parent company Netscape remove the Kurdish category from DMOZ.

makne writes "H. Ertas, a Turkish editor of the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) has been sentenced to 10 months in prison after being found guilty of editing a category about the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). Ertas's lawyer, Suna Coskun, explained that his client had worked as a voluntary editor at the Open Directory Project during his studies at the Euphrat-University and had been responsible for the Kurdish category. At the same time he became interested in Kurds and undertook his own research into the subject. As a voluntary editor, he had sorted the directory submissions but could not be responsible for their content. Therefore there could be no penalty under international law, according to Coskun. His activities could in no way be understood as 'support for a terrorist organisation' and thus Ertas' release was appropriate. The court sentenced Ertas to 10 months in prison and a fine of 416 million Turkish lire ($293). The sentence is not eligible for probation." (Read on for more.) By email, makne writes "I don't know the editor personally, but the editor was first arrested two years ago, then released on parole until now. Members of the editor community have tried to help him in any way they can, with no apparent success. The editor resigned from the ODP in 2002."

Makne also provided this link to a summary (from the Kurdish point of view) of earlier attempts to stifle Kurdish sites, including a campaign to have DMOZ's then-parent company Netscape remove the Kurdish category from DMOZ.

makne writes "H. Ertas, a Turkish editor of the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) has been sentenced to 10 months in prison after being found guilty of editing a category about the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). Ertas's lawyer, Suna Coskun, explained that his client had worked as a voluntary editor at the Open Directory Project during his studies at the Euphrat-University and had been responsible for the Kurdish category. At the same time he became interested in Kurds and undertook his own research into the subject. As a voluntary editor, he had sorted the directory submissions but could not be responsible for their content. Therefore there could be no penalty under international law, according to Coskun. His activities could in no way be understood as 'support for a terrorist organisation' and thus Ertas' release was appropriate. The court sentenced Ertas to 10 months in prison and a fine of 416 million Turkish lire ($293). The sentence is not eligible for probation." (Read on for more.) By email, makne writes "I don't know the editor personally, but the editor was first arrested two years ago, then released on parole until now. Members of the editor community have tried to help him in any way they can, with no apparent success. The editor resigned from the ODP in 2002."

Makne also provided this link to a summary (from the Kurdish point of view) of earlier attempts to stifle Kurdish sites, including a campaign to have DMOZ's then-parent company Netscape remove the Kurdish category from DMOZ.

mcovey asks: "Unix shell accounts used to be easy to find, with quality applications installed and free web space. Nowadays the only free ones left are either not accepting new accounts, have limited applications or send you on a wild goose chase to register. Does anyone know any free or low-cost shell accounts that include compilers, IRC, background processes, FTP, a decent editor and an email app (preferably pine, since I have a config file already on my IMAP server)?"

Robert Accettura writes "Network Solutions has updated its whois interface, giving it an interesting new twist. On top of regular info provided, it shows data that appears to be from Alexa, including a screenshot of the homepage (though not terribly recent), as well as looks up your IP, and displays lots of information on it. It even shows the server type, if it supports SSL, DMOZ, Yahoo listing, traffic ranking, and lock status. This comes right after they announced rapid DNS updates. Perhaps they are trying to win over the geeks before they turn on sitefinder?"

rjelks writes "The Register is running an article about Google's new email service that was mentioned earlier, here. The story details the new privacy concerns about Gmail's privacy policy and Google's tracking habits. The policy states that Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account. 'The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.'" Reader cpfeifer writes "Rich Skrenta (founder of ODP, and Topix) speculates in his blog that the real product Google is creating isn't web search or email, but a massively scalable, distributed computing platform. 'It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.' If he's right, the question isn't what product will Google announce next, but what product will they not be able to announce?"

Slashback tonight brings you updates to previous stories on computer-class cheating, Smoothwall, AIBO hacking, the Open Source Directory, and the fate of Loki's CVS. Read on below for the details! Jon Masters was one of the many to write in after recent articles about automated cheat-detection employed in undergraduate CS classes to catch plagiarists. "Hi, cheat detection is hardly new. For example The University Of Nottingham have developed an automated marking/plagarism detection system as part of their CourseMaster software. Personally I don't agree with automated assessment in general, however plagarism detection can be useful."

From the email I've gotten on it, it seems like a whole passel of schools have at least a homegrown solution to CS cheats.

Perhaps the cute dog will end up changing Sony's stance? CodeMonkey555 writes "Here is a story that chronicles Sony's little foray into the DMCA with a hacker who added software for the Aibo robot."

It's nice to see that publications like SciAm are following the results and consequences of the DMCA.

Care to help edit an online software reference? SteveMallett writes "We at Open Source Directory (OSD) have opened the directory to volunteer editors now that we've given app authors and maintainer's a good chance to start and/or maintain their own listings.

Those interested may wish to visit our volunteer page which outlines what we're looking for. Don't worry. We're not that picky. The outline includes guidelines and tips for being a volunteer. Unlike dmoz, which has volunteer editors, we _will_ delete unupdated or neglected editor work in accordance to our Social Contract.

We hope that editors will help fill in the missing apps, take over those listings that they can do a better job of or have become neglected, and find those diamonds in the rough."

See our earlier post about the project if you're not sure what this is about.

Yes, someone has to read all those emails. kcurtis writes "Boston.com's tech site has this AP article about the large response to the Court's request for comment on the MS case's proposed settlement."

Now all they need is a trowel with an emblazoned smiley. enigma48 writes "Looks like the C'T article a little while ago about Smoothwall prompted some changes after all. Juergen Schmidt even gets a little credit. Shadow passwords are now in, but it looks like the ppp secrets file is still open (they describe it as being a "non-vulnerability"). A-patchin' I will go, a-patchin' I will go..."

So you don't have to stop playing your games ... Scott Draeker of Loki has some encouraging words for those who thought the announced (upcoming) closure of Loki would mean the loss of Loki's code and community. Draeker sent word of this a few days ago, but here are more details.

He writes:

"We have prepared tarballs of the public CVS, FAQs, mailing list archives, demos and Loki_Update which will be available for people to host. That's exactly what's going on with icculus.org.

The official repository will be hosted by the SEUL group at MIT. Once that site is set up we'll point the loki domains that direction. They'll also be adding some Loki projects to public CVS which were never completed."

Microsoft's C# has raised eyebrows, interest and debate since its official announcement last year. The prolific Carnage4Life (Dare Obasanjo) has completed a detailed comparison of C# and Java, outlining the things that are identical, similar, nearly the same, or completely different between the two languages. If you're considering learning or applying either one, you might benefit by reading this paper first. There are some other excellent comparisons to be found linked from the Open Directory Project as well. Update: 11/20 03:35 GMT by T : Note: here's a mirror; interested readers who mirror the mirror get good seats in heaven.

An anonymous reader says "The Open Directory Project is owned by AOL/Netscape and the status of the copyright and amount of corporate interest has always been a question. In light of a coming copyright revision, the staff was urged to give something back to assure that the volunteers contributing to the directory would not be taken advantage of, as they were with CDDB/Gracenote. The Debian social contract was brought up and was met with surprising support from Netscape. Here is the ODP's social contract. It's seen as a great triumph for the volunteer community that has worked so hard on the largest human edited directory on the web." I was always skeptical of dmoz, but I'm pleased to see this step taken. Now if only Gracenote would be good enough to do the same. Oh wait, that would imply that they had souls.

An anonymous reader says "The Open Directory Project is owned by AOL/Netscape and the status of the copyright and amount of corporate interest has always been a question. In light of a coming copyright revision, the staff was urged to give something back to assure that the volunteers contributing to the directory would not be taken advantage of, as they were with CDDB/Gracenote. The Debian social contract was brought up and was met with surprising support from Netscape. Here is the ODP's social contract. It's seen as a great triumph for the volunteer community that has worked so hard on the largest human edited directory on the web." I was always skeptical of dmoz, but I'm pleased to see this step taken. Now if only Gracenote would be good enough to do the same. Oh wait, that would imply that they had souls.

wayne writes: "CNN is running a story on web search engines and their inablity to keep up with the growth of the web. Web directories such as Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project can take months to add a site and the queue of unreviewed sites is growing. Most search engines are even further behind and are filled with off-topic and dead pages. The trend is toward pay for listing. Will the free, searchable web fade away?" The article gets beyond the "Wowie, so much content, engines can't keep up" typical blather and addesses some of the reason search engines have a hard time keeping up.

wdebruij asks: "I'm currently writing a small program for sharing information over the internet. For categorizing and indexing this information I want to use RDF and the semantic web as described by the WWW consortium, but since the documentation says nothing about a standard dictionary I seriously doubt we will ever have such a general information index. The Open Directory Project has written it's directory in RDF, but does anyone know of another 'standard' dictionary?" The whole point behind the "semantic web" concept is that data is organized online in such a manner, that a variety of different, independently designed machines can use it without compatibility issues.

Aggrazel passes along a FinancialTimes.com story that would send chills down my spine if I weren't already jaded and bored by such patent nonsense. You mean suits at a megacorp are taking advantage of absurd U.S. intellectual property laws to stifle innovation, quash competition, and steal candy from hard-working programmers? I'm shocked, shocked! Here's the InternetWorld interview: "...virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents. Q. Does that mean you'll pursue that? A. Yes, we will. Coming up in the first quarter of 2001." Could someone please find out what patents CMGI owns? And in related news, DeadSea notes that the search engine that powers the ODP (dmoz.org) has been released, under the MPL. It's rough around the edges; go thou and smooth it out. While you still can.

Aggrazel passes along a FinancialTimes.com story that would send chills down my spine if I weren't already jaded and bored by such patent nonsense. You mean suits at a megacorp are taking advantage of absurd U.S. intellectual property laws to stifle innovation, quash competition, and steal candy from hard-working programmers? I'm shocked, shocked! Here's the InternetWorld interview: "...virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents. Q. Does that mean you'll pursue that? A. Yes, we will. Coming up in the first quarter of 2001." Could someone please find out what patents CMGI owns? And in related news, DeadSea notes that the search engine that powers the ODP (dmoz.org) has been released, under the MPL. It's rough around the edges; go thou and smooth it out. While you still can.

beebware writes: "According to this article on C|Net, Tim Bray (co-inventor of XML) has launched Antarcti.ca which renders computer networks in 2 and 3D maps. It's currently running a demo off the ODP data. But will it take off? Will users really like 'country-maps' opposed to listings? (Incidentally Tim used to be vice-president of production at Yahoo! so I think we can tell what his money's on.)"

The Cunctator writes: "The Open Directory Project Guidelines (also known as dmoz.org, purchased by Netscape and then AOL) have recently (10/18/2000) been changed, in a few dangerous ways. The two things of interest are: The newly censorious Illegal Sites description ('Sites with unlawful content should not be listed in the directory. Examples of unlawful content include child pornography; material that infringes any intellectual property right; material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence); and material that is libelous.') which would eliminate such categories as Culture Jamming (a category I edit) and Suicide and Hacking; And the new copyright notice, which now gives Netscape (aka AOL) full copyright, which before remained in the editors' hands." DMoz has pissed off a lot of editors in the past for screwing with their content, but so far not enough to actually hurt themselves.

The Cunctator writes: "The Open Directory Project Guidelines (also known as dmoz.org, purchased by Netscape and then AOL) have recently (10/18/2000) been changed, in a few dangerous ways. The two things of interest are: The newly censorious Illegal Sites description ('Sites with unlawful content should not be listed in the directory. Examples of unlawful content include child pornography; material that infringes any intellectual property right; material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence); and material that is libelous.') which would eliminate such categories as Culture Jamming (a category I edit) and Suicide and Hacking; And the new copyright notice, which now gives Netscape (aka AOL) full copyright, which before remained in the editors' hands." DMoz has pissed off a lot of editors in the past for screwing with their content, but so far not enough to actually hurt themselves.

The Cunctator writes: "The Open Directory Project Guidelines (also known as dmoz.org, purchased by Netscape and then AOL) have recently (10/18/2000) been changed, in a few dangerous ways. The two things of interest are: The newly censorious Illegal Sites description ('Sites with unlawful content should not be listed in the directory. Examples of unlawful content include child pornography; material that infringes any intellectual property right; material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence); and material that is libelous.') which would eliminate such categories as Culture Jamming (a category I edit) and Suicide and Hacking; And the new copyright notice, which now gives Netscape (aka AOL) full copyright, which before remained in the editors' hands." DMoz has pissed off a lot of editors in the past for screwing with their content, but so far not enough to actually hurt themselves.

The Cunctator writes: "The Open Directory Project Guidelines (also known as dmoz.org, purchased by Netscape and then AOL) have recently (10/18/2000) been changed, in a few dangerous ways. The two things of interest are: The newly censorious Illegal Sites description ('Sites with unlawful content should not be listed in the directory. Examples of unlawful content include child pornography; material that infringes any intellectual property right; material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence); and material that is libelous.') which would eliminate such categories as Culture Jamming (a category I edit) and Suicide and Hacking; And the new copyright notice, which now gives Netscape (aka AOL) full copyright, which before remained in the editors' hands." DMoz has pissed off a lot of editors in the past for screwing with their content, but so far not enough to actually hurt themselves.

The Cunctator writes: "The Open Directory Project Guidelines (also known as dmoz.org, purchased by Netscape and then AOL) have recently (10/18/2000) been changed, in a few dangerous ways. The two things of interest are: The newly censorious Illegal Sites description ('Sites with unlawful content should not be listed in the directory. Examples of unlawful content include child pornography; material that infringes any intellectual property right; material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence); and material that is libelous.') which would eliminate such categories as Culture Jamming (a category I edit) and Suicide and Hacking; And the new copyright notice, which now gives Netscape (aka AOL) full copyright, which before remained in the editors' hands." DMoz has pissed off a lot of editors in the past for screwing with their content, but so far not enough to actually hurt themselves.

The Cunctator writes: "The Open Directory Project Guidelines (also known as dmoz.org, purchased by Netscape and then AOL) have recently (10/18/2000) been changed, in a few dangerous ways. The two things of interest are: The newly censorious Illegal Sites description ('Sites with unlawful content should not be listed in the directory. Examples of unlawful content include child pornography; material that infringes any intellectual property right; material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence); and material that is libelous.') which would eliminate such categories as Culture Jamming (a category I edit) and Suicide and Hacking; And the new copyright notice, which now gives Netscape (aka AOL) full copyright, which before remained in the editors' hands." DMoz has pissed off a lot of editors in the past for screwing with their content, but so far not enough to actually hurt themselves.

The Cunctator writes: "The Open Directory Project Guidelines (also known as dmoz.org, purchased by Netscape and then AOL) have recently (10/18/2000) been changed, in a few dangerous ways. The two things of interest are: The newly censorious Illegal Sites description ('Sites with unlawful content should not be listed in the directory. Examples of unlawful content include child pornography; material that infringes any intellectual property right; material that specifically advocates, solicits or abets illegal activity (such as fraud or violence); and material that is libelous.') which would eliminate such categories as Culture Jamming (a category I edit) and Suicide and Hacking; And the new copyright notice, which now gives Netscape (aka AOL) full copyright, which before remained in the editors' hands." DMoz has pissed off a lot of editors in the past for screwing with their content, but so far not enough to actually hurt themselves.

Adam Brate, Slashdot reader, sent us a review of Cyberselfish: Technolibertarianism, a book which takes a look at the "cyber" culture, and what it means. It sounds interesting, although perhaps a bit off-base - comment below if you've read it. Cyberselfish author Pulina Borsook pages 256 publisher PublicAffairs, 05/2000 rating 8/10 reviewer Adam Brate ISBN 1891620789 summary A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech I heard about Cyberselfish when driving around Vermont Memorial Day weekend from used bookstore to used bookstore. The NPR station was broadcasting an interview with Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook, a writer who worked for Wired during its glory years. I was put off by the book's wretched title, but engrossed by the subject: the powerful undercurrent of libertarianism that flows through high-tech circles. I have been astounded but not amazed at the deeply adolescent and peevish libertarian attitudes that so many techies cling to, from gun worship to fear of governmental Internet regulation. Listening to Borsook speak intelligently and cogently about technolibertarianism made me want her book very much.

This month I garnered a copy of Cyberselfish, and I'm still appalled with the title (which comes from an eponymous essay for Mother Jones she wrote in July 1996, when such cyberlanguage wasn't so cybertrite). Cyberselfish is a book-length essay, in fact a somewhat thinly edited series of linked essays. There's a rush of immediacy and wit; for a random example, "Polyamory is the preferred term of art; it's gender-neutral, where polygamy and polyandry are not, and allows for all persuasions of partner choice (gay/straight/bi/it depends)." With the freshness and informality comes flaws. There is too much repeated material in the book. It's clear that essays written at different times have been cobbled together. Reading the book straight through is like reading some multi-volume series straight through, in which the characters and history are rehashed at the beginning of each book.

Cyberselfish looks at a few specific examples of technolibertarianism in depth: Bionomics, cypherpunks, Wired magazine, and Silicon Valley's impressive lack of philanthropy. Each time Borsook exposes the compassionless, fearful, posturing, politically myopic core, without dismissing the good aspects of the high-tech culture and individuals. For example, she thinks fighting for privacy rights is good, but obsessing about it and descending into rabid, paranoid ranting on alt.cypherpunks is scary. She moves smoothly from the historical to the academic to the personal, deliberately exposing her own frailities and biases while she examines those of others.

To give a deeper example of the content of Cyberselfish, Bionomics is the use of biological (and particularly Darwinian) metaphors to describe economic processes, as popularized by Michael Rothschild (Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem) and then the The Bionomics Institute (TBI). Borsook convincingly points out through both empirical observation and reasoned analysis that Bionomics boils down to economic libertarianism, where government involvement is wrong and the most cut-throat, efficient and entrepeneurial businesses are the best. Ecological metaphors are used in Bionomics only when they're useful and sexy: The ecosystem of Hawaii was used as a metaphor for the fragility of protected industries. Under Bionomics logic, Hawaii's beautiful, lush, peaceful ecosystem is to be derided. Bionomics uses metaphors to draw syllogistic conclusions. Doing that can be powerfully convincing but amounts to hand-waving and emotional appeals. Borsook cuts through the smoke and mirrors.

After a few years, the Bionomics Institute conferences were (literally) taken over by the Cato Institute, the premier libertarian think tank in the nation. The annual Bionomics conterences began in 1993. The 1997 conference was the Cato/Bionomics Conference; 1998, the "Annual Cato Institute/Forbes ASAP Conference on Technology and Society." TBI morphed into software-startup Maxager, which intends to offer Bionomical tools to companies. Borsook wonders what meaning can be ascribed to the success or the failure of the company. If Maxager fails, is it because it wasn't Bionomically good enough, or just because of the many uncontrollable factors that cause the vast majority of startups to fail? If it succeeds, does it validate Bionomics, or just the good connections the founder has with Silicon Valley venture capitalists?

The other chapters are just as interesting. Cyberselfish sharply describes all the archetypes of the technolibertarians, from the neo-hippie polyandric Burning Man attendee to the Lexus-driving, 100-hour-a-week, plugged-in entrepeneur with a sprawling bungalow in Santa Clara county.

One of the most crystalline passages in the book describes Eric Raymond's leaking of the Halloween Document, written by Microsoft program manager Vinod Valloppillil. The two clearly have vast ideological differences, the open-source cowboy and the Evil Empire functionary, but they're both hard-core libertarians, an entirely unreported fact. In Borsook's words, "It was rather like discovering that both a liberal and a conservative senator had both acquired their law degrees from Yale: no news here."

As I said before, the book is somewhat haphazardly put together, and nearly every sentence is to some degree contentious; even someone who agrees with her basic position will find reason to quibble. Cyberselfish doesn't come near to answering all the questions it raises. Borsook doesn't really tackle the paradox that "libertarians celebrate the cult of the individual" but Open Source celebrates the collective. What does it mean to be an Open Source libertarian?

I personally think it's somewhat unfair to attack those flaws, as they're inexorably part of Cyberselfish's loose, immediate, opinionated, and conversational style. It's kind of like how Slashdot's open forums allow for a review like this and the inevitable "hot grits" responses.

Purchase this book at fatbrain.

C. Adam Kuether asks: "I like the concept of the open directory project and am considering joining the effort and contributing my bit to organizing the Web. I am concerned about the ownership rights to this compilation. The useage agreements seem reasonable enough now, but what assurance is there that this work will not become just another asset of the Time/Warner/AOL (read Netscape) media empire? Could this project convert to a legally enforceable open and free use license? Are the existing open content licenses practical? "

It's been a long week for etoy.com. On Monday, a judge issued a preliminary injuction fining them $10,000 each day that their website was hosted at their domain. They shut it down right away, of course. They're just internet artists. They don't have six billion dollars like the company that filed the suit: eToys.com. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Click More. Update: For more information about etoy, see the freshly-updated dmoz category.

etoy was founded in 1994 by a group of European artists who worked on the cutting edge, doing performance art at techno events and raves. Their focus has always been on the internet as new medium; this interview gives a feel for their perspective.

They picked the name "etoy" literally by consensus and running code. Being from Italy, England, and Switzerland, physical collaboration was difficult, so they got together on an IRC channel and went through a list of random names generated by a perl script. When "etoy" came up, they all knew that was the name they wanted; they first used it in October of 1994. In October 1995 they put up their website at etoy.com.

Christmas 1995 came and went.

In 1996, etoy won their first artistic award. Their work typically blurs the line between real world and art; in this case, they had undertaken to demonstrate how important and yet how fragile the system of search engines was. By subverting the meta tags of prominent websites like Playboy, they pulled inexperienced surfers to their site, where they put in a plug for Kevin Mitnick, and had a few laughs at the newbies' expense. They called it the "Digital Hijack."

A curious kind of art. In 1996 it was original enough to win an award from Ars Electronica. Nowadays everyone knows the trick, the search engines find it and disregard it, and some underhanded websites try to make a fast buck by stealing trademarks - but etoy did it first, for fun.

Christmas 1996 came and went.

In June 1997 etoys.com, with an S, began operations. It wasn't until October that their website went online. They filed for a U.S. trademark on their domain, at which point etoy got a little alarmed and filed for their own trademark on their own domain. Maybe because they're based in Europe, or maybe for some other reason, etoy says their application is still pending on some technicalities.

But it doesn't matter when their trademark is granted. Their website went online in October 1995, two full years before etoys', and it's date of first use that's important - not the date of filing.

Christmas 1997 came and went.

Christmas 1998 came and went.

But now it's 1999, the year of the e-tailer. Suddenly etoys.com, with an S, has gone public and is worth six billion dollars. Meanwhile etoy.com, without an S, again putting the spotlight on corporations and society, has raised money by "selling shares" of itself. I'm not quite sure how they did it, but at an artists' gathering, a half-serious, half-mocking exhibition-slash-fundraising they pulled in something over ten thousand dollars. (Which they then donated to their friends in the U.S., also working at the boundary of society and corporations, RTMark, best-known for their George W. Bush parody site.)

In the year of the e-tailer, what kind of speech scares corporations more than anything? Disrespect. Artists who don't play by the rules. People who don't understand that business is serious business.

Etoys.com, with an S, wants etoy.com, with no S. They offered money. At one point they were offering cash and (mostly) stock that would have been worth almost half a million dollars. No sale.

But that should give us an idea of how much they're willing to spend on lawyers.

Finally, in September, eToys filed a lawsuit against etoy, on the grounds that a potential customer had mistakenly gone to the wrong site and had seen the message that - if they wanted to enjoy etoy.com to its fullest extent - they should download "the fucking flash plugin." They also didn't like the pierced breasts or etoy's sense of humor.

To be precise, they claim that "the antisocial, obscene, and offensive images associated with defendants' use of the mark 'etoy,' both on the Internet and elsewhere, have tarnished the ETOYS® mark and the eToys brand name..."

Let this be a lesson to anyone whose domain is coveted by a multi-billion-dollar company: careful with the F-word.

In October and November the case was bounced from an L.A. court to U.S. District Court, and finally to a California State Court. In late November the judge refused a request to let the European artists attend the proceedings by teleconference. In those proceedings, the judge was told that the artists had engaged in "digital hijacking" (the 1996 project), and had sold shares of stock without being properly regulated on an official stock exchange (the 1999 fundraising exhibition). Worst of all, they were hosting illegal hardcore pornography (which was actually just a link to another site).

They claim:

"Defendants use the mark ETOY indiscriminately and in random association with unrelated concepts. For example, on the etoy web site alone, defendants use the mark ETOY in conjunction with other, randomly selected words to create phrases such as: 'etoy.research,' 'etoy.eternity,' 'etoy.timezone,' 'etoy.history,' 'etoy.servers,' 'etoy.strategy,' 'etoy.journeys,' 'etoy.universe,' and 'etoy.crew.'

"By using the mark ETOY in this random, indiscriminate manner, defendants cause both ETOY and the ETOYS® mark to lose any distinctive, signifying meaning."

Serious business.

The lawyers also kindly suggested that, since at least one etoy member is from Switzerland, they really would be more suited to a website in the .ch domain: etoy.ch. Never mind the years of work and the reputation that the artists have built around etoy.com - we all know that "dot-com" belongs to America!

Faced with a torrent of buzzwords, the judge issued a preliminary injunction barring etoy from: operating a website in the etoy.com domain; associating their domain name with the "digital hijack"; or selling their "shares" in the U.S.

Penalty for disobeying the injuction: $10,000 per day in fines.

On November 30, etoy.com shut down its Apache webserver. Its last access came from the eToys law firm (which has been monitoring it closely). They had no choice, really. In fact, when I talked with a member of etoy, he was very nervous about saying things which might get him in more legal trouble. Suddenly, the artists are afraid to speak.

How can this be, when, as the Village Voice wrote in an excellent article, this lawsuit doesn't even pass the "giggle test"? It's absurd to think that one website can shut down another for having a similar domain name - when the second site is not a domain poacher and has been operating two years longer than the first.

The date of the next court hearing, at which this preliminary injunction will surely be overturned: December 27th. How convenient! Just after the Christmas shopping season.

If you'd like to see more about etoy, their domain is down of course, and I don't know of any mirrors, but their fans have constructed a site at toywar.com that has some information. And etoy may put some or all of its site back online at its IP number (not name!): 146.228.204.72:8080.

Good rules have been written to prevent things like this from happening. Unfortunately, the rules have not taken effect yet for most domains. Even after they do take effect, their legal status will be uncertain until they are tested in court.

Those rules are ICANN's Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. This policy ensures that the conditions under which a domain name can be disputed are strictly limited. For such a dispute even to proceed, a complainant must assert that each of three things is true:

your domain name infringes on a trademark;

you have "no rights or legitimate interests" to your domain;

and your domain name is being used "in bad faith."

As long as you're operating in good faith, or you have any legitimate interest in your domain, there is not even cause to bring up a dispute over a domain. Clearly this puts etoy.com on firm ground, because regardless of the trademark issue (which should be resolved once their mark registration is granted) they win on the other two points. This doesn't stop clueless judges from issuing injuctions, of course. But having these rules codified as official policy will give the legal system better guidelines to operate by.

These rules went into effect for some domain name registries on Wednesday, but will not apply to the most popular registry, Network Solutions, until January.

I can't even complain to eToys.com. I clicked all over their website looking for an email contact address and couldn't find one. When I filled in the web form to ask that someone get in touch with me for this story, all I got was a email form letter:

It is our goal to respond to all order-related e-mail within 24 hours. If your e-mail is not order-related, we will do our best to take care of your questions, concerns and suggestions as soon as possible.

It's 72 hours later, so my email must not have been sufficiently order-related.

In the meantime, I can at least have the satisfaction of taking my order-related business elsewhere this holiday season. I'm sure eToys couldn't care less, but it will serve me as a small comfort during the remaining 22 holy shopping days. In a world run by retailers, e-tailers, and lawyers, I need everything I can get to help me make sense of the bizarre orgy of spirituality-soaked commerce that serves as the endcap of each year. Hohoho.