This could be interesting if YouTube fights it. It's an open question under US law whether security camera images are copyrightable. See this legal article, note 153. The Supreme Court ruled in Feist vs. Rural Telephone that the data in phone books are not copyrightable; "The standard of originality is low, but it exists". So anybody can scan in a phone book and put the info into a database.
That's a famous decision - whole industries are based on it. The Court ruled that originality is a constitutional requirement: "Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. 1 M. Nimmer & D. Nimmer, Copyright 2.01[A], [B] (1990) (hereinafter Nimmer)."
The output of a security camera has no author. That's the key here. Copyright must start with an author.
It's "Cringeley", so don't take it too seriously, but...
Google has a fundamental problem. It became successful as a search company that ran a few ads to defray expenses. Now it's an ad agency that offers services to build ad traffic. This limits them.
How? You can do a better job at search if you don't have to suck up to the pay per click advertisers. Just throwing out most sites with pay per click ads is a good start. But Google can't do that - that's where the revenue to support their bloated operation (been to Shoreline lately?) comes from.
Google seemed to undergo a big change starting about two years ago. That's when they first started cozying up to the "search engine optimization" people. Google used to view "search engine optimization" as evil. Now they are the major sponsor of SEO conferences. And, of course, they bought DoubleClick, an advertising company so obnoxious that most Firefox users blocked their ads long ago.
Consider Craigslist, which is rapidly destroying newspaper classified advertising. Craigslist has an edge - they're cheap. They only have fifty or so employees, and the owner has no ambitions to become a Fortune 1000 company. This drives their competitors nuts, because they aren't annoying their customer base with ads and nobody can afford to compete with them. They're devaluing ad-supported media.
If you haven't spent much time in the UK, you may not realize that Ann Summers is a major retail chain, with hundreds of sex shops. It's like Victoria's Secret in the US, but harder-core.
I want to buy one of those laptops, and look forward to the first reviews. Does the WiFi really work? Do sleep modes really work? Do the graphics modes really work? Did Dell preload adware? If the first few weeks of reviews indicate it's basically OK, I'm getting one.
Way too many people are into typosquatting now. From OpenDNS to the "toolbar" guys to the guy who paid off the government of Cameroon (try anything in ".cm"), there can now be several layers of typosquatting between the user and the actual domain. At least we got Network Solutions to back off from their attempt.
Search may be coming apart. There are too many people trying to "game" the search systems now. "Search engine optimization" used to be viewed as evil and was done by low-rent operations. Now we have publicly held companies (Marchex, ticker symbol MCHX) formed just to create dummy domains. Collactive, the Digg spammer, just got venture capital from Sequoia Ventures. Computer vendors load up their preinstalled machines with unwanted "toolbars", which, as this article mentions, produce mostly user-hostile information. All the sources of information which drive search engines, from inbound links to user ratings, are now being spammed by sizable companies. It's a big change from the situation two years ago, when the troublemakers were all little guys with limited resources.
These days the registrar "buys" any domains theit clients let expire. You can thank ICANN for this.
It's even worse than that. Most of the ICANN accredited "registrars" are domain squatters who paid the fee to become a registrar so they could get a bulk rate, bulk Whois access, and the ability to do "domain tasting". Really. Take a look at the list.
Some fun registrar names:
Enom1 Inc., Enom2 Inc., Enom3, Inc.... Enom371, Inc.... Enom 465 Inc. (Enom seems to have these to support their resellers and domain squatters)
Klaatudomains.com LLC (another front for NameScout)
NotSoFamousNames.com LLC (now there's a bottom feeder)
Rerun Domains, Inc. (site is down)
Soyouwantadomain.com LLC (goes directly to an ad site; they don't even make a pretense of being a real registrar)
Threadbot.com, Inc.
Threadexchange.com
Threadfactory.com, Inc.
Threadshare.com, Inc.
Threadsupply.com, Inc.
Threadtrade.com, Inc.
Threadwalker.com, Inc.
Threadwatch.com, Inc.
Threadwise.com, Inc. (all fronts for "Club Drop")
When you visit the site mentioned in the article, a scary box labeled "UK Internet Monitoring Service" slowly fades in and wants you to answer a questionnaire. It supposedly comes from "Forrester Research".
Your desk should face the telescreen - "Big Brother"
Somebody is paying for all those clicks, and they're probably not getting much actual business from them. Advertisers are getting fed up with paying for "clicks", just as they did with "banner views" a few years back. The trend is towards paying only for actual sales directly derived from an ad. That's what "Google Checkout" is really about.
It's not hard to filter out typosquatting sites. We do it with SiteTruth, which tries to find the real-world business behind the web site, and down-rates the ones where it can't be found. Almost all the typosquatting sites are anonymous. Some of them have reasonably high Google rankings, because they have inbound links, but as soon as you look behind the facade of the web site, it's clear there's nothing behind them.
With all this "domaining", link-based page rank is no longer meaningful for small and medium business sites. With hundreds of thousands of phony domains, all linking to each other, a growing fraction of business links are just noise. Search engines try to filter out this stuff, but it's like spam filtering; it mostly works, but isn't airtight. With a high volume of junk sites, enough bad links get through to affect ranking.
The other two web-based sources of credibility, user-provided ratings and blogs, are also collapsing. Blog spam is a huge problem. Not only do existing blogs get spammed, millions of automatically created dummy blogs full of spam have been created. Until recently,
user provided ratings had some credibility, but now there's a Collactive, which has a sort of spam engine for ratings, Digg, Reddit, and such. (Their slogan: "It's good to be popular").
Amusingly, in this world of spam, Usenet, where spam began, has become almost spam-free.
What's so weird is that, as with YouTube, Google is buying traffic. Not revenue. Not technology. Traffic. One wouldn't think that Google needed more traffic. More revenue from its traffic, maybe, but more traffic from free services?
Google, according to Alexa, is #2 in traffic, and Yahoo is #1. But Google isn't far behind. These buys look like a desperate attempt to displace Yahoo as #1. Whether this make economic sense isn't clear.
Interestingly, Google traffic takes a dive every weekend, as does Feedburner, but Yahoo traffic does not. Look at the Alexa graphs. That gives a sense of how much work-related use the site gets. Slashdot, incidentally, has a strong weekly cycle, much stronger than Google.
It's still not clear if Google's expansion beyond search will be seen a few years hence as a good move or as corporate megalomania.
I recently tried to download "Elephant's Dream" (the open-source 3D blender project) via BitTorrent
This is more like "I finally found something legal on BitTorrent, so now I can complain." Right.
It's easy enough to download Elephant's Dream. There are nine mirror sites. And if you download one of the streaming formats, you don't even have to wait for the download to finish.
It's a beautifully rendered, but otherwise unimpressive short film. It's more of a demo reel for Blender.
It's from a right wing nut group.
on
Piracy Economics
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
This is one of those wierd "economics papers" from a far right "faith tank", where the solution to everything is an unregulated market. Notice that the paper is mostly vaguely relevant analogies. This is punditry, not research.
It's from the Ludwig von Mises people, who are usually busy attacking the GPL as being "anti property rights".
But will they be cheaper?
on
Dell Linux Details
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The base Dell 1505 laptop is $699, with some low-end version of Windows Vista preinstalled. If the Linux version costs more than that, Dell isn't serious about this.
Note that this is a distribution network for multicasting. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't do anything for ordinary point to point Internet communications. The cable TV people might find it useful, though.
Without open source, pricing for web hosting would be far higher. Because hosting has become a commodity, with little or no proprietary lock-in, it's cheap and getting cheaper. So every business can afford a web site. Open source made that possible.
I posted "What's a bank?" previously, with some examples of ambiguous cases.
If the criteria for some ".bank" domain are broadened to financial service businesses generally, it's even worse. That pulls in mortgage brokers, which range from major firms like Provident to the "Lenders compete from your business" spammer. Then there are the "offshore" operators, the "High Yield Investment Program" people, hedge funds of varying degrees of legitimacy, and armies of "affiliates" and "resellers". Expecting domain registrars, who have a terrible reputation as verification services, to sort this out is asking too much.
We've been struggling with this issue for SiteTruth, where we try to rate businesses for "legitimacy". Simply trying to associate the name and address of a legitimate business with a web site is enough to filter out a huge number of marginal web businesses. But it's not a solid protection against more determined fraud operations. We check against third-party sources for identity verification, which helps. We give the highest rating only to sites for which we have some source of third-party confirmation (a valid SSL cert with a name and address, a BBBOnline seal, etc.)
The Online Better Business Bureau is probably the best verification service right now. Their seal of approval actually means something. (But click on it to check that the BBB site says the seal is valid. We check that automatically with SiteTruth, and there are definitely sites out there using the BBBonline graphic that aren't entitled to do so.)
The PhishTank people have a user-reported list of "phishing sites", but it's always behind. Worse, it's by URL, not domain, so sites that generate a new URL for each spam escape that check.
There have been several previous attempts at "identify your business as legitimate by paying us money". This ".bank" scheme falls into that category. Before that, "High Assurance" certificates were touted as a similar scheme. There are several companies selling "seals of approval";
there's "ValidatedSite.com", the "International Bureau of Certified Website Merchants", "Guardian ECommerce", and the "International Chamber of E-Commerce". Most of the certificate authorities have some kind of seal program, too. This ".bank" thing is the same idea, at a higher price point.
The gallium isn't a static catalyst, as in a catalytic converter.
A gallium-aluminum alloy goes in, and a mixture of gallium and alumina comes out. Which then has to be run through some kind of processing operation to separate the gallium. It's recyclable, but it's part of the fuel, not part of the engine.
Also, the price differential between low-purity and high-purity gallium isn't that large. In 1999, it was $250/Kg for low-purity from China and $400 for high-purity (mostly from France).
Gallium is a by-product of aluminum and zinc extraction. There's about 50ppm of gallium in bauxite, and only some fraction of that (maybe half) is recoverable. So it takes something like 40 metric tons of bauxite to yield one kilogram of gallium.
Basic lesson: when replacing oil, you have to find something cheaper, or at least not far more expensive.
Check the price on gallium. It's about $500 per kilogram, although there was a price spike a few years back and it passed $1000. It's a trace component in bauxite and coal. Way too expensive to be used as a fuel component.
Gallium is so expensive that it's not even cost effective in solar cells, where it works very well.
Reactions to texting vary so widely. If I send text messages to people over 35, they often never even get them, or are puzzled that strange icons have appeared on their phone, and never reply with a text message. But they answer E-mail. If I send text messages to younger people, they get them, and may text or call back, or e-mail back. If I text to friends who are young, female, and Asian, a reply comes back within minutes. But if I e-mail them, I don't get an answer until the next time they check their web mail, which may take days.
ETrade Etrade is a brokerage house, but owns a bank on the side. Both operate under the "etrade.com" domain.
Bank of America is a major bank which owns a brokerage house on the side, the reverse of ETrade.
L. F Rothschild. Once one of the old-line banking houses of Europe, after about three mergers and breakups, they do offer financial services to the public, but they're not regulated as a bank.
UBS Financial Services. In the US, they're a brokerage house, but in Switzerland, they're the Union Bank of Switzerland.
Provident Credit Union A credit union performs the basic functions of a bank; it takes deposits and makes loans. But it's not a bank.
Provident Funding, which sells mortgages, but doesn't take deposits. They're the tenth biggest lender in the US, but not a bank.
ETrade's user trading interface was deliberately designed to look something like a video game. Not too many choices, self-guiding, big type. This encourages users to trade too much.
A modest request when using a wierd country code
on
Microsoft Using .MS TLD
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When you use some country domain that's not really the country you're in, put the real country name after the postal mailing addresses on your web site. Wrong country domains screw up systems that are trying to locate your business for local search purposes. If your domain is under ".WS" (Western Samoa) or ".TO" (Tonga), you may be mapped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
(There are Tongan web sites in ".TO". Admittedly, ".TV" is unlikely to lead to a real web site in Tuvalu, and does tend to be handled as a special case.)
If it's a real, successful product, it will be available tomorrow, the next day, probably next week, and at a lower price in a few months. If not, well...
Big mistake on Zango's part. Now comes discovery, a searching examination of Zango's business practices to answer the relevant question "Is Zango evil"?
Slashdot Mirror
When in Los Angeles, visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology. See their model of Noah's Ark.
This could be interesting if YouTube fights it. It's an open question under US law whether security camera images are copyrightable. See this legal article, note 153. The Supreme Court ruled in Feist vs. Rural Telephone that the data in phone books are not copyrightable; "The standard of originality is low, but it exists". So anybody can scan in a phone book and put the info into a database.
That's a famous decision - whole industries are based on it. The Court ruled that originality is a constitutional requirement: "Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. 1 M. Nimmer & D. Nimmer, Copyright 2.01[A], [B] (1990) (hereinafter Nimmer)."
The output of a security camera has no author. That's the key here. Copyright must start with an author.
It's "Cringeley", so don't take it too seriously, but...
Google has a fundamental problem. It became successful as a search company that ran a few ads to defray expenses. Now it's an ad agency that offers services to build ad traffic. This limits them.
How? You can do a better job at search if you don't have to suck up to the pay per click advertisers. Just throwing out most sites with pay per click ads is a good start. But Google can't do that - that's where the revenue to support their bloated operation (been to Shoreline lately?) comes from.
Google seemed to undergo a big change starting about two years ago. That's when they first started cozying up to the "search engine optimization" people. Google used to view "search engine optimization" as evil. Now they are the major sponsor of SEO conferences. And, of course, they bought DoubleClick, an advertising company so obnoxious that most Firefox users blocked their ads long ago.
Consider Craigslist, which is rapidly destroying newspaper classified advertising. Craigslist has an edge - they're cheap. They only have fifty or so employees, and the owner has no ambitions to become a Fortune 1000 company. This drives their competitors nuts, because they aren't annoying their customer base with ads and nobody can afford to compete with them. They're devaluing ad-supported media.
If you haven't spent much time in the UK, you may not realize that Ann Summers is a major retail chain, with hundreds of sex shops. It's like Victoria's Secret in the US, but harder-core.
I want to buy one of those laptops, and look forward to the first reviews. Does the WiFi really work? Do sleep modes really work? Do the graphics modes really work? Did Dell preload adware? If the first few weeks of reviews indicate it's basically OK, I'm getting one.
Way too many people are into typosquatting now. From OpenDNS to the "toolbar" guys to the guy who paid off the government of Cameroon (try anything in ".cm"), there can now be several layers of typosquatting between the user and the actual domain. At least we got Network Solutions to back off from their attempt.
Search may be coming apart. There are too many people trying to "game" the search systems now. "Search engine optimization" used to be viewed as evil and was done by low-rent operations. Now we have publicly held companies (Marchex, ticker symbol MCHX) formed just to create dummy domains. Collactive, the Digg spammer, just got venture capital from Sequoia Ventures. Computer vendors load up their preinstalled machines with unwanted "toolbars", which, as this article mentions, produce mostly user-hostile information. All the sources of information which drive search engines, from inbound links to user ratings, are now being spammed by sizable companies. It's a big change from the situation two years ago, when the troublemakers were all little guys with limited resources.
It's going to get worse before it gets better.
These days the registrar "buys" any domains theit clients let expire. You can thank ICANN for this.
It's even worse than that. Most of the ICANN accredited "registrars" are domain squatters who paid the fee to become a registrar so they could get a bulk rate, bulk Whois access, and the ability to do "domain tasting". Really. Take a look at the list.
Some fun registrar names:
When you visit the site mentioned in the article, a scary box labeled "UK Internet Monitoring Service" slowly fades in and wants you to answer a questionnaire. It supposedly comes from "Forrester Research".
Your desk should face the telescreen - "Big Brother"
Somebody is paying for all those clicks, and they're probably not getting much actual business from them. Advertisers are getting fed up with paying for "clicks", just as they did with "banner views" a few years back. The trend is towards paying only for actual sales directly derived from an ad. That's what "Google Checkout" is really about.
It's not hard to filter out typosquatting sites. We do it with SiteTruth, which tries to find the real-world business behind the web site, and down-rates the ones where it can't be found. Almost all the typosquatting sites are anonymous. Some of them have reasonably high Google rankings, because they have inbound links, but as soon as you look behind the facade of the web site, it's clear there's nothing behind them.
With all this "domaining", link-based page rank is no longer meaningful for small and medium business sites. With hundreds of thousands of phony domains, all linking to each other, a growing fraction of business links are just noise. Search engines try to filter out this stuff, but it's like spam filtering; it mostly works, but isn't airtight. With a high volume of junk sites, enough bad links get through to affect ranking.
The other two web-based sources of credibility, user-provided ratings and blogs, are also collapsing. Blog spam is a huge problem. Not only do existing blogs get spammed, millions of automatically created dummy blogs full of spam have been created. Until recently, user provided ratings had some credibility, but now there's a Collactive, which has a sort of spam engine for ratings, Digg, Reddit, and such. (Their slogan: "It's good to be popular").
Amusingly, in this world of spam, Usenet, where spam began, has become almost spam-free.
What's so weird is that, as with YouTube, Google is buying traffic. Not revenue. Not technology. Traffic. One wouldn't think that Google needed more traffic. More revenue from its traffic, maybe, but more traffic from free services?
Google, according to Alexa, is #2 in traffic, and Yahoo is #1. But Google isn't far behind. These buys look like a desperate attempt to displace Yahoo as #1. Whether this make economic sense isn't clear.
Interestingly, Google traffic takes a dive every weekend, as does Feedburner, but Yahoo traffic does not. Look at the Alexa graphs. That gives a sense of how much work-related use the site gets. Slashdot, incidentally, has a strong weekly cycle, much stronger than Google.
It's still not clear if Google's expansion beyond search will be seen a few years hence as a good move or as corporate megalomania.
If you want "boring", there's a place for you in Gold Farming.
I recently tried to download "Elephant's Dream" (the open-source 3D blender project) via BitTorrent
This is more like "I finally found something legal on BitTorrent, so now I can complain." Right.
It's easy enough to download Elephant's Dream. There are nine mirror sites. And if you download one of the streaming formats, you don't even have to wait for the download to finish.
It's a beautifully rendered, but otherwise unimpressive short film. It's more of a demo reel for Blender.
This is one of those wierd "economics papers" from a far right "faith tank", where the solution to everything is an unregulated market. Notice that the paper is mostly vaguely relevant analogies. This is punditry, not research. It's from the Ludwig von Mises people, who are usually busy attacking the GPL as being "anti property rights".
For only $24, you can read the cited paper, "Software Piracy: Estimation of Lost Sales and the Impact on Software Diffusion", which might actually contain some useful info on the subject.
The base Dell 1505 laptop is $699, with some low-end version of Windows Vista preinstalled. If the Linux version costs more than that, Dell isn't serious about this.
Note that this is a distribution network for multicasting. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't do anything for ordinary point to point Internet communications. The cable TV people might find it useful, though.
Without open source, pricing for web hosting would be far higher. Because hosting has become a commodity, with little or no proprietary lock-in, it's cheap and getting cheaper. So every business can afford a web site. Open source made that possible.
I posted "What's a bank?" previously, with some examples of ambiguous cases. If the criteria for some ".bank" domain are broadened to financial service businesses generally, it's even worse. That pulls in mortgage brokers, which range from major firms like Provident to the "Lenders compete from your business" spammer. Then there are the "offshore" operators, the "High Yield Investment Program" people, hedge funds of varying degrees of legitimacy, and armies of "affiliates" and "resellers". Expecting domain registrars, who have a terrible reputation as verification services, to sort this out is asking too much.
We've been struggling with this issue for SiteTruth, where we try to rate businesses for "legitimacy". Simply trying to associate the name and address of a legitimate business with a web site is enough to filter out a huge number of marginal web businesses. But it's not a solid protection against more determined fraud operations. We check against third-party sources for identity verification, which helps. We give the highest rating only to sites for which we have some source of third-party confirmation (a valid SSL cert with a name and address, a BBBOnline seal, etc.)
The Online Better Business Bureau is probably the best verification service right now. Their seal of approval actually means something. (But click on it to check that the BBB site says the seal is valid. We check that automatically with SiteTruth, and there are definitely sites out there using the BBBonline graphic that aren't entitled to do so.)
The PhishTank people have a user-reported list of "phishing sites", but it's always behind. Worse, it's by URL, not domain, so sites that generate a new URL for each spam escape that check.
There have been several previous attempts at "identify your business as legitimate by paying us money". This ".bank" scheme falls into that category. Before that, "High Assurance" certificates were touted as a similar scheme. There are several companies selling "seals of approval"; there's "ValidatedSite.com", the "International Bureau of Certified Website Merchants", "Guardian ECommerce", and the "International Chamber of E-Commerce". Most of the certificate authorities have some kind of seal program, too. This ".bank" thing is the same idea, at a higher price point.
The gallium isn't a static catalyst, as in a catalytic converter. A gallium-aluminum alloy goes in, and a mixture of gallium and alumina comes out. Which then has to be run through some kind of processing operation to separate the gallium. It's recyclable, but it's part of the fuel, not part of the engine.
Also, the price differential between low-purity and high-purity gallium isn't that large. In 1999, it was $250/Kg for low-purity from China and $400 for high-purity (mostly from France).
Gallium is a by-product of aluminum and zinc extraction. There's about 50ppm of gallium in bauxite, and only some fraction of that (maybe half) is recoverable. So it takes something like 40 metric tons of bauxite to yield one kilogram of gallium.
Basic lesson: when replacing oil, you have to find something cheaper, or at least not far more expensive.
Check the price on gallium. It's about $500 per kilogram, although there was a price spike a few years back and it passed $1000. It's a trace component in bauxite and coal. Way too expensive to be used as a fuel component.
Gallium is so expensive that it's not even cost effective in solar cells, where it works very well.
Reactions to texting vary so widely. If I send text messages to people over 35, they often never even get them, or are puzzled that strange icons have appeared on their phone, and never reply with a text message. But they answer E-mail. If I send text messages to younger people, they get them, and may text or call back, or e-mail back. If I text to friends who are young, female, and Asian, a reply comes back within minutes. But if I e-mail them, I don't get an answer until the next time they check their web mail, which may take days.
Even in the financial services industry, there's disagreement over what a "bank" is. Consider
OK, who gets to be in ".bank"?
ETrade's user trading interface was deliberately designed to look something like a video game. Not too many choices, self-guiding, big type. This encourages users to trade too much.
When you use some country domain that's not really the country you're in, put the real country name after the postal mailing addresses on your web site. Wrong country domains screw up systems that are trying to locate your business for local search purposes. If your domain is under ".WS" (Western Samoa) or ".TO" (Tonga), you may be mapped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. (There are Tongan web sites in ".TO". Admittedly, ".TV" is unlikely to lead to a real web site in Tuvalu, and does tend to be handled as a special case.)
This isn't a story. This is an ad.
If it's a real, successful product, it will be available tomorrow, the next day, probably next week, and at a lower price in a few months. If not, well...
Big mistake on Zango's part. Now comes discovery, a searching examination of Zango's business practices to answer the relevant question "Is Zango evil"?