You must check out A9.com Maps. Google's Maps are awesome, but A9 has some great tricks too.

Is Google developing their own browser? Those who think so might note a new google employee.

PHP in the news: Why PHP 5 Rocks!

Adam Trachtenberg wrote a nice article on the benefits of PHP5. If you use MySQL/PHP based technologies, it's worth the read.
Excerpt:

In this article, I highlight seven of my favorite PHP 5 features. These features allow your PHP 5 code to frequently be shorter, more elegant, and more flexible than ever before.

Google Labs has come out with something new: Site-Flavored Google Search.

Google has launched Google Blog, with posts by Evan Williams, Google's Blogger Program Manager. Welcome Evan.

Google in the news: Google has filed with the SEC to go public!

Google Seen Announcing IPO Plan Within Days

Excerpt:

The announcement is related to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule that says a private company must make public more information about its business once its passes a certain size in terms of assets and number of shareholders, the Journal said.

Google, which has enough assets and shareholders to trigger the rule, is expected to make those disclosures as early as next week, the Journal said.

Nutch is the Open Source search engine I've spoken about before. Well Yahoo! Labs has opened up an open source Nutch Search Demo. They have some interesting features in the search result pages. While right now the "cached" links don't work for me, the "explain" and "anchors" link are very interesting! Search experts might want to take a look.

Not getting the results you want from archive.org? Try out Search Engine Ay-Up.com.

Small search engine company Eurekster has launched their search engine into beta. I'm not thrilled with their results from a cursory look at it, but then again, Google's results are filled with spam these days too. I do really like their bar on the right listing popular searches and letting you navigate topics. Give it a try and drop a comment on how you like it.

After dealing with a bunch of comment spam tonight, I decided to take a different approach to dealing with it. While others point out some features that will come up with the next version of MT, I had another idea MT can use, as well as one all bloggers can use. For the MT developers, I'd suggest instead of just offering a user sign-up for commenters, or moderated comments, they can offer moderated urls. Since some comment spammers are looking for "google juice" as Joi Ito calls it, just moderating the urls allows you to choose whether to accept the link or not, while allowing free commenting.

Another idea which is my new policy here, is to subvert their goals of using link text to get a high ranking on google, for any money keyword. If all the blogger victims of spam were to simply erase the urls of comment spammers, then the spammers themselves would subvert their very own targetted keywords. Instead of pointing to their url, they would wind up creating a ton of competition for their money words! If this got to be popular, targetting keywords in blog comment spam would die overnight.

Update: Instead of just deleting the url, I am now borrowing a page from Google and linking to charity organizations.

Sir Richard Branson is the first customer of the Aquada.

The New York Times discusses the possibility of Google going public.

Charlie Demerjian at The Inquirer has written an interesting article claiming that Microsoft is on the decline. A worthwhile read.

The whispering wheel is a brilliant new idea for improving fuel efficiency and pollution.

Microsoft has come up with the best anti-spam concept I've ever really heard. As long as they make it open source, this will be a tremendous help for the scourge of spam. Can't wait to see it implemented.

Check out Google's new Google Print.

Excerpt:

What exactly is Google Print (BETA)?
Google's mission is to provide access to all the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites.

Try a search for Diamonds

Minox has released a fashionable digital camera with synthetic diamonds.

This Slashdot article on Moore's Law has some interesting discussion about how synthetic diamonds may affect chips in the future.

I just found my next laptop, the Ferrari 3000.

There is an excellent article in Wired Magazine of the upcoming Amazon venture, Search within the Book. This will be a tremendous innovation and rival Google when searching for information.

The Financial Times reports: Google is considering holding a massive online auction of shares early next year in an initial public offering that investment bankers predict could value the internet search-engine company at more than $15bn.

You thought Kazaa was bad for the music industry? Wait till you hear about Skype. Verizon must not be very happy! You will definitely hear more about this soon!

There's a new search engine out there for Acronyms: Find out what over 317,000 acronyms & abbreviations stand for.

Microsoft is launching self-destruct e-mails. An idea whose time is overdue. Hopefully their protocol will be "open" so that other systems can incorporate the feature. I have to imagine it won't be hard to reverse-engineer.

I learned something rather surprising from this article on the BBC...the U.S. Government does not allow destruction of email?? I wonder who is obligated to keep the email, for how long and other details.

Can you imagine being fined for deleting Junk Mail?? Since the government is so interested in email, why can't they stop child pornography from being emailed to millions of people including children?

Excerpt:

Microsoft says Office 2003, which is to be launched on Tuesday, will allow users to "time stamp" e-mails, ordering them to be deleted on a set date.
But any organisation planning to install the new software may run into opposition from regulators.
In the United States, destroying e-mails is a federal offence, regarded in a similar light to shredding documents.
Earlier this year, brokers Morgan Stanley were fined $1.65m for failing to keep e-mail records.

Although I don't agree with most of what David Gelernter says about spam in his article: Apres Spam, the next email crisis, the following paragraph definitely resonates:

You get an email (maybe longer or more complicated than average, or from someone you don't know); you have no time to respond right now, but you mean to answer--but other emails stack up, and you answer those first--but you still plan to reply--but more emails keep arriving. . . . Meanwhile the sender is wondering: Is he ignoring me on purpose? (I'll cross him off my list and forget about it.) Did he mean to reply, but has since forgotten? (Resend my message.) Or does he still mean to reply and just hasn't gotten around to it? (Don't get mad or resend.) All three possibilities are real, and happen all the time.

Just found this fabulous page which will help to secure your computer against all kinds of vulnerabilities. I highly recommend trying out the programs written by the Gibson Research Corporation.

TechNewsWorld has an article on the upcoming Open-Source search engine called Nutch. It will take a while, but I bet this will be a big player one day.

Google Labs has released a new feature called Search by Location. Try searching for Diamond websites in your area by typing in the area code below and drop a comment here to let us know how the search results came out:

About a week ago Verisign started to resolve all unregistered ".com" and ".net" domain names to itself, redirecting it to an Overture affiliate program. Commentwire has a discussion on the financial windfall to Verisign as a result of this action. By the way, you may have very likely come across this verisign page without even realising it. Just type in any domain name that doesn't exist and you will see it. Try this one: www.thisdomainnamedoesnotexistactuall.com.

God bless Dave Barry. His column on telemarketers gave out the phone number of a telemarketing association so that people could discuss with them what they thought of telemarketing. They weren't amused. How shocking, who would have thought that having people you don't know call you would disturb anyone? I'm sure Dave Barry meant no harm...

A soon-to-come Japanese import will be the reusable aluminum can. Definitely a product whose time has come.

How do you fight a monumental problem such as spam? Italy is jailing spammers. Bravo! Now they just need to bring that to America and conservatively a good half of the spam that plagues us will be gone.

Sergey Brin on an eventual Google IPO.

Overture is the latest to offer a Toolbar.

I find this memo a little hard to believe. It is allegedly a memo from eBay management saying things like "It has come to my attention that several employees are talking at their desks during scheduled work hours. I must convey the importance of NOT talking at your desk, or to your desk partner. Talking greatly decreases work productivity, and company morale." Company Morale??

I know the blogger community is talking about it, but I'd like to see more evidence that Jody Rivers is the Safeharbor Manager and really wrote that. It's just too outrageous to be true. Although Dilbert has made a career out of these types of incidents so who knows...

From USA Today: Microsoft keeping eye on employee blogs.

Thomas Friedman of the NY Times visited Google headquarters and reported on it. Not sure why a political Op-Ed Columnist would write about Google, but he does bring up some good points. Especially about how wireless devices hooked into Google and the Web will only increase web use in a big way. An interesting read.

Check out the new Google Toolbar!

I don't know. This whole thing seems fishy to me.

Excerpt:

Several US biotechnologists are working on cloning pets. However, customers could get a shock. Last year, scientists in Texas created Cc, for Copy Cat, but the resulting kitten looked nothing like its originator.

It's getting pretty heated.

Excerpt:

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet.

Even better than this article on spam, which details some efforts made by Yahoo to reduce spam, like forcing you to identify a picture when sending out email, is this comment about creating fake open relays to fool spammers. I hope there will be a major solution soon. It's just getting too crazy.

OK, enough is enough. Maybe there aren't that many laws specifically attacking Spam. But between all the porn and wasted time and personal hassles and port scanning etc done by spammers, they must be doing plenty to be sued in court. If any class action lawyers are reading this, how about a Class Action Lawsuit?

Let's identify the top spammers, we'll definitely get help from plenty of spamcop people. Then let's start the largest class action lawsuit in the history of lawsuits ever. You'll probably get just about every American to testify for you. Let's pick em off, one at a time and sue them. Anyone who wants part of the lawsuit, add your comment here and say AYE!

Exactly.

New anti-rape jacket is Shocking.

PhotoShop Contest is the Aortal site of the week! (ok, month since I haven't exactly been getting to it each week ;)

Wondir is a new search engine. Kind of.

Happy Fun Pundit has some great advice for the Star Trek crew.

CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER SPAMMER is a very interesting read.

If you live in NY, are an engineer of high caliber, and love technology, you might be happy to hear that Google is hiring 100 software engineers for a New York Office.

The Register reports that Google will be creating a blog search and most probably removing blog content from the main database.

Here is an interesting review of blogging APIs...

You probably haven't heard about this yet, but if it goes through...you will. This is MAJOR news and I'm surprised the press hasn't caught onto the story yet.

The ensuing spam will be painful. The whois system has been poorly managed from the beginning and they have not done enough to protect domain name registrants from spam, hijacking etc.

A federal judge handed a win to file swapping tools.

Although I do understand the concern of the recording and entertainment industry, there are legitimate uses for file swapping and it's a shame to kill a technology because they haven't yet found a solution to the illegal use of said technology.

Google is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA:

Joi Ito has posted his first audio blog entry. Cool!

Always On has an interview with Eric Schmidt.

I was saddened to learn today that Edgar Codd, the father of relational databases, has died. He was a brilliant man. After he proposed the relational database model, people thought he was crazy and that it would make data retrieval far slower. Instead, he revolutionized the computer industry. May he rest in peace.

The Smoking Gun explains why the music industry might want to take a different approach in combatting the problem of Kazaa. Well, at least Madonna may be happy to get some more press.

Looks like Joi Ito's company is investing in Moveable Type. Good move.

With the upcoming release of TypePad, this will be an interesting little competition for Google-owned Blogger. I would tend to think Google plans to improve blogger, so there may be some interesting wars ahead.

In case no one noticed, the one gaping hole in the field is a php-based MT-level blogging app. When the right player steps in with it, which is inevitable, expect things to be taken to a higher level.

Kudos to Mitch!

Everyone is talking about how Ask Jeeves has really improved with this latest release, but I think it's way too little, way too late. The search results are ok, but far from enough to take traffic from Google.

Space Ship One is really cool!

Wired has an interesting story on Google.

Jon Udell discusses The Semantic Blog. There is so much promise in all these protocols, I hope one day we see major use made of them. But as Jon indicates, it has to be as transparent as possible to the end user creating the data.

This is the coolest ad ever. Apparently inspired by The Way Things Go, a film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

They went to a lot of trouble to explain the SnapBack feature of Mac's new Safari Browser, but I'm afraid it didn't make much sense to me. Is the idea that you select a temporary "Snap Back" page so you can browse around a shopping cart a bit and then "Snap Back" to the same page?

Reading Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day, I found out about The Digital Journalist. Looks very promising!

I guess some google employees are having fun with blogs and the google purchase of Pyra. The official chef of Google has posted the Google Daily Menus. Lunch on Friday was a "PASTA CON VODKA mixed al dente rotelle pasta & raditore Served w/ a Tomato Vodka Sauce & Roasted organic vegetables".

Sounds pretty good to me!

I found out about Friendster from reading the latest entry on Joi Ito's Weblog. It looks like a good idea. Increase your group of friends by hooking your own friends and their friends' friends into a network. Hmm, may be worth a try. What's nice is that you can limit the people who are allowed to view profile info.

Yahoo! News: Officer's Star Searches Raise Liability Worries

Excerpt:

For six years, Officer Kelly Chrisman used Los Angeles Police Department computers to look up confidential law enforcement records on celebrities and other high-profile people, including Sharon Stone, Courteney Cox Arquette, Sean Penn and Halle Berry.

Chrisman says he was just carrying out orders from superiors, but a lawsuit recently settled by the city for nearly $400,000 alleged that the officer had accessed the records to sell the information to tabloids.

Paypal was the only really successful Internet payment system out of the many startups who promised to revolutionize the way money was transferred between people. Now there's a new one being talked up. It seems like a great idea, you simply need to hook into the system with a 19 digit security code and the cash value and the "money" is yours. I wonder if this system is secure enough....

Jeremy Zawodny has found some cool Yahoo! shortcuts. Here's the full list.

Here is an interesting overview of the Quantum Computer, in the guise of a book review. In essence, if they can get it to work, the quantum computer will be really really fast.

Here is the new beta of the Yahoo! Search page. I believe it will be live tomorrow morning. The results still show up the old way. I'm not sure what the difference will be between the former link and this one, or which one will go live, if not both.

NanoNexus is an up and coming company...worth a look..

Another take on Google.

davidgagne.net saw this article on Wired about Benetton weaving chips into garments. Interesting...

TECHNOEROTICA shows you how to watch Iraqi TV on the net. I couldn't get it to work but if you can, drop us a comment.

I didn't know Intel was in the wine business?

Web pioneer Nando Times to close. If I recall correctly they were on the web even before CNN (another news on the web pioneer) was... Sad to see them go..

Thanks to Antipixel for mentioning NetFuture. So far it does indeed look like an excellent pub. The article on Organic food was very enlightening.

This is one battle Microsoft won't find easy to win.

If you are a top developer specializing in email, you may want to look into Mitch Kapor's Chandler. He's looking for a developer... I know someone who did a port of sendmail for one flavor of Unix, but I lost his email address...hey, if you're reading, this is right up your alley!

Adam Osborne has died.

Good news for avid searchers, Co-founder downplays Google IPO.

Joi Ito has done the first Segway review I've seen. Somehow I doubt the Segway will ever reach sales commensurate to even 1% of the hype, but it probably is a fun ride...

Although there was no fanfare or announcement, hidden in their filing is the note that looksmart has purchased Grub.

Expect some news from Yahoo and Microsoft in the coming couple of months...

FastCompany has an interestiing article on Google: How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows...afterwards, check out Good Experience's interview with Marissa Mayer, Product Manager at Google as well as Neema's report on the seminar by Marissa.

A few points struck me:

1. Google news has a delicate balance. Since it is being cited as a news source, those blurbs carry a lot of responsibility to them. It's more than just a machine picking up news items from all over the web, even though, all it is, is a machine picking up news items from all over the web.

2. Marissa's interviews sound very similar to interviews given by Larry Page. They probably have the same talking points.

3. Nice Flow Chart :)

The NYPost reports that YAHOO! TO BUY U.K. ONLINE PAY-FOR-PLACEMENT AD FIRM. If it's true, Overture's days are numbered. At least that's the buzz. But I think Google's announcement I reported here a couple of days ago will wind up being a much bigger problem for Overture. But one thing's for sure, Microsoft and Yahoo! will be doing some purchases soon.

Epinions.com has been bought by Dealtime.

Critical Section has an interesting article on The Tyranny of Email.

Good luck in Boston, Dave.

If SPAM was federally illegal, maybe good people (rodents?) wouldn't have to go to such lengths to fight it.

Damn Small Linux is pretty cool.

Joi Ito has been meeting some interesting people lately, like Larry Page of Google.

Google has 3 billion pages indexed. Wisenut is making noises about some big announcement coming soon. But they are still at one to one and a half billion pages. The amount of processing involved in analyzing and categorizing that much data is mind boggling.

All of these companies have probably created their own database systems from scratch just so that they are optimized for the requirements of a search engine.

This field has been full of announcements lately and I bet that a big player is behind the acquisitions and will soon acquire the acquirer. Yahoo has something up their sleeve and Bill Gates most certainly has to have something planned. Stay Tuned.

The Holland Sentinel reports that AOL will soon be charging users to use instant messenger.

Daypop has released a new feature called Word Bursts, which give you an idea of "Hot Topics" in the news.

AlltheWeb.com has a site redesign. I like it.

Here's the F.A.Q. on the Google purchase of Blogger.

Very impressive.

Rupert Goodwins of ZDnetUK has written an excellent article on how a Blizzard prompted creation of the first BBS in 1978. BBS's were the precursor to Compuserve, then AOL and finally the Forums in so much use today. I remember joining my first bulletin board in 1980. It was still pretty clunky and wild back then...

Following quickly on the heels of purchasing AltaVista, Overture has now bought FAST, otherwise known as All The Web, the only search engine that is better in terms of search results than Google (even if Google is much better at PR and has a MUCH larger market share). It only cost them $70 million whereas Alta Vista cost much more.

Check out EVHEAD, where you can read a bit about the sale of Blogger to Google, written by the (previous) owner of Pyra/Blogger.

Reversible.org stopped working the way I expected. They don't seem to accept pings anymore and I don't understand the sort order. Here's another test to create the Jewelry/Diamonds category...

Xanadu has a great entry about an episode on my new favorite channel, The Science Channel. The entry is all about the next generation of planes and how they will borrow the concept of the B2 minus radar absorptive material.

I just found out that DoubleClick offers an AD-SERVING COOKIE OPT-OUT feature. I highly recommend performing this action. You may think you are browsing anonymously, however you are not. Doubleclick advertisers can figure out who you are as long as you have ever bought anything online or filled out a form from one of their client sites...

In what is the pinnacle of achievement in the world of blogging, Google Buys Pyra. Pyra is the company behind Blogger. Stay tuned.

I've seen this term all over but not the definition, so can someone tell me what a Moblog is?

Hmm, someone created a reversible: testing category, but there is nothing in the category. Let's see if anything will show up now...

Please excuse me while testing the hierarchy of reversible....

Wired has a great story on The House That Woz Built

Tokyo Professor Working on Invisibility

This is the most amazing scientific achievement I've seen in a very very long time. I always wondered if it would be possible to kind of come up with some way of making something appear kind of invisible bt placing a 360degree camera behind a transparent shield one day and deliver the result kind of like a tv to the flat screen on the other side to kind of mimic invisibility... But I thought if it wasn't a pipe dream that it would be many many years away and work with very expensive equipment and in few real ways...

This is just amazing. No cameras and it's already here....kudos to the folks behind this one...

States Still Trying to Stop Spam

Since the feds are doing nothing, the States are working on Do Not Email lists similar to the Do Not Call lists for telemarketers which are pretty effective. Somehow I think the emailers are more sophisticated and they will wind up getting a copy of the list and putting yourself on it will wind up getting you more email not less, but we'll see. I still think the Feds need to take care of this scourge.

British Pathe has a huge database of film covering news, sports, social history and entertainment from 1896 to 1970.

OASIS is looking at how to improve on the url to make web services on the net findable...

Byte reports that Researchers from Berkely cracked Gimpy security system designed to block Internet robots. Not good news for PayPal, Hotmail, Yahoo or victims of spam. Back to the drawing board...maybe they should show a picture of an animal or object and ask the user to type the name of the animal/object..

In a year-end search-engine surprise, Yahoo! and Inktomi announce that YAHOO! TO ACQUIRE INKTOMI!

I feel all Googleyed right now.

The Computer History Museum has some excellent online exhibits...

This is the official site for the book The Internet For Dummies, apparently the best selling Internet book of all time, according to the authors...The site isn't fancy, but it's cool.

If someone figures out what Gnod - The global network of dreams is, please let me know.

Wired news has just reported this story: Bye Telemarketing, Hi More Spam?

The more you read "news" articles the more you begin to recognize how journalists (or their editors) sometimes like to spin a story, like recently happened to Mitch Kapor and his excellent open source project. Incidentally, that situation happened with Wired Magazine as well.

A story on how you will receive more spam is bigger news than just a telemarketing story alone, hence the spin... But even the end of the article acknowledges that the "additional spam" will only be a drop in the bucket. So the take home message, once the National Do Not Call List is up, make sure to subscribe. Here's an excerpt:

Bye Telemarketing, Hi More Spam? By Katie Dean.

If annoying calls from telemarketers are to fade into a distant memory due to a landmark Federal Trade Commission ruling Wednesday, more spam may be sneaking into e-mail boxes as a result.

That's a harsh projection coming from privacy watchdogs based on the FTC's announcement for a national do-not-call registry. Consumers will be able to add their names to the list, either by registering on the Internet or calling a toll-free number.

As if you didn't already know ;)

More than a week later and I'm still laughing.

Are you an Eric? Then visit the Eric Conspiracy Home Page.

And here is the History of ArpaNet eMail.

Robert Zakon has put together an impressive Internet Timeline - the definitive ARPAnet & Internet history.

Look at Manhattan!

Joi Ito took some pictures of his lunch with Ben and Mena Trott, who created Movable Type. They look like a nice young couple.

Samsung Electronics has the coolest History Hall Tour.

The folks at Google have done it again with a product called Froogle. Taking product search to a new level.

Google has released the Google Viewer and the Google Webquotes.

I found the AT&T Labs Research - Projects homepage. This is lots of fun reading!

Joi Ito Met The Woz yesterday. Seems he's launching a new venture. If anyone in the field of computing was an inspiration to me, it is Steve Wozniak. I hear he is a very nice guy. I hope his new venture meets great success.

Met Steve Wozniak who is recently founded Wheels of Zeus. I can't tell you what we talked about. ;-) I had done an interview of him for a Japanese magazine years ago at a Macworld Japan. He remembered...

This argument will probably not receive much sympathy. How about if they work together with the anti-pop-up software to help ensure that people who don't like popups won't visit their sites ;) ?

Well I'm surprised to see that Yahoo! has responded.

If MyWay gets much better, it will definitely eat into Yahoo...but I've said this before...

Salon.com reports: Political spam: Get used to it

Now I'm furious....Political SPAM??? Not only aren't they doing anything about spam but now they are sending it to us? What else can politicians do to make us trust them less? This is so ridiculous.

Speaking of Salon.com, they have a new gimmick.

"Salon.com has introduced an unusual advertising program that waives subscription fees for readers willing to wade through an interactive commercial."

Sorry, I just don't think it will work. I think the direction of ads in the future will be like what I read the latest James Bond movie's nickname is: "Buy Another Day". Product placement is the future of ads. Which makes it a big problem for content sites like Salon.com. Good content is not like good entertainment...product placement hurts the quality of the content far more than it hurts entertainment. When you watch a TV show, who cares if the actors drink Coke or Pepsi? Basically only Coke or Pepsi care... even if it affects our purchasing habits, personally I still couldn't care less. I'd gladly trade in commercials for product placement...but not in written content.

What people are not understanding is that the Internet has made it cheap enough to create quality content that ad driven content is not that huge a moneymaker.

There are 500,000 blogs out there. Take the cream of the crop and you will find some awesome content including up to date news and articles for free. Why wade through an excessive Mercedes Benz commercial just to read Salon? A few clicks on the net and you'll find plenty of value to read...

It's not that I don't sympathize with Salon. I appreciate quality writing and would be happy if the average person placed more value on it. But reality is reality and they will probably never be as big a business as they or their investors wish them to be.... and dancing ads may help them a tiny bit, but not enough to keep them afloat...

I've been saying this about Spam for a long time and have been surprised at how slow the pace has been for this to happen... We'll see if it does eventually get there...

So, sophisticated Internet users are turning to a new approach. Instead of trying to block spam while allowing everything else, these users employ software that blocks everything except messages from already known, accepted senders. These systems, called "whitelists," change e-mail from an open system to a closed one. Whitelist applications available today include MailFrontier, ChoiceMail from DigiPortal, Vanquish, and the freeware Tagged Message Delivery Agent. There's also a whitelist option built into Hotmail, known as the "exclusive" setting. Though it's hidden in the preferences menu (click "Options," then "Junk Mail Filter"), more than 10 percent of Hotmail users reportedly invoke it. Before long, expect all e-mail applications to offer this function.

Joi Ito points to this cartoon by Invisible Shoebox. Cool.

Surfing can be a fun diversion sometimes...and you never know where it will take you. I started out at Anonova's tech news and found out that Philips is announcing a new device, a remote control that uses WIFI. They foresee a future with less wires and making computing more human centric.

Going along with this theme I found out about Project Oxygen. From there I saw a creepy technology demonstration video. I say creepy because just like I'm not interested in a video phone, I'm not interested in wearing a GPS that will announce my whereabouts to visitors.

Anyways, from there I found out about tech photographer Sam Ogden. Turns out the Borg have already invaded earth in real life. Somehow I'm not surprised that they live at MIT:

ABCNEWS.com : Marketing Scheme Misusing 20/20's Name

Hopefully this will get them to do some aggressive reporting on Spam. They should start with the Direct Marketing Association and then move on to the states that still haven't put anything on their books about spam...

But what will really change the face of spam will be the day when spammers start to send emails in the names of congressmen. Once it touches our bureaucrats personally, THEN they'll finally do something about it....

Movielink is Hollywood's answer to Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus and Gnutella. I don't think it will do that well, I'd rather stick with BlockBuster or Hollywood video. Even their help system, which you think would be geared towards newbies, is more complicated than the site itself..

Wow...these guys are as mad about AOL cds as I am about Spam. And they are determined. Perhaps after they have achieved their goal they can be persuaded to do something about spam!

German scientists develop chip to beat the action replay.

I've been waiting for this type of thing to come around. Although the definition of a strike in baseball might make it tough to create an electronic method of saying ball or strike, with today's terchnology they should be able to put a sensor on a puck and detect if it went into a net...

Boston Dynamics has been doing some incredible work on simulating the human form. Who knows, soon the movies won't need real actors...

Boston Dynamics, the leader in dynamic human simulation, announced today that it has been awarded a contract by the US Army Soldier Systems Center to measure and validate the accuracy of its physics-based human simulation software, Digital Biomechanics(tm). The contract follows on a contract the Army awarded Boston Dynamics earlier this year to develop Digital Biomechanics for virtual prototyping of next-generation soldier equipment.

Sharp Develops LCD Switchable Between 2D and 3D Viewing

Sharp Corporation and Sharp Laboratories of Europe, Ltd. have succeeded in developing a new LCD capable of displaying 3D images, which does not require the use of special glasses. This LCD is electrically switchable between 2D viewing (planar mode) and 3D viewing (stereo mode). This innovative display can lead not only to the development of dedicated 3D display equipment that provides a realistic sense of depth and presence, but can also be used in existing LCD application products, opening up new worlds of enjoyment far beyond what is currently available. For example, in the PC field, it functions as an ordinary 2D display for applications such as word processing or spreadsheets. Switching to 3D display mode, it lets users enjoy specialized 3D content such as computer graphics or games with an amazingly vivid sense of depth and immediacy.

This is cool, I did see a preview of the scene with the surgical Robot for the upcoming Bond Flick, Die Another Day...I didn't know the surgical robot was actually in use in a couple of hospitals.

You may ask "What is Hyper-Threading Technology?"

Before giving you Intel's answer, I'll give you the short one...if you like to multitask (as I do, with literally about 50 open windows right now), this will make it faster. Here's their answer:

"HT Technology brings increased performance to computer users in two ways: using multithreaded software or using software in a multitasking environment. Software applications that have been written to use multiple pieces of code called "threads" view the Pentium 4 processor at 3.06 GHz with HT Technology as two processors. HT Technology allows the processor to work on two separate threads at the same time rather than one at a time. In addition, applications can benefit in a multitasking environment - operating two or more different software programs at the same time - when run under operating systems such as Windows*XP or Linux*. Both ways add up to extra performance and less waiting for the computer user."

Remember I mentioned one month ago that Brian Mcwilliams at Wired wrote about breaking into Hussein's email account? Well Yahoo via AP finally caught up to the story and it's one of the most popular stories of today.

Befuddled asks Yahoo: What are blogs and how did they become so popular?

This is amazing!

Following an in-depth article in The Wall Street Journal of spam queen Laura Betterly, SlashDot readers tracked down her email address and other info. Remember that episode of Seinfeld where a phone company cold calls Jerry and he turns it around and asks the cold caller for his home phone number to studio audience applause? Well the Slashdot readers are suggesting a similar poetic irony...

What I got out of the article was confirmation that if spam was actually illegal, it would reduce spam considerably...

What a story: Save Karyn.

Karyn ran up a credit card debt of $20k. She got laid off. Opened a website asking people to help her pay off her debt. Listed herself in DMOZ, listed some stuff on eBay, published a Daily mE-Mail (every week or so) and is now debt-free and the talk of the net. Go figure.

My spam filter missed this email address:
Florence Craddock

How could a spam filter detect this? Well, if it's aol.com, hotmail.com or yahoo.com, and it has a ton of letters and no vowels...99%, it's spam!

After all these years, I finally tried Opera! I always heard it was faster and less bloated, which I assumed to mean less features as well. Boy was I wrong. This is a major upgrade from IE as far as I'm concerned. I bought a paid version right away and am waiting for them to send me the key...but even with the banner ad this browser does so much more than IE. I hope I won't find any major downsides and can keep this puppy!

So this is the first entry using Opera. Try it, you'll like it!

Kirk Israel has some cool mini gif cinema to show you.

Ever feel like someone's been pulling you by the nose?

Timothy is a smart and funny guy. I learned that from reading his little article: Give these fine folks a call why don'tcha?

I learned something else from this article. First, that call blocking doesn't work when you are calling an 800 number. Huh!!! Nice of the phone companies to mention that...

Second, that some spammers give you their toll-free number.

Well, how about that. Timothy seems to intimate that some joy may come from making some phone calls. I guess I can understand that somehow...but it gave me an idea.

First, wouldn't it, theoretically speaking of course, be ironic if people were to get those automated junk faxes, MCI phone reps, Sprint phone reps, etc.. to have those 800 numbers on their lists?

Second, since email addresses should never be placed on websites, because spammers harvest them...wouldn't it be cool if someone compiled a list of the REAL EMAIL ADDRESSES OF SPAMMERS and people used a service similar to Blog Rolling to serve up the latest spammers real addresses on your website, so that they get swamped by their own harvesters?

Sheer Poetry :)

Google CEO to Advertisers: Stop Scaring Users

Nice article with some great points!

I found out about this from Joi Ito's web. A former law clerk to a 3rd circuit judge caught an error in Judge Smith's opinion. Turns out Judge Smith is a regular reader of his blog and corrected it on the spot!

Algorhythm points out the irony that he's paying $3 per month to SBC/Ameritech for their "Privacy Manager" to block telemarketers, knowing full well that the company most responsible for his junk telephone calls is SBC Ameritech! He asks for suggestions...

Well, as I've discussed before on DT, I used to get 5-10 junk phone calls per day at home. I used the script from Junkbusters that he said he's too busy to try. And I can say that it worked wonders. I can't remember the last time I got a junk cold call. And with a bit of modification, it can be done rather quickly.

I embellished the script a little, especially when it was clear the cold caller didn't know the law...

The most important thing to keep in mind during a phone call from one of these guys is that the person making the call is trained to overcome your objections and can be rather resistent to your script. If you don't get joy out of tormenting the cold caller and having them call you a freak, as I managed to get one really smooth cold caller to "lose it" and do, then in my experience you can speed up the process considerably with the following:

"Hello, I'm calling for MCI/Sprint (whoever) and this is a courtesy call."
(The FOR is a dead giveaway that he works for a telemarketing company and NOT MCI/Sprint/whoever. Courtesy call = junk phone call)

May I speak to your supervisor?
(I never heard a "no" to this one).

"Yes".
Do you maintain a do not call list?
(If they say no, I always say, "Do you realize that you are personally liable in court to pay me $5,000 for calling me when you do not maintain a Do Not Call List". That always gets their attention. I think the law is the company is liable, but by making it personal and scaring them, you usually get them to pay attention)

"Yes".
Please put me on it!

That's all it takes, but to be more effective, I would definitely add the following lines:

Do you work FOR MCI/Sprint (whoever) or do you work for a telemarketing company making calls ON BEHALF of MCI/Sprint AND other companies?
(Sometimes they will resist telling the truth on this one, but the supervisor generally knows the law and knows that you are a PITA who will never give up and will generally cooperate with a little prodding)

"A telemarketing company".
Can you please put me on the Do Not Call List for both MCI/Sprint (whoever)
AS WELL AS ALL OTHER COMPANIES YOU CALL FOR?

"Yes".

You're done. It takes about 2-3 months of this before you stop receiving calls. Although the concept was from JunkBusters, the fact is that it works and I'm telling you real-life experience.

Additionally, by the time this problem was going down, my brother bought me the TeleZapper for my birthday so I can't say how much it helped, but it's only on one line. And the calls stopped coming from both lines...

The only junk phone calls I have to deal with is Junk Faxes. And they sure seem to defeat the telezapper. I also have to think with the frequency of their use, that they have found a way to defeat paying any charges on their phone bill as well.

As far as Junk Faxes go, it is clearly violative of the law. And there are often urls mentioned in the fax "newsletter" and phone numbers, so I'm a bit puzzled as to why they haven't been shut down...

One of my favorite topics here is spam and how to get rid of it. As I've said before on DT, the reason that legislation hasn't worked is because of a powerful lobbying organization called the DMA. They have opposed legislation for a long time. These are the folks behind junk mail and other marketing gimmicks. Even they have finally recognized the need for anti-spam laws. This reduces one of the bottlenecks to spam- somewhat.

The only reason they are realizing this is because with spam taking over, their own members' emails are getting lost in the noise and are therefore not effective. They are so blind and self-serving that they don't understand how useless their own stand is and how their power is making everyone including their own members suffer.

And their change of heart is still rather feeble. For they still want it to be legal to send unsolicited email. In other words, Opt-out laws rather than Opt-in laws. What does this mean? It means that the emails must provide a way for you to be removed from the mailing list.

Although I'm in disagreement with the DMA on this issue, their concept of opt-out is completely unrealistic even from their own worldview. No one uses opt-out anymore because all it does is validate your email address to spammers who will then send you more emails.

It is more than a little aggravating that our lawmakers are also so self-serving that they rather listen to a PAC like the DMA rather than what is obvious to any human being with an email address. Spam should be very illegal period. If the politicians need money, they can get plenty more than the DMA is offering if they would stem the tide of this scourge of the Internet.

Mark Pilgrim goes into considerable detail about what I was recently discussing here on referer spam and similar topics. His basic point was that LoJack deters crime overall, but won't stop your car from getting stolen, whereas the club will stop your car from being stolen because the thief will go after another car...until such time that The Club is so ubiquitous that it will be worth the thief's effort to steal cars that use it.

What Mark failed to do in his discussion is provide an example of a LoJack type system in the world of fighting spam. I'd say the answer to that question is to make spam and all it's variants very illegal with extremely stiff penalties, far beyond what you would normally expect such a crime to carry due to the number of people affected and for how destructive it is to the community as a whole.

P.S. using the PayPal style system where they say "please enter the code contained in this blurry image with no ALT text" is a problem that spammers have solved by shipping out those gifs to humans to decode them and continuing with the automated process!

If you know PHP and like Yahoo (or used to), don't miss this.

I'll believe it when I see Office 11 but this guy "Co-Inventor of XML" Says Office 11 is "A Huge Step Forward for Microsoft". I don't know about that headline as co-inventor, but unless Word saves its docs as XML by default, this story is way overblown. Nonetheless, when developers catch up with the importance of XML, there will be HUGE advances. People have been talking about it for awhile, but it will be mostly talk until developers make something of it... But the potential is indeed huge and the blogging world is at the forefront of actually doing anything about it. And IMO, they haven't even scratched the surface... If you're technical and don't know anything about XML, learn learn learn. It's the future...

Simon reports that my prediction already is happening. Not only that, but it's happening on Bulletin Boards too. But we are more protected because they need to register first...

RowBoat identified Mr. Mastodonte and he's from Montreal. When I clicked on the referer he didn't seem to have any ads up. And I doubt he ever will. The porn spammers are smarter because they never told you what they were doing and it took some detective work to figure out what was going on...

Joi Ito is trying to convince Casio to make a Blog Camera. Great idea.

And today on the same page as that article on Mitch Kapor, is an article on Shazam's cellphones. If there's a song playing in a cafe for example, it will compare it to a database of 1.6 million songs and name that tune for you. I have doubts about the need for such a device, but I thought of something else that would be cool.

First some background. A few years ago I bought a present for my tech-gadget crazy cousin (yes, it runs in the family). It was a GPS. He loves sailing, you see.

Well one day, I'm in the car with him, visiting a corporate customer of his and he had been there once before 2 years ago. He pops open the GPS I gave him and blip blip blip, there's one blip where we are and another blip where the customer is. Had I bought it a couple of years later, he tells me, we could have been given directions and had streets laid out in front of us.

Anyways, yesterday I was in a car going to that Halloween party and had to call my friend to get directions, which were given but weren't that accurate. I thought it would be cool if standard with cellphones would be the ability to send the co-ordinates from one phone to another so you could see exactly where you have to go.

Gen points out an interesting article in NYTimes about the physics of riding a motorcycle. But if you like motorcycles, don't miss his article published here.

Another one who scams the scammers. Enjoy!

Mitch Kapor made page C3 of the NY Times today. As mentioned before, he is building what many are calling an outlook killer even if he is humble enough to view it differently.

I think Microsoft is not unshakeable in the position they're in. I believe they have weaknesses and Kapor's project, if successful, can spawn many others. Just for some examples. The web is so central to what we do. Yet there are a bunch of things that microsoft never fixed in their browser as they have done for Word, Excel etc.. (e.g., right-click and copy image location to clipboard, upgrade the excellent webtools that used to be available to ie 5 users but disappeared after the "upgrade" to ie 6. Easier access to "open link in new window", and a bunch of others).

There is an army of out of work developers who are more than capable of creating and launching the best browser out there. Microsoft stopped innovating after they beat Netscape...

I'd love to see it happen and I think Mitch Kapor's example is a great one to follow. Good luck Mitch!

The IBM glass engine is really cool!

The IBM glass engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.

After reading an entry on Instapundit, once again I am getting angry.

Apparently, Wired Magazine is reporting on a new phenomenon. Referer advertising. A couple of companies have created an advertising model where they send a false referer note in your logs saying that a user arrived to your site (blog) from another site. Actually, I've seen this long ago on Diamond Talk and wondered how someone got to, say Diamond Talk, from a porn site. It's only now that I realize it was "referer advertising".

Unfortunately, it's rather obvious what the next step will be. Trackback and Pingback advertising. These parasties will abuse the friendly nature of the net and destroy the entire protocol of pingbacks and trackbacks like they destroyed usenet.

I take that back. What will probably happen there is the designers of software supporting these protocols will have to create filters where each trackback or pingback will have the option to be moderated before it is allowed to appear on a blog.

The wired article is here.

Astute readers of Diamond Blog will recognize that the line in the article about "Some bloggers publish a list that automatically updates links to sites that have linked to them" may have been inspired by the work of a frequently cited (at DB) blogger, Mark Pilgrim, although other fine sites like plastic do the same.

In the scheme of things, I'm still far more upset by spam porn to children than fake referer advertising, although all these practices should become illegal.

Parents, there is something you can do to protect your kids. DT member Song described the steps she took. Bravo Song!

Perhaps the PR guys subscribe to the philosophy that there is no such thing as bad publicity....

Jake has a great tip for Verizon users:

Dial *228 once a month to update your list of towers on your cellphone. Sounds like the "hosts" file on your computer :)

Wi-Fi enthusiasts should love this Announcement.

Mobile phone maker Ericsson and communications components manufacturer Agere Systems, yesterday announced their plan to create Wi-Fi solutions, which could mean users will no longer have to connect to designated hotspots or even stick to one service provider. The companies are working on Wi-Fi solutions that connect to service providers' network hubs to enable user authentication and billing, meaning users can roam between networks. "Together with Ericsson, we will clear the last hurdle to enabling widespread deployment of Wi-Fi networks in public spaces," said Ron Torten, vice president of Agere's networking and entertainment division.

Music giants target workplaces

Trade groups representing record labels, film studios and music publishers are to send a letter to 1,000 big corporations asking them to implement a system to stop illegal downloads.

The industry has been fighting a constant battle against websites such as Kazaa, Gnutella, and the now defunct Napster, which offer download services for free, dodging copyright fees.

3 members of the house sent a letter to their colleagues:

Here's the note to the New Democrats from Smith, Kind and J. Davis:

Support Innovation in Cybersecurity -- Sign The Attached Dear Colleague

Deadline: Friday, October 18th

Dear New Democrat Colleague:

Attached is a letter that is being sent to Dick Clarke, the Chair of the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. As he shapes the "National Strategy"on cybersecurity, it is important to affirm that government R&D should be made available under intellectual property licenses that allow for further development and commercialization of that work. Licenses such as the General Public License (GPL) are problematic and threaten to undermine innovation and security. I urge you to sign this letter.

As you know, the basis of the Internet - the TCP/IP protocol - is a result of federal R&D efforts at DARPA. The advancement and commercialization of this research provided significant economic growth as well as gains in productivity and efficiency.

Public-private partnerships have been hallmarks of technological innovation and government has played a positive role in fostering innovation by allowing the private sector to develop commercial products from the results of publicly funded research. As such it is important that the National Strategy reject any licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption of promising cybersecurity technologies developed through federal R&D.

The terms of restrictive license's - such as those in the GNU or GPL - prevent companies from adopting, improving, commercializing and deriving profits from the software by precluding companies from establishing commercial IP rights in any subsequent code. Thus, if government R&D creates a security innovation under a restrictive license, a commercial vendor will not integrate that code into its software. So long as government research is not released under licensing terms that restrict commercialization, publicly funded research provides an important resource for the software industry.

New Democrats have long supported public-private partnerships -- it's important that any licenses do not compromise a company's intellectual property rights in their own technology. I encourage you to sign the attached letter to Mr. Clarke. If you have any questions, please contact Mike Mullen (Rep. Jim Turner; 5-2401) or John Mulligan (Rep. Adam Smith; 5-8901). Thank you.

Sincerely,

Adam Smith Member of Congress
Ron Kind Member of Congress
Jim Davis Member of Congress

Text of attached letter to Mr. Clarke

Congress of the United States
Washington DC 20515
October 8, 2002

Honorable Richard A. Clarke
Chair, President's Critical Infrastructure Board
The White House
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. Clarke:

We are writing to submit our views on the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace that you circulated for comment on September 18, 2002. We believe the National Strategy should explicitly recognize that overall cyber security will improve if federally funded research and development is made available to Americans under intellectual property licenses that allow for further development and commercialization of that work product. This is a long-standing federal principle that should be explicitly stated in the National Strategy.

The leading example of this principle is DARPA's research in the 1970s that resulted in TCP/IP - the key set of communications standards that form the technical basis of today's Internet. These communications standards were made available under licensing terms allowing their integration into commercial software, which in turn enabled a wide range of companies to develop innovative communication and networkingservices.

Taxpayers are still realizing a tremendous return on that federal investment through Internet driven productivity gains, economic growth, job creation, and individual empowerment that could not have been predicted by the federal, academic and private sector researchers who developed TCP/IP. However, none of these returns would have been possible unless the research was made available under licensing terms that allowed the private sector to commercialize TCP/IP. Nor would the government and industry have enjoyed the fruits of this economic activity-- fruits that have funded additional research and development-- unless it had been made available for commercialization.

It would be very unfortunate - indeed, couterproductive and contrary to the public-private partnership that is at the core of the national cyber security strategy - if companies were reluctant to adopt promising security technologies produced by federal research for fear that doing so may compromise their intellectual property rights in their own technology.

For these reasons, it is essential that the National Strategy affirm federal tradition by explicitly rejecting licenses that would prevent or discourage commercial adoption of promising cyber security technologies developed through federal R&D. We commend your hard work on an issue of pressing importance, appreciate the opportunity to participate in this process, and trust you'll consider our views when you issue the final version of your report.

Sincerely,

(signed)
Tom Davis

(signed)
Jim Turner
Ranking Member, Reform Subcommittee on Technology

These things go on every day on a variety of issues. It's very rare that these things get reported.

For more info, click here.

Then check out this interview.

This is an amazing Sports Story. I always wondered just how detailed sports stars got with television analysis of games. Here's an excerpt:

Schilling relies on technology to maintain every edge possible on the mound. "Before, I was using TVs and video to look over hitters," Schilling says ..."And each hitter had his own little videotape, which was somewhat time-intensive and bulky. This system is portable. I've got 475 hitters and 20,000 pitches on about 85 CDs right now. I can pull up any pitch I've thrown, any count, any at-bat, any situation I want over the last nine years." Yes, we've come a long way from the old pen-and-paper charts that guys once kept to track which pitches worked and didn't work against different teams' lineups. Up comes Schilling in freeze-frame. We're looking over his shoulder at the catcher. It must be old footage from an interleague game, because Schilling is wearing the red pinstripes of his former team, the Philadelphia Phillies, and that's Yankee Derek Jeter in the batter's box. Schilling taps the keyboard, and the video rolls. Pitch follows pitch in rapid sequence -- no home-run trots, no tiresome throws over to first base, no dugout shots of the manager picking his nose. And because each pitch is a separate MPEG file, cross-referenced every which way, Schilling can play with the data all he wants.

"If I go to, like, Derek Jeter here," Schilling says, switching to a data-entry screen, "I can ask for all the first-pitch strikes I've thrown him." Up comes a list of 15 pitches. "Six of those 15 are swinging, which tells me that early in the count, he's not a very aggressive hitter. Now I can look at the balls he did put in play" -- back to video -- "and see where they were. Or go through and watch all the outs and see just exactly how I got him out." Click. "Fastball away." Click. "Another fastball away. I do this for every hitter."

And every game. Between starts, Schilling formulates a plan to retire each hitter he may face up to four times -- "In this count you should do this, in that count you should do that, and if he comes up late in the game, in a big situation, you could potentially do this." He records his observations in a spiral-bound notebook he brings to the dugout, and refers to this ledger between innings.

For the data, the software, and the computer, Schilling pays about $15,000 a year to Hertz Consulting, a political polling firm in Petaluma, Calif., with a sideline in sports. (Richard Hertz, the president, is a catcher in an over-30 league.) All season, Hertz collects videotape from the Diamondbacks, digitizes the relevant data, and ships updates to Schilling. "I'll pitch a game on Monday against the Padres," Schilling says, "and I have to pitch against them on Friday, and [Hertz will] have my video burned to a CD and back to me on Wednesday."

Hertz has a few other baseball clients, but they're all hitters, and none is as committed to the technology as Schilling is. "It gives me less reason to get beat," Schilling says, trying to explain why, for him at least, there's no going back. "A lot of guys are afraid to make the leap simply because this type of technology entails responsibility. I don't have excuses. I'm expected to win. I know what they pay me for, and I couldn't do the job as well as I do without this."

IBM Scientists Build World's Smallest Operating Computing Circuits--IBM Press room-Press Release

The new "molecule cascade" technique enabled the IBM scientists to make working digital-logic elements some 260,000 times smaller than those used in today's most advanced semiconductor chips.

The circuits were made by creating a precise pattern of carbon monoxide molecules on a copper surface. Moving a single molecule initiates a cascade of molecule motions, just as toppling a single domino can cause a large pattern to fall in sequence. The scientists then designed and created tiny structures that demonstrated the fundamental digital-logic OR and AND functions, data storage and retrieval, and the "wiring" necessary to connect them into functioning computing circuitry.

The most complex circuit they built -- a 12 x 17-nanometer three-input sorter -- is so small that 190 billion could fit atop a standard pencil-top eraser 7mm (about 1/4-inch) in diameter. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter; the length of five to 10 atoms in a line.

The Weblog MetaData Initiative

NZ Bear is proposing a new weblog metadata initiative. Great idea. He also asked for some comments, so here goes:

DMOZ: I'd add Yahoo as well. Those 2 are the best-known categorization systems. What if you have a site that doesn't match a DMOZ category but does match a Yahoo category?

Also, it would be nice to provide a mechanism to use DMOZ as a starting point and allow new categories to be applied. A self-categorized web.

This is all quite interesting to me because what NZ Bear is doing is something similar to what a techie suggested to some friends back in 1996...he was right but years ahead of his time....

Joi Ito reports: Disney and MSN Join Forces

Microsoft, Disney Unveil Release of Upgraded MSN Internet Service Stocked With Disney Content

You can read the original report here.

The Nigerian Nightmare - Who's sending you all those scam e-mails?

Brendan I. Koerner at Slate wrote a great article on the Nigerian Scammers. I've seen these scams on Compuserve back in the late 80s. Boy have they grown...

Mark Pilgrim doesn't like links to open in new windows.

Although I understand his arguments, I don't agree. There are times when you want to open links in a new window and times you don't. Hopefully the web designer will be sensitive to how the user wants it. What probably winds up happening is that the web designer designs it how he/she likes it half the time.

On DiamondTalk, we added these links all over the place so the user has more choice.

Generally when looking at blogs I prefer when a link opens a new window. Others may have different preferences. But the markup is there for a reason and the truth is it isn't the designer's fault if the preference doesn't match what the user wants. No matter which way the designer goes, there will be some users that like it one way and others that don't like it that way.

I do think it's the fault of the designer of the browsers. IE and Netscape used to have great new features coming out all the time. Ever since IE totally defeated Netscape it's been a long time since IE or NS has done anything too exciting and interesting (debatable, I know, just my opinion).

Why can't the browser be given the option to have his/her own default? Why isn't there an easier way to switch between opening in a new window or not?

Say one click for same window, double-click for new window...

Anyways, that's my take on the question...

Attack on 13 root servers.

I'm amazed that there are only "13 root servers".

Now this is cool.

Try the Google Voice Search Demo!

Vignette Takes Wraps Off New Content-Management System

Visit the link for the news. The only thing I wanted to know is something they didn't even mention. Will they have normal urls in this upgrade?

Someone mentioned that the more complex and feature rich the web content management system, the more complicated the url :)

Microsoft releasing next version of Office.

This should be big news. They are supporting XML and .net in a big way. But somehow I don't see Microsoft leading the way in XML and .net the way they managed to control the desktop...

Mitch Kapor's Weblog is the talk of the net today. He was the co-designer with Jerry Kaplan of Lotus Agenda (I used to use it, btw). Will it be an Outlook-killer? Who knows...but I'll be happy with something that just does a good job with Spam. Poco is better than outlook, but I wouldn't mind better than Poco even if it didn't do anything else.

Congrats to GlennFrazier for making the Inc. 500 with refinery.

Many of you old enough to have seen the excellent movie "Network" are familiar with this battle cry. Nothing makes me feel more like this than the issue of Spam. From what I hear, the best site for information about spam is at
spam.abuse.net. If you read the page at the link above, perhaps you will be as shocked as I am that they seem to not even have hope. Not even hope at stopping pornography from reaching the emails of children. It is unfathomable that we cannot even hope to stop people from sending pornography to our children. I will say this again. It is unfathomable that we cannot even hope to stop people from sending pornography to our children.

I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

I would like to hear feedback from anyone who cares as much about this issue as I do and let's see if we can do something.

Let's get our best minds together on these questions:

1. What is our best hope of containing this problem?

2. How can webmasters/bloggers/internet users help make this happen quicker?

My answer to question number 1 is to make spam very illegal, meaning the penalties should be VERY SEVERE, and we need to put tremendous pressure on our governments, local and federal, worldwide, to take the issue seriously and go after these people in the strongest way possible.

My answer to question #2 is that we need legal & government experts in the webmaster community to get together on this issue and offer some good advice on the best program to create to attempt to bring in some regulation and law enforcement on the issue. Once there is an international organization in place that is well-funded and intelligently aims to showcase what laws need to be passed in what countries, and even politically who is behind the initiative and who is not, then webmasters can collectively unite to back this one powerful initiative and put pressure on governments, who frankly are doing pretty much nothing about this plague.

All who are with me, please follow the advice of Paddy Chayevsky and then drop your comments here:

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. Now into it. We know the air is unfit to breath, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don't go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won't say anything." Well I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets. All I know is first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm a human being. God Dammit, my life has value." So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Things have got to change my friends. You've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open your window, stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Algorythm reminded me of a time, not too long ago when push was "the once-future king of content delivery". What a great line :)

Wow, I can't even remember the name of the company, but it was so cool, everyone installed this screensaver with stock quotes ticker on your screen, the latest sports scores. This company was going places. I am amazed that I can't even remember the company name, that's how low they went. At least Netscape survived in some form even if it was sold....

I remember when Backweb (was that the name? Another future-king Push company I can't recall the name of...) came out and I was shown a beta copy by a CEO who was so excited by it. Everyone was talking about this like it would revolutionize the Internet. And I'm looking at the product and thinking, boy are the tech media overblowing this. People won't want data brought to them that way.

I think the power of the Internet is not that content providers can push data to the end consumer, but that the consumer can find just about anything they want with pull technology.

Mark Pilgrim's problem with bandwidth is related to the fact that content aggregators are pulling his data too frequently. I'm not quite sure why he titled his entry "Push", to tell you the truth...maybe I'm missing something...

But one solution that would help his problem was mentioned by Fishbowl. The content aggregators would check first to see if content had changed before whacking the page....

This is actually the ideal situation for push technology. I don't think end-users especially appreciate push. But from a content producer to a news aggregator, I think it works well. Even Blog-to-Blog. You have new content, you inform a tool that either publishes or aggregates content that you have new content. Then the user can visit the aggregator any time he/she wants and find everything. No reason for the aggregator to pull. So why is there pull here? Because the content publisher is providing an RSS feed, and any aggregator is welcome to come by and pick up a copy.

An alternative would be a subscription mechanism whereby all aggregators could subscribe to a feed, would provide an address to push the feed to, then each time there is new content, it would be pushed to the subscribers.

This would work great for an application, but alas I don't see this working well as part of a spec.

P.S. after going to the link provided to Mark Pilgrim I saw and therefore remembered the screensaver push company name that would be as big as Yahoo...Pointcast!

Our readers are new to Blogs so it isn't quite clear to many yet how this works, but Joi Ito is right when he says:

User Radioland now has an ExplorerTool that lets you browse other bloggers RSS feed subscriptions. This context is very interesting to me. This community space is what is the difference between blogs and POWP's (Plain old web pages). It is CONTEXT, TRUST, COMMUNITY. This is NOT a static medium. The way the blogs and readers relate with each other, this distributed, decntralized network of trust and referrals is where a lot of the value...

Emmanuelle reports that fridges can now surf the internet. Genial!

When the cellphone first came out, I got one. Same with PDA and the teeny tiny pagers. But I dumped them all to spend some time away from technology when I'm away from the computer. The new BlackBerry may lure me back one day. Anyone try their version of the PDA/cellphone?

Dorothea has an interesting post about tech employees being watched in their after hours activities and fired for working on other things. If you know any techies who are the type to work on Open Source projects, they tend to be the kind of employees that with little effort will be loyal, hardworking and productive forever. But it's probably a blessing because it's about the only thing that will get them to find work where they will be appreciated.

Ain't this depressing. (Nod to the Security Blog.) A salaried programmer had his job threatened because he worked on open-source software during his off-hours. But if you're salaried, there are no off-hours, it seems. This poor soul's employer told him to quit doing the open-source work or quit his job. He chose the former:

Some others show MS the way.

Microsoft is releasing some new consumer products. As many of you know, I like to follow how journalism is being done and how news becomes news. So this little spat was a natural for me to read.

As a result I found a nice blog from a fellow I recognized from a tech TV show: Chris Pirillo.

Turns out he has a switch ad too.

He also believes 010000110110111101100110011001100110010101100101001000000110100101
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00000000. Let's see which of our readers can figure out what this means first. I mean, beyond the fact that he's a geek and so am I for knowing what he said without even being a drinker of either.

Don't miss that cool interface he has. At the top of the page.

So yesterday I'm reading Joi Ito's excellent blog and read an early version of his entry about Microsoft fighting back at the popular Switching to Mac ads, but using a stock photo as the person who made the switch, rather than real people as Apple did.

Today I'm surprised to find out that this story made Yahoo's Most Popular list. It turns out that they tracked down the "writer" and it is someone hired by Microsoft.

Here is a good illustration as to why blogs are popular. You learn so much more about a story by reading blogs with all the citations and the collective research of a community of people reporting a story. While AP reporter Ted Bridis, who has written some impressive articles on technology before, did a fine job on this one, the Yahoo version of the story lacks any good links.

By going to the Wired version of the same story, you get almost the same story, but some links that are invaluable in digging deepers into the story. Like a relevant page in slashdot rather than their front page as Yahoo did. The original ad as it appeared on Microsoft's site, with the original picture. A link to the original stock image from Getty (Yes, the people responsible for this mistake used a Getty image instead of Microsoft's Corbis). And finally, a link to the original document from Microsoft's site.

Indeed, if you follow the instructions on the Wired story, you will see PR firm Wes Rataushk mentioned.

I can't imagine that the writer left in her name and employer on purpose. She was probably using her home computer and left in references she shouldn't have.

The truth is, this was one of a series of articles. Barbara Sehr wrote one called The meaning of Life and Office XP. She works freelance and also worked for Getty Images, which may somewhat explain how Getty images rather then Corbis images wound up in Microsoft Ads.

At the end of the day, when you actually read those ads, or even the Mac ads, it isn't all that convincing. It's pretty clear that this is just marketing. The concept of "fighting back" at the Mac ads was a big mistake in the first place. That kind of ad plays well for the underdog, not for a giant. And if you are going to do it, you better make sure the whole story is not faked.

Sometimes I like to look deeper at these kinds of stories not for the story itself, but just to analyze how it is reported in the traditional media vs. how the Internet has changed reporting and allowed you to go deeper into a story.

A couple of people have reported seeing popup ads on DiamondTalk. We have never and will never have popup ads on any of our sites. If you ever see this, it is because there is some software installed in your computer that creates popup ads and makes it look like it's coming from a website. This page can help you detect programs that install "spyware" onto your computer. Ever been asked to install Comet Cursor? Looks like something that will give you cool cursors, but it will give you more than that.

Also see: Cnet's take on this topic.