Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Doc asks You want hijacking? You want piracy?. I give you VeriSign. Elliot Noss explains, in terms of stewardship, which VeriSign has, and is violating. He should know. He's the president & CEO of Tucows, and knows more about all this stuff than just about anyone else on Earth. Well . . . I dunno about taking the last literally, but, okay, yeah, metaphorically, allegorically, somehow nonliterally, emphatically, yes. The VeriSign stuff is high seas stuff. 7:07:03 PM    comment []

Consumers open wallets for paid content. U.S. consumer spending for paid Internet content is spiraling upward, due partly to more people looking for a mate online, according to a new study. [CNET News.com - Front Door] 5:23:08 PM    comment []

Benton News has these related stories today: A VERI BAD SCENE VeriSign, which runs the master domain name servers for all sites ending with .com and .net, has launched a controversial new service that redirects Internet users who mistype a Web address. Instead of returning a standard "site not found" error message, the Site Finder system forwards mistyped and non-existent URLs to a VeriSign webpage that includes pay-for-placement topic links. Critics claim that VeriSign is overstepping its authority and hijacking certain common Web searches. Site Finder has also been criticized because it makes even bogus emails appear to come from a valid domain, meaning spam may get through a company's spam filters. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has asked VeriSign to suspend its service until it can gather more information. VeriSign competitors Netster.com and Go Daddy Software have filed lawsuits against the company. In response to complaints, VeriSign is creating a committee of "Internet leaders" to advise it on technical matters, although it plans to continue offering Site Finder. (Reuters/USA Today) MICROSOFT GOES AFTER GOOGLE Microsoft has shaped much of its growth by buying and investing in everything from small business software to video games, but recently, a new industry has caught its eye: Web searching. In February, company executives met to decide on whether building an advanced searching platform or buying one would be the focal point of their strategy; building became the priority. Furthermore, the goal would be to build the top Internet search destination, eventually surpassing Google's ability to sift through the Web and return highly relevant results. "The decision to build or buy came down to our ability to innovate," said Kirk Koenigsbauer, strategy manager at Microsoft's MSN Internet portal. "Our ability to innovate is predicated on our ability to own the platform." Analysts believe that Microsoft will incorporate this new technology in its new version of Windows, which is its main cash crop, running on more than 95 percent of the world's PCs. This type of innovation could leverage their control over the operating systems market. Microsoft's Bill Gates has promised that Longhorn, the new version of Windows expected to launch in 2005 or 2006, will include database technology to make it easier for users to track and find information. (Reuters/CNN) 12:14:16 PM    comment []

The Baroque Cycle is about to begin... Don't know whether Andrew has his copy of Quicksilver yet (see earlier discussion), but mine arrived in town at 08:50:00 this morning, according to amazon.com/UPS Shipment Tracking, so I may be reading it by tomorrow night. (Of course, delivery isn't promised yet, and past experience suggests that that sometimes slows UPS down not insignificantly. We shall see.) 10:13:46 AM    comment []

xian on The Julie/Julia book. Add The Julie Powell to the list (along with Salam Pax) of bloggers whose weblogs have landed them sweet book deals. Congratulations to Julie for conceiving of her brilliant project and then - most importantly - executing it. So now, is the book going to just be a slightly edited rendition of the yearlong cooking project or is it some other kind of derivative work? She said in her interview in Inkwell (on The Well -- you were there for part of this, Christian!) that it would be something other/more than a dump of the blog. And I see it's not due until 2005. 7:25:46 AM    comment []

Doc has Proof that blogs are the duct tape of journalism. Or: whatever.. The American Chamber of Commerce in Kazahkstan has (is?) a blog. Perhaps related: Blogalization. 7:11:21 AM    comment []