Couldn't Have Said it Better Myself

From Meg:

Weblogs for Dummies

Coming this April to a bookstore near you: Weblogs for Dummies. The best part? It's the same God-awful publisher behind my book. Apparently one under-publisized, under-selling weblog book wasn't enough for their catalogue. Or perhaps they'll actually *try* to sell this book? (I.e. when the press requests a copy, they'll receive it, allowing them to mention the book in publications like, oh, Newsweek?!) [_Go_]

As one of the authors of Essential Blogging, I feel similarly.  Thanks to Guy K. Haas for passing this on.

9:40:48 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Getting Spammed About Spam

This just makes me chuckle:

If there's one thing more loathsome than getting spammed, it's getting spammed about spam.

One might call it spam spam.

So when a Northern California company broadcasted an unsolicited mass mailing to the press on Tuesday with the subject line "ANTI-SPAM LEADER SURFCONTROL CITES TOP 10 MOST ANNOYING SPAM IN 2002," it was, well, a tad annoying. [_Go_]

There is just something howlingly unethical about a company that makes anti-spam tools using Spam to send out its marketing messages.  Sigh.  Needless to say this is something we don't do at Inbox Buddy.  We've thought about it -- for about a microsecond --- before realizing that the just plain bad karma from such an act could curse us to hell forever.

Bias Note: Inbox Buddy is a product / company of mine.

9:14:19 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Sigh.  RIAA Wins Again

Given the intelligence of Brent's commentary that I posted earlier today, this is disappointing indeed:

"Blaming ISPs for giving these hardened criminals the bandwidth for perpetrating their heinous file-sharing acts is akin to blaming the highway department for creating roads that are used by dope smugglers," said security consultant Robert Ferrell. "It just doesn't make sense."

Sense or nonsense, Rosen said during her keynote address at the Midem music conference in France that ISPs should pay a fee to the music industry to compensate for those losses. ISPs could then pass the cost along to their song-swapping customers.

Such a fee-collection plan would be incredibly difficult to implement legally and technically, experts say. Even some music industry sources quietly dismissed the plan as unreasonable and unworkable.

But the RIAA scored a big win against an ISP on Tuesday, when a federal judge ruled that Verizon Communications must turn over the name of a Verizon Internet subscriber who allegedly downloaded 600 songs through file-trading network Kazaa in one day. (emphasis mine) [_Go_]

9:08:40 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

For Radio Users Only

I just heard from a fellow Radio user who lost his radio.root file.  Have you backed up yours lately?  If not you should.  When that file goes down then you are pretty much hosed.

Who Me?  Yup.  Backed it up, zipped it and moved it onto a different box, in a different state.  Paranoia thy name is me.

8:05:15 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Interesting: Googlert

This looks neat.  [_Go_]

Note: Currently untried by me.  If I could remember where I stored down my Google key, I'd probably even try it.  Thanks to Andy for pointing it out.

8:02:55 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Brent Is Just Plain Right: Monitor the End not the Middle

I've never been comfortable with the idea of an ISP monitoring traffic but I really haven't been able to put it into words.  Certainly not as well as Brent did in this comment to my blog (on this post):

An internet address is just a termination point on a worldwide switched network, no different from the telephone. IP is a stupid end-to-end protocol that knows nothing of its content. No point in the cloud should be held responsible for the anonymous bits that pass through it. Intent is formed at the edges of the network, not internally.

Why aren't these people trying to impose these restrictions on the telephone companies whose dialup connections are enabling the communication? Because people already understand that the phone network is a dumb end-to-end medium and don't consider that it should be policed in the middle. Nobody is saying that the phone companies have to stop routing telephone calls to known pimps or bookies or other illegal endpoints.

Once people start treating internet access as the dumb end-to-end commodity that it is, they'll start turning their efforts towards more useful lines of inquiry.

Brent Ashley  • 1/20/03; 12:42:50 PM

7:42:42 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This