Students as Spammers

This is just amazing to me:

Tufts University, a 151-year-old school in Medford, Mass., last month discovered spammers were paying students to offer up their PCs as relay points that helped mask the true source of the spam. While university network executives interviewed were not aware of other cases on U.S. campuses, the phenomenon has cropped up in Israel. [_Go_]

And what's even better is this:

"The students involved in this found the opportunity themselves - they were not contacted by the company directly," says Tolman, who adds that the software likely was downloaded via FTP or some other file-sharing protocol. "But right now, we know the relay by the students has stopped."

I mean we all did weird things in college for cash.  I started a software company, I dated a girl once whose previous boyfriend paid his way though school by a combination of stripping and dealing, others wrote papers for cash.  But I mean spamming?  Ick!

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Patent Stupidity

Via Dave.  Oh yeah... Right.  Amazon and Jeff Bezos invented online discussion.  Don't even get me started.  But when you read deeper then you see this line in the 1st claim:

A method in a computer system of a non-participant for starting a discussion relating to an item offered for sale, the method including: (emphasis mine)

providing information describing a plurality of items being offered for sale;

receiving from an originating participant a selection of one of the items being offered for sale;

providing to the originating participant information describing the selected item offered for sale and an indicator for starting a discussion relating to the item being offered for sale, the information and the indicator to be displayed to the originating participant;

in response to selection of the displayed indicator by the originating participant of the discussion, providing to the originating participant an initial discussion thread that includes a description of the item being offered for sale; [_Go_] 

So the real issue here is patenting the context of discussion being the sale of a product.  That's not the same as online discussion per se.  Now I'm doubtful that it would hold up but it isn't as obvious as it appears on the face.

Well the only good thing about this is I see that software I used to work on is still running the patent office (anyone else memorize URL schemas from past lives?) and that is keeping people that are friends still employed. 

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Unscientific Search Engine Comparisons Take 2

About six or so months ago I took my name and checked its search engine ranking across different engines.  Since I just tried Jeremy's and Kasias, I thought doing the same type of unscientific ranking again would be interesting

Query: dave

• Google: #5 of page 1 of results
• Teoma: #9 on page 2 of results.
• AlltheWeb: #3 on page 1 of results.
• MSN: #8 on page 3 of results

Query: jeremy

• Google: #1 of page 1 of results
• Teoma: Midway through page 14 of results.
• AlltheWeb: #2 on page 11 of results.
• MSN: #3 on page 22 of results (But for amusement sake, check out the #1 Jeremy).

Query: kasia

• Google: #1 of page 1 of results
• Teoma: #1 of page 1 of results
• AlltheWeb: #1 of page 1 of results
• MSN: #5 of page 1 of results

Query: scott johnson

• Google: #1 of page 1 of results
• Teoma: #1 of page 1 of results -- although interestingly not for my blog but for my fuzzygroup page of writing samples!!! (my blog shows up as result #3)
• AlltheWeb: #2 of page 1 of results
• MSN: #1 of page 1

Query: scott

• Google: Midway through page 4 of results
• Teoma: No where in the 1st 16 pages of results
• AlltheWeb: No where in the 1st 16 pages.
• MSN: No where in the 1st 16 pages.

Conclusion?

Well there really isn't enough data to draw real conclusions.  At a rough guess, the search engines are starting to handle ranking more similarly than differently.  And all of them seem to weight blogs more than a bit.  If I had to guess I'd say that AlltheWeb is weighting blogs the most.  Still there really isn't enough data to draw real conclusions.  Of course if I was Kasia, I'd think it was cool to be #1 across almost all the major search engines.

Side Note

I wrote this entire article and was about to post it when I realized that I hadn't even bothered to look at MSN at all.  I'm not sure whether that indicates anti-microsoft bias on my part (possible) or the lack of mindshare that MSN has in the Internet space. 

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When Will Blogging Become "Gaming Googing" ?

There's an interesting front page article in the Wall Street Journal about how Google is penalizing folks that intentionally "game google" i.e. "subvert" the ranking system to generate a better position in the search results.  Here's the precis and link if you're a WSJ subscriber:

Google's emergence as the gatekeeper to the Web has prompted an arms race between the search engine and a cottage industry of companies that use tricks to help merchants climb to the top of the company's rankings. [_Go_]

So here's my question -- When will Google start to view blogging as subverting the ranking system?  Am I really the most important Scott Johnson in the world?  Is Jeremy Zawodny the most important Jeremy?  Is Kasia the most important Kasia?  Right now bloggers just plain *love* Google but a lot of that is because of how Google treats us.  They view our blogs as "legitimate link farms".  So when are we going to become illegimate?

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