Robert Hashemian

For those you who have E-ZPass (EZPass or EZ-Pass, I can never spell it right) tags, you'd better take a look at your recent statement. No, this is not about phantom charges for some bridge you never crossed. It's about a $1 service charge that was quietly added in july.

Generally, when I receive my E-ZPass statements in the mail, I just glance over the balance amount and if it seems in line, I toss it. For some strange reason, I actually reviewed my last statement to see what kind of charges they have on it, and that is when I discovered the mysterious $1 account service fee.

The next day, I asked one of my coworkers if he knew anything about this. No, he said. But then he checked his account online and sure enough he was also being charged. So finally I decided to call E-ZPass and see what was up. It turns out that the E-ZPass tags are assigned by various authorities in new york, including Port Authority, New York State Thruway, and MTA. Mine was issued by the MTA. The Port Authority had been charging its E-ZPass customers the $1 service fee for a while, and the MTA, apparently feeling left-out, decided to silently add the fee.

What a perfect scam, bait and switch, swindle, robbery. First they sucker you into getting one of these tags so they can save money on toll collectors, then they charge you a service fee for the privilege of charging you at the toll plazas. And on top of it all, they sneak the charge in, hoping people wouldn't notice. When Kozlowski taps Tyco's money, that's fraud and embezzlement, and he must be punished. But when the government steals (and these outfits are quasi-government sorts), I guess it's called legitimate practice.

Hey Spitzer, are you awake?

In my last blog I wrote about Google Web Accelerator (GWA), but I also mentioned about some lesser known adverse effects. Here's a short summary.

GWA is in effect a proxy client drawing from the vast Google cache content. This means that when you visit a site, in addition to your ISP, Google will also know about it, even if it doesn't supply the content from its cache. If you already have the Google toolbar installed, chances are Google is already collecting the information. The difference however is that with a decent network analyzer you could see what information is sent back to Google via the toolbar. With GWA, you can never be sure what is being collected since data is being supplied through Google itself.

Web operators are already having a hard time collecting data on their visitors. With paranoid users blocking cookies, disabling scripts and images, and cloaking browsers, now their IP addresses will also be masked by those of Google's. For some users, being IP-anonymized is a boon, but if you are a Web operator who depends on visitor's IP addresses for Web analytics, banned and private lists, site troubleshooting, or culture detection, life just became a whole lot more complicated.

To see what I mean, visit the Whoami page on my personal site with GWA turned on and then turned off and note the differences in the information presented.

Finally, will Google ever use GWA as a censorship or subjugation tool, displaying content based on its discretion? Google already wields so much power that many sites fear being banned from its index. Just imagine how much more anxiety they would have, if their site won't even load because GWA might decide to dump them and provide a 404 page instead. This is an unlikely and alarmist scenario of course, but it is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility.

If GWA is ever released as a finished product, it has the potential of becoming as popular as Google's toolbar. Only time will tell whether its benefits outweigh the risks.

Google has become a relentless machine pumping out new products and services at dizzying speed. I absolutely love how they go about it. First the stuff appears in Google labs. Then they go beta, and finally they're released. At every stage the Google geeks can test-drive the service, tweak it, optimize it, integrate it, or perhaps even discard it if they don't gain traction.

One of the newer products offered is Google Web Accelerator (GWA). It had been open for download for a while, but it was yanked offline citing too many users. the GWA home page is in some sort of a limbo now and sometimes it redirects to the Google toolbar's page, but GWA can still be downloaded from a number of other sites. Google it up if interested.

I recently downloaded it from one of these sites and gave it test run. It looks like a speedometer with a needle, sitting in the tray and the browser toolbar. The needle moves as the browser is used, indicating activity. A small text proclaims the amount of time saved using the tool. The idea behind GWA is simple, even though the implementation is a bit involved. Since Google has so many web pages cached in its distributed servers, it could rush content back to the browsers faster than the actual web sites can.

Making all of this work is a little proxy installed by GWA on the PC that attempts to pull content form the Google cache as the user browses to various sites. So far GWA claims to have saved me 15 minutes, but I don't have a sense of faster browsing yet.

I suppose GWA can be called a great innovation by a company that can leverage its massive cache content to facilitate browsing. But GWA also has some adverse effects. I'd discuss that in my next entry.

The GWA's home page is http://webaccelerator.Google.com/.

If you operate a public web site, there is little doubt that you'd like an occasional visit from search engine minions, known as robots. Robot are little agents that search engines dispatch to your site to scan your page contents and sent them back to the mother ship for cataloguing and finally including in search engine results pages (SERP).

 If you have ever scanned your web logs, you would undoubtedly noticed these agents. They come with different names like googlebot, msnbot, and yahoo slurp. Almost all legitimate robots ask for permission before crawling a site, and the way that's done is through a file named robots.txt. This capability has been around since the early days of the search engines, but it is perhaps one of those often forgotten details. The reason is that if a robot can't locate /robots.txt on a Web site's root, it takes that as a green light to crawl and index the whole site.

 robots.txt is flat ASCII file with a simple format. It is placed at the root directory of the Web site, so for example, it can be accessed this way: http://www.tmcnet.com/robots.txt. If you want search engines to crawl your whole site, you would specify this inside robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

If you want to block robots from a certain location of your 

site, you would specify this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

I won't bore you with the details. You can read about the stuff <a title="robots.txt" href=http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html>here</a>.

Now the question is: if a missing robots.txt file is an open permission to crawl, why bother creating one? The best reason is to save on bandwidth. Many sites are designed to deliver a standard page to help lost users with missing pages. A robot looking for a missing /robots.txt file would also receive this page, and while in most instances, the standard error page will not cause any harm, the robot would still have to parse it, wasting bandwidth and resources. A safe practice to avoid this waste is to place an empty robots.txt on your Web site.

Finally, understand that /robots.txt works based on the honor system. While most legitimate search engines follow its instructions, there is no way to enforce obedience via this file.

As a frequent reader of MSNBC's Web site, I started noticing this past weekend that their left-side navigation menu items no longer expanded. As of this writing, the menu has yet to regain its dynamic trait.

The expanding menu has been part of MSNBC's navigational feature for many years. As the user hovered over the different item, a submenu would branch off displaying links to the top news for that section and other relevant sub-sections within. The sub-section items, once hovered over, would in turn open up their own menus displaying relevant links.

I always liked this functionality. It provided a one-click access to the stories I wanted to view. Dynamic menus do come with some inherent issues. One of the most problematic is layering. Most dynamic menus have the unfortunate side-effect of being eclipsed by active controls on a web browser. Those controls comprise items such as drop-down lists, applets, and flash.

To solve that problem, MSNBC would hide the active controls on the page whenever the user hovered on a menu item, thus the expanded menu would not clash with other controls on the page. It meant that many times interactive banners would suddenly vanish, and I suspect the advertisers weren't so pleased about their banners doing the disappearing act.

Now, with the expandable menu gone (at least for now), MSNBC is reaping several benefits, albeit at the expense of upsetting the dynamic menu fans. The banners would no longer need to be hidden, the users who would need to click on and visit the various section pages to see the relevant links are now greeted with a sponsored splash page (read more page impressions), and MSNBC.com would no longer need to maintain the dynamic menu.

According to one of our Web designers most people dislike dynamic menus because they interfere with the page and irritate the user. Perhaps that was part of MSNBC's reasoning to kill its dynamic menu. But given the other benefits, I hardly doubt MSNBC agonized much over this decision.

By the time I got home tonight, my 9-year old was nearly finished with her homework. The only question remaining on her assignment sheet was "What is Olympus Mons?"

Now I knew I had heard of this term before, but I just couldn't come up with a definitive answer. Was it a crater on the Moon? A rock formation on Mars? I was certain the term pertained to some off-earth object, but it's a big space with lots of objects.

So I promised her that we will look it up in the dictionary after dinner. Her response, "Let's look it up on Google first?" I was struck with how fast the Internet has endeared itself to even the elementary school kids today. The truth is that I do the same when I am looking for something, so why shouldn't she? But somehow I can't help feeling sad about how drastically the Web has mutated our culture.

Instead of opening a book or two, now we just Google it. In some ways we have been robbed from the fun and challenge of searching for something the old-fashioned way. But there is no defying progress.

As a compromise, I suggested for us to look the term up on wikipedia.com. At least that Web site has some semblance to a real encyclopedia. No dice, wikipedia was stumped, though it came up with some suggested links. But clicking on those would mean too much effort. And so Google became the clear the winner, and we didn't even have to click on any search results. In a flash of a page-load, the answer sat before us.

Olympus Mons, located on Mars, is the largest volcano in the solar system. A speedy answer, courtesy of the omniscient Google.

The health care industry got a shot in the arm today with IBM's announcement of an 8-year, $402 million partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The company claimed that this will be a model for how the health care industry can use new technology. The news comes on the heels of poor earnings announcement by IBM earlier this month. While IBM is licking its fresh wounds, it is aggressively pursuing and expanding into lucrative sectors to breathe life into its ailing earnings.

This is good news indeed. Technology has already had a great impact on the health care industry and that is wonderful for patients. There is no doubt that this new initiative would further enhance how patients' vital data is handled. Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or Electronic Health Records (EHR) are nothing new. Plainly stated, they are patients' records on computer databases. But as new frontiers are explored, EMRs will become precariously closer to falling into wrong hands.

Consider the spate of news about stolen data from a number of prominent companies lately. LexisNexis, Polo Ralph Lauren, HSBC, NCR, and a number of renowned universities around the nation have had security breaches with customer data stolen. These are not fly-by-night companies with half-baked products. They are brands that most consumers trust and rely on.

If we are doomed to repeat past mistakes, then companies must be prepared to defend the EMR data with everything they have. But going a step further, they had better have plans in place for when security is breached and data is stolen. Because, let's face it, it is inevitable.

The announcement was made today of the $3.4 billion take-over of Macromedia by Adobe. I was a bit surprised at how expensive Macromedia was, but then again this is one of the success stories of the Internet age.

 Interestingly enough, these companies have crossed paths of sorts before. Nearly a decade ago, Adobe had a chance and declined to acquire FutureWave, which later on merged with Macromedia and its flagship product, FutureWave, became what is know as Flash today.

 Besides Flash, Macromedia has a full spectrum of Web products to offer Adobe. There's ColdFusion, a mature server-side Web application product, DreamWeaver, a superb Web page design and layout product, and FireWorks, a versatile image creator and editor geared mostly for the Web. It remains to be seen how FireWorks will be positioned against Photoshop which is a competing product from Adobe. It is possible for the two products to merge into one.

 The acquisition, while an expensive venture, will bolster Adobe's presence on the Internet and Web arenas as it jostles for a bigger market share. Is all this activity getting Apple's attention? With the iPod market nearing saturation, Apple could be on the prowl for areas of expansion. Both Adobe and Macromedia have products with Mac roots and almost all of their current products and their Web sites have that special clean and polished look most associated with Apple. One wonders.

A few days ago I had a discussion with our managing editor for our company's Web site about how crawlers discover and index pages. He was convinced that search engines can somehow find hidden pages on a Web site even if there are no links to those pages. I, on the other hand, wouldn't be persuaded. How could search engines crawl a page if they don't know the page's name and location, i.e. its path? Turns out we were both wrong – and right, depending on how you look at it.

In order for search engines to crawl a Web page, they must first be directed to it. The process of page discovery is generally a hyperlink on another page that the crawler can follow. I'm not sure if search engines also follow plain text URLs, but it is a possibility. A site that wants to publicize a new page would normally have links to the new page from other pages, or the page will be in a directory index which lists all files in a directory when accessed (Web sites normally disable this option though for security reasons). In the absence of a link to a Web page's URL, crawlers would have no idea about the existence of that page (referred to as a hidden or orphaned page). I suppose they could engage in name-guessing, but that's an expensive proposition I suspect most search engines shun.

Then a few days ago I ran into an anomaly that disproved my belief about hidden pages and crawler discovery. I was working on a fairly popular page (Browser Simulator/Emulator) on my personal site. Due to the nature of the page, it has the potential of becoming a tool in the hands of abusers, so it is monitored for abusive activity patterns. I began to notice that the page was being accessed excessively by Googlebot with specific parameters as if a human was commandeering the page. Respecting the privacy of users however, I only monitor general patterns on that page, so I didn't have detailed information about Googlebot's activity.

With my curiosity piqued, I constructed a similar but hidden page in the same folder and switched on full monitoring. Then I began hitting the page, entering various data in the form fields. Sure enough, Googlebot began accessing that page with the same data as I had specified. How could Googlebot discover the hidden page so fast (if at all) and specify the same data as I was? A glance near the top of my Internet Explorer browser found the culprit. It was the Google toolbar, the seemingly innocuous toolbar that most people have installed on their browsers and are oblivious to its operation.

I am certain the Google toolbar comes with a privacy disclosure detailing how and what it gleans from the user's activity. I never bothered to read this and chances are most people ignore it as well. I am also not sure what Google does with the data. I suppose they do use it for ranking purposes, but I am now certain that it crawls the pages surfed on by users. I am, however, still unsure whether the crawled pages ever make it to the Google's index to be displayed as search results. I am also unsure if what the browser displays to the users is sent to Google along with the URLs (this could have potentially disastrous privacy repercussions).

There you have it. If you place hidden pages on your Web folders, don't be too confident about their secrecy, even if those pages are only accessed internally by you and a few trusted people. Anyone with a Google toolbar (or any other toolbar such as Alexa or A9) would be unwittingly sending the URLs of those hidden pages to Googlebot (or other robots/spiders), and potentially exposing the location of those pages to the world.

It's a classic tit-for-tat. In a move that is nothing short of an act of reprisal, GM announced today that it will indefinitely suspend advertising in Los Angeles Times. GM cited "factual errors and misrepresentation" for its decision.

 The move comes two days after an LA Times columnist criticized the auto-maker for pushing its gas-guzzling SUVs rather than investing in hybrid technologies. Perhaps the columnist went too far by calling for the impeachment of two GM executives, but GM's action is just plain childish.

 It's a free press. People express a lot of opinions about a lot of subjects. Some may get a bit scathing, others a bit risqué perhaps, but advertisers should take criticism in stride and understand that the separation between the editorial and advertising departments is what keeps a publication vibrant. An uncontaminated editorial process can only help the credibility of its publication which leads to more interested readers which in turn translates to more eyeballs seeing the ads.

 If GM hadn't jumped the gun, they could have used their advertising space to subtly challenge the columnist's position. Instead they decided on this immature action, possibly handing the columnist even more credibility.

I wasn't sure if this was an April fool's joke when I logged in to my Gmail account and saw my total storage at 1324 MB. It had been 1000 MB (which by the way, is not exactly 1GB) since its inception. But then something stranger kept happening. The next couple of times that I logged in during the day, I noticed that the storage limit was increasing. It's like it was a moving target. Right now it's sitting at 1627 MB and I surmise I'll see a higher number late tonight.

I'm not sure what to attribute to this strange behavior. Google already had its April fool's fun with Google Gulp. But I just saw this story and  it appears that Gmail is indeed marching towards the 2 GB storage limit. It was only a few days ago that Yahoo! announced plans to augment their email storage to 1 GB.

So it seems that the storage wars are once again heating up between the email titans. Personally I can't see how anyone would exceed the 1 GB capacity, but I suppose there is some value in bragging rights here. Having the highest capacity in the industry is great PR after all.

Meanwhile Hotmail has been quiet during all this. I wonder if they're planning a 1 TB storage offer after the smoke has cleared. That should settle the race, or does it?

Admit it. You have broken the law at least once in your life. Maybe you have gone above the speed limit a time or two, or made a copy of your cousin's music CD. The law doesn't have the patience nor the time to worry about these occasional lapses. Society must rely on people's good characters in some instances, lest be crippled under a mountain of enforcement actions. But when an illegal activity reaches critical mass, it is the duty of the law to step in and curb the abuse.

Such is the case heard before the supreme court regarding the file sharing and file swapping products known as P2P or peer to peer software. No one in their right mind is going to admit that the products they create are intended to encourage people to break the law, but actions speak louder than words.

Napster, the original digital piracy tool wasn't heralded as a bootlegging product either, but once its true usage in swapping pirated music became obvious, the law had no choice but to shut it down.

Proponents of P2P products such as Kazaa, Grokster, and eMule claim that their creators have the right to innovate and can't be held liable for people's misuse of their creations. There is some merit to that argument, but when these wares become tools in the hands of millions to break the law and bilk others of their rightful living, the law has no choice but to intercede. If the purveyors of the P2P products are looking the other way and getting rich on the backs of others' hard work, even if it is inadvertent, they must bear some responsibility.

They would holler just the same if someone found a dubious method to unwittingly hijack their creations and dent their pocketbooks.

Checking my mailbox over the weekend, I was greeted with my tax return documents. Only thing is that those were supposed to be delivered to the darlings at the IRS. What steams me is that I made sure to mail my return from another government entity, the post office. They weighed the enveloped, printed the postage stamp, and sent it on its way. I even paid for delivery confirmation. Thankfully I had a return address on the envelope (I normally don't bother), and the envelope returned to me with an insufficient postage sticker. Nice!

Wonder what would have happened if I was at the deadline date (I wasn't) and I owed money (I didn't). I guess on top of the wasted time and postage money, I would have been slapped with late IRS penalties too.

Moral of the story? I'm not sure. I mean how much more certain can you be than taking your tax return envelope to the post office to send to the IRS? Maybe get a second opinion on the postage from a different post office?

For some, e-file may be an option. I tried it a couple of years ago and it worked out great, but last year I had some hassles with it and ended up mailing in the return. It's back to e-file for me this year. And, what are my chances of recovering my postage fee from the USPS? Yeah, right.

Seeing Bernie Ebbers' picture with a gloomy face after the guilty verdict was announced evoked some feelings of sympathy in me. Perhaps I am too sentimental seeing people in distress. I truly felt bad for him. He just doesn't look like a criminal. But the facts spoke for themselves.

Ebbers' star rose at a dizzying speed during the heyday of the telecom era. From a small-time phone company operator, he became the mighty chief of MCI WorldCom and would have nabbed the number one spot had his merger initiatives with Sprint had come to fruition.

We have been a long-time MCI customer and I suppose we should have foreseen such a bleak day for its chief. From our vantage point their accounting department was nothing short of a complete disarray. I can't tell you how many uncounted times we contacted their accounting people to fix a billing problem, only to call again and again after receiving subsequent erroneous invoices. And the bills themselves were impossible to decipher. It's almost as if they were deliberately designed that way to confuse and thus fleece the customers.

Ebbers' anguished face might engender feelings of pity for many, but in the final analysis, the man was in charge of the company and deeply involved in its operation. He could not shirk responsibility of the massive fraud that had overtaken the company, and the jury was observant enough to conclude his guilt.