April 2004 Archives

A couple of weeks ago a new search engine went online. There wasn’t much fanfare and reaction was equally muted. It was a9.com and it’s amazon.com’s latest move to muscle in on the search engine industry.

A9.com is merely a shell around google’s index. What’s added is a number of extra features designed to dazzle the users. There are a number of nifty features. For example if you are searching for Arkansas, you can simply type a9.com/arkansas. Another valuable feature is that book contents are also searched for the matching terms and the results are displayed in a separate window.

I’m not sure if this will be a successful venture for amazon.com. I used a9.com for a bit but once the novelty wore off, I switched back to google. Search engine history has shown that less is more. Google’s simple site but powerful search capabilities made it the powerhouse it is today. Cutting-edge sometimes cuts both ways.

Word has it that DSL is fast catching up to cable in terms of market penetration. Perhaps as early as a few months ago, estimates where that cable users trumped dsl users by almost 2 to 1. Now the gap has narrowed considerably thanks to marketing efforts, price breaks, and quality improvements undertaken by the telcos as of late.

The telcos have one other advantage over cable companies, communications. The internet has much closer synergies to telecommunications than it does to TV channels. After all, the internet was invented by a telco. And telcos have done a much better job bundling their services with dsl, than cable companies have done with cable modem.

Now that voip is gaining rapid acceptance, the telcos seem much better positioned to offer this new service. AT&T recently announced their voip product and who knows, Verizon may not be far behind. Cable companies, on the other hand seem to be standing still. The only message they seem to be sending is the old “cable is faster than dsl”. Well,
That’s not enough.

Sure I can get fast cable service and then subscribe to one of the independent voip providers out there. But I’d rather see a simple cable/voip plan, competitively priced from my cable company. You want to spend the cash and do it from scratch, go for it. You want to buy out one of the existing voip providers and integrate it with your business, that’s fine too. But then again maybe you just enjoy watching the telcos rob your market share.

It was bound to happen. Earthlink has announced their new anti-phishing product called ScamBlocker, and they are making it available to all for free.

Phishing is a technique used by hackers in which a spam sent to users contains links to fraudulent sites mimicking authentic sites such as ebay, paypal, or citibank. Statistically speaking, a percentage of the recipients would have accounts with those firms, and a sub-percentage of this group would fall for the con and submit their private data on the fake site. The data, of course, will be immediately sent to the evil scammers who will use it in a any number of ways to profit from.

There is a good reason why earthlink has decided to make ScamBlocker free. ScamBlocker would harness the collective voting muscle of all the surfers who would report phishing sites back to the ScamBlocker servers. In doing so they save future victims of the scam from being duped. If ScamBlocker detects a user visiting a reported phish site, it would redirect the user to an earthlink warning page, alerting the user of the potential danger.

The jury is still out on whether this system will thwart most phishing scams, but as most things go, it’s a start and it’s better than nothing.

Go here for more info.

some people are never satisfied. take the microsoft crowd as an example. the buzz in the industry is that microsoft is losing its focus because their release cycles are now getting too long. their next version of their much anticipated windows, code named longhorn, has slipped several times to possibly 2006 or beyond and other products have also been hit with delays.

it's hard to understand what the users are complaining about. in past when microsoft released new versions of its products at breakneck speeds, people complained that the cycles were too short and it was impossible to keep up with the upgrades. now they begrudge the software giant for taking too long to release new versions of its products.

i, for one, can appreciate a little lull between software releases. it allows me to do productive work, rather than being suspended in an endless cycle of upgrades and new installation.

so, microsoft, please go ahead and take as much time you need to release your next versions and let me do some productive work for a change.

when is spam a good thing. if you're the unfortunate victim of its assault (and who isn't these days?), you might be tempted to say: never. the spam fighters out there in cyberspace would like to remind you that they empathize with you and they are working hard to eliminate this parasite.

a particularly active and vigilante-style genre of these anti-spam folks are the so-called black-list operators. they maintain a list of offending servers and most make their lists available for free. their services are usually not for end-users, but they fit best for email administrators. once installed, every piece of email reaching the network, is checked against the subscribed blacklist and if it's a match, it is simply dropped right then and there. it will never reach the intended recipient.

this is a great service, but it has a wide potential for abuse. as more organizations use these lists, the list operators gain more importance and as human nature goes, it becomes difficult to resist hubris and arrogance, and ultimately corruption. some of these list sites, in mob-like fashion, add servers to their lists and then demand large sums of money from the complainants to investigate the complaint and possibly remove them from their black list. in lay terms: ransom money.

a proposal made to the official internet supervising group (icann), and sponsored by one of these list operators (spamhaus of united kingdom), has the potential to up the ante on the spam fight. it calls for the creation of the .mail domain (e.g. example.com.mail) and it will subject all registrants to stringent guidelines for acceptance. oh and by the way, it comes with a hefty application fee. guess who's going to be the predominant beneficiary of the application fees? my money is on those altruistic black-list operators.

so when is spam a good thing? when you are the spammer, or you are a black-list operator who's about to get filthy rich through extortion, er, application fees.

the latest good earnings news at yahoo and the announced 2 for 1 stock split is yet one more indication that the companies operating in the internet space have gained traction. it gives the kind of validation the internet sector deserves.

yahoo has been making a number of right moves, not the least of which has been diversification. perhaps with the emergence of google, it saw the writing on the wall that simply being a search engine is not enough (remember altavista?)
so today, yahoo is a multi-functional company and is reaping the benefits. from advertising, to email, to e-commerce, it keeps re-investing and refreshing itself lest become another forgotten dotcom darling.

they even managed to get to my wallet through their launchcast product. yahoo launchcast is music radio played online. it has a sleek design and it can quickly adapt to user's music preferences. no, it's not song on demand, but as the user coaches the product using its rating system, it learns to play the kind of music that the user actually likes.

after about a year of using the product for free, i was hooked. i plunked down the subscription fee to have unfettered access to all of launchcast options (the free version has some restrictions). and so i became another unwitting benefactor to yahoo's bottom-line.