Robert Hashemian

Did you vote during the last presidential election? I did, and I realized that registering to vote gives you more than a power to voice your choice. It adds you to a list that can be used by a variety of government agencies for a number of purposes. One of those is for jury duty selection, and I was called for it for the first time ever.

Okay, I realize that jury duty is supposed to be an honor and a civic duty and what not. But really, how many of us really look forward to being called for it? I don't. Yet I wonder how after so many years, my name finally made it in the pool. It had to be the registration to vote. The truth is that until the last presidential election, I had never voted, and therefore never bothered to register. Once I did however, my name went into the list, and jury duty found me.

This is not unlike companies selling their customer lists to others for the purpose of marketing, but at least in this case the government is not secretive about it. I should have done my homework to understand the process better. I'm not sure if knowing this information would have stopped me from voting, but since my chosen candidate didn't make it, it makes this jury duty call even harder to bear.

There was a time when blogs (known as Weblogs in those ancient times) were considered a personal diary, relegated to chatty teenagers. Then as more people found out about them, they began typing away. I myself keep a blog on the my personal site and find it therapeutic and liberating to freely express my views on a variety of topics.

As blogging gathered critical mass, companies started to show interest. Now many news and information sites have a heavy blog presence as well, manned by their editors and other contributors. Our own company saw a slow start to blogging, but now we have a number of power bloggers who contribute to the wealth of our online existence.

Many people now get their daily news from blogs, but one of the areas that blogs have begun to encroach on Web pages is what's known as trackback. This is a means by which a blog site can be notified when another blogger makes a mention of them in the form of a url link. Generally, the notification involves a summary of data to be passed back to the mentioned blog site and most sites choose to display this information, in effect providing a link back to the blogger's post. It's a courtesy move in response to the mention. By the way, trackback was devised and promoted by the renowned blog software maker, Movable Type.

Now many sites have decided to incorporate trackback in their own pages, and we now provide this service to our readers. When you read our pages on tmcnet.com, feel free to reference them in your blogs and if your blogging software is equipped with auto-discovery, we will receive your message (known as Ping). To view the trackbacks or get the Ping url (to trackback manually) just click on on the our pages.

Remember .NET? The cutting edge, unifying, all encompassing platform Microsoft launched a few years ago?
It was perhaps one of the most confusing and blurry marketing ideas ever to come out of Redmond. And no matter how hard Microsoft tried to clarify this grand vision, the befuddlement just got worse. Finally Microsoft threw in the towel and backtracked on calling everything under the sun, "everything under the sun".NET.

Along with the .NET hoopla, the Passport service was being showcased as the de-facto authentication scheme. It would allow third party Web sites to login users through Passport and leave the authentication and access job to Microsoft. The idea wasn't new by any means. Single sign-on has been the aspiration of the authentication industry for decades, but alas, Passport wasn't meant to be the proverbial silver bullet.

eBay was one of the more prominent companies who initially signed up for Passport services in addition to their own authentication method. But I always wondered, why would a vendor entrust its valuable customer information to Microsoft. I guess eBay must have been having the same doubts. As of January 24th, they are dropping the Passport service from their login screen. If not the death knell, this is a giant blow to an already waning product.

Meanwhile .NET has mostly been forgotten by the public, save one area. It is still much alive in the development community and with the next version of .NET development Framework 2.0, and Visual Studio 2005 on the horizon, it has the development community, myself included, abuzz. The .NET vision has never been clearer.

Desktop Search has become all the rage these days, and for a good reason. After people discovered that they can seemingly search the Web faster and more efficiently than the contents of their own PC's, the search companies decided to use some of their search technologies to help users find stuff in their own backyard, i.e. files stored on their own hard drives.

For years the only choice for Windows users to search their local files has been the standard Microsoft Search program which comes bundled with Windows. It does the job,
But it's minimalist, clunky, and painfully slow. Microsoft tried to address the speed issue by marrying the search program with the Index Server (a service that indexes the local files), but while this has boosted the performance of search it is still woefully lacking in utility, features, and robustness.

There has been a need for a better search software for quite a while. Enter the big three search outfits, Yahoo!, Google, and MSN with their own search programs, known as Desktop Search.

Not too long ago I installed Google's Desktop Search and I was initially happy with its performance and flexibility. But Google's program is limited in the file types it could index and the interface is, well, Googlish, as in plain and simple and no frills. Perhaps Google's strength in its Web search simplicity was just too bland for me when it came to searching locally. I soon lost interest and forgot about desktop search, until today when I downloaded the Yahoo's incarnation of the desktop search program, and my reaction so far is, wow!

Available in beta version, this program does an impressive job of indexing the local files as well as Outlook messages. It has the intelligence to recognize over 200 different file formats and it can index everything in its path. The interface looks fresh, functional, and fast. In little time I had it configured to index my entire hard drive and after it was done with its initial scan, I tested it with a number of keywords. Who knew searching could be so much fun? It's blazing fast and the results are presented in a nice format. I am sold. Yahoo's Desktop Search has now replaced Google's program in my program tray and I feel absolutely empowered having such a tool at my beck and call.

You can download Yahoo! Desktop Search for Windows from here.
Read the press release.

It was only a matter of time, but Microsoft's concerted mobilization against hackers has started to pay dividends. Today, that dividend manifested itself in the form of an anti-spyware program, aptly named Microsoft AntiSpyware. The program (currently in its first Beta) is available for free from Microsoft's Web site.

Windows Users have a number of choices to battle spyware today. They come in free and paid flavors from a number of companies and I bet these companies are not so sanguine about this new release from Microsoft.

Installing and configuring the program was a breeze and then I had it run a quick scan. It identified one low-risk program (with a nice summary) and gave me a few options to deal with it. For the time being I configured it to run a deep scan every mid-night and check for new updates. Exiting the program, it silently went into an icon state, nestling itself with the rest of the resident programs in the Tray area.

For me, the Microsoft AntiSpyware program is too new to have a definitive opinion about, but my first impression was a positive one. One more thing, the program also contains a tool to wipe clean many hidden areas that record user's activity and whereabouts, including Internet Explorer history, visited links, and recently opened documents by other program. It's a great tool for a paranoid like me.

You can download Microsoft AntiSpyware from here.

As parents, we always strive to teach decorum and proper behavior to our kids. One of these areas has to do with how one handles telephone calls.

As a matter of personal choice I rarely pick up the phone. Having three females in the house for a number of years, the Pavlovian in me has learned that chances of me receiving calls is rather insignificant. Nevertheless proper telephone etiquette is a necessity of life. I still answer most calls I receive in the office.

So here's the conundrum. How can we teach the kids proper telephone manners when most callers are telemarketers? My wife and I have different approaches in dealing with them. Depending on her mood she could go from rude to nasty. In some cases it even makes me shudder, which is why I sometimes plead with her to allow me to handle the calls. My methods are more gentle. They go from abruptly declining to fooling with them.

I have to admit neither of us employs much etiquette in dealing with telemarketers. But I'm afraid that now my children have acquired some of this crude behavior and that worries me.

As adults we can differentiate between a genuine call and a sales cold call. The distinction is murky for kids however. The learned response is to be rude, no matter how amiable the caller is. In fact it seems that the more polite the agent, the more harassment the kids will unleash.

I'm not sure what the solution is. How do you teach grade-schoolers that some polite callers are really script-regurgitating sales-people interested in selling something they may not even know about and collecting a commission? And they might be calling from the next town, India, or even a federal prison.

For now we've taught them to never identify themselves or disclose any information no matter how trivial. I suppose adding my number to the federal Do-Not-Call list would also be a good move. I just hope my kids don't find out about it. They almost look forward to tormenting the hapless agents.

Google's wildly successful Adsense program, while a blessing for some, has become a bane for others. In a lawsuit brought on by Geico, the insurance company claimed damages because some of Google's advertisers buy the "Geico" keyword for the specific reason to display insurance-related messages to the viewers.

While Geico claims that this practice infringes on its trademarked company name, I can't see how this holds any water. I suppose if the ads are defamatory or baselessly attack Geico, the company's lawsuit may have some merit, but even then, Geico should pursue such litigations against the original advertisers, not the publisher itself.

The point is that if everyone wanted to use cheap litigation to stop their competitors or detractors, then that could amount to censorship and that would drastically change the advertising landscape. Even Geico may not like that.

A new and more stealth phishing scam has entered the Internet scam market. According to this link, scammers are now able to manipulate the hosts files in users' computers, thus redirecting them to their nefarious Web sites without the user ever realizing it. This is mainly done with script-laden emails, some of which may not even require users clicking on any links – just opening the email is enough.

Frankly I am surprised that it took this long for scammers to employ this trick. But abolishing the hosts file, as some experts might suggest, is not a solution to curb the crackers using this trick. First of all hosts files are still legitimate means of translating names into ip addresses. I bet many organizations still use them internally as a quick and simple DNS alternative. Secondly, hosts files are invaluable for debugging. I can't tell you how many times I have used the hosts file to troubleshoot DNS problems, access issues, or other host name related quirks. Without the hosts file, I would have had to tinker with a name server which is a lot more complex and may itself be the root of the problem.

Finally, who's to say the bad actors won't change the computer's DNS entries to point to their own evil name servers. If they can change the hosts files, modifying DNS entries takes just a little more work.

Let's not eliminate a helpful tool out of fear and desperation. Practicing good security is the only way to fight these types of attacks.

With help from its earning's announcement last night, Google seems poised to overtake Yahoo's market cap in short order. The gap is hairline thin as I write this.

It's hard to imagine that a company of such humble beginnings could surpass Yahoo! in such a short time. But then again that statement alone is astonishing in its own right. It wasn't long ago that Yahoo itself was considered a speculative company with a sky-high stock price. Now it's almost looked at as an established and viable denizen of the corporate world.

And yet we wonder if Google's lofty valuation is justified. Who knows? If you consider that its market cap is almost triple that of Amazon.com, that question may have some merit. But then again Amazon.com's market cap rivals that of Raytheon, a large defense contractor with 78,000 employees.

Recently Tracey Schelmetic wrote about her satisfying experience with Geico. So when I had a great customer service from another company (this one involves cars too), I thought I'd share the story.

Late August on a trip from Connecticut to Virginia my car broke down in the center lane of the Jersey turnpike. The alternator had died and the battery had little juice left to keep the car going. So on this hottest hour of the hottest day of August, I stepped out of the car, pushed it to the shoulder in the middle of the angry traffic, and not having a cell phone walked a mile to the nearest rest stop to call for help.

At the end of the day I found myself in a motel in Burlington, NJ. My car had been towed to a Goodyear service station that was closing for the day and there were no open car rentals offices at that hour.

The next day, I made a call to the service station and made sure they had started to work on the car. Anxious to continue with my trip, I rented a car (I definitely recommend Enterprise, they pick you up!), and finally made it to Virginia to visit my Grandmother.

The next day I called the service station and found out the car was ready and the day after that I set out to Burlington, NJ again to pick up the car and return to Connecticut. I returned the rental car (again, I recommend Enterprise, they drop you off too!), paid the repair bill and got back home. The car drove just fine.

About 3 weeks later, the alternator started to make screeching noises and then a couple of days after that the noise stopped and the charge indicator lighted up on the dashboard. I knew I was running on my new battery alone and I had little time. I had a warranty on the repairs but how could I possibly go to New Jersey again? It is an old car and I thought it was time to junk it. What bothered me was that the repairs had lasted less than a month and I had no recourse.

But before junking it, I decided to call the Burlington service station and at least give them a piece of my mind about their repairs. But much to my surprise the manager apologized and told that my local Goodyear service station would honor the warranty -- A ray of hope. Calling the local Goodyear station went better than I could possibly imagine. The manager patiently listened to my case, took my information and promised to call me back. Yeah right, I thought.

Right he was, he did call back, made arrangements for me to bring the car over immediately, and showed concern by encouraging me to buy a new battery (which he would reimburse) to install in the car, in case the current battery died on the way there. The repairs took about an hour, didn't cost me an extra dime, and the car is back on the road. On top of that, a few days later I received a call from him just to make sure everything was well and I was satisfied with the service.

Thank you Bill O'Russo and thank you Goodyear. You've got yourselves one very satisfied customer.

Just logged in to my Hotmail account and noticed the storage meter reads 250 MB. It's good to see them keeping the promise they made a few months ago after Google introduced their 1 gigger email service and Yahoo! followed suit with their 200 meg upgrade.

I was beginning to think that Hotmail might renege on their promise. Glad my suspicion was disproved. Bring on the spam.

Just logged in to my Hotmail account and noticed the storage meter reads 250 MB. It's good to see them keeping the promise they made a few months ago after Google introduced their 1 gigger email service and Yahoo! followed suit with their 200 meg upgrade.

I was beginning to think that Hotmail might renege on their promise. Glad my suspicion was disproved. Bring on the spam.

In the beginning there was Internic, the quasi-government outfit tasked with assigning domain names, numbers, etc. Anyone who wanted a domain name could get one for free just by applying.

Soon the Web turned popular and Internic began charging annual fees for the domain names. It eventually morphed into Network Solutions Inc. or NSI (a for-profit registrar later purchased by Verisign). The other parts became a non-profit known as ICANN tasked with over-seeing the IP addresses and the domain name registrars. Soon there were other registrars competing with NSI and competition moderated prices.

So far so good, except that NSI's prices never quite became competitive and people started to move their domain names to other registrars. Operating out of paranoia and panic NSI has employed some desperate acts to retain its customer base and boost its revenues. First came their deliberately convoluted way to transfer domain names; obviously designed to discourage migration. Then came the unregistered domain redirect fiasco, in an effort to capture that segment of the typo-prone Web browsers. Instead of allowing accesses to non-existent domains fail naturally, NSI decided to redirect them to their own site where they would be greeted by advertising and who knows what else.

The Domain Protect program is their latest gimmick in an effort to throw roadblocks in the way of customers migrating their domains. Don't get me wrong, Domain Protect is a useful feature designed to thwart would be slammers from switching domain names to other registrars. But in their latest email to customers (in an ostensible response to ICANN's latest domain transfer policy changes) NSI states:
"To further enhance the security of the domain names you have registered with NSI and to protect you against unauthorized or fraudulent transfers, we will activate our free Domain Protect service for all of your domain names beginning October 18, 2004."
In other words, we don't care if you had decided not to use this service in the past. We will force it back on you to make your domain transfers as difficult as possible. NSI may be desperate but its trickery machine never seems to cease.

Becoming the largest WiFi hotspot in the world is no small task but that is exactly what Philadelphia is aiming for.

The plan currently under development by the city of Philadelphia would uniformly cover the entire city (135 square miles), and best of all would be available to the residents for free or a small fee. The projected budget for this ambitious project is a mere $10 million, and it would involve installing a large number of WiFi transmitters in and around the city.

It remains to be seen whether this project comes to a successful conclusion, and how it is received by the residents. It also introduces a number of challenges such as maintenance, management, and security.

I, for one, applaud Philadelphia for undertaking this feat. There is no doubt that the DSL and Cable outfits are watching nervously and praying for this project to collapse. I can only hope that other cities and municipalities follow suit and free us from our $600/year Cable and DSL contracts. Or in my case, from my slow dial-up torture.

Imagine my surprise when I went surfing on msnbc.com today at lunch time and I saw this banner:



I have seen political banners before but this was probably the most blunt one I have seen to date. The banner itself was enticing enough to persuade me to click. And I was immediately ushered to the Democratic party's donation page. No preambles and no information, just a simple donation form waiting for me to enter my credit card information.

I guess some people don't mind cutting to the chase and skipping the formalities, but I doubt companies would get far if their banners just funnel the masses to their payment pages asking for money. Usually such banners lead to a page describing the product or service with some information about how the user can be benefited and what the main advantages of such product or service are. If you are asking for money, you need to be a little more subtle and discreet about it.

In this case, it might make sense to highlight Democrats' advantages over Republicans, and once the reader is sold on the concept, then ask for a donation. It’s not about political affiliation, it's about e-commerce etiquette.