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F***edcompany.com put on the auction block - again
One of the better pieces of dotcom bubble history (and fame) is for sale. The maker of FuckedCompany.com is soliciting bids for his website.
The site rose to fame during the dotcom bubble implosion, when a mere mention on the page could deflate the stock price for businesses that are low on revenues vision. Attributing to the site's creditability, posters were often employees that themselves were confronted by investors and senior managers running for the hills.
The site's owner Philip Kaplan made an unsuccessful attempt at selling the service in 2000. The Ebay listing was pulled after pranksters started putting in false bids. He then introduced a subscription based premium service that offered a searchable archive and other features, and promptly starting making a profit.
The site may have bragging rights for assisting the internet bubble, today it reports on layoffs and such across the economy. Kaplan in the mean time also shifted his attention to AdBrite, an online advertising market place.
The site may note bring in as much as it might have in 2000, it still has a strong following and seems to be made for an age in which aggregaters and user generated content are all the hype.
Viral video pundits take on cable news
Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, the two brothers behind JibJab are at it again. During the 2004 presidential elections, they rose to fame with their "This Land" video portraying Bush and Kerry.
In a new episode they are taking on cable news stations, alleging that the media are to blame for the fact that people can't find Afghanistan on a map but know every intimate detail of Britney Spears' life.
Intel to step up blogging efforts
Intel is preparing a cautious expansion to its blogging initiatives with the launch of a set of research blogs authored by its research fellows, Tom Waldrop, director of Intel's Global Communications Group said at the Press Club of California's 2007 Media Summit.
Intel currently publishes an "IT @ Intel blog" that is written by 8 pre-selected employees from the chipmaker's product groups. The research blogs will be written by research fellows such as Mark Bohr.
Senior executives however remain missing in action. Intel chief executive Paul Otellini currently writes an internal blog for employees (as do about 300 other employees), but doesn't blog publicly. Waldrop did admit however that he was inspired by the blog of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
Intel however prefers to take a cautious approach: "We want to embrace [blogs] more than we do now. But Intel may never be the most embracing," Waldrop said.
Oracle scores some Linux wins
Oracle is parading 26 customers for its Linux support offering in front of the world.
The list features some notable names such as BNP Paribas and Yahoo, and should silence the skeptics who speculated that customers would never fall for the company's support offering.
As a quick refresh: Oracle in October unveiled a support offering for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux distribution. Instead of paying Red Hat for support and updates, users can now pay Oracle, which charges less for the same services. The announcement wiped out several hundred millions off Red Hat's market capitalization.
The question that begs answering however remains: will this catch on with the broader public? Oracle no doubt has showered these early customers with gifts and rebates to make them sign up. But would they still be interested in Oracle Linux support without those?
It takes hundreds if not thousands of Linux customers to answer that question.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last October, talking up Red Hat killer
SAP's Agassi shows his true coloursf
You know that an executive left a company with slamming doors when the press release complains about his lack of commitment.
Take the press release that SAP sent out after Shai Agassi gave up his position as president of SAP's Product & Technology Group.
As the company's founder and chairman Hasso Plattner put it:
…it became apparent that Shai was not comfortable committing to a 10-15 year period which was not in keeping with his personal career timeline. Given this, I made the recommendation to the Supervisory Board that we change our plans and now adjust SAP’s executive management team responsibilities.
To put it more bluntly: Agassi wanted to become CEO, but got really upset last month when SAP decided to extend the term of its current chief executive Henning Kagermann until 2009.
Agassi didn't intend on waiting for his employer to assess his skills before they propelled him to the corner office. If it wasn't the fast track to the top, Agassi preferred to spend his days back in the Israeli desert thinking about the environment. After all, he succeeded in Israel, where he failed in the US.
Yahoo to Google: size does matter after all
Yahoo is preparing to lift storage restrictions from its online email service.
The move by itself isn’t that surprising giving the ever-declining prices of storage.
But it does raise a few eyebrows because the portal in the past has argued that its users don’t need large email inboxes. In response to Gmail's 2.8GB storage limit, Yahoo argued that 99.9 per cent of its users don't even have more than 20MB of messages in their inboxes.
When Google offered 1GB Gmail mail boxes, the company did so because it could, and because it needed a way to differentiate from the competition. Several years later Yahoo and Hotmail are still the largest email providers, each with roughly 250m subscribers. Google is dangling near the bottom at 60m inboxes.
Size doesn't matter.
The first annual SVS YouTube awards!
In what may be the first YouTube story on the last year and a half not to contain the words "lawsuit" or "copyright," the video sharing mega-site announced the winners of its first ever video awards contest. The contest included such sappy categories as "most inspirational" and "most adorable."
While we're not exactly the most dedicated followers of the cult of YouTube, going through the various winners got us recalling some of the better YouTube videos we've encountered throughout the year while covering various stories for Silicon Valley Sleuth. As such, we've decided to present our own picks for the YouTube video awards...
Most creative: "Super News! –Gates vs. Jobs"
YouTube didn't have a "best video" category, so we'll stick with the "most creative" label for this one. It starts off as another Mac/PC ad spoof, and turns into so very, very much more. This five-minute gem combines all of our favorite topics: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Apple product hype, Vista-bashing, and a singing Finder. Plus, it coined the epic phrase: "PCs are for fart-huffers and Macs get you laid."
Best Series: Will It Blend?
You can keep your ninjas and your lonelygirls. Nothing whittles away productivity like watching iPods and hockey pucks get reduced to smoking mounds of dust.
Best music video: Basketball accident / "I believe I can fly"
I believe I can fly. I believe I can dangle from a basketball hoop by my tibia...< If ever a cheesy movie soundtrack song and a video of backyard antics gone horribly wrong were meant for each other. This video was a consistent favorite, if only because we've all done something equally stupid and/or painful at some point.
Best commentary: "Turkey vs. Greece"
When most kids get caught making nasty comments on YouTube, their parents take away computer privileges for a week or two. This series of video replies and comment flame-wars brings home the "best commentary" award solely for the fact that it managed get an entire country grounded from YouTube.
Most inspirational: Diet Coke and Mentos
Inspirational? Maybe not in the "I'm going to change the world by hugging one thousand kittens" sense, but this phenomena has without a doubt inspired the purchase of more bottles of diet coke, rolls of mentos, and boxes of ultra-strength laundry detergent than any other viral video to date. Plus it's way better than those creepy old "freshmaker" ads.
Redshifting: Sun's fancy name for growth market
Sun is shifting focus from the war on market share to the war on market growth.
They have a fancier name for it. During a meeting with reporters last Friday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz refered to the phenomenon as "redshifting", named after a phenomenon in physics where light increases its wavelength while its frequency decreases. The opposite is known as blueshift.
The essence is that companies like Google, Ebay and mobile operators have an insatiable appetite for the latest computer technology, while the average ERP shop is doing just fine with its 2-year-old Dell servers or mainframe.
Growth in the second market is achieved by stealing business from your competitors. In the first you only have to keep up with your customer's new business ideas.
The casual observer can't help but notice that Redshifting looks a lot like an attempt to return to the internet hype days, when dotcoms were scrambling to put in their orders for new Sun servers (and you know what happened when the dotcoms disappeared). By focusing on Web2.0 firms today, Sun is positioning itself to deliver the infrastructure of the internet of tomorrow.
The danger in this strategy lays in the fact that Sun has to balance cutting edge internet servers with revenue generating x86 systems. The company's chief executive Jonathan Schwartz is the first to admit that its "blue" business doesn't just make up the bulk of its revenues, it also subsidizes fancy new products such as Sun's "project black box" and its forthcoming Niagara 2 and Rock processors.
But at some point in the future, Schwartz predicted, sales in the "red market" will overtake those of the blue ones.
While the red areas are driven by increased computing demands, the blue ones just hope to do more with less.
Infoworld won't ax any more trees
Infoworld, one of the oldest professional IT publications, has abandoned its print format. Starting next month, the publication will be exclusively issued online.
The publication's general manager disclosed the move on a company blog on Sunday. Rumours of the pending move had started to appear earlier. He dismissed print as a "nearly obsolete distribution channel", which can't sit very well with Computer World, a sister publication by Infoworld's parent company IDG that hasn't made any public disclosures on abandoning its paper edition.
Infoworld's time had definitely come. Rumors about the publications decreasing sales and subscriptions have been going around for years. But folding a paper publication isn't as easy and obvious as it may seem.
Publishers have a wealth of data on their paper readers thanks to the 'controlled circulation' model. Advertisers know exactly who reads the publication, what the size is of the budgets that they control and which purchase decisions they make.
Websites often don't know much more than their visitor's IP addresses. While Google adsense and Yahoo's Overture in part have solved that problem by charging per click, paper advertising rates are still a factor 10 to 100 higher than their online equivalents.
Intel shows off rural WiFi systems
On March 22nd Intel opened the doors to its Berkeley Labs research facility. The lab allows Intel researchers to develop new projects with graduate students and professors from UC Berkeley. Among the areas that the lab focuses on is Technology for Emerging Regions. After the jump, UC Berkeley student researcher Sonesh Surana explains the pitfalls of setting up WiFi internet access in remote parts of the world and how the lab is able to use the technology.
Oracle takes SAP war to the courts
Oracle has filed a lawsuit against SAP after its server log files indicate that SAP has been leeching Oracle's entire library of support documentation for the JD Edwards and Peoplesoft enterprise applications.
In doing so, the company violated Oracle's copyrights, the firm alleged. It furthermore used expired accounts for former Oracle clients that had since moved to SAP. So even if downloading the documents themselves wouldn't be illegal, doing so without paying for it would be, the company argues.
Support documents for enterprise applications are far different from the 40-page booklet that comes with your copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements. These pages contain detailed information, often including source code.
Even if SAP technically violated Oracle's copyrights, you have to wonder what the damages are in this case. Support is all about sharing information with the outside world. Therefore it is bound to end up in the hands of you competitors.
The only extraordinary thing about this case is that SAP was downloading Oracle documentation in a structured manner. But in the war between the two software vendors, no weapon will remain unused.
SAP's Shai Agassi vs. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: battle of the (oversized?) egos.
Adware peddler offers advice on how to (not) ruin customer experience
News Corp/NBC today unveiled plans to launch a Youtube rival, and the Zango adware pushers are jumping in to offer their expertise on how to milk your users at all costs.
The television and movie conglomerate has figured out that it can make more money by offering online video itself, than if it allows random users to post their content on Youtube.
It all goes to Youtube's walled garden model that requires users to upload content to their servers, and only allows them to search within the Youtube property. After Viacom's flat-out refusal to give in to Google/Youtube's market dominance, News Corp/NBC's move will only further increase the need for a genuine video search engine.
But why would that have anything to do with Zango's shady adware empire? (Shady enough for the FTC to fine the company $3m.) Zango is all about luring consumers into downloading its adware software by offering video content and games. The firm isn't a content provider, it pushes adware and hopes that its customers don't notice its true intensions. In the process, the company is a major enabler of botnet operations (a practice that is continuing despite the FTC settlement, security experts confirm).
Whether you love or hate the company, it has successfully been installed on millions of computers and is allegedly making millions of dollars.
Zango's PR firm is now pitching the firm's expertise in this field as free advice to NBCTube.
"You do not want to negatively impact the consumer experience," its PR firm Martin Levy PR pitched to media. "In a briefing, [Zango founder Daniel] Todd can provide insight and clarity on effective models marketers and advertisers can implement that will connect with consumers downloading digital media entertainment – without pissing them off."
This PR firm must have been watching the movie "Thank you for smoking" too much. The movie offers a great, cynical look at the art of public relation spinning. It teaches that you don't have to be right if you're doing horrible things, you just have to proof that your opponent is wrong.
In fact, Zango is just like the cigarette makers, or the gun lobby. It may occasionally cross the line and get wrist slapped, it generally leaves the truly horrible things that it enables to anonymous outsiders.
They should introduce as new tagline: "Thank you for installing our badware."
PS: needless to say that we turned down the offered interview with this pundit.
Microsoft accused of being the culprit in Xbox Live account thefts
Microsoft claims to have found no security vulnerabilities on its systems in its investigation of Xbox Live account theft. But the company left out the possibility that its own helpdesk employees might be to blame.
Microsoft on Wednesday issued a statement that it has found "no evidence of any compromise of the security of Bungie.net or our LIVE network." Instead, the company suggested, gamers who had their accounts stolen must have inadvertently given up confidential information.
Microsoft's explanation however doesn't cover all the issues that users have reported. The number of reports of stolen accounts for instance is far too high to justify a plain phishing attack.
Some of the self-proclaimed account thieves in fact say that Microsoft's helpdesk is to blame. Provide with a sobby story, and they will happily cough up all the info that is needed to hijack an Xbox Live account.
Youtube declared the 2008 presidential battleground
The 2004 presidential elections revolved about Meetup.com, an online service that allows individuals to connect to like-minded people. As things look now, Youtube will be all the hype in the 2008 elections.
Earlier this month an anonymous user created a new version of Apple's famous 1984 ad where a colorful woman breaks the hold that a grey force has on the masses by hurling an oversized hammer through a movie screen.
The spoof however features Hillary Clinton talking on the screen as she is uttering shallow one-liners. The video ends with a campaign pitch for Barack Obama, one of several other Democratic presidential hopefuls.
Obama claims he has nothing to do with the video and the clip's author is staying tight-lipped on his or her identity.
Clinton meanwhile seems to be indifferent to her portrayal as Big Brother. "I haven't seen it, but I'm pleased that it seems to be taking attention away from what used to be on YouTube and getting a lot of hits, namely me singing The Star Spangled Banner," Clinton told New York's NY1 News.
How can one make Mac fanboys happy?
One of our editors yesterday wrote a story on OS X malware threats. As security vendor McAfee points out, there has been an amazing lack of malware for the platform, eventhough the software is suffering from its fair share of vulnerabilities.
You'd figure that the self-regulated army of Mac fanboys would be glad. But the majority of the comments zooms in the assertion that OS X "isn't inherently more secure" than other operating systems and vehemently disagrees.
Questioning the infallibility of OS X is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. "But what about Microsoft?" they scream. This isn't about Microsoft. This is about the fact that attackers can't seem to be bothered to write OS X malware.
The Mac-fan community needs Microsoft like the Republican Party needed Sadam Hoessein, as God needs a devil. But the world isn't black and white.
Classic copyright fight
Counterfeit software is a phenomenon of all ages, as is proven by the video below.
Boy, the 80-ies was a decade to quickly forget.
The internet suffers from messy breakup
Reading court documents generally requires an ability to stay awake while sifting through countless pages boring legal lingo. But that isn't the case in the legal feuding between two former lovers over the ownership of RegisterFly.
The domain registrar has made news headlines after ICANN pulled the firm's license, effectively ending its ability to directly register new domain names.
Meet Kevin Medina and John Naruzewicz.
In Kevin's version of the story, Kevin in 2000 started up the business that grew into an $8m operation. His lover John was allowed to help out initially, but had such poor customer relationship skills that he was soon banned to handling the company's payroll and shopping for $60,000 Morrocan furniture.
John sees things slightly differently. In his legal documents he doesn’t mention his romantic ties. Kevin's "misfeasance and/or malfeasance" caused the company to loose approximately 75,000 domain names over the last 3 months. He also makes sure to accuse Kevin of spending company funds on "personal escorts", his $10,000 Miami penthouse and a $6,000 liposuction.
Nothing says: "and you were a fat bastard all along!" like making your ex's liposuction part of public record.
When the couple's relationship went sour, Naruzewicz allegedly agreed to invest $500,000 in exchange for a 50 per cent equity stake in the comapny. All the documents were signed, but no money was ever deposited. Yet Naruzewicz convinced a judge to temporarily remove his ex as the company's chief executive.
Without pointing fingers, things just kept going downhill from there, resulting in the ICANN ban.
$10,000 a month is still peanuts compared to the Sentai penthouse in Miami, which goes for $25,000 per night.
Microsoft admits: OneCare sucks
Microsoft is going through the dust over its failing OneCare security suite. Over the past months the application got pounded when in several tests when it failed to detect several known online pests.
At the time Microsoft PR gave the cautious answer that they are trained to give when bad news hits: "we are currently studying the results of the test," they claimed.
That inquiry apparently has been concluded, and Microsoft saw the poor results in all their horror.
To further underscore the failure of Microsoft Onecare, the company started hiring security researchers from established security vendors such as McAfee to clean up the mess after OneCare had launched. A blog posting in which the security team confesses to its security failure was authored by Jimmy Kuo. As recent as last July, Kuo was working for McAfee Avert Labs, as is witnessed by this blog posting.
Kuo's posting is tiptoeing around the failure of Onecare, but he makes an excellent suggesting for people who might consider purchasing the software: "So it’s also about making sure our customers *feel* better protected when using our products." Which inherently implies that today, that isn't the case.
Twitter will solve all your problems
Would you be interested in knowing what I am doing right now?
That I'm writing this blog post? Or that I just called an analyst firm looking for data on Ajax developer tools, and called Dell to seek a confirmation on their plans to launch vPro systems? Or that we've been really busy on putting together the upcoming International Media Summit for the Press Club of California. Or attended sport practice last night?
If you answered "yes" to those questions, you're a candidate for Twitter. The service allows users to post ultra brief comments that are then broadcast to the world as a blog posting, text message, e-mail, you name it.
Former Microsoft fame-blogger Robert Scoble is a huge fan. His Twitter page shows the great value of the service: his friends provide you with a world of insightfulness that solve real world problems.
Venture capitalist Jeff Clavier shared with Scoble the observation that the "WORLD IS SO FLAT Working from home today, reading Joi's twitts from Japan, im'ing with Loic in Israel and Skyping with Nik in Australia."
ArsTechnica is spamming a recent posting to its website that
informs the public of a new $130 premium Halo 2 package. Some user
called ekai just saw Flavor Flav roll by on his wheelie sneaks (he must
mean Heelys).
How did we ever get by without it.
Twitter is living proof of the theory that geeks will try anything that is new. I just signed up.
Office outsourcing goes telepressense
Workplace outsourcing provider Regus has signed an agreement to purchase 50 telepresence systems from Cisco. The $300,000 devices will be placed in locations around the world and can be rented for glorified teleconferences.
Regus essentially rents out temporary office space including telephone answering and mail forwarding services. It helps small branches to create a professional appearance without actually having to be professional.
Cisco is touting telepressense as the best thing short of being there. Where teleconferencing requires people to look at tiny TV screen that is suffering from networking latency, telepresense offers 3 1080p high definition televisions that eat up bandwidth like Americans consume Big Macs. Entirely coincidentally, Cisco also can also sell you the routers and switches that are needed to pump all that data around the office and web.
Telepresense would be great, if it weren't for its insane price tag – which doesn't even include your internet subscription. Regus didn't disclose what price it will charge for an hour of telepresense goodness, but you can bet that it won't be cheap.
If written off in 5 years and based on a 5 day work week, one system needs to rake in $230 each day (and you need two unless you plan on talking to a wall). Add maintenance, rent for the room itself and the cost of bandwidth and profit margin, and you get the picture.
Chinese hackers awaken
Security researchers have strong suspicions that Chinese hackers are behind the series of zero-day Word and Excel vulnerabilities that have emerged over the past months.
A hacking attack against the Superbowl website too was linked to China, and digital fingerprints for the same group have since been found all over the web.
The Chinese dragon finally seems to have waken up to the riches of online crime and is expanding its horizon beyond World of Warcraft password stealers that rob players from their digital gold.
In their newfound love of the capitalist model, China is taking its age-old approved approach. Early pests are essentially a rip-off from western ones. But they are slowly starting to develop their own ideas, models and innovations.
The Symfly Trojan for instance is abusing the Alexa toolbar that measures site popularity, even though it isn't clear what the attackers hope to accomplish by doing this. Chinese hackers also have developed several stealth technologies that have proven particularly hard to remove.
Few people are surprised or caught off guard. But the Chinese economy is growing up in all kinds of ways.
Waking up to a new kind of virus
Identity theft, now for a low price of 96 hours community service
California authorities have dropped charges against HP's former chairman Patricia Dunn. Three other individuals that were charged in HP's boardroom spying scandal are being let off in exchange for 96 hours of community service.
The scandal was a text book case of identity theft: investigators went through the garbage from journalists and posed as their relatives to obtain phone records.
It was never clear if Dunn had any knowledge of all of this, but the private investigators who acted out the mischief certainly did.
The judge presiding over this case is saying that our identities are worth no more than 96 hours of poop scooping and graffiti removal. There is hardly a better signal to send to criminals: if you commit identity theft, you'll get no more than a slap on the wrist.
More than 104m personal records have been compromised since 10 January 2005. The justice systems is saying that it doesn’t believe there to be anything wrong with that.
The tax computer ate my homework
Tax authorities in Canada have cancelled their online filing service.
The database that contains records on 25m Canadians has been suffering from unexplained glitches that caused it to send out information on random people instead of the logged in user.
Local authorities claim that the problems are software-related and aren't caused by hackers. Somehow people are supposed to find that comforting – but if there is any silver in it at all, the lining on this dark cloud is miniscule.
But you should consider the Canadian factor there, which causes the nation to waste away its 12-month winters in log cabins, drinking Molson and believe that hockey is played on ice.
Mac is smug and condescending, but will the Brits notice?
Apple has launched a new set of "I'm a PC, I'm a
Mac" ads tweaked for an
Other than British accents and pasty complexions, the ads for the old continent offer mostly localized versions of the US commercials.
A rare exception would be one featuring a "naughty step", a set of three steps where Mr. PC banishes children who refuse to perform serious tasks. The hilarious joke is an obvious pun at the Nanny 911 and Super Nanny reality TV shows on US TV. In both shows English nannies make desperate attempts at straitening America's poor parenting skills.
If anything, Apple's UK ads must be payback for years of TV abuse by UK born shows like these and, say, American Idol.
At least Steve Job didn't get vindictive for his Japanese ads…
Intel sets out to kill the hard drive
Intel has unveiled its first Flash based solid state hard drive.
The time is there for flash hard drives to move beyond ruggedized
computer systems. A 1GB or 2GB flash based hard drive today is actually
cheaper than a mechanical model, and 4GB drives will cross that line
within months. In yet another 1.5 years, Intel expects that 8GB flash
drives will become a viable option for notebook and desktop systems.
Intel obviously doesn't think flash drives will be available on high end business notebooks. In the video below, Intel shows off the hardware and explains where it will be used.
Bill Gates gives up presidential bid
A group of Bill Gates fanboys has abandoned its attempts to make the uber-geek run in the 2008 presidential elections.
The campaign might strike you as a bit silly because Gates has never expresses any interest in running for political office. But the folks behind the BillGatesForPresident.net website were hoping that they could persuade him to do so if only enough people asked.
Bill Gates, they argued, would make for a "good president" because he's rich, rational, unselfish and knows management.
Historically, Bill Gates however is ill equipped as a president. He has never run any oil company's into the ground (some of Bush's valuable experience) and has yet to face a sex scandal (Clinton, anybody?). But you could argue that his strategy to derail Netscape and his failure to properly cover up his crimes there provides him with at least partial experience in the mismanagement.
But then, considering that the alternative is some slimy politician who will follow special interests and party lines, you might want to give this gates thing some thought.
Learning project?
Photo courtesy of Microsoft
Billionaire wannabes need more credit cards
Red Herring rumoured to be down and out
Red Herring used to be synonymous with the first internet bubble, surging and imploding on its back. Layoffs started hitting in 2001 and the plug was finally pulled in 2003.
Then the publication and website was brought back late 2004. But rumour has it that the magazine has already run its course despite a recent $1m investment.
Quoting from an former employee's email, the Valleywag blog has the dirt: payroll hasn't been made and the paper publication hasn't been printed. Senior management allegedly has started running for the hills, as have most senior reporters.
But at least a 2007 implosion will be nothing like that 2003. Silicon Valley's labour market is starting to heat up enough to absorb Red Herring's staff.
Broadband finally gets its killer app
The urge to watch a never ending series of video blog ramblings and backyard acrobatics is driving sales of broadband internet connections, according to Infonetics Research.
Prior to the need for broad internet pipes, broadband sales seemed to have been driven primarily by their always-on capability. That would also explain why DSL and Cable subscription rates are relatively high in nations with expensive phone fees.
Thank Youtube for enabling a new market. And make sure to realize that it was a start-up, not some billion dollar corporation, that invented the wheel here.
Mobile providers and device makers should pay attention. Because we're still waiting for the mobile killer app. The recommendations and suggestions from established parties so far have been… rather lame and unsuccessful.
FSF asks Apple to put its money where its mouth is
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs was playing cute last month, when he complained that the record labels and movie studios forced him to include digital rights management technology on iTunes content. But in a world led by Jobs, he stressed, there would be no DRM.
The Free Software Foundation now is asking Jobs to show that he's serious. There are plenty of independent artists that would be happy to have their music on iTunes without any DRM.
Jobs furthermore is the largest single individual shareholder in Disney and a board member, providing him with ample opportunity to pressure the firm into dropping DRM.
Fact is that Apple today doesn't offer a single DRM-free video or music clip in iTunes. For a company claiming to hate DRM as much as the free information flow promoting FSF, Apple is showing very little action.
Oracle finally succumbs to licensing reform pressures
Oracle has finally given in to pressures to change its licensing structures from a per-core to a per-socket model.
The change means that users no longer pay a premium to run a dual core or quad core processor. Instead they are charged a fee per processor, regardless of its speed, bells or whistles.
Oracle is one of the last major enterprise software vendors to adapt its licensing structure to multi core chips. The firm originally charged users for each processor core, and later compromised by effectively giving multi-core users a discount.
The database vendor now is claiming that the changes were sparked by "customer demand". Never mind that the demand has been there for months and that Oracle is one of the last to start listening.
Gates to Senate: bring more foreign tech workers
Bill Gates is convinced that all techies in the world want to live in the US. Given the $100,000-plus pay for an average software engineer, he is probably right.
Silicon Valley feeds on foreign tech workers. Just try finding a vice president at Oracle who isn't from India.
But while math levels in US public schools are rated at the bottom of the developed world, the state will admit no more than 65,000 "skilled" foreigners under its H-1B visa programme.
The situation has spawned the phenomenon of the "H-1B refugee", where companies hire foreigners and temporarily have them work from a foreign office. As a new batch of visa is made available, these employees quickly snatch up the available permits.
Gates proposes that the ban be lifted entirely. Otherwise, all those smart technology minds might just decide to take their wits elsewhere. In the long haul, that might just cause the US to loose its technology lead.
Turkish-Greek war picks Youtube as its latest battleground
Turkey has blocked access to Youtube for all its citizens because the online video service offered a video that was deemed offensive to the nation's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Greek and Turkish Youtube users are waging a full scale Youtube war in an attempt to insult the other.
Insulting (includes criticizing) "Turkishness" is a criminal offense in the nation. The includes any comment on the founding father, the army as well as the Amernian genocide of 1915-1917 in which authorities claim to have no role. Journalists and writers are have repeatedly been tried for such mortal offences despite the obvious challenges that they impose on the freedom of speech.
If Ataturk believed in building a nation where facts have to be suppressed, he was a mediocre statesman at most. If he believed in safeguarding basic human rights, the current government must be dearly mistaken.
The internet is made for senseless flame wars about mundane trivia and questioning the sexuality of people you’ve never met. But don't come crying to the courts when somebody gets hurt.
Got it. He's not gay… but what's that jar of Vaseline doing there?
E-voting bully gets hit where it hurts
Diebold allegedly is considering to pull out off the electronic voting machine business.
The negative publicity about its uncontrollable and non-verifiable voting machines is starting to affect sales of safes, which remains the firm's primary revenue source.
Diebold's nightmare started during the disastrous 2001 presidential elections, during which its machines in some cases screwed up and tallied a negative number of votes. The company waged a fierce battle against calls to open up the source code for its machines and demands that they provided a verifiable paper trail. Meanwhile its chief executive proved a vocal supporter of the Republican party: enough to feed even the most modest conspiracy theorist.
Diebold's surrender however won't provide much of a benefit to e-voting watchdogs. There still is no legal precedent requiring e-voting black boxes to open up. Ultimately that is the only way to safeguard democracies in the electronic age.
100 Google engineers working on phone?
Venture capital investor Simeon Simeonov on his blog claims that Google has a team of 100 engineers working on the legendary Google Phone.
The team allegedly is headed up by Andy Rubin, the famous founder of HipTop manufacturer Danger.
The rumours about Google's planned assault on the mobile device market seem to have replaced those of the Google operating system. Evidence for either service has been famously absent. But in the twisted world of online rumours, a lack of facts only serves to strengthen the case.
Simeonov admits outright that he has no hard information to back up his speculations. He simply notices that Google has acquired several mobile application firms over the years and then jumps to the conclusion that building a mobile phone interface is the only viable way to put all those resources to any good use.
Add some references to "rumours" that have been proven to be wrong, throw in the famous Google phone picture, and you have just forge a new link to the chain of unfounded speculations.
No more margin of error for customer service in a Web2.0 world
The local Dutch cable monopolist UPC issued a terror alert last Friday after a disgruntled customer returned his physically abused cable set top box – and proudly showed off the misuse in a Youtube video.
The company that is effectively controlled by media tycoon John Malone has a history of providing horrible customer service. In its most recent instant of customer abuse, it decided to send out digital cable boxes to each of its subscribers. Those who sign for receipt of the unit by default agree to a one month trial that will be converted into a regular subscription.
Customers who realize that they have fallen for the bait and switch scheme can send back the units, for which UPC claims to provide a special shipping box. Those boxes, however, appear to have befallen the same faith as the weapons of mass destruction that were stockpiled in Iraq back in 2003.
Long story short, local publication Bright went medieval on one of the boxes, which included soaking it in gasoline and setting it on fire. Next they offered the remnants to a clerk at the customer service desk at the firm's corporate headquarters.
The gasoline fumes combined with the occasional charred wire sticking out from the box were enough to set off a terror scare and forced the building to be evacuated, according to local media.
It's unlikely that this incident will change anything about UPC's ways. If they were willing to change the way that they interact with consumers, they would have done so years ago. But any company that infuriates its customers enough for them to create a movie about it, should realize that the damages will be lasting and will hurt business for years to come.
(video in Dutch - but flames, baseball bats and crowbars speak a universal language)
Youtube licensing is a business mistake
Google may be all about open standards and open access to information, but it's building a walled garden with its Youtube service.
The BBC today agreed to provide access to some of its digital video through the online video service.
Since the BBC is run with public funds and the station doesn’t have any advertising revenues, it makes sense for its content to be distributed as widely as possible.
But anyone hoping to make any actual money through online videos has nothing to gain from offering them through Youtube. Until in-video advertising takes off, publishers have more to gain from keeping video locked in on their own sites.
Furthermore, if Google wants to solve a video problem, they would do much better if they built a video search engine instead of trying to lure content owners into their walled garden.
Obesity epidemic could save us from greenhouse gases
A Hong Kong health club is hooking up car batteries to its fitness equipment in an effort to turn its patron's sweat into electricity.
All the fat that people burn in the gym currently is literally burned – converted to heath through friction. So it makes perfect sense to exploit the waste of our lifestyles and put it to good use.
The next step should be to drop health club fees, and a few years later we'll start banning outdoor sports for their obvious anti-social energy implications and contributions to global warming. Ultimately outsourcing will provide the solution. Why sweat away on a stairmaster, if you can pay some kid in Bangladesh to do it for you?
PR offensive blows up in Secure Computing's face
Say you're a marketing or PR manager with a $109m (2005 revenue) security firm called Secure Computing. Your too big to be considered small and cuddly, but are also too small to play with the big boys. How do you attract the world's attention?
You resort to fear mongering! Find an obscure virus, send out a press release that warns against the impending end of the world, and the clueless hacks and bloggers will drop to their knees to save their mindless souls.
It must have all looked great in a Powerpoint presentation. So when the Mespam threat came by, the release was issued. You must have been able to smell the excitement and anticipation. But then anti virus vendor Sophos came along and brutally popped Secure Computing's bubble.
"Secure Computing's incorrect claim that Sophos could not deal with this threat gave the guys in our labs the best laugh of their day," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.
"Sophos customers had a bigger problem deciding which socks to put on this morning than they did with this malware."
The chip wars turn nasty
Is AMD turning for the worst or is Intel?
AMD yesterday launched an all-out attack against Intel for spreading FUD on the performance of its chips. Intel allegedly compared one of its latest chips with an older AMD model last week.
The company also refused to acknowledge the value of a monolithic multi core design (as practiced by AMD) versus a chip that slaps two duo core units on a single package (Intel). But Intel just won't stop talking about its great advances towards 45nm technology.
Flame wars like this are like passing a car accident on the highway. You feel awkward if not disgusted, but can't resist watching.
Intel in response to AMD's flame war is denying any wrongdoings. The company simply took the highest ranking that AMD posted to the Spec list and compared that with its highest ranking.
And you can hardly blame Intel for talking about 45nm more than its crippled approach to quad core processors.
The fact is that Intel is currently ahead of AMD in the chip wars and AMD is returning to its old mud slinging habits. That just makes it look like a sore loser.
Henri Richard, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer at AMD declared that he is "sick and tired of being pushed around by a competitor that does not like fair and open competition".
It's time for the web2.0 bubble to burst
There are too many Web2.0 social bookmarking services.
So far I've succeeded in ignoring most of the ones that fail to make my life any easier, and thrived in the ignorance about the existence of the irrelevant ones.
Then I ran into a blog that displayed the following bookmark bar under each posting (image slightly cropped). Each of the tiny squares represent some service that ultimately will help the blogger attract more traffic.
It took a proper look before the bar was recognized as a set of bookmarks. At first glance it looked like a banner ad - the kind that my brain is programmed to ignore.
The world needs all these services as badly as we needed the Lycos, Altavista, Excite and Hotbot search engines.
But instead of the Web1.0 hype victims, the current wave of useless websites doesn't have any natural enemies. They are inexpensive to create and maintain, and just like the rabbit plague in Australia are bound to stay with us.
Gaming digg is a piece of cake, if you can afford it
There has been plenty of talk about gaming Digg, but Wired News finally took the plunge.
All it took to manipulate Digg to feature a story on the service's front page was $450, the publication found. The funds were paid to the User/Submitter service about which we reported earlier. The site claims will pay random users to vote on stories, making both parties a handy penny.
The story doesn't end there however. The Wired story ended up on the top of another social new site: Reddit. That one happens to be owned by Wired's parent company Conde Net.
Reddit users in the past have demonstrated an intense aversion against Digg, but does that really justify the 615 votes that the story received – that’s high by Reddit standards but not out of the ordinary.
Conde Net is clearly facing some conflict of interest in this matter, but from a business point of view this $450 was well spent.
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