April 2008 Archives
Medium-sized UK ISP TWS has won a domain name appeal against News Corp.-owned MySpace. The politics of the ruling were complex, and the story may not be over, The Register reports.
TWS had owned the myspace.co.uk domain name since 1997, so should have the rights to it, but may have been profiting from ads run on the site since News Corp acquired MySpace in 2005.
Meanwhile the .uk administrator Nominet is in the middle of contentious elections.
It's a story to keep your eye on.
Kenneth Corbin of internetnews.com titles the story, AOL Touts Turnaround Success After Record Traffic.
It's certainly reasonable for an ISP to try to make money from its home page, but AOL's strategy is radical. The company has been offering a free portal, hoping to make money from advertising. Meanwhile, the AOL brand has been losing close to 1 million subscribers per quarter.
It's true that the old strategy wasn't working (see AOL, Feeble Giant). But is the new strategy really successful?
Corbin writes that we'll know when AOL releases its results. We'll need to take a look at the trending schedules to know for certain, but the odds are that AOL has not fully replaced its lost subscription revenue.
With the release of Grand Theft Auto IV nearing, I expected the controversy over sex and violence in video games to heat up again, but Ars Technica is reporting that the usual trolls received an unusual assist from gaming site IGN. (IGN is owned by Murch. Coincidence?)
The Ars Technica article describes the IGN video: "The video strips the game of all context and merely shows scenes of sexual content and violence, one after the other. In fact, it can be hard to watch for that reason, and it's a rather numbing experience."
You won't find a link to it on this page.
The ISP issue here: ISPs do not want to be asked or forced to police the usage of video games on their networks. If rogue lawyers want to indict everyone at a video game company for a game they call "worse than polio" then that's fine. They're allowed to present their case, no matter how ridiculous.
I fear, however, that since the Department of Justice ranks pornogoraphy as a higher prioirity threat to America than anything else, including organized crime and terrorism, the response will be fanatical and heavy handed, and may harm ISPs.
Update: Well, after this game appears to have broken records, achieving what may be the best composite review score of all time, I'll buy it when it comes out on the PC, if I can play it on my XP / DirectX 9 computer. The reviews exceeded high expectations and drove up the game maker's share price.
There are some complex things you can do to save data center energy, but there are also some relatively obvious steps you can take as oil approaches $120 per barrel.
ServerWatch has 8 Simple Ways to Slash Your Data Center Electricity Bill.
Don't believe it? Check out what Sonic.net did. Of course, it may only be in California that your local utility would pay you $100,000 to upgrade your cooling.
Also, allow me an OT aside: pretty unusual use of a bucket truck at Sonic.net!
ITChannelPlanet is reporting that Intel is working with NaviSite, an ASP veteran, to offer SMB services to the VAR channel.
The article quotes Steve Dallman, vice president of Intel’s sales and marketing group and general manager of Intel’s worldwide reseller organization as being very blunt about it: "Many of our resellers haven’t branched out into offering services. This program will give them the opportunity to provide services for a little money upfront."
If you're not using these snooping / adserving services, you might want to advertise the fact.
If you do choose to use them, you'll also need to inform your users, but if you're WideOpenWest (WOW!), you will try to avoid informing them, according to a Register article snarkily titled Data pimping catches ISP on the hop.
The issue is that even novice users will notice that Google is loading slowly (and when that happens, even the Bells have to stand down, we argued in Editorial: The Fight the Bells Will Lose).
The price of oil just hit $117 today! People were talking crisis at a price of $100. We've already blown through most price rise expectations for the full year, and we're not even into Summer yet.
Diesel's at $4.20 per gallon in California and gas is up to about $3.50 per gallon.
Marketwatch says the price of gas went up 16 cents in two weeks. I'm sure it won't rise 26 x 16 cents = $4.16 this year, to $7.50 per gallon, but a 5 percent rise in two weeks is very, very bad.
It's the rate of the price rise that's truly frightening. This is inflation, and it will make everything cost more.
Start re-examining your prices today. Everyone else will, soon.
There are two problems with the IProvo and UTOPIA municipal fiber rollouts, according to this local article.
The first problem is that the monopolies have come in with low price bundles whereas in the past they did not serve the area. That's a natural consequence of municipal fiber: when a city starts building a network, the monopolies always come in with discounts and even dirty campaign tactics.
In the internet, you don't matter until you start destroying job silos and creating conflict within organizations. This excellent writeup on GigaOM of the culture clash caused by virtualization systems shows that this new technology could fundamentally change the architecture of enterprise systems.
ISPs need to pay attention.
Change like this creates an outsourcing opportunity. Enterprises are not ready to manage an any to any access environment, but ISPs that are already running their own data centers may be able to build it. The tools you use (Cisco, Scalent, Xsigo) are secondary to this: an opportunity to talk to prospects about a solution to their IT department's civil war.
Just a quick note to say that my writeup of the Green sessions at the Freedom to Connect conference are up on Jupitermedia's green blog:
Companies presenting:
Although global warming is a real problem, many large companies see this issue as yet another way to obtain more goverment money. It's important to be knowledgable about this issue because the telcos will be asking the government for billions of dollars to build closed fiber networks with taxpayers' money, a strategy that has worked for them in the past.
More unethical behavior from an unrepentant government grant monopoly. BBR reports that NetSol is advertising on its customers subdomains, behvaior that is tantamount to theft.
It gives NetSol revenue from a website that its customers own, and the type of advertising that NetSol is using appears to be spamming of the worst kind, which lowers the value of the customer's domain. So add spamming to charges of theft.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been awarded a lifetime "Muzzie" by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.
The first ever lifetime Muzzie I know of handed out by the TJC in 1999 to Rudy Giuliani. The FCC is the first to get two of them.
The award goes out to the FCC for continuing to fail to set guidelines for indecency fines, resulting in chilling effects, such as networks' unwillingness to air "Saving Private Ryan" for fear that it would be ruled obscene.
The TJC notes that Howard Stern was fined not just for his language but also for castigating the FCC.
But the second lifetime award is mostly for ignoring the Supreme Court and the Constitution in order to expand its regulatory perogative to cover indecency on cable and satellite television. It's typical big government Republicanism trampling individual rights in the service of special interests.
Those of us who care about the internet must be vigilant because the FCC wants to shut down free speech here too.
The music industry wants end users to pay to use technologies that compete with its distribution channel, the music store. The EFF has an interesting editorial that says that an ISP tax is bad, but that the idea of collective licensing is not wrong.
This formulation is brilliant. Technology hating industries, those trying to preserve their bricks and mortar and pre-internet monopoly on knowledge, want to slow down the internet and hinder its adoption by taxing it.
The EFF is saying that it's not a tax but a collective license. If end users pay for file sharing, that legitimizes it and gives them rights.
But the internet hating industries don't want to give end users rights, they just want to stop people from using new technology.
The EFF has set up a trap and ISPs should help them spring it.
Evidently, Al's at CTIA, and not too happy with Kevin Martin's Speech
He writes:
F.C.C. Chairman Kevin Martin, a true believer in letting big business consolidate however and whenever it pleases, has delivered what history will judge to be one of the most disingenous speeches ever before the CTIA wireless industry group.
...
Martin's FCC majority -- and guess what political party they represent? -- has repeatedly turned a blind eye to broadcast media consolidation in the U.S. That partisan majority also endorses a closed Internet that benefits a select few. Now, Martin is preparing to empower the telecom industry's existing hierarchy to crush smaller competitors. Although Martin is stupendously misguided, he's certainly consistent.
For the rest of the rant, check out FCC Chairman's Open-Market Rhetoric Is A Sham.
I'm at F2C and you'll want to encourage your users to do this:
It's related to the Pew Internet Project. All too often, people rely on FCC data (data the FCC admits is inadequate). Better data should enable better policies in government.
Uses the internet 2 speed test.