The war on the web

Anthony Cox describes how his spoof error page turned into a ‘Google bomb’ for weapons of mass destruction

Thursday July 10, 2003 The Guardian

I had always wondered how those viral emails or amusing web page addresses forwarded to me built up such momentum. Little did I know that I would be responsible for one of the most successful internet memes this year, and be accused of developing a so-called “Google bomb” of mass destruction.

In early February, I was reading online a Guardian article about Hans Blix’s problems obtaining cooperation in Iraq. Immediately after, I was confronted with the ubiquitous 404 error page, which usually tells the reader that a website is unavailable. With this serendipitous inspiration in mind, along with a text editor and some fiddling in a graphics package, I created a spoof 404 “weapons of mass destruction” error page . Saddam would have been proud; the page was deployed and operational well within 45 minutes.

After favourable comments from friends, I posted it in the newsgroup uk.rec.humour. Within the next 24 hours, the website had had 150,000 hits and had propagated to 118 newsgroups. By the end of February, it had received more than one million page impressions. Perhaps the ultimate accolade was having the original email come back to me with a note saying: “Have you seen this?” Visits declined throughout the subsequent war, and I suspected its 15MB of fame had passed.

Yet, suddenly, in the first four days of July I received nearly 4m page impressions, more than the previous five months combined. The reason? Typing “weapons of mass destruction” in Google and hitting the “I’m feeling lucky” button did not bring up Number 10’s “dodgy dossier”, but my spoof site. Suddenly, it was a lot funnier and accessible: even Google couldn’t find the WMD.

The first Google bomb was created by Adam Mathes in 2001 . He exploited Google’s page ranking system to return a friend’s website when the words “talentless hack” were used as a search term. He used a multitude of pages linking to his friend’s site, with the specific term “talentless hack”. Even though his friend’s site did not contain the search term itself, after calling upon others to insert such links into their sites, the Google bomb found its target.

Google’s page ranking treats links as votes for a website, and both the number and the importance of the link helps increase the ranking of a site. My site had steadily increased its ranking, including a link from the Channel 4 news website and the Guardian, but perhaps the majority were from personal pages, discussion boards and blogs.

However, this was not a deliberate attempt to use Google to make a political point. This Google bomb was slowly and unknowingly built, and only by chance coincided with the accusations that intelligence documents had been “sexed up”.

Last Friday, bloggers really picked up on it and it was the highest linked to page in weblogs according to Daypop.com . On Monday, however, a search for “weapons of mass destruction” sent you to a White House strategy document, which might be seen as a step forward for Google users and perhaps the White House.

Then on Tuesday my page was back at the top, so it may have been a glitch at Google, rather than a deliberate decision to drop the site.

This is a problem for Google: weblogs have been accused of causing “noise” in their searches. Instead of providing good original source material, reams of musings from bloggers are returned. The success of my WMD page underlines a problem Google needs to address. Sure it’s funny, but if you wanted documents on WMD, is that what you really expect from a search engine?

I have received about 200 emails from such diverse sources as United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and serving soldiers in the Gulf. Even those critical of the perceived anti-war message thought it was funny. One of the more offensive messages called me a cowardly little boy and stated: “I am grateful to the almighty that not all Englishmen are slithering bottom-feeders.”

Ironically, I was not against the war, my views on the war being similar to those of journalist David Aaronovitch and MP Ann Clwyd. But if you are going to make a topical joke, then Bush is an obvious and easy target.

·Anthony Cox is a pharmacist at the West Midlands Adverse Drug Reaction Monitoring Centre and a teaching fellow at Aston University. He also writes a blog on drug safety at www.blacktriangle.org

December 12, 2002 The Wi-Fi Boom By ADAM BAER

ON a brisk autumn day in Portland, Ore., Paul van Veen was soaking up some sun as he logged on to the Internet – from a spot in bustling Pioneer Courthouse Square. Mr. van Veen was looking for a job, and he was surfing the Web over a free wireless connection.

These days, Pioneer Courthouse Square is but one of some 140 public spots across Portland with free Internet access using a high-speed wireless technology known as Wi-Fi. The network of such Wi-Fi “hot spots” throughout the city was developed by Personal Telco, a grass-roots, nonprofit group devoted to blanketing the city with free access points.

Portland and Personal Telco are just part of a growing national trend. There are community groups promoting public Wi-Fi access in nearly every large American city, from NYCwireless, which “unwired” Bryant Park and Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, to KC Wireless in the Kansas City area. They have been joined by independent cafes and restaurants, apartment houses and community centers across the country that view free, easy access to the Internet as a draw for customers.

At the same time, subscription services and pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi hot spots are springing up in cafes, bookstores, hotels and airports, put in by companies like T-Mobile and smaller, start-up competitors like Boingo Wireless and Wayport. Last week, Cometa Networks, a new company backed by Intel, AT&T and I.B.M., said it planned to put a network of thousands of wireless access points across a huge swath of the nation by 2004. The result is a growing array of options for Wi-Fi users and the emergence of a mobile wireless culture that spans business travelers, teachers and students, people relaxing in coffee shops and even moviegoers waiting for the show.

All that is needed for laptop users to wander with Wi-Fi (the name is short for “wireless fidelity”) is a piece of hardware called a Wi-Fi card – perhaps a $100 investment – and where the access is not free, a one-time or longer-term service provider. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most users are male, under 40 and comfortable with technology.

The technology is, however, becoming more accessible. People who use paid hot spots like those offered by Wise Zone, Wayport and T-Mobile simply open their browsers to log on. Users of free city networks like NYCwireless are asked to agree to the network’s “acceptable use” policy, and if they do, they are on the Internet for six free hours until they have to sign on again.

Wi-Fi is also changing the way that people – at least some young, technologically adept people – go about their work. In Philadelphia, Yvonne Jones, a 33-year-old freelance copywriter, moved her base of operations to a Starbucks about a month ago and said she quickly became “a thousand times” more productive than she was when working at home. “It’s not your house, and you are there for a specific purpose, so the ‘distractions’ aren’t that distracting,” she said.

Frank Bonomo, who is between apartments and living with his parents on Long Island after losing his job at a dot-com, spends nearly every workday at a Starbucks in Greenwich Village. Mr. Bonomo, 24, is building a freelance practice as a Web producer, managing online advertising and message boards for design firms. He uses an account with T-Mobile to stay in touch with his clients by e-mail and instant messaging. “I commute here from the Island so I can be close to the offices of my three to four regular clients,” he said.

Mr. van Veen, who is looking for work as a wireless systems engineering manager, said he was using the public Wi-Fi hot spot in Portland to research a “hot job lead” because the connection was so much faster than his home connection. “At home, you generally use a standard phone line,” he said. “This downloads at 200 kilobytes a second, which is just lightning quick.”

Actually, under ideal conditions, Wi-Fi offers even greater speeds – 11 megabits per second, exceeding those typically achieved by high-speed home connections through cable modems or digital subscriber lines. Connection speeds slow, however, as a user gets farther from the source of the signal, which has a range of about 300 feet.

Ryan Palmer, a Portland-based consultant who studies human-computer interactions, said public wireless access had allowed him to be more efficient and enjoy himself at the same time. Mr. Palmer, 27, was on a business trip to Austin and wanted to sample the authentic Texas barbecue that he kept hearing about, but he also had some work to finish. He was able to do both at Green Mesquite BBQ, a restaurant with a recently installed free Wi-Fi access point.

“It’s nice to surf the Web and enjoy some good food,” he said, adding that the Internet connection at his hotel was so slow it was “painful.” He said: “I feel empowered. I’m not a stranger in a strange land anymore.”

It took Mr. Palmer 15 minutes of fiddling with the settings on his laptop to get a connection at the restaurant. “I had to play around a little bit,” he said. “I’m still not confident that someone could walk in off the street and do it.”

Not everyone can. Jodi Avant, 41, who is studying for teacher certification at the University of Texas at Austin, uses wireless frequently on campus, where it is widely available. As part of her program, she had to buy an Apple iBook with a wireless card to do schoolwork and communicate with teachers and other students.

She tried and failed to log on to the free Wi-Fi hot spot at a Schlotzsky’s Deli near the campus. “I brought it here, set it up and played around with it for half an hour,” she said. But she did not know what settings she needed and there was no help available in the restaurant.

Ms. Avant, who lives near Schlotzsky’s, visits the restaurant with her children every Saturday. They stay about an hour and use the wireless Internet terminals provided by the restaurant. She checks her e-mail while her 7- and 11-year-old sons play games and her 8-year-old daughter visits sites like www.funjail.com. Ms. Avant said she planned to keep trying to get through to the Schlotzsky’s network on her own computer. “It’s a lot better than my dial-up at home,” she said. “The only downside is I can’t print anything.”

People who use public Wi-Fi networks have another option: they can use the same setup to connect to wireless networks at home, at the office and at school. Running a Wi-Fi network in an office is only slightly more involved. Janine Kurnoff, who runs a Portland company that trains sales and marketing professionals, has maintained her Wi-Fi network for a year and a half. “There’s a little bit of setup involved, but less than an hour of work,” she said. “You don’t have to configure anything. The computer sees your network and picks it up.”

Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a girls’ school in Bellevue, Wash., was part of Microsoft’s Pioneer School program on incorporating technology into the curriculum in 1996. Now each student’s tuition buys a Wi-Fi-ready laptop.

“There’s a lot of instant messaging going on,” said Diane Burgess, 39, the school’s information technology manager. Ms. Burgess said classes were no longer disrupted by cellphones, parents message their children to arrange pickup times, and students regularly share files for collaborative projects. “Wi-Fi lets them do group work from anywhere on campus,” Ms. Burgess said. “It’s a really freeing experience.”

Beyond the hardware and software difficulties that users like Ms. Avant have encountered at public Wi-Fi spots, there are traffic considerations: connection speeds can slow if the number of users on a network picks up. And some home Wi-Fi users have reported that the systems, which operate on the 2.4-gigahertz frequency, are subject to interference from cordless telephones and microwave ovens. Ms. Burgess said that water, which absorbs the wireless signal’s energy much like food in a microwave oven, can interfere with a home network and that glasses, clothes and other clutter can obstruct the signal. “It actually helps me keep my home cleaner,” she said. “My kids keep their rooms absolutely streamlined now.”

Security is also a concern for open networks. Mark Malewski of NexTech Wireless, a Chicago-based nonprofit group that is trying to organize grass-roots Wi-Fi networks, said there were steps the hot spot operators could take to help. “We have an authentication server that tracks usage,” he said. “Without that, a lot of people could plug in an access point and share it with those who could conduct fraudulent activity.”

Security concerns will become more important as public Wi-Fi networks spread and more people use them. Statistics on use of the technology are elusive, but according to Gartner, a consulting company in Stamford, Conn., the number of Wi-Fi cards sold in North America this year is on track to jump 75 percent over 2001, with another 57 percent gain over this year expected in 2003. William Clark, research director at Gartner, said that the number of frequent Wi-Fi users was expected to grow to 1.9 million next year from 700,000 in 2002, with the number of public hot spots in North America likely to nearly triple by the end of next year from about 3,300 now.

In fact, this growth is responsible for casual Wi-Fi use beyond the high-tech vanguard. Sherry Bough, 56, and her husband, Bob, 59, live at the Austin Lone Star RV Resort, a gated park with a heated pool, a playground and a Wi-Fi network, for six months a year to be near their children. The Boughs used to order a phone line whenever they stayed in one place for more than a month so that they could use their dial-up Internet connection to track their investments, check e-mail and search the Web. Now they use the park’s Wi-Fi network.

“It’s amazing how fast it downloads,” Mrs. Bough said of the network, which was installed earlier this fall and offers fee-based service by the day, week or month. Still, she said, it took her a couple of hours to connect the first time. “It was a little bit confusing,” she said. “To me, that’s where they’re failing right now.” To use the wireless network, the Boughs had to buy a U.S.B. card for their computer and they updated to Windows 98; Mrs. Bough said they also needed to install more memory.

James Westberry, 55, is another part-time resident at Austin Lone Star. He works in Austin, the state capital, when the Legislature is in session, advising lobbyists for small telephone companies like the Eastex Telephone Cooperative, where he works. He goes home to Tyler, Tex., on the weekends.

“I have to have high-speed Internet wherever I’m at,” he said. “Otherwise I’d be at a hotel or have an apartment.” He uses it to download bills, attend committee meetings online and to check e-mail.

Public Wi-Fi has also begun to change the way people play. Jack Swayze, a 27-year-old technical-support worker in Vienna, Va., gathers with laptop-equipped friends at Wise Zone hot spots around Washington to team up for live-action shooting games like Unreal Tournament 2003 and Medal of Honor, which they play against other Web “posses.” “The connection is as reliable and fast as my connection at home,” he said.

At the Alamo Drafthouse North, a movie theater in Austin, wireless access is available in the four screening halls. Tim League, the theater’s 32-year-old owner, installed the Wi-Fi access in concert with Austin Wireless, which set up the system after he agreed to offer it to viewers free.

Mr. League uses the network to offer Internet-based activities to entertain viewers before movies. He is testing interactive trivia programs and audience polling contests and expects to have one running soon. “I’ve always thought it strange that the slides you see before movies still exist,” he said. “That the practice hadn’t changed in 30 years just seemed silly.” He shows animated videos that are downloaded from the Web using a Wi-Fi-equipped computer in his projection room. “Viewers also use the Web to research movie facts or catch up on their work or e-mail, though we ask them to close their laptops when the show begins,” he said.

Entertainment is the main motivation behind Shane Nixon’s experiments with public Wi-Fi. Mr. Nixon, 34, was trying to log on to a Wayport hot spot at the Austin airport last week while he waited for a flight to Bowling Green, Ky., where he lives.

A construction and maintenance coordinator who travels three weeks a month, Mr. Nixon had been using dial-up connections while on the road to chat with his wife by instant messaging and to play card games with her on sites like www .mysticisland.net. He had just installed a wireless network at home so that he, his wife and two sons could go online at once, and he was trying to connect wirelessly on the road for the first time. When he could not log on, he used his cellphone to call Wayport’s technical-support number, but his cellphone battery died. Despite the technical problems he encountered, Mr. Nixon said he would probably stick with Wi-Fi. “I’m gone all the time, so that’s a way to keep in touch and do something together,” he said.

Mr. Nixon noted another virtue of high-speed chatting. “You can talk all night long,” he said, “and you don’t have a large phone bill.”

———–

Livewire: Blogs May Pierce the Fogs of War Sun Dec 8, 3:06 PM ET Add Technology – Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

By Adam Pasick

NEW YORK (Reuters) – CNN owned the story of the first Gulf War (news – web sites) — blogs and the Internet may carry the day if there is a sequel.

Just as the 1991 conflict was the testing ground for 24-hour cable channels like CNN more than 10 years ago, a second conflict there may serve as a trial by fire for the news and commentary sites known as blogs.

Blogs — short for Web logs — are pithy, opinionated collections of links to other news coverage, accompanied by the author’s commentary. Since a blog can be created by anyone with an Internet connection, however, readers should take what is written there with a grain of salt.

A war in Iraq could be a blog watershed. Just as CNN made its reputation with live coverage from Baghdad, blogs may be uniquely suited to help cut through the fog of war by showcasing diverse accounts and opinions.

“The chief role of bloggers, judging by the Afghan war, is to draw together obscure reporting that didn’t make the mainstream, and also to second-guess dumb news analysis, pointing out what people said that was wrong,” said Glenn Reynolds, whose Instapundit blog (http://www.instapundit.com) is one of the most well-established and widely-read.

Blog creators are usually candid about their ideological leanings. But it is ultimately up to readers to decide which blogs are worthy of trust.

“It’s based on their track record more than anything else,” said Reynolds.

Some media experts, however, doubt that blogs will be able to get the access necessary to actually break stories or be at the front line of coverage.

“The military is going to say … you could be anybody — you could be Al Qaeda for all we know — and your promise to abide by our ground rules isn’t worth the virtual paper it’s printed on,” said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. “The bloggers’ role is probably going to be more of what we call the second-day story.”

In some cases, soldiers have created their own blogs to share news with friends and family, although obviously there are restrictions about what information they can disclose.

One blog created by soldiers in Afghanistan (news – web sites), initially located at www.172med.org, had to relocate after being swamped with readers from all over the world. Now located at logwarrior.com (http://www.logwarrior.com), the site tells the story of day-to-day life for the soldiers, including subjects such as their Thanksgiving dinners and shopping expeditions into nearby towns.

The U.S. Army has its own Afghanistan blog (http://www.americasarmy.com/archives/afghanistan_weblog/bomb.p hp), part of its “America’s Army” public relations effort designed to entice potential recruits, which also includes a video game.

The language on the Army blog is dramatic, to say the least: “WAAABOOOOM!!! A flash of light followed by a concussion of air shook the RPG fence in front of me and the safe house windows behind me.”

If there is war in Iraq, don’t expect to see bloggers parachuting into Baghdad — although there is already at least one blogger on the ground there, who publishes his descriptions of daily life in Iraq at Where_Is_Raed? (http://where_is_raed.blogspot.com/).

In criticizing the British dossier of alleged human rights abuses by the Iraqi government released this week, he wrote, “Thank you for your keen interest in the human rights situation in my country, thank you turning a blind eye for thirty years … thank you for not minding the development of chemical weapons by a nut case when you knew he was a nut case.”

War-related information online doesn’t stop with bloggers. GlobalSecurity.org (http://www.globalsecurity.org) offers high-grade pictures of military bases, presidential palaces and other sites of interest inside Iraq, which it says are obtained from commercial imaging satellites.

And for-profit intelligence-gathering companies, including Jane’s (http://www.janes.com) and Stratfor (http://www.stratfor.com), provide detailed military analysis and security briefings, with more details available to subscribers.

Bloggers, in addition to drawing on the vast news resources online, can also get news from readers.

“In early November I was getting e-mail from people on the front (in Afghanistan), and you’ll probably see bloggers getting e-mail” if there is war in Iraq, said Reynolds.

Other bloggers, especially journalists and ex-military personnel with reliable contacts, can break news on their own. Fred Pruitt, who runs Rantburg (http://www.rantburg.com/), a blog devoted to news in the Middle East and Africa, worked for a U.S. intelligence agency according to his bio. “He gets stuff before anyone else,” Reynolds said.

The site reported on Dec. 2 that “Shia militiamen opposed to Saddam Hussein (news – web sites) have begun deploying around strategic towns in the south of Iraq and are disrupting communications and military supply routes, it was claimed yesterday.”

Other sites of note that concentrate on the Middle East include Little Green Footballs (http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/weblog.php), by Charles Johnson and a blog run by Australian journalist Tim Blair (http://timblair.blogspot.com/).

———–

-Ian.

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncidX2&e=6&cidX2&u=/nm/ 20021021/wr_nm/media_advertising_bmw_dc BMW Gives New Roadster the Hollywood Treatment Mon Oct 21, 5:39 PM ET

By Adam Pasick

NEW YORK (Reuters) – BMW Films, the online movie company that blurred the line between entertainment and advertising when it debuted in 2001 with a series of short action films featuring BMW’s cars, is taking another lap around the Web.

Actor Clive Owen returns as the nameless chauffeur who escapes from tricky situations with deft driving and an iron will. But the trio of films, directed by action-adventure luminaries like John Woo (“Broken Arrow) and Tony Scott (“True Romance”), have one true star: the upcoming BMW Z4 roadster.

Is there any conceivable way that a 10-minute movie on the Internet about a drag race through the streets of Las Vegas between James Brown (played by the Godfather of Soul himself) and the Devil (played by Gary Oldman) will put any additional rear ends in BMW’s sporty leather seats?

The German automaker, along with other advertisers, can’t afford not to find out.

Tides are shifting in the advertising world, and marketers are desperate for new, more effective ways to reach their customers. For BMW, which found through market research that its prospective customers are typically tech-savvy and have fast Internet connections, that means the Web.

“It’s quite difficult finding network TV that attracts a significant cluster of our prospects, so (we’ll take) any way we can get closer to those people,” said Jim McDowell, vice president of marketing for BMW North America.

ADS OR ‘ADVERTAINMENT’?

A television viewing audience fragmented across hundreds of channels and technological advances such the TiVo (news – web sites), the ad-zapping personal video recorder, pose a sizable threat to the dominance of the 30-second commercial, said Hank Kim, a senior editor at Advertising Age who covers the convergence of advertising and entertainment.

The growing shift has forced marketers like BMW, and its advertising agency, Publicis’ Fallon, to experiment.

“Instead of some programming guy telling you when you can watch what, you have a lot more choice,” said Kim. “Devices with commercial skipping or forwarding capabilities strike fear into the heart of the established advertising industry and everyone who’s involved in it.”

As a result, advertisers have joined forces with Hollywood to get their message out in more flashy and hard-to-avoid ways. These range from product placements and sponsorships, like Ford’s underwriting of the commercial-free premiere of Fox’s popular show “24,” to the hybrids known — depending on who you ask for a definition — as “branded content” or “advertainment.”

“We will defend to the end that we’re not advertainment,” said McDowell. “We’re entertainment that just happens to have a BMW in the script.”

The use of the online films to launch the Z4 roadster may indicate BMW has run out of patience with traditional product placements. The company launched the predecessor Z3 roadster with a hackneyed, high-profile placement in the James Bond film “GoldenEye.”

DRIVING CUSTOMERS TO THE WEB

The money that BMW lays out for Hollywood-style short films swamps the budget for a 30-second commercial. But because the movies are streamed over the Internet, there are also cost savings to be had.

“Maybe you spend maybe $10 million on the films but only $1 million distributing (them),” McDowell said, as opposed to a television commercial that costs far more to run than to produce. “We thought it could be about as cost effective as network TV advertising.”

The first round of films, directed by Guy Ritchie, Ang Lee and John Frankenheimer, were seen by more than 14 million people.

“It’s taking a brand and creating an entertainment vehicle around it,” said Kim. “It’s gotten a lot of attention, and as a branding exercise it’s been very successful, but the jury is still out as to how many cars it actually moved.”

BMW is even promoting the second film series with a television advertising campaign, in some of the most high-profile commercials designed to drive traffic to a Web site since the dot-com crash.

And in an effort to squeeze every ounce of promotional power from their investment, the BMW films have been shown in movie theaters and were distributed directly to TiVo customers.

Just because BMW’s online movies make sense from a financial and advertising standpoint shouldn’t detract from the quality of the films, McDowell said. Think of it as corporate sponsorship of the action-adventure arts.

“Years from now when there’s a retrospective on Frankenheimer or Ang Lee, we would hope our films would be part of that,” he said.

———–

See how Gary Glitter is making his Mom proud: http://www.groupiecentral.com/newsglitter.html

-Ian.

———–

SONY/Ericsson support Bluetooth in their current round of phones, Apple has already demonstrated interoperability with them in shipping product, and Apple has mysteriously incorporated robust Bluetooth support into OSX Jaguar.

-Ian.

On Thursday, September 26, 2002, at 04:23 PM, Anson Lee wrote:

> And while we’re on the topic of the phone/pda
>
> An article that claims to have stumbled across the Apple hiPhone.
>
> Nice rendering, but what’s with that Apple logo?
>
> -Anson
>
> http://www.eprairie.com/news/viewnews.asp?newsletterIDA48
>
> Apple, Motorola Avert Confirmation of Unannounced Cell Phone
> 9/26/2002
>
> ePrairie has obtained these three photographs (dated September 2002)
> of an
> unannounced Apple cell phone called the Applele hiPhone R4 CHICAGO
> (Exclusive) – A picture can tell a thousand words. Leaked to the right
> place
> at the right time, some pictures of some products can even tell a
> story of a
> new venture by an unsuspecting company that has decided to silence the
> word.
> Well, at least for now.
>
> Such is the case with Apple Computer – known usually for making
> computers
> and MP3 players and software – regarding pictures of a new Apple cell
> phone
> that have been disclosed to ePrairie. As seen on the right, they sport
> the
> grace and colorful styling you’re used to from Apple’s computers but
> in a
> decidely more mobile fashion.
>
> Upon confronting Apple with the discovery, Nathalie Welch, a
> spokeswoman for
> the company, wasn’t interested in revealing any details. In fact, she
> wasn’t
> even interested in confirming its existence.
>
> “I can neither confirm nor deny the rumors that Apple is developing a
> cell
> phone or discuss unannounced products,” Welch said in an e-mail to
> ePrairie.
>
> Representatives from Motorola – a local company that has been known for
> working closely with Apple – also declined to confirm or deny whether
> or not
> the Schaumburg, Ill.-based powerhouse was or will be involved in
> developing
> the phone’s chipset. But several analysts, who say Motorola would be a
> logical partner, also say the release of a cell phone would make sense
> for
> Apple.
>
> “It would fit with Apple’s whole digital universe strategy in which
> the PC
> is the hub of your digital universe and the iPod (Apple’s mobile MP3
> player)
> is a peripheral,” said Kevin Hunt, a research analyst at Thomas Weisel
> Partners who covers Apple but hadn’t heard of a cell phone in the
> works.
>
> He added: “Apple has been very vehement that they wouldn’t get into
> handhelds because they think handhelds will go away and blend into a
> cell
> phone, so it would make more sense to come out with a cell phone.” The
> phones look much like Apple’s older iMacs in terms of the vibrant
> colors,
> prompting Hunt to say: “They do have some of the coolest-looking
> products.”
>
> Other analysts, though, are less convinced: “I’ve talked to some
> component
> manufacturers that say Apple’s going to do this and some that say they
> won’t,” said Dan Niles, an analyst that covers Apple at Lehman
> Brothers who
> has heard conversation of an Apple cell phone.
>
> He added: “I’m not sure how this fits in Apple’s current business
> strategy.
> I don’t view it as synergistic as the iPod. Yes, you can transfer your
> contact list [from your computer] with a cell phone, but it hasn’t
> necessarily been proven that people are using the data capabilities of
> their
> phones anyway.”
>
> Hunt says that Motorola and IBM have banded together to develop chips
> for
> Apple’s power PCs (the G4), and because Apple wouldn’t make its own
> cell
> phone chips, Motorola would be a likely vendor. He adds that the cell
> phone
> would probably be a combination device that has much of the same
> functionality as a handheld.
>
>> From Motorola’s vantage point, the sense is similar to what Apple is
>> saying
> but with the added notion of a sensible synergy.
>
> “I can’t comment on rumors,” said Amy Halm, director of communications
> for
> Motorola’s networking and computing group, “but I can say that Apple
> is one
> of Motorola’s most valued customers and has been for a very long time.
> Apple’s customers are some of the most passionate customers in the
> world.
> Every time Apple introduces a new product, they have the most loyal
> following of any company I’ve ever seen.”
>
> In terms of the chances for success in the marketplace, Hunt says this
> would
> be a very new market for Apple that would complement its own product
> line
> rather than try to compete with the big cell phone makers.
>
> He says Apple – one of the most “tightlipped” companies he’s ever
> covered in
> terms of speaking about products before they’re ready to ship – would
> likely
> begin talking about the phones in the middle of 2003 in anticipation
> for the
> next Macworld trade show. Hunt says the price point for the combination
> device might be between $300 and $500, or that of a higher-end phone.
>
> The pictures obtained by ePrairie named the phone the Applele hiPhone
> R4 and
> were dated with a September 2002 time stamp.
>
> By ADAM FENDELMAN
> Editor-in-Chief
> Reporter’s Beat: Telecom
> adam [at] eprairie [dot] com

I use LimeWire.

For the uninitiated, all of the clients we’re discussing use the same GNUtella code base which was developed by the the WinAmp guys, NullSoft. Ironically, they released GNUtella six months after they were bought by AOL, which became AOL Time-Warner.

Here’s a quick Ascii Diagram to help you out:

[LimeWire] [BearShare] [Morpheus] [XoloX] [Shareaza] \ [Swapper] | [Gnucleus] | [Phex] | [Qtella] / \ \ \ | | | / / / \ \ \ \ | / / / / \ \ \ \ / / / / / \ \ \ \ / / / / / \ \ \ \ / / / / / \_____\______[GNUtella]__/____/____/

🙂

It’s all the same thing…

-Ian.

On Thursday, September 5, 2002, at 11:49 AM, Adam Wood-Gaines wrote:

> Curiously, I decided to check out Morpheus.
> But it doesn’t look like it’s getting good reviews.
>
> http://download.com.com/3302-2166-10141574.html
>
> And what’s the deal with it being flamed “spyware”?
> That’s seems tres uncool. Are these accusations founded?
>
> I have little experience with file sharing networks, but
> I’m curious to check ’em out on my OSX box.
>
> –Adam
>
>
> — Mark Bussanich wrote:
>> Of course, I would never do anything illegal like download copywritten
>> materials but, in response to Mark’s question regarding alternatives,
>> I am
>> told that Morpheus is a pretty good service. http://www.morpheus.com
>>
>> After all, it’s good to share.
>>
>> Mark (the other)
>>
>> —– Original Message —–
>> From: “mark winder”
>> To: ;
>> Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 10:46 AM
>> Subject: Re: @F: [GEEKS] Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave
>>
>>
>>> I hvae to disagree somewhat – companies dying that had no business
>>> plan is
>>> old news – SO 2000 ;o)
>>>
>>> Personally, I think that what’s really noteworthy is that by going
>>> to the
>>> Napster website (http://www.napster.com – for those of you who need
>>> the
>>> reminder…) one can still find utility in the site. For instance,
>>> the
>>> “Napster was here” image can really spruce up an otherwise drab
>>> desktop
>>> pattern on you PC. You can also… well… actually, I guess that’s
>>> about
>>> it, really…
>>>
>>> …so Napster was fun – what are people now using to get tunes and
>>> videos
>>> off the net?? Any front runners??
>>>
>>> okbye,
>>>
>>> – Mark.
>>>
>>>
>>>> From: Ian Andrew Bell
>>>> To: foib [at] ianbell [dot] com
>>>> Subject: @F: [GEEKS] Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave
>>>> Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2002 10:40:34 -0700
>>>>
>>>> The death of Napster is not so much a signifier of the victory of
>>>> the
>> RIAA
>>>> over the infidels as it is of the defeat of companies which had no
>>>> identifiable business plan..
>>>>
>>>> -Ian.
>>>>
>>>> ———–
>>>> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020904/wr_nm/
>>>> media_napster_reaction_dc
>>>>
>>>> Napster Goes Unmourned to the Grave
>>>> Wed Sep 4, 1:38 PM ET
>>>>
>>>> By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
>>>>
>>>> LONDON (Reuters) – Like so many one-hit wonders before it, the
>>>> demise of
>>>> the once iconic online song-swapping service Napster ( news – web
>>>> sites)
>>>> has failed to stir much sympathy.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> “Really, who cares?” Sebastian, a student at the Technical
>>>> University of
>>>> Darmstadt, Germany, told Reuters as he heard that Napster would
>>>> likely
>> be
>>>> forced into Chapter 7 liquidation as early as Thursday.
>>>>
>>>> “Everybody’s moved on to other file-sharing (services). The
>>>> interest for
>>>> Napster in the Internet community just wasn’t as high as everybody
>>>> originally thought,” said the 28-year old student of IT engineering.
>>>>
>>>> During its heyday in 2000, Napster attracted tens of millions of
>>>> music
>>>> fans who traded all manners of recorded music from Eminem ( news –
>>>> web
>>>> sites) singles to rare concert recordings of the Dave Matthews Band.
>>>>
>>>> To the chagrin of the media establishment, Napster introduced the
>> concept
>>>> of file-trading to a generation of youths who now exchange a wide
>>>> range
>>>> copyright-protected materials from feature-length movies to video
>>>> games,
>>>> drawing Hollywood and lawmakers into the fray to corral the
>>>> activity.
>>>>
>>>> NO CHANCE
>>>>
>>>> While the legacy of Napster thrives, the service itself became a
>>>> non-entity as it shut down a year ago amid mounting legal troubles.
>>>> Thursday, Net discussion groups were largely devoid of commentary
>>>> on the
>>>> online service that major music labels once considered to be public
>> enemy
>>>> number one.
>>>>
>>>> “Well, it’s official,” read one discussion group posting, summing
>>>> up a
>>>> demise that has long had an air of inevitability — as an
>>>> underground
>>>> service it was a hit, but as a business it had no chance.
>>>>
>>>> The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of
>>>> Napster’s chief nemeses, gave a bitter-sweet obituary to the defunct
>>>> service.
>>>>
>>>> “Napster had a great technology but it was never going to be
>>>> successful
>>>> until it managed to turn that technology into a legitimate business
>> model
>>>> that respected the copyright of artists and record companies,” the
>>>> IFPI
>>>> said in a statement.
>>>>
>>>> Napster’s fate was sealed Wednesday when a U.S. bankruptcy court
>> rejected
>>>> German media group Bertelsmann’s bid to buy Napster. Record labels
>>>> and
>>>> songwriters had opposed the deal, saying the price was unfair.
>>>>
>>>> IMMINENT LIQUIDATION
>>>>
>>>> The decision leaves Napster, which had been grounded since July,
>>>> 2001,
>>>> with no choice but to pull the plug on the operation.
>>>>
>>>> Napster, which still has a large copyright-infringement suit hanging
>> over
>>>> its head from the labels, is expected to file for Chapter 7
>>>> liquidation
>>>> Thursday, sources said.
>>>>
>>>> A statement from Napster Wednesday said the company had fired staff
>>>> and
>>>> shut down the operation. A trustee will auction off Napster’s assets
>> that
>>>> include its globally recognized brand name, Web addresses and
>> proprietary
>>>> technologies.
>>>>
>>>> The Napster Web Site now consists of two pages — “Napster was
>>>> here” on
>>>> the home page, linking only to a crude tombstone bearing the
>>>> trademark
>>>> headphone-wearing cat and the legend “Ded kitty.”
>>>>
>>>> Wednesday, officials at some of the music labels told Reuters they
>>>> did
>> not
>>>> think the fall of Napster would have any meaningful impact on the
>>>> file-sharing and music piracy craze.
>>>>
>>>> The labels may have triggered Napster’s demise, but it leaves
>>>> behind a
>>>> more powerful crop of imitators including Morpheus MusicCity,
>>>> Grokster
>> and
>>>> Kazaa, sites which have succeeded in driving the activity further
>>>> underground.
>>>>
>>>> As a posting by a person nicknamed “PianoMan” said: “They will never
>> stop
>>>> it. Or even slow it down. And as you may have guessed, I’m not
>>>> sympathetic.”
>>>>
>>>> Henry Wilson, founder of Grokster, a peer-to-peer network named in a
>>>> lawsuit by Hollywood and the labels for copyright abuse, pointed out
>> that
>>>> Napster went out of business before the courts could make a final
>>>> ruling
>>>> on the legitimacy of file-sharing networks.
>>>>
>>>> “I don’t think you can say this is a win for (the labels) on the
>>>> legal
>>>> front,” Wilson told Reuters.
>>>>
>>>> ———–
>>>> FoIB mailing list — Bits, Analysis, Digital Group Therapy
>>>> https://ianbell.com:8888/foib.html
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> – Mark
>>>
>>> —
>>> Mark Winder
>>> me [at] markwinder [dot] net
>>>
>>>

WASHINGTON, July 26 The compromise bill, which was approved on Thursday by Congressional negotiators and is expected to be adopted in both the House and Senate by the end of next week, will make it much harder for Americans to wipe out their debts when they declare bankruptcy.

After the agreement, lawyers around the country said that they had begun to receive calls and visits from debtors worried that they needed to file bankruptcy before the old rules lapse next year.

“I’ve had plenty of calls this morning,” said Gary F. Weltmann, a consumer bankruptcy lawyer in Washington. “And I’m telling people that they need to take action now.”

Marty K. Courson, a bankruptcy lawyer in San Francisco, said he was “getting ready for the onslaught.”

“I do think there will be a lot of people trying to use the old rules,” he said.

The White House announced today that President Bush would sign the bill, which was scheduled for a final vote in the House late tonight and in the Senate next week.

“The president looks forward to signing that,” said Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman. “That bill enjoys widespread bipartisan support for good reasons.”

The bill, which had been stalled until this week in a House-Senate conference committee, passed both chambers by overwhelming margins more than a year ago. The conference committee approved the bill Thursday after agreeing on an abortion-rights provision that had been the final obstacle to passage; the provision will bar anti-abortion protesters from using the bankruptcy laws to avoid paying court judgments as a result of clinic protests.

The bill has long been the top legislative priority of the credit card and banking industries, which say that many people now abuse the bankruptcy system by writing off debts that they should be able to pay. There were 1.45 million bankruptcy filings last year, a record, up 19 percent from 2000.

“This legislation restores integrity and accountability to our bankruptcy system by offering a fresh start to those who deserve one while cracking down on those who don’t,” said Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Critics, including top consumer-rights groups, described the bill as a gift to lenders in exchange for a recent, drastic increase in campaign contributions to members of Congress. They also said that it would do harm to millions of Americans in financial distress as a result of lost jobs, poor health or divorce.

The bill’s opponents have also questioned the timing of its passage, which comes in the midst of a Congressional crackdown on abusive accounting practices by many of the largest companies, including some of the same financial services companies that have lobbied strenuously for the bankruptcy bill.

“The timing couldn’t be worse,” said Travis B. Plunkett, the legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America. “It takes a lot of gall for Congress to make a move like this when so many Americans are concerned about corporate abuses, and when the economy is so shaky.”

Senator Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat who is a leading critic of the bill, said today that “it boggles the mind that at a time when Americans are more economically vulnerable, when they are most in need of protection from financial disaster, we would eviscerate the major financial safety net in our society for the middle class.”

Bankruptcy lawyers said that the bill would do harm to low- and middle-income clients who would be saddled with debts that would take them years to pay back. The new law will end the debt-free “fresh start” that many of those debtors had been permitted under the current law.

Recent studies have shown that the average American filing for bankruptcy has a median household income well below the national average of about $42,000 in 2000. A study cited in Congressional testimony last year showed that the average person filing for bankruptcy had a car that was six to nine years old, and that a quarter of those people had medical debts exceeding $1,000.

“I won’t deny that there are people who abuse the bankruptcy system,” said Mr. Weltmann, the Washington lawyer whose firm calls itself the Bankruptcy Center. “But there are honest, hard-working folks who are really going to be affected by these changes.”

The bill would impose a means test on debtors, based on median incomes in their home states, for bankruptcy filings under Charter 7 of the federal bankruptcy law, which permits debtors to erase most of their unsecured debts, like credit card bills.

Debtors with an income above the state median would be barred from filing under Chapter 7 and would instead be required to file instead under Chapter 13, which requires that a portion of the unsecured debt be repaid over time under the court-administered plan.

Mr. Courson, the San Francisco lawyer, said that the changes would “hurt a lot of consumer debtors who really, rightfully belong in Chapter 7.”

“My clients, for the most part, are honest and unfortunate people, and they’ve just got heavy debt,” he said. “You can always find some circumstance where a person really went to town with a credit card and got themselves in trouble. But I have people who are just plain old poor. My experience is something wildly different than the story that the credit card companies make to Congress.”

—- aDaM [at] XeNT [dot] CoM — .sig double play!

At its peak, there were more than 100 peer-to-peer start-ups. There now remain, at most, a couple of dozen companies concentrated in a few niches. The main activity of companies venturing into peer to peer is file sharing. But the dozens of overoptimistic forays into alternative economic systems, hyper-sophisticated technologies, and recording industry collaboration turned out to be dead ends. Peer-to-peer auctions, peer-to-peer supply chain management, and peer-to-peer e-mail may have failed because they were ahead of their time. It’s more likely they failed because they were just ahead of themselves. Clearly, the public’s appetite for file sharing has increased, and the state of the art has improved dramatically. But companies have still not yet found satisfactory business models, thus leaving file sharing’s last chapter unwritten. — Gene Kan, http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/zd/20020710/tc_zd/942734

XML proxies are add-ons to firewall and network environments that have the ability to monitor XML traffic and apply business rules and IT policies such as security, routing, performance, management, transformation, and connection provisioning. Current firewalls aren’t able to peek in the envelope and decipher XML traffic, said report author Ronald Schmelzer, ZapThink senior analyst. XML proxies are not only able to understand network protocols, but also the XML-based content traveling on top of those protocols, Schmelzer said. ZapThink identifies a slew of new vendors with XML-ready security solutions, including Flamenco Networks, Forum Systems, Reactivity, Vordel, and Westbridge Technology, among others… ZapThink estimates that XML represents just 2 percent of network traffic today, but that will increase to almost 25 percent by 2006. — http://www.internetwk.com/story/INW20020726S0004 http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

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