Rogers Cadenhead looks at Dave Winer’s long bet with New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz on whether blogs or the Times would reign supreme by 2007. The winner: none of the above. Wikipedia outranks them both.

The terms of the deal between Apple and ThinkSecret? Apple agrees not to sue and ThinkSecret agrees to close up shop. Ouch.

Tyler Cowen on Ron Paul. I think this holds in general:

There’s what a politician believes, and how a politician believes. As I get older I put increasing weight on the latter.

Here’s something I haven’t seen before. A member of the MooTools development team made some intemperate remarks about some other JavaScript frameworks in a presentation, posted a video of the presentation to the project home page, and was kicked off the team. Here’s the upshot:

The apology here is not that Olmo gave his little rant, nor that it got posted on our blog. I am personally sorry that he did, but that’s not the point. No, my apology is for letting this kind of perspective have a place on our team. It’s immature, but it’s also disrespectful, and while I looked at it light heartedly as something fun, Olmo seems to have truly felt this way and I should have recognized that as both dangerous and infectious.

I’m not sure what I think about it, but I do find it interesting. Normally the level of accountability for volunteer projects is lower.

World of Warcraft offers an arena system where players can create teams and fight other players. Participating in rated arena matches earns points that players can use to buy equipment that in turn makes them more formidable in the arena.

Teams that compete in an arena are assigned a rating of 1500 to start out, and their rating goes up when they win matches and goes down when they lose matches. Teams that are average to below average get roughly the same number of points, and higher rated teams get a lot more points than average teams. A team that maintains the default 1500 point ranking gets 344 points for the week. A awful team with a rating of 1250 gets 289 points. A team with a good rating, 1750, gets 683 points, and an outstanding team with a 2000 rating gets 1054 points. Here’s the scale on a graph (from here:

Most teams have a rating around the 1400 mark, as you can see from the graph that follows (borrowed from here):

What players soon figured out is that good teams could give (or more often, sell) arena rating to people.

Players can get points for playing as few as 3 games per week (the rules for who’s eligible for points are complex and aren’t worth going into), and it’s tough to lose more than 20 points in a game. So really good teams were selling spots on their roster to inferior players, lending them their rating for the week and giving them more points than they could come by honestly.

When Blizzard kicked off Arena Season 3, they wanted to limit certain “showy” rewards to the top arena players, and put a minimum rating of 1850 on weapon rewards and 2000 on shoulder armor (because they’re fancy looking). To prevent people from getting these rewards without beating other good teams, they created a personal rating that is adjusted from match to match along with team rating. So every time a player wins a match, their personal rating goes up, and every time they lose a match, their personal rating goes down.

You may be able to guess how players responded. Matches are made based on team rating, but the reward limits were based on personal rating. Players would fill their team with characters with disposable ratings, then intentionally lose to drive the team’s rating down. Then the good players on the team would log in and win against inferior competition, raising their personal rating. A player with a personal rating of 1800 would be playing matches set up for a team with a rating of 1200 or 1300, enabling them to get fat playing against poor competition.

Last week Blizzard instituted a new rule that prevents players from buying their rewards if their team rating and personal rating aren’t within a certain range. I can’t wait to see what the players come up with next.

Note to Senators — you people make me sick. No guts, no principles.

The context of these comments is the vote today that granted immunity from prosecution to telecommunications companies that in all likelihood illegally threw their networks open for wiretapping, even before 9/11.

Ten Democrats and no Republicans stood up for the Constitution. 76 others voted for cloture to end Senator (and Presidential candidate) Chris Dodd’s filibuster of the bill. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama didn’t show up to vote.

Update: The bill is off the table until next year, thanks to Chris Dodd.

The Russian Business Network is a hosting company that specializes in offering services to online criminals. Need someplace to host your phishing site? Want some help setting up a shell company? These are your go to guys.

Washington Post Internet security reporter Brian Krebs published a story about RBN on Wednesday.

There’s also a blog that reports on RBN’s activities.

How did I not hear of these guys until today?

Amazon has added a new company to their S3 and EC2 services called SimpleDB. Rather than providing a traditional relational database, they’ve created an object-oriented database that is supposed to be simpler to use. That’s probably not a bad idea, given the popularity of ORM libraries like Hibernate and ActiveRecord.

They’ve already created libraries for Java, Perl, C#/.NET, and PHP, and the documentation is thorough.

The thing I always wonder about with solutions like these is what happens when you get beyond the simplest mode of usage. It’s great to abstract away all that nasty SQL until your database gets big and your queries start getting slow, but then you need to get closer to the metal and figure out what’s going on in there. How do you do that with SimpleDB? Or is it expected that most users won’t build big enough sites with SimpleDB to have to worry about that?

For what it’s worth, SimpleDB reminds me of the database API that was provided to Ning developers when the site launched. Here’s some documentation.

Update: Here’s a blog post with more scoop on SimpleDB. The software is written in Erlang.

Last week I asked what one question you could ask programmers to screen out viable candidates from poor candidates in a preliminary interview. I think that the one question you should keep in mind when interviewing programmers is, “What can I learn from this person?” If you get through an interview and can’t think of anything the candidate could teach you, they’re probably not right for the job.

Google is launching a new Web site aimed at individuals who want to publish articles on the Web. Google calls the articles knols, and based on the example, I’d say they’re most similar to Wikipedia articles. The difference is that the knols are closely associated with one author, whereas Wikipedia articles are all treated as collaborative works. Here’s how Google describes it:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

The other important difference from Wikipedia is that if you write a knol, you can choose to allow Google to run ads on it, and you’ll get some of the ad revenue. Google says it’s a “substantial portion.” I imagine that Google has seen more and more Wikipedia articles rise to the top of the rankings for various search terms, and that they want to provide some competition in that market.

As Paul Kedrosky points out, this is a move that could cause some collateral damage as well. It’ll be interesting to see whether it’s better for an author to write a knol on a topic or to publish a downloadable PDF through a publisher like Peepcode. I had a long blog article on SSH I’ve been working on that I may publish as a knol instead, just to find out.

The final question is, how are knols licensed? Does the author keep the copyright or is it assigned to Google? When I write a knol, can I use a Creative Commons license? Licensing issues will play a big part in the success or failure of this new venture.

Update: Adam Engst on Knol:

Just as the open source Linux has proven impossible for Microsoft to squash, Wikipedia’s community-based approach, flawed and argumentative as it can be, will prove more compelling, accurate, and resilient than Google Knol in the long run.

I think this is almost certainly true and yet I also think that Knol still has a potentially valuable role to play. One thing’s for sure, if Google (and other search engines) are fair with their search indexing, we’ll find out which resource people find more valuable by way of search result rankings down the road.