Posts

Another one bites the dust: IUMA is no longer being funded and is limiting their operations as much as possible. I can remember seeing IUMA when it first launched in 1993, and thinking that it was the first site that really showed what the Web could be. In what I would consider to be a natural evolution of the medium, marketers are spamming Napster users with instant messages based on the songs that they’re sharing. If there’s anything that might kill Napster (and Napster clones), this is it. If the cost of sharing music through Napster is not only some of your bandwidth, but also being involuntarily subjected to marketing campaigns, then the number of people who opt to share their MP3s might drop precipitously, thus exacerbating the free rider problem. ...

The Register has an interesting take on Microsoft’s product activation scheme. CNet’s Gamecenter site is going to the big colo center in the sky in about a week. I knew they cut off everyone in the Gamecenter Affiliates program, but I didn’t know that they were on the chopping block as well. The utter devastation of the gaming site universe has really come as a shock. What’s particularly interesting is that many gaming sites are victims of their own popularity. The sites are so popular that the people who run them can’t afford the hosting costs, and yet there’s seemingly no way to turn all that traffic into money. ...

Artistic Style looks like a cool tool for those times when you inherit code that doesn’t follow the indenting style which you prefer. Declan McCullagh follows up today on yesterday’s USA Today story about government claims that terrorists are using steganography to conceal messages on the Internet. You can always count on McCullagh to fill in the gaps when stories like this break. Voter.com has bit the dust. Too bad, they ran a pretty good site. ...

Joe Conason explains why lots of people have big problems with Ted Olson’s nomination as solicitor general. It seems terrorists are using the Internet in interesting ways. Apparently it’s becoming common for them to conceal encrypted messages within ordinary-looking image files, and then share them using freely available services. Think about it, the next time you’re looking at celebrity pictures on some site at Geocities, you could be unwittingly looking at secret terrorist messages. Of course, the downside of all this is that the government wants to use this as an excuse to limit our freedom. ...

Microsoft, continuing its flight from comprehensible version numbers, has decided to call the version of Windows code named “Whistler” Windows XP. The next version of Microsoft office will be called Office XP. And today a thousand jokes were born. When you link to a page at Amazon.com as an affiliate these days, the user is no longer taken directly to that product’s page. Instead, an intervening page is inserted promoting other items related to that item. The question I have is whether you get the full referral fee if the user buys a related item instead of the linked item. It seems like they’re kind of ripping off their affiliates to me. Of course, since I haven’t earned any affiliate money in ages, I don’t really care. ...

The O’Reilly Network has spawned a new site focused on LAMP, the open source Web development platform. It looks promising, it certainly overlaps my interests in the world of Web development pretty closely. A reader correctly points out that Pyra isn’t dead. My apologies to Ev.

Odd that even as Microsoft dismisses Linux as a failure, IBM continues to pump major dollars into Linux projects. Of course, Microsoft dismissed OS/2 as a failure as IBM continued to pour massive amounts of cash into it, but we won’t talk about that. From Today’s Papers: The WSJ reports that yesterday, without realizing that his remarks were being broadcast on a feed to some White House reporters, President Bush told the heads of some Catholic charities that his faith-based social services initiative was linked to his goal of curtailing abortions, a connection he did not make when he announced the initiative earlier this week. During the same meeting, reporters were also able to hear Bush say that his plans for federal funding for school vouchers may not succeed because a lot of Republicans don’t like them. Online, the NYT carries an AP dispatch about the same meeting, which plays the voucher comment and Bush’s joke that he’s about to name his brother Jeb ambassador to Chad above the abortion comment. ...

In Molly Ivins’ latest column she mentions that John Ashcroft is a member of the Council for National Policy, an organization that I hadn’t heard of. Apparently it’s a group of politicians, money men, and hardcore idealogues from the religious right who meet three times a year to work on their public policy agenda. They don’t have a Web site and don’t publish policy papers, because they’re a secret organization. Neither the membership list nor the meetings are open to the public. Sounds pretty nefarious doesn’t it? Fortunately, the Institute for First Amendment Studies is keeping an eye on these guys. ...

Somebody trademarked the emoticon :-(. I noticed that the trademark is owned by Despair.com, but was too lazy to investigate the matter further. Fortunately, a helpful reader pointed out that the trademark is an excellent hack, not a disturbing misuse of the US intellectual property system. Bush’s idea of giving billions of tax dollars to religious groups to provide charity really, really pisses me off. It seems to fly in the face of the first amendment separation of church and state. The idea of subsidizing religious charity leads me to two questions. One, if we give money to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, do we also have to give money to the Church of Scientology and the World Church of the Creator? And if we do, doesn’t this make the idea worse, not better? ...

Today, Salon runs some tales of dot com layoff woe. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that people who are incapable of running a business are also incapable of putting one out of its misery in a decent enough manner. Declan McCullagh has a story explaining what happened to Microsoft’s Web sites this week. They were brought down by a DNS configuration error that they couldn’t figure out for nearly a day. I’m sure that many people are disappointed that they can’t blame (crackers | script kiddies | Network Solutions | Windows 2000 | Bill Gates) for this. ...