Posts

The Tucows Network has a review of Linux Mandrake 7.0. It’s a pretty interesting looking distribution that I might try out the next time that I install Linux (which should be very soon). You can get the CD distribution from CheapBytes for $1.99. Hey, version 2.0 of Seti@Home is available. Mighty team [email protected] (consisting of me) continues to chug along. Thresh’s Firing Squad has an interview with John Carmack, the primary culprit behind the first person shooter revolution. In my opinion, he’s the most interesting person in the game industry. ...

For work, I’m reading the book Permission Marketing, by Seth Godin. Generally speaking, it’s a pretty good book that discusses marketing strategies that work in an economy where attention is the scarcest commodity. I think all marketing people should read it, because it recommends that they treat their customers with respect. Interestingly, while the book was written at least a year ago, the author predicts exactly (starting on page 133) the DoubleClick situation where an advertising network uses its placement on many sites to track user activity, and then uses its affiliation with sites where users register to map their Web activity to their real name and other information. The only difference between his prediction and reality is that he says Imgis will be the company that brings this about. I hadn’t been paying attention, but perhaps they’re doing the same thing DoubleClick does. (In the book, he argues strenuously against this type of activity as it squanders the “permission” given to companies by their customers.) ...

I saw the Superbowl ad for Epidemic.com, but I didn’t really understand what they did (not unusual for a Superbowl ad). Now that I do know (thanks to Janelle Brown’s article in Salon), I must say that I’m pretty revolted. They offer a little program you can use to include graphical advertisements in the email messages you send. As if HTML mail weren’t bad enough as it is. All I can say is that anyone sending me Epidemic-infected email will immediately earn a one way ticket into my procmail filter. ...

For the sake of thoroughness, I wanted to point out that Etoy achieved total victory over Etoys.com in the end. Etoys.com ended up dropping their court claim and giving Etoy $40,000 bucks. I wish it were 40 million, just so Etoys.com would think before pulling this sort of stuff in the future. Tara Calishain, of the ResearchBuzz web log, found the release date for NCSA HTTPD 1.0 for me. Thanks, Tara! The Center for Democracy and Technology has put up a site that provides one stop where you can complain about DoubleClick’s evil practices and opt out of their ad tracking scheme all in one place. I have doubts about the efficacy of emailing form letters to people, but if the best thing that happens is that all of the people involved get thousands of messages from around the ’net, I’ll still consider it a success. ...

Web nostalgia: Rob McCool’s musings on why NCSA HTTPD sucked. Of course, it has since been replaced by Apache, which doesn’t suck. By the way, what brought me to the site was a search for the release date of NCSA HTTPD 1.0. If anyone knows this date, please send it to me. By the way, I haven’t mentioned yet that Netscape is calling the M13 release of Mozilla the alpha release. I downloaded it on my PC and have been using it for my everyday browsing. It works fine for Web surfing. I haven’t yet entrusted it with my email. ...

A reader points out that there’s a newer version of the jargon file (aka The New Hacker’s Dictionary) than the one I pointed to the other day.

Rule number one for anyone doing anything online … never trust AOL to get anything right. In this case, people who use AOL Instant Messenger and aren’t AOL users are at risk. (I use Yahoo! Messenger, you should too.) I’ve long been one of those people who told everyone not to turn off cookies in their browser because they can’t really be used for nefarious reasons. Well, DoubleClick has proven me wrong. The sleazeballs at the Internet’s largest advertising network are doing their best to tie your surfing practices to your real name and address. I know that a lot of poeple have a “so what” attitude toward this sort of thing, but I firmly believe that as customers we don’t have to stand for it. The proper response to this, if it offends you, is not to hack your browser so that you don’t accept DoubleClick cookies, but to stop visiting Web sites on the DoubleClick network. There are 11,000 of them, but hey, there are lots of other good sites out there too. If you’re feeling really proactive, send feedback to those sites letting them know why you’ll no longer visit. Cookies are a very useful tool. Allowing advertising networks to subvert them so that the best thing to do is turn them off is unacceptable. ...

Buying advertising time during the Super Bowl is the antithesis of guerilla marketing. Even so, bunches of cash strapped dot coms are spending millions to get on TV during the big game. Compared to spending 3.2 million of your 6 million VC dollars to get 90 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl, paying a small town in Oregon to change its name looks like a downright brilliant idea. In amongst some stuff that’s not particularly interesting to me, Dave Winer takes on the people who would leverage patents against the Internet community in his DaveNet essay today. Fortunately, the Internet community does have a weapon that can be used against patent holders … prior art. ...

Salon has an article about the sale of illegal merchandise, particularly products made from endangered animals, on eBay. They refer to some of eBay’s tactics to eliminate illegal auctions as Orwellian, which I think is pretty harsh. Kevin Mitnick is being released today, but he’ll hardly be free. He won’t be allowed to use a computer, or even work somewhere where they have computers, for three years. That should make it easy for him to support himself. ...

Veteran Transmeta and Linux watcher Andrew Leonard provides coverage of yesterday’s Crusoe launch for Salon. Apple reported a fat $178 million profit for the quarter yesterday, and announced that they’re rewarding Steve Jobs with a jet and 10 million shares of Apple stock for the big turnaround that he has engineered. Apple spent about 90 million bucks to purchase the plane and take care of all the taxes Jobs would owe on it. ...