tombrennan.org

Once the only game in town, domain registrar Network Solutions has stooped to a new low.  Many years ago the company started offering hosting packages as well as domain registration.  It seems that if you hosted with them and had a subdomain (like blog.tombrennan.org) that you haven’t updated in a while something interesting will happen.

According to NetSol’s terms of service (TOS) they have every right to use those abandoned subdomain and fill it with pages chuck-full of ads:

You also agree that any domain name directory, sub-directory, file name or path (e.g.) that does not resolve to an active web page on your Web site being hosted by Network Solutions, may be used by Network Solutions to place a “parking” page, “under construction” page, or other temporary page that may include promotions and advertisements for, and links to, Network Solutions’ Web site, Network Solutions product and service offerings, third-party Web sites, third-party product and service offerings, and/or Internet search engines. You agree that Network Solutions may change the content and/or appearance of, or disable any of these temporary pages at any time, in its sole discretion, and without prior notice.

You have every option to not use this service, but you’ll first have to dig through the TOC to know about it.

Many years ago NetSol was the only game in town, charging $300 for all three domains (com, org, net).  Times have changed in the domain registration landscape with $3 domains, many registrars, and many more domain suffixes.

In the new world of the web, NetSol needs to figure out how to be the best game in town and still make money.  A fine balance that relies on the customers of the company, who may not be too happy with hijacked subdomains.

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Comcast has silently changed it’s terms of service to clarify the cable giants policies on traffic management.

This move comes on the heels of months of debate and third-party proof that Comcast was throttling back bandwidth on some subscribers using BitTorrent.

Now according to Section III of the new terms “uses reasonable network management practices that are consistent with industry standards.” Comcast says that it’s not alone in this practice stating that “all major ISPs” use some sort of “traffic shaping”.  A spokesman went on to say that if an ISP doesn’t use this type of throttling it leaves the customers open to “spam, viruses, security attacks, and other dangerous risks” that can hinder the company bringing “the best possible service to it’s customers”.

Customers were not happy with Comcast.  A class-action lawsuit was filed against by one subscriber, a website complained to the FCC and an investigation ensued.  Once the FCC opened the investigation to comments they were flooded to messages from angry users.  “If you so much as open a BitTorrent client on a computer on the Comcast network, your entire connection drops to almost a crawl,” said one comment. Another subsciber said,  “I have experienced this throttling of bandwidth in sharing open-source software, e.g. Knoppix and Open Office. Also I see considerable differences in speed ftp sessions vs. html. They are obviously limiting speed in ftp as well.”

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By going over a long thread on Apple.com’s support forums users having slow connection speeds with the iTunes Music Store have discovered that they all live in the same general area and all have Time Warner’s Roadrunner broadband service.

According to the forums the problems started about January 31st with slow downloads of music and podcasts.  Some on the forum vented their frustration at Apple for slowing down the connection speed.  It was then realized that connection speeds on other online services (web browsing, e-mail, etc) were running just fine.

It wasn’t until later on in the discussion that people started putting down the area where they live.  It first started with “Texas” then “Roadrunner”, then towns started pouring in: Plano, Arlington, Austin, and others.  In the past few months other companies like Comcast have been accused of capping off bandwidth but not for just one service.

Some customers were able to unblock port addresses on their computer.  By turning off blocking of the data going into and out of the ports some users expressed better download speeds.  What about people who don’t know how to do this and just want to watch their iTunes movies?

Since Apple announced video rentals over iTunes last month much has been discussed online of how the competitors will react.  Is this just Time Warner’s answer for pulling people away from Pay-Per-View movies?  Is TWC in bed with the RIAA?  Or are people just over-reacting to a thread on an online forum?  Time will tell…still downloading, please wait.

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Like Digg but can never get on the the front page? Try AddPile.com

Presidential Primaries are so 20th century. Let’s spend a few movements at take a look at who’s the most popular Democratic Candidate online:

According to Alexis.com, which tracks and ranks website traffic BarackObama.com is a clear winner ranking 9,008 with HillaryClinton.com taking a distant second with 23,375. JohnEdwards.com is left in the cyber dust with a rank of 48,516.
Alexis.com winner: Obama

Next lets see who has more freinds on MySpace.com. You may be one of the 235,559 friends of the most popular candidate on the social networking site of Barak. Hillary has 168,924 freinds and John is in the corner with only 52,925 freinds.

MySpace.com winner: Obama

More people seem to be posting blogs about Barack Obama according to Technorati.com. 24,424 blogs have been writting about the Senator from Illonois. Former Senator Edwarws squeeked out more entries than Senator Clinton. Mr. Edwards has 22,858 entries about him with Mrs. Cliton with 22,502 entries.
Technorati.com winner: Obama
Social bookmarking site Digg.com has a story “dugg” 1,113 times about Barack Obama’s named being misspelled on the Florida Ballots. 2,167 diggs on a blog entry at JohnEdwards.com that explains all of the major networks are discounting the former Senator as a front runner. In the top 10 search results at Digg.com Hillary Clinton’s appears, but not as favorably as her opponnents.

Digg.com winner: Obama

YouTube.com serves up online videos of every sort. Hillary Clinton has about 35,600 videos with her name tagged in them. There are about 27,700 tagged for Barack Obama. John Edwards, is not so popular on the site with about 11,100 hits to his name.

YouTube.com winner: Clinton

Conclusion: It appears that in this clearly unscientific poll that Barack Obama wins this online primary of the front runners for the Democratic Party’s candidate for President in 2008.

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Online DVD rental company Netflix may suffer a cut into its profits if the USPS imposes extra postage for those cute, red envelops. 

The US Postal Service’s Inspector General has prepared an audit that recommends charing a company an extra 17 cents per envelop to cover labor costs.  If this “unidentifed” company is Netflix analysts project that their profits would drop from $1.05 per subscriber to 35 cents.

Could that company be Blockbuster?  The short answer is no.  Netflix’s competitor handles their online rentals a different way in the mail.

The IG said that a majority of the “unidentified company’s” envelopes have a floppy edge which means that the mailers must be handled manually, increasing the cost to ship.  Over the next two years the estimated cost of the manual handling will rise about $20 million.

Can this cause a big spike for Blockbuster’s stock?  Let’s look at some numbers.Netflix sends out about 1.6 million DVDs a day.  They save about $100 million a year by using first class postage even as they pick up the cost of the return postage. A spokesman for the company doubts that Netflix will add a surcharge to the price of shipping the DVDs.

As news of this hit the markets Netflix’s shares rose 18 cents.

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A flawed security setup could make access to the personal data of Canadians easily attained. 

Last week a man from Ontario, Canada, stumbled upon a way to find data of other users applying for passports.  While filling out his information online he discovered that by altering one number in the URL of his web browser he could view other people’s data.

The data that could be obatianed in the flaw includes social insurance numbers, birth dates, driver’s license numbers and other personal data of people applying for Canadian passports online.

Last Friday the website was taken down for repair.  Earlier this week it was back up, but on Tuesday it went down again.  The second suspension was “of a different nature” said a spokesperson for the agency.  Indeed it was, as of Tuesday afternoon the site was back up, with the security flaw still accessible.

You can view a screen shot of the flaw here.

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Last year Netflix offered a prize of $1 million to anyone to improve their recommendations to user by 10% or better. Now it seems the gave out more than expected.

When the online DVD service Netflix offered its $1 million prize gave out real data from its users to help improve its recommendation feature on its site. When a user rates a DVD the feature offers other movies that user may like depending on genre, actor, director, etc.

To make sure the contestants’ algorithm would work in the real world data Netflix provided data over 100 million movie ratings made by 500,000 users. To be careful Netflix first asked users if it was OK to use their data for this project than anonymized the personal details of the user.

Now it turns out that two men from the University of Texas at Austin have de-anonymized the data. By cross-referencing data from sources other sites and the Netflix data they were able to identify the anonymous Netflix user.
Aside from popular movies people have unique tastes and tend to share them on sites like IMDB, Amazon, and others that have a similar ratings systems. Sometimes those users rated and review films on similar dates, narrowing the fields.

The duo from Texas explained:

“Given a user’s public IMDb ratings, which the user posted voluntarily to selectively reveal some of his (or her; but we’ll use the male pronoun without loss of generality) movie likes and dislikes, we discover all the ratings that he entered privately into the Netflix system, presumably expecting that they will remain private.”

Be aware that when you share something online you are not just sharing it with “friends” on not just on that site. Your data can be cross-referenced then your anonymity will no longer be as strong as you thought.

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Web sites on Thanksgiving Night and Black Friday for some major retailers we caught off guard by shoppers.

Victoria, Macy’s, and Lowe’s we surprised on those two periods which hit them hard.  Their sites slowed down by online browsers and shoppers.  This caused transaction times on their respective sites to come to a crawl.
Black Friday is the time for retailers to turn their red ink black.  The slow down hampered those efforts. Some sites crawled at a rate 4 times slower than normal.  This would cause shoppers to simply use the power of the mouse to shop somewhere else.
Macy’s site saw its load time go from 12 seconds to 15 or 20.  Lowe’s slowed down 300%.  Office Depot’s normal load went from 10 to 25 seconds.   In a time when seconds count this is a big deal for retailers who are trying to stay afloat.

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Things must be going pretty good at Google.  It seems that the web giant pays $1 billion a year in “click fraud” or false clicks on it’s ad services.

Google’s AdWords programs were a relief to the banner ads of a few years ago.  The service paired text based ads with the content of the page being visited.  When a visitor clicks on an ad the web host gets paid.  This works great for Google, webmasters, and surfers.  Not so fast.

Google says less than 10% of the ads showed on AdWords are invalid.  That adds up to about $100 million a year in revenue the company can not make.  If the link does not work, Google doesn’t charge the advertiser so Google “eats” those invalid click-throughs.

Google settled a lawsuit last July (2006) for $90 million and about $60 million in credits to its advertisers in credits for click-fraud. Although spokespeople at Google say they are taking click-fraud “very seriously” they aren’t hurting with all that lost revenue.
Google has the power, money, and technology to take care of these click-frauds, but doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot about it.

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Remember when you thought Facebook was so much better than MySpace?  Think again.  The social networking site has developed a new target ad system based on the information you put in your profile.

The more detail a profile  reveals about a user the more the site will target the ads.  The Wall Street Journal is reporting that this system will “let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves” and in the future the site will “predict what products and services users might be interested in even before they have specifically mentioned an area.”

Social networking sites have been historically hard to earn revenue from.  It wasn’t until MySpace struck a deal with Google that the money really started to roll in.

As one search engine once put it “Do no evil” may only apply to when you first start up.

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