DarkStar Spouts Off

YouTube Is The "New" Internet Crack

'nuf said.

Wide Access To Broadband

Thanks to the growing access of broadband, we know are learning how funny, sick, strange, talented, original thinking some people can be.

Youtube is fascinating.

And don't get me started on Hot Ghetto Mess.

And Flickr? Come on. Sharing pictures with family and friends?

Ahhhh... Broadband.

I'm going to quickly tie this into something I'm not seeing enough being written about and that is net neutrality.

Think about Verizon, AT&T, and COMCAST deciding that Youtube is taking up too much bandwidth and decides to independently, in concert, filter Youtube's packets until Youtube agrees to pay them for the amount of bandwidth that goes over the "last mile" of wiring to the home that they control.

A few years ago, when MCI was still around, they had a dispute with someone and decided to block packets of the ISP. It caused some serious problems for a few days.

Currently, COMCAST has taken strong action to block SPAM senders by blocking packets that have 192.168.*.* some where in the packet stack. The end result is some legitimate email is not being received because of it.

SPAMMERS Reverse The Tactic

Spammers are now putting their spamming message in an image and sending that image to email addresses.

The image is formatted like the image used for ticket verification from Ticket Master or the images used in email list confirmation.

In other words, scanning text doesn't work with these emails.

Google Is Segmenting The Search Market

Google is doing something very smart. They are eating the search elephant one bite at a time.

Google introduces U.S. Government Search

Now THIS Is GANSTA!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, THIS is the definition of gansta!

Eran Reshef had an idea in the battle against spam e-mail that seemed to be working: he fought spam with spam. Today, he'll give up the fight.

Reshef's Silicon Valley company, Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.

That led to a flood of Internet traffic so heavy that it disrupted the spammers' ability to send e-mails to other victims -- a crippling effect that caused a handful of known spammers to comply with the requests.

Then, earlier this month, a Russia-based spammer counterattacked, Reshef said. Using tens of thousands of hijacked computers, the spammer flooded Blue Security with so much Internet traffic that it blocked legitimate visitors from going to Bluesecurity.com, as well as to other Web sites. The spammer also sent another message: Cease operations or Blue Security customers will soon find themselves targeted with virus-filled attacks.

Today, Reshef will wave a virtual white flag and surrender. The company will shut down this morning and its Web site will display a message informing its customers about the closure.

"The Russians"  hijacked computers, sent the hijacked computers  commands to connect to Blue Security computers at such a pace that it created a denial of service to the company's systems. The translation is, earlier, they sent viruses to computers which were unpatched or unprotected, infected the computers, and turned those computers into bad guys at their will.

Think about this for a moment.

"The Russians" decide to get more money and contact a company like E*Trade, who does most of its business via the Internet. They threaten the company with an attack unless they provide money and or services. To show they are not playing and that it is possible, they initiate a short DoS attack on E*Trade. What do you think E*Trade would do?

Here is the serious part. What makes anyone think the scenario has not already happened?

There are plenty of companies that have had serious IT problems because of virus attacks, untargeted and targeted. Personally, I know of 3 major technical companies whose web presence was shutdown because of  untargeted and targeted attacks. It was interesting seeing an employee log into the company employee portal, only to see graphic porn images stream all over the computer.

People, what "The Russians" did was straight up gansta. Blue Security thought they were bad. "The Russians" showed what BAD is.

Google Toolkit

From The Server Side:

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

is a Java software development framework for writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail.

JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile. GWT claims to avoid this while offering users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

I find this interesting and a good thing.

Net Neutrality

Be afraid... Be very, very, afraid....

Verizon offers rebuttal on net neutrality

Efforts in the U.S. Congress to prohibit broadband providers from impairing or favoring some network traffic will "shut the door" to new services, a Verizon Communications official said Tuesday.

Current congressional attempts to write a so-called net neutrality provision into law would stop broadband network operators from offering VPNs (virtual private networks) to online gaming vendors looking to improve connectivity or hospitals launching home health-monitoring services over IP (Internet Protocol), said Tom Tauke, Verizon's executive vice president of public affairs, policy, and communications.

Tauke's concerns that Verizon could no longer offer VPNs are "ridiculous," said Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, an online rights advocacy group.

"The point is that there has to be room for a company other than Verizon's favored health-monitoring partner to offer the service as well," Brodsky said in an e-mail.

Tauke's speech -- at a broadband policy summit sponsored by Pike & Fischer, a research and publishing company -- was a focused rebuttal to consumer groups and e-commerce firms calling for a net neutrality provision to be included in telecommunications reform legislation now being debated in Congress.

[ Update ]

Plan and simple, Verizon and the other telephone companies want to charge based on the ISDN model, not the DSL model. Based on the amount of money the telcos are putting into lobbying efforts, I fear they will get what they want, and then maim the Internet revolution to get paid their five pounds of flesh.

And the telcos know that they will get it because the public has no control over the congress-critters and they know the public is, for the most part, ignorant of what is going on.

Google Kool-Aid

I said years ago that Google was the only Internet web application that I would pay to access.

More and more this is becoming the case.

Google? Check.
Google Personalized Home Page? Check.
Google News? Check (one of a few sources).
Gmail? Check.
Contact list? Gmail. Check.
Google Desktop? Check.
Google Calendar? Evaluating.

OK, for many people, how do they use the Internet?

Browser: free options.
Email: Free email clients or web mail.
Video: plug ins.
Pictures: Flickr and the like.

For me the biggest thing was calendars. I'd evaluate one here and there, then I heard Google had one in the works and I waited.

Google Internet disk storage (GDrive) is in the works.

The GDrive service will provide anyone (who trusts Google with their data) a universally accessible network share that spans across computers, operating systems and even devices.  Users will no longer require third party applications to emulate this behaviour by abusing Gmail storage.

And the Open Document Format for Office Applications may turn out to be real:

Name

OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC.

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of this TC is to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.

The resulting file format must meet the following requirements:

1. it must be suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents,
2. it must be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications,
3. it must retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
4. it must be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools,
5. it should keep the document's content and layout information separate such that they can be processed independently of each other, and
6. it should 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted.

OH, now if that really kicks off....

OK, someone stop me. I'm drinking the Kool-Aid.

How People Get To This Site

The following search patterns have landed people to my humble dust spec on the internet:

• Google: "Bob Wade" and variations
• MSN: "unbelievable sex acts"
• Google: "Picture of national great blacks in wax museum"
• MSN, Google: "covenent with black america" or some variation
• Google: "Biz markee you got what I need"
• MSN, Google: "Farrakhan" variations
• Google: "Flava Flav"
• MSN: "Faith Hill spouts off"

That's interesting to me. YMMV.