Tuesday, February 19, 2002

Wired.  The new Great Wall.  ISPs are starting to block entire countries like China and Taiwan where anti-spam measures aren't enforced.  My view is that ISPs are out of control in regards to this type of conduct.  Spam isn't fun, but to ban a country or prevent unmanaged SMTP traffic is both stupid and a serious blow to the Internet.  This is just the tip of the iceberg.  I expect to see draconian measures like these taken against P2P technology and other disruptive technologies soon. >>>"Spammers and geeks are managing to do to China's people what the government has attempted but been unable to do," said Mike Markham, an English language teacher in Beijing. "We are slowly being cut off from participating in the most democratic system ever developed -– e-mail." Many systems administrators and spam-fighters said that apart from blocking all e-mail from Asian Internet service providers, there doesn't seem to be any way to stop all the spam originating from or being routed through Asia's e-mail servers. But they also worry that the blockades will lead to isolating huge sections of the developing Internet.<<< 3:00:06 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

NetRatings aborts plan to buy Jupiter. The Internet research and measurement firm's bid to acquire Jupiter Media Metrix for $71 million collapses after scrutiny from the FTC. [CNET News.com]  The research company that along with Forrester launched thousands of .coms is about to go out of business.  Its stock is down to $0.20 today (down another 75% today) which gives it a market cap of just $7 m. 11:46:47 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

NYT.  IBM wants to put Web Services into their Grid technology.   I certainly can see why the Big Co's want this type of technology.  They have cast their greedy eyes on the 400 m computers people are using that aren't under their control.  There will be 140 m computers sold this year with 1 GHz processors and 40 Gb of storage.  That dwarfs the current installed based of centralized hardware by any measure you want to use.  Every year that ratio moves in favor of PCs.  So, the solution here is to build apps that can run on these machines and pay people for their contribution.  Unfortunately, I think they would rather come up with a flashy app that people will download that would then allow them to sneak unused compute cycles out the back door.  10:07:41 AM    Comment_ Trackback []