Brent points out a joke of a patent (Patent 6941562) this time hitting very close to home:
Beyond the obviousness, inspection of both the client and server side
code for the patent reveals that most of it is copied directly from my
JSRS library, published a year earlier, not only without attribution, but claiming it as their own “NetGratus Remote Scripting”. Of course,
my license is very liberal, allowing reuse for pretty well anything, however it does say:
…
So, if you’ve been asked to license this patented technology, I’d be
happy to have a look at the particular code being offered for licensing
and see whether it violates my copyright by restricting you from using
it without a license.
Category: General
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It is being reported lately that spammers are using lesser known domains in their links in spam messages. See this article for example. In the article they state:
Using
a lesser-known top level domain changes the game and makes it harder to
distinguish spam from legitimate e-mail by examining the links in the
e-mails.
They also quote Conor Flynn of Irish security firm Rits as saying:
“Spam filters are set up to recognise the well known domains, spam from lesser known domains can slip through”
I would have to disagree with both of these statements. It actually might make it easier!!
Category: General
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This looks like a great resource for developers looking to search public domain / open source code out there. As google says here:
Code Search crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz,
.tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories, making
them searchable in one place. Results are also accessible via a
GData feed, which we hope people will use to create plugins for their favorite editors and IDEs.
Category: General
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Via Mark Evans:
“You have to love Mark Cuban, who says it like it is. At a
conference yesterday, he said only a
“moron”
would buy YouTube. “They are just breaking the law,” CNet reported.
“The only reason it hasn't been sued yet is because there is nobody
with big money to sue.” Cuban's no-lawsuit theory may be right but
isn't a little curious YouTube has escaped the wrath of copyright
owners so far while Napster, et al incited a wave of lawsuits and
attacks on consumers?”
Category: General
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September 25th, 2006 · No Comments
Yahoo is now using what they call personal sign-in seals to combat Phishing. Interesting idea.
Category: General
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September 22nd, 2006 · No Comments
Bloglines just announced yesterday that they are integrating Sqweezer support. Interesting on its own is Sqweezer which basically optimizes any website for mobile browsing. Just goto Sqweezer and enter any URL and checkout the output.
For example, here is this weblog in Sqweezer.
Category: General
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September 19th, 2006 · No Comments
It looks as though our SimpleFilter service has come under attack today. We seem to be weathering the storm and delivering email as we normally do.
Noticed that a majority of the attack seems to be coming from an IP owned by Affinity Internet. Considering they are an online marketing service company I wouldn't doubt if they are generating some sort of spam campaign.
I've done a bit of google searching on these guys. What I'm finding is a lot of bogus looking press releases from a number of bogus looking domains and websites/blogs so I've come to the conclusion that they are some sort of spam business (even though they look like a legitimate business). I'll update this post if I'm incorrect but I've done enough investigation at this point to lead me down that road.
I've attempted to contact them by phone but was waiting on hold for too long so I gave up. They can contact me through this post if they like.
Category: General · Spam
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September 12th, 2006 · No Comments
I really don't get what all the fuss is about river of news. I've been using my news aggregator on PDA's and lousy cell phone screens for about 2.5 years. I just spent an hour int he Doctor's office yesterday catching up on some news on my lousy cell phone screen (which happens to work well enough). The beauty is that I don't have to care whether someone has provided a river or stripped down view and I can view it the way I like to read news and not the way Dave thinks I should read news.
And I've said this before, if you really want to read in a river of news style then Bloglines lets you do that. Most other aggregators do as well I'm pretty sure. I just can't be bothered to waste the time to verify that myself.
So whats all the fuss and why is everyone wasting a bunch of time creating “river” views of content?? I'm sure someone will enlighten me in the comments here.
Category: General
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September 10th, 2006 · No Comments
Category: General
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Cuban is pretty much right on the money here:
Today though, with all the excitement about rich media, whether its video or audio, you hear and read all about
views and listens.
Which leads me to the question: Just what is a view or listen ?
For podcasts, is a listen a download ? I hope not, i have several podcasts in Itunes i subscribe to, and that
download every episode, but I havent listened to in a long while. A couple others I have listened to the first several
seconds or minutes of, but havent really dented. How would what i just did fit into the podcasts metrics ?
In radio there is Time Spent Listening. There are quarter hours , where a radio station gets credit for someone
listening for 15 minutes if they listen for 5 minutes. Are there standards for podcasts ?
Then there are videso on the net. Just what exactly is a view ? Our HDNet Trailer for an upcoming
Dennis Rodman show has been viewed 2339
times. I know i have gone to the site and it has started running at least 20 times that I didnt watch it all
the way through. Are those counted ? I cant find anywhere on the Youtube.com site that defines how views are counted.
Did i miss it ?
Category: General
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