May 2007 Archives

I mentioned that I was having issues with content theft the other day, however I did not want to name names until I had received some form of response from the perpetrator. After 5 days I have finally received a reply from them and I am now more than happy to name and shame. As regular readers to this blog may know I also maintain several other blogs on specific themes. One of them is ISquattedYour.EU, which deals primarily with domain industry related content. I am involved with several registries (we're an accredited registrar for several) and keep an eye on movements at ICANN, so it was only natural that the financial issues that may impact on the .travel registry would catch my eye. On that basis I wrote a short article on this on the I Squatted blog: Tralliance in Trouble - .travel could die Which was published on 20th May 2007. Two days later DomainNews.com published an article entitled "Is the .travel Registry broke?" which bears more than a passing similarity to my article, as it's basically a direct rip of mine. I had been in contact with the editor of DomainNews.com previously and had explicitly told him that I did not grant them permission to republish my articles: (email 3rd April 2007) They replied: Yet, when I became aware of their recent infringement of my copyright it took them 5 days to reply and the reply that I got was hardly satisfactory: (email May 30th 2007) Interesting. So basically they don't admit to ripping the content from my site, but from someone else's? And where is the reference to the source in the republished article? Could anyone be expected to believe that anyone other than DomainNews wrote the article? Have a look at a screenshot to see what I mean (sorry if it's a bit big): To add insult to injury the ripped off article is now being cited as the source by several other sites that cover the domain name industry. Of course their attitude does make you wonder how much of their content is their own and how much they have been blatantly stealing from other blogs and websites. Their attitude to copyright is laughable: (email May 30th 2007) So what are you meant to do? Put a great big "hands off" on all your content? Since when do you have to do this with original works? I am not a lawyer and would not pretend to be one, however my understanding of copyright and fair use is quite clear on this point. My interpretation would also seem to fit with that of professional journalists, such as the comments on my previous post on this subject by ENN's Ralph Averbuch and The Sunday Business Post's Adrian Weckler. Copyright theft is wrong. There's no two ways about it. And what makes it even more annoying is when you know that other people are profiting from your work (ie. selling advertising on their site based on your content!) While this may not be as abhorrent as the recent case of a 14 year old's photo ending up on the cover of an adult DVD, it's still morally indefensible.

Dell has launched its range of Ubuntu powered desktops. At present the product range is only available for purchase in the US. If you go to the dedicated OSS site you will be greeted with this (click to enlarge) : and the product page has the following: (click to enlarge) The introductory text is pretty clear: I wonder how long before we'll be able to order these from Dell in Europe ....

Cormac moved over to using a Mac a couple of months ago and has just setup a blog to help people with the transition. Interesting idea.

Earlier today I came across one of my posts (verbatim) on someone else's website. The website owner had previously been in contact with me requesting permission to republish my content, which I was not willing to do. They assured me that they would respect my wishes, but they obviously didn't. It also begs the question whether any of the content they are publishing is their own or if they are ripping off other blogs without their owner's knowledge. What is the best course of action in this kind of situation? It's not an automated splog polling an RSS feed source. It's clearly a case of them visiting the site and doing a copy and paste of my content into their site.

I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean last night (possibly more on that later). Of course before the film there were several trailers, which I always enjoy. So what does summer 2007 have in store for us? There's the new Harry Potter, Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix 12th July, but before that there's Shrek The Third on June 29th. I'm not sure if the second instalment of the Fantastic Four (Fantastic Four 2 Rise of the Silver Surfer) which is being released on June 15th is going to be worth watching, though it does star Jessica Alba.... The ones I'm really looking forward to, apart from the Harry Potter, are of course Die Hard 4.0 (4th July), The Bourne Ultimatum (17th August) and Resident Evil: Extinction (21st September). They're all sequels, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing NOTE: All release dates mentioned are for Ireland

Yesterday there was a general election in Ireland, so the count is on today. While independent sites, such as IrishElection.com are making full use of online media, the party websites are relatively static:

We've been using Skytel for the last couple of years to handle all our voice traffic including our 1850 number. Unfortunately the level of service has been declining and is no longer reliable (Our 1850 number has been offline for the last two days!!) Can anyone suggest any alternatives?

Next week will see the official launch of Enum in Ireland. So what exactly is enum? See enum.org Over the past couple of years there have been trials in many countries, including Ireland, with some countries taking the service to a commercial level. In the UK for example Nominet will be involved, while here in Ireland IENum LTD won the bid. So what's happening next week? It's the official launch. The registry will start accepting applications from companies that wish to become accredited as tier 2 registrars and offer enum services to their clientele. (Disclosure - I sit on the policy advisory board for Enum353)

I was just playing around with the new interface for Google Analytics and decided to email myself a report. It's a nice little feature, but there is a serious downside to their implementation. Instead of sending the email from a Google domain (it's not as if they have a shortage) they send it from your email address. While this may seem logical at face value it has serious implications for email security, as you are effectively allowing Google to send mail purporting to be from your domain. If you have been avoiding DKIM and SPF, then this probably won't be a problem for you, but if you have actually implemented it using a relatively strict, and therefore useful policy, then you are going to run into problems. Of course this isn't the first instance of a Google implementation flying in the face of common sense. Their Gmail service has been severely criticised in email filtering circles on may occassions since its introduction due to the lack of a vital part of the email header - the source IP. Whereas other services such as Yahoo! mail or Hotmail / MSN include the sender's actual IP in the email header, Google decided not to. If they'd stopped there it wouldn't be too bad, but they've applied the same logic (or lack of it) to their Google Apps services, so you could easily end up discovering that your mails are being blocked due to abuse of the Google SMTP by others.

I get alerts when certain keyphrases are mentioned in articles, so this morning I was drawn to SiliconRepublic.com. SiliconRepublic.com fancy themselves as being a competitor for the likes of eWeek and other well known and respected online publications. However, unlike eWeek, SiliconRepublic's writers don't seem to have "got" the entire concept of hyperlinks. An article I was reading this morning mentioned at least 4 separate companies and 3 other organisations. Not one of them was hyperlinked, even though the body of the text actually included the domain name! It's almost as if SR hasn't quite understood that it's an online publication and that hyperlinking is "allowed". Even the review of muse.ie doesn't include a link to the site! What use is a site review without a link? Talk about frustrating!

One of my pet peeves is misleading advertising. In some cases it's a matter of reading the fine print. In other cases it's simply a matter of the advertiser "chancing their arm". At present this site, and several others I run, are displaying adds from a particular company that claim to offer "the best", "the cheapest" etc., etc. Of course they don't, but it does make you wonder about people's buying decisions. Are they really influenced by a company's own claims? Should companies sell themselves as being the "best" etc?

Kilkenny County Enterprise Board's blog is the latest addition to IrishBlogs.info. It's nice to see semi-states / official bodies getting online, even if they are using a free blog hosting solution. Maybe, once they're feeling comfortable, they'll move it over to either its own domain or make it part of their existing site...

The Miss Ireland 2007 site is online with a list of the finalists and their photos. Why do I mention it? Well, as my good friend Irene Gahan (no point linking to her blog!) is one of the organisers I've been invited to the event. What I'm going to do at the Miss Ireland final is beyond me, but I'd never turn down a night out in a tux :) I'm not too sure if I like the site's colour scheme. Maybe I'm not in their target market, but I do find the text really hard to read.

In the random topics category: Out of context they sound incredibly odd ....

Following on from a recent discussion on the Enterprise Ireland e-Business mailing list about hosting and domains I offered to draw up a comparison list. The list, which is available here, is of the top 10 or so companies as listed by WebHosting.info. The pricing listed is for the following items: The list is split into those with servers in Ireland and those without. I may do another more detailed breakdown of these, but the work I did this weekend is just a starting point. EDIT: Actually including the link might help! EDIT 2: At Keith's suggestion the columns are now sortable and a bit of CSS magic makes this all the more obvious. Thanks to Keith for the code (and links)

I just got an email from CDWow promoting a one day special: It's not clear whether you will be told that your order is one of the ones that is being credited or not, though I'd assume that some form of notification would have to be active .... I already placed my order for Scrubs season 5 yesterday, though I was able to save 1 euro thanks to Realex!

I posted a couple of times about my experiments with Amazon's contextual links program. Yesterday I was about to remove them completely from the sites that were still running them, but before doing so I ran a revenue report. Much to my amazement they'd actually resulted in some sales. Admittedly the sales weren't huge, but they were enough to make me think twice about removing them, so I've decided to leave them for the time being. The feedback I've had from visitors to the sites where they are enabled seems to be fairly consistent - make sure that they are not confused with "normal" links. I'd love to hear from people who are making "serious" money using the system, as I still think that certain types of sites could do really well with it (though I don't run any of those sites personally!)

When I was in LA earlier this year I finally got to meetup with Frank Michlick who I've been corresponding with for quite some time. He'd just left his job with Tucows to start a new venture, but was tightlipped about the whole thing. A few days ago he let the proverbial cat out of the bag, as the runup to SharedReviews.com's launch was made public. So what exactly is it all about? The underlying concept is quite simple. People buy based on recommendations from other people. Just look at the product review sections on Amazon and you'll get the idea. The problem for reviewers is that until now their reviews were free ie. they didn't make any money from writing them, while the ecommerce sites that published them were able to reap the rewards. SharedReviews.com takes the idea of user-contributed content and adds a shared income model and meaning. The "meaning" part of the equation is very interesting. As someone who doesn't like anonymous posts to mailing lists it fits in with my philosophy very neatly: As Peter, one of Frank's business partners, puts it: The actual details of the revenue sharing are currently a closely guarded secret, but Frank's team have provided a glimpse of the concept: However, during the beta you will be able to earn US$10 for every 5 reviews published up to a maximum of US$100 per person (they've got US$100k to spend during the test period) Since it's 2007 you can expect to see APIs and widgets galore in order to make posting reviews as easy as possible. If you signup now you can get in on the beta which will run next month

The winter ICANN meeting is being held in Los Angeles, California from 29th October to 2nd November. It will probably be in the Marriot Marina del Rey, though I the exact location doesn't seem to have been announced as yet. I'm praying that there's a discount rate for the hotel, as the list price is rather high!

Since I can't be in two places at once I wasn't able to attend DomainFest in Amsterdam this week, which is a pity, as the live domain auction produced a very interesting result. The domain poker.de was sold for a staggering 695,000 Euro! That's the highest price ever paid for a ccTLD domain (on the record).

I'll be at the IIA conference all day tomorrow with a few of our crew. I'll be chairing one of the breakout sessions in the afternoon, which should be quite interesting. We'll also have a stand, so you can pop by and say "hi" if you're around :) The only thing I'm dreading is the trip up in the morning, as everyone is saying that the "Mad Cow" just got madder!

I ordered the new Agricantus CD on Sunday night / early Monday morning from IBS I wasn't expecting it to arrive until tomorrow or possibly Friday, but it got here around 10 am this morning Wow! That is impressive!

The Optimus keyboard has been hyped a lot. For a product that you can't even purchase yet the amount of hype surrounding it is impressive. The price was announced a couple of weeks ago and it is equally impressive in a sort of "Oh my God you'll need a bank loan to get this" sort of way. The price for the keyboard (presumably excluding shipping etc.,) is $1564!! Ouch!

From time to time I like to give away stuff. Some people probably think this is a little mental :) I don't really mind .... Anyhow .... Today's little offer.. To celebrate our introduction of a nice new web frontend to MS SQL 2005 (see here ) we're giving away a couple of ASP.net hosting plans with MS SQL 2005 support. First 3 people who contact me via email (michele@blacknight.ie NOT my personal address please) will get one of these: Asp.net Standard Hosting Plan I'll even throw in a free domain (com/net/org/info/biz/mobi/eu/at/co.uk) EDIT: All gone now. For those of you who missed the freebie use the coupon code "blog07" to get a 20% discount on the same hosting package. The coupon will be valid for the next 24 hours

My mother emailed me earlier today to ask if I was going down to Cork to vote. It seems that I have a vote in both Cork and Carlow. I will vote in one place only, though I haven't decided which yet. However it seems that about half our staff have been removed from the register or have had to spend a silly amount of time sorting out their votes. The turnout at general elections is poor and nobody is expecting it to improve. If you make it awkward for people to exercise their right to vote the situation can hardly improve.

Agricantus' latest album Luna Khina has been released. There isn't a lot of information about the new album available, except for some text on the "official site" (there seem to be two official sites which is confusing matters!). Full text That's marketing speak. A few reviews would have been more helpful In any case ordering a copy of the CD was far from easy, as it isn't sold by any of the major online vendors. The only site that seems to be selling it is Internet Bookshop Italia

If you don't know who is visiting your site, Log based analysers, such as webalizer, sawmill and awstats work on the logs that your web server has collected. You can garner a lot of information from web logs (and other types of logs too), but you won't be able to get certain types of information easily. With the Javascript based analysers you don't even need to worry about your web logs, as the system reports to a remote server / service. While Javascript cannot detect every single aspect of the device browsing your site it can give you a lot more information about the browser being used, such as screen resolution etc., I've been using Awstats for a long time. It's handy and fairly intuitive. I've also been using Urchin since before its acquisition by Google and its subsequent transformation into Google Analytics. I loved Urchin, but had a lot of reservations about the system once Google made it a free for all (the entire system fell over). Over time they seemed to have got their act together, but the user interface was always a mess. Trying to find out relatively simple things like "referrers" involved a lot of clicking about and changing user types. It was anything but intuitive. Yes it is free, but as I've said more than once I don't mind paying for things that make my life easier and had been paying for Urchin before the Google move. In any case Google have just unveiled a new version of the interface and it is a significant improvement. For the first time you can get to the information you want quickly and easily: Compared to the old version: Of course, as I am a cynic, I'll probably discover that they've removed some key features, but for the moment I am impressed. There are some nice little touches like the option to compare traffic for different periods. So I can now see easily how much traffic I get on a site for a period this year compared to last year. The one issue with that part of the interface is that they've set it to use American date format. Hopefully that will be rectified, as it's quite confusing. You can also export to PDF now. The option to export to Word and CSV seems to have been removed or hidden on the main screen, though you can opt for those formats on the email report option. I'm still exploring, but I like what I've seen so far. It's a lot more intuitive, so you don't spend as much time clicking around randomly in the hope of stumbling on the report you're looking for. Other reviews: Peter Knight IQ Content

Firestats 1.2.4 has been released. It's not a major upgrade, but it does bring a few new features.

I spent part of my lunch break today checking the IE deleted list. As usual there's a very mixed bag of domains in there. There's some really nice generics (ie. one word domains) that would never be dropped in a gTLD. One that caught my eye is skype.ie. This was previously registered to a company other than Skype. I mentioned the co.uk challenge to skype.co.uk, and while there was no open challenge to the skype.ie registration I can imagine how it would have panned out. If you want to browse the deleted IEs have a look here

This is funny (strong lanuage)

It seems that a lot of people develop Ruby On Rails using Windows. I suppose that makes sense (to a point), so it was only inevitable that O'Reilly (or someone else) would get round to publishing a book / pamphlet on setting up a development environment. In this case it was O'Reilly with "Rails on Windows" - it's a PDF download, so you get to download and make the trees suffer later :)

Eircom have dropped their pricing on domain names. While this is currently appearing on the Eircom.net business site as a "sale", there is no indication of the duration. Their price on .ie domains drops from €99 to €67, which puts them almost €3 below both Novara and Hosting365, while their pricing on .com domains (€10) comes in slightly above that offered by some of the larger hosting providers. It's an interesting move, as they seem to be offering a form of online order form as well (although it doesn't display properly in Firefox). It's a pity they didn't test the site on Firefox! Compare what you see if you use Internet Explorer: with what I normally see: Kind of hard to read, wouldn't you say?

ICANN is currently seeking several candidates to fill roles on its various boards and committees: ICANN have extended the deadline for statements of interest to May 18th. Full details on the various positions and what they involve may be found on the ICANN site

I don't have an SSIA. For a variety of reasons I didn't get one. I might have thought that this was a bad thing, but now I'm thankful. Why? Anyone who does have an SSIA is being bombarded with "advice" on how to best use their "windfall". One of the Sunday papers ran a series of articles recently giving you plenty of options on how to spend, invest or use your SSIA money. When you combine this with all the other "advice" from the various financial institutions it becomes quite overwhelming. It's much simpler not having one :) NOTE: For anyone who doesn't know what an SSIA this site explains the concept quite well

Amazon (US) has been offering downloadable films and tv series for the last few months, although they are not available to Irish consumers. So what about Europeans? We can access hardcore adult video streams without any issues, but what about "tamer" selections? Earlier this evening DVD.it emailed me to let me know that they are now offering films from a mere €2.99. The selection isn't exactly amazing, but it's a good start. The only downside is that you need to speak fluent Italian! :)

The other day I went to a meeting of INEX - the Irish Internet Neutral Exchange - of which we are members. Apart from the standard updates etc., there were also a number of talks including one by Colm who now works for Joost. His talk was fascinating, as he explained not only what Joost is, but also how it actually works and what kind of network infrastructure they need to run it. I like the idea of being able to watch music videos, tv, film and more on my desktop PC legally, which is exactly what Joost allows you to do. Unfortunately the only way you can get into Joost at present is via invite, but luckily someone was kind enough to send me one, so I got in and downloaded the software yesterday. Once downloaded it was simply a matter of setting up a basic profile and then I could watch TV. The Joost system works on a peer to peer basis, so the more popular shows are a lot faster to stream than the less popular ones. I didn't spend too much time watching it last night, but I did get to see enough to be impressed. The picture quality is pretty good. While it's nowhere near DVD quality it's perfectly acceptable. Sound quality is fine, though anyone with a finely tuned ear would probably find the compression a little annoying. Downsides? At present the client software is only available on Windows and Mac.

Agricantus are set to play at Womad in Taormina, Sicily. I was at Womad in Cáceres several years ago and it was absolutely amazing. Now, how can I justify a trip to Sicily in July??

You can read about it here

Yes. Another shameless plug! We're doing a promo on .tv domains for the month of May. Why would you want a .tv domain? You can read all about all the advantages on our special .tv promo page

Nominet's AGM takes place today. All members can attend and if you can't make it in person it will be webcast (which is how I intend to follow it).

According to an article on eWeek, Dell are planning to offer Ubuntu preinstalled on some models from later this month (it doesn't say if it's a global decision or US market only). It seems that Mr Dell runs Ubuntu on his own PC!