The Net

Google has gone live with their new chat service. If you have a Gmail account, then you've got IM. If you've got Google IM, here is why you want to use it:

• It is open. It is based on the standard Jabber protocol, not some proprietary hack that needs to be reverse engineered for multi-platform support. You have total freedom as to which program to use. Use the one that Google provides or bring your own. My Gaim IM client is totally compatible. I just needed to setup a new account. Configuration directions are here.
• Communications are secure. Just enable TLS security in your IM client. In Gaim, it's under "more options" on the account setup panel. Plus, Gaim turns it on by default.

If I IM with you on some other network, I hope you'll consider moving to the open and secure Jabber server provided by Google. My screen name is chip550.

I wrote a letter to the Austin American-Statesman decrying the Texas HB 789 provisions to outlaw public Internet. You can read the letter in an entry I blogged over at Save Muni Wireless.

As is typical, the letter was edited prior to publication. Fortunately, the editing was light. The letter already was within their 150-word limit and, thanks to assistance from Adina Levin, was pretty well done. I know you are supposed to rail when the press changes (twists?) your words, but I must admit the changes improved the letter—mostly.

Their editing introduced one significant error. When I viewed the letter as posted to the newspaper's web site, a reference to State Rep. Todd Baxter was mistakenly edited to identify him as a "State Senator." The print version, fortunately, was correct.

I'd always assumed that the online version of a newspaper web site was an electronic duplicate of the print content. Now I see that's not the case.

It's distressing to see that a newspaper could introduce so significant an error into their web content. Aren't newspapers supposed to be held to a higher standard than, say, bloggers? Don't those standards hold regardless of whether the information is produced in print or online?

The traditional pressroom protocols worked fine—the mistake was caught before it went to print. It appears there must be different—and lesser—protocols for web content than there are for print.

I recently posted news of a DMCA takedown notice I received. The notice claimed illegal file sharing was occuring on a network that doesn't exist.

I never got around to responding to the MPAA about that notice. Nevertheless, I received followup correspondance from them last week. They said, in essence, "Ooops, we goofed."

Yeah, no shit.

The panix.com domain, operated by one of the oldest ISPs in the nation, was recently hijacked. The hijacking demonstrates that the system designed by ICANN is working exactly as designed.

ICANN's new domain transfer policy requires that a registrar must fulfill a transfer request unless rejected by the domain owner. This policy was introduced so that unscrupulous (and incompetent) registrars could not block domain owners from moving their domain elsewhere. Opponents feared the policy would make it easier to hijack a domain. Looks like that's been confirmed.

Fortunately, there is a fix. First, make sure your domain is with a registrar you trust. Then, lock it. If you log into the administration interface for your domain, you should see a setting called transfer lock or something similar. If you turn it on, your domain cannot be transferred away. If, later, you should choose to transfer it, just turn off the lock.

So, lock your domain. It's quick and easy, and it could prevent the theft of your domain.

This morning I received email from Hollywood. I wish I could report they want to turn my spam fighting adventures into a major motion picture. Alas, I was the recipient of a DMCA takedown notice.

A takedown notice is sent to a network operator by the owner of copyright material. It alleges that there is infringing material on the operator's network. The network operator may be afforded legal protection if they remove that material promptly. If they don't, they could have big trouble on their hands.

A takedown notice is not something I want to treat lightly. There is, however, a small problem here.

The MPAA sent me a takedown notice for a network that doesn't exist.

Today, a fascinating experiment is happening over at MetaFilter. As an April Fool's joke, the site has been replaced with a wiki. People are already scribbling all over the home page. The question is by the end of the day will it self-organize into something useful, or will it be a shambles?

As my contribution to the forces for organization, I added a HappyAprilFools page (to collect joke pages people find today) and linked it from the front page. Within about 45 seconds the front page was defaces and my link was removed.

I'm cheering for the forces of organization to win. If I was a betting man, however, I'd lay my money on the forces of chaos.

I've written several articles about the damage Verisign caused with their Site Finder product rollout. The current Verisign controversy is over a scam called "Wait List Service." Fed up yet? Go Daddy has started a petition to recall Verisign.

I spent the morning doing the "search" track at SXSW. First was Don Turnbull's panel on Revolutionary Search Technologies, followed by Marissa Meyer talking about Google.

I asked a question of the first panel, more related to information architecture than search. "Since RSS has become a fad, people have been rushing to move all their structured data into it—even if it's not an article for syndication. Is that a good thing?"

Scott Johnson fielded the question. He said a year ago he would have said stuffing everything into RSS was a bad thing. He's changed his mind. People are putting all sorts of things into RSS and it seems to be working. At the very least, it gets the information partitioned properly.

After the session, I introduced myself to Scott and explained that I was thinking about this problem in the context of event scheduling. I'd like to see organizations, say, around Austin be able to publish their event calendars in an XML format. Then people could aggregate a calendar of events from whichever organizations they might choose. RSS provides a powerful syndication mechanism for the project, but not the appropriate structure for schedules. Scott pointed out there is an RSS extension out there for scheduling. I was excited to discover that. This project suddenly seems more feasible.

I tagged along with the search people for lunch. Over ribs and chopped beef sandwiches, I mentioned one of my worst, current RSS annoyances. I stuffed the Austin Bloggers blogroll into an RSS feed, but it won't validate. The <author> tags for the blog entries sometimes are names or 'nyms and not full email addresses, which violates the RSS spec. I guess I'm not the first person to complain about this. Sam Ruby rolled his eyes and said, "Use <dc:creator>. It's a perfectly good tag." I'm not sure why I overlooked the Dublin Core tags, but that's the perfect solution to my problem.

Google Keywords: domain registrar, Dotster, spam, stupid gits.

Although not the cheapest, I've been satisfied with Dotster as a domain registrar. Then, they decided to spam the tech contact of a recent registration with unwanted email saying, "You have the .ORG domain, now buy the .COM domain." Stupid gits. First, nowhere did I ask them to spam me with advertisements. Second, if I wanted the bloody domain in the first place, I would have registered it.

Link: Consequences of Putting Wildcards in .NET and .COM.

Why are so many people pissed that Verisign broke the DNS? The initial anger was that a fundamental assumption of Internet operations was violated. How that manifests itself takes time to show. The linked page documents the wide swarth of damage Verisign has caused. And the list is still growing. I saw a mailing list message earlier today that dicussed the problems Verisign created for some applications that use SOAP.