The Reg leads with this. Even if UK-based digital threat analysis group SecureTest is the only organisation that confirmed they were doing the logging, it’s still extremely disturbing. Even more disturbing was that unamed security vendors apparently took infected and inappropriately protected PC’s to the show leading to a spread of the slammer worm. Not very impressive at all…
They may be a bit cagey about their popularity relative to the almighty Google but there’s no disputing that Alexa does a damn good job of analysing domain popularity. This is quantitatively different from analysis of link relevance performed by Google. Amazon’s search engine is often useful as a mechanism of finding sources of knowledge, opinion or just plain stuff that are unknown to you but have been tried and trusted by others. Google is better at finding the needle in the haystack. The breadth of it’s search is great at detecting that one useful link from an ocean of fractured factums.
I guess the feature that excites (no pun intended) me most about Alexa is their Web Search Platform. Released in December of 2005, this enables developers to roll their own search engines, providing them with programmatic access to over 5 billion indexed pages through a nifty web service API. This is more than just a web API to retrieve basic alexa searches in a standardised form. It’s enables the creation of search applications which operate directly on defined subsets of the Alexa search space, consume alexa resources and flexibly publish results. DB programmers can think of it as the coolest stored procedure mechanism in the world today.
Just reading Planet PHP and learned some interesting info about Google Calendar, which I started using last week. Apparently you can aggregate your calendar with friends/associates using RSS. Now that’s a brilliant feature. Using RSS as the event syndication mechanism is really smart. Now I can use my calendar to effectively schedule meetings and can also incorporate that scheduling into the tool of my choice using RSS. With the right applications RSS can be great people management tool.. I’m going to christen this “org casting”.
As the co-owner of one of those telecomms providers saying their call charges are lower than eircom’s basic rate I’m amused at their latest advertisements. I’m sure you’ve heard them. The ones that say that there are lots of providers who provide a basic rate cheaper than eircom’s but most eircom customers aren’t paying a basic rate anyway or words to that effect. It’s a bit cheeky. Ask yourself the following none-too-subtle questions.
Here’s the defintion of anti-competitive and monopolistic practices (which are outlawed by the EC). The reader can draw their own conclusions and I’ll draw mine!
“Anti-competitive business practices (including improper exploitation of customers or exclusion of competitors) in which a dominant firm may engage in order to maintain or increase its position on the market. Competition law prohibits such behaviour, as it damages true competition between firms, exploits consumers, and makes it unnecessary for the dominant undertaking to compete with other firms on the merits. Article 82 of the EC Treaty lists some examples of abuse, namely unfair pricing, restriction of production output and imposing discriminatory or unnecessary terms in dealings with trading partners.”
From reading the following very entertaining piece contrasting the US Sharman Act Section 2 versus the EC Treaty Article 82 it does appear that the behavior is fine from a US perspective but within the ECJ’s jurisdiction, perhaps more questionable, especially if unnecessary barriers are put in place to prevent the consumer from fairly moving to a new telecomms service provider. Generally if you try to get an Esat-BT a/c moved to a new house without an Eircom line, Esat will ask you to ask Eircom to install a line. Eircom will refuse unless you become an Eircom line-rental customer first. Is this reasonable? Under EU law, as there are arguably numerous other mechanisms for Eircom to charge for the line installation service (Esat or the consumer themselves) it would appear to be an anti-competitive practice. It constitutes behavior which makes the process of using telecommunications services from a provider other than the incumbent more difficult. Hence, it’s anti-competitive. That’s not what’s gotten my goat!
When we offer the FreeSpeech service to customers we have to get an original eircom bill from them in order to transfer the customer from Eircom to an outsourced MCI CPS service. A copy of the bill won’t do despite the fact that Eircom can easily check the validity of the bill and also the validity of the appended signature. It appears Eircom don’t trust us to look after the customer’s best interests which, if you think about it, is very funny indeed.