Category: Uncategorized

Never mind the dog

This bizarre story in the London Daily Mail almost defies description. Usually, when postmen feel threatened by an animal, it is a dog, typically one of the larger breeds of dog such as a mastiff, pit bull, Rottweiler, Doberman, maybe even a Great Dane.

So Kenneth Ridge and his son Bradley were quite shocked when they got a letter from the Royal Mail threatening them with suspension of mail service. On 2009-06-06 a postal worker (for some reason, referred to as both a postman and postwoman in the article, not that gender really matters here) delivering mail to the Bradleys had been attacked by the their six-month-old, seven-pound kitten Illy.

From the article:

A Royal Mail spokesman said it always treats animal attacks on postmen seriously, however minor they might appear.

‘We record about 5,000 animal attacks on our postmen and women each year with the vast majority being dogs,’ he said.

‘The member of staff suffered a very bad cut to her hand while delivering mail through the letterbox of the address.’

Having been around cats as long as I have, I find the story plausible, but still very bizarre. Then again, I’ve never been to the UK, so it’s entirely possible the domestic felines are much fiercer there.

Unite behind Opera? Read the fine print

NPR reports on Opera Unite, the latest attempt by the alternative Web browser maker to implement what at first is touted as a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, primarily among users of its browser. What Unite actually is, however, is a centralized network run by Opera where all user content must go through Opera’s proxy servers, and users are subject to an odious terms of service agreement (TOS). A portion of the TOS agreement reads as follows:

By using the Services, you warrant that you will not upload, transfer or otherwise make available files, images, code, materials, or other information or content (“Content”) that is obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, threatening, or that violates any laws or third-party rights, hereunder, but not limited to, third-party intellectual property rights.

And further down, the rather ominous but predictable:

Opera has the right, in its sole discretion, to remove any content or prevent access to and/or use of any or all of the services, for any reason, including as a result of your violation, or alleged violation, of these Terms of service.

I think Opera really misses the entire idea of a P2P service here. The whole advantages of P2P are not having to depend on a centralized server and not having to deal with yet another set of restrictions on top of any imposed by one’s ISP.

This whole clause of the TOS smacks of censorship. Whose judgment applies to what is considered “obscene” or “vulgar” anyway? Where does Opera get off telling users what they can and can’t share?

Even Flickr lets you share such content willingly as long as you label it appropriately. Of course, there are some things that even Flickr will not allow at all; that’s where Freenet and hidden services such as Tor come into play.

If Opera had just said “Why trust Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube when you can just trust us instead?” it would at least be transparent what their service is about.

[edit 2023-07-03: fix formatting]

Tethering troubles for smartphone users

The latest story comes via Techblog, detailing the UK phone provider O2’s plan to charge iPhone users making “unauthorized” tethering use of the device (i.e. using the iPhone as a fancy, expensive USB cellular data interface). It turns out that AT&T has a similar policy in place, except authorized tethering is not available for purchase yet for AT&T customers.

A commenter on the Techblog post raises a very valid point: iPhone users–in fact, most likely all smartphone users, including non-iPhones and those on providers besides AT&T–already pay a significant amount for data service, and says an extra tethering fee is “double-dipping” on AT&T’s part. I think the serious laptop-based data network users will wind up buying an actual data interface device and that most see tethering as an emergency backup.

The notion that Apple or AT&T would want to restrict the freedom of its users yet again is disheartening, but unfortunately expected; there is nothing really prohibiting AT&T–or any other carrier–from doing what they are doing.

Google’s senseless squabble over $761

I recently found this Huffington Post story on Aaron Greenspan’s long-running small-claims lawsuit against Google. The story details Google’s appeal of the $761 judgment and is actually a follow-up to an earlier story about the original lawsuit.

Aaron runs a small company called Think Computer. At the time of the lawsuit Think Computer owned three domain names with Web sites showing Google AdSense ad banners. One of these domain names was for a product still in development. Everything went just swimmingly until the late morning of 2008-12-09, when Aaron received this ominous message upon logging into his company’s AdSense account:

Your AdSense account for this login is currently disabled. We recommend checking your email inboxes for any messages we may have sent you regarding your account status. […]

The only reason Aaron ever got for the disabling of Think Computer’s AdSense account was that Think Computer’s participation in AdSense “posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers.”

Aaron sued Google and was awarded the $721 owed to his company, plus $40 in court costs, in a hearing on 2009-03-02. The judge had some choice sarcastic words for Google’s paralegal, Stephanie Milani (this being small claims court, Google was barred from sending a full-fledged attorney to represent them):

I don’t think I have the power here in Palo Alto small claims court to make you reinstate his account, but I think you owe this young man $721. I think there might be money in Google’s treasury for that.

Given that that amount represented the going price for 2.2 shares of the company’s stock at the time of the hearing (trading closed at US$327.16 per share), I think the judge made a more than reasonable conclusion.

Later that week Aaron gets a request from Ms. Milani on behalf of Google for the taxpayer ID number for Think Computer, with the explanation that the accounting department needed it to write the check. All seems well and good. Except, Aaron never gets the check, but instead a form stating “[his] case had been ‘APPEALED’ to the superior court.'”

Yes. A $761 judgment against a company with a $132.72 billion market capitalization. Appealed. I mean, this is not McDonald’s getting sued for millions over one too many cups of hot coffee. For Google, this type of amount is quite literally equivalent to pocket change; the percentage is so small I’m not going to even bother doing the calculation.

Fast forward to 2009-05-22, the appeal hearing. Only now does Google reveal the exact reasons Think Computing’s AdSense account was disabled to Aaron: use of the forbidden phrase “pick a link” (which Aaron implies is mentioned nowhere in Google’s AdSense terms of service) and a technical non-compliance with the AdSense terms of service, in that one of the three domains was not actually an active Web site.

Aaron points out that the AdSense for Domains program was closed to the public for years, yet was opened up to the public only two days after Think Computer’s AdSense account was disabled. All Google really had to do was let Think Computer sign up for AdSense for Domains from the beginning.

Aaron hints that the appeal only came after he wrote the original article for the Huffington Post. If so, shame on you, Google, for an absolutely disgraceful handling of negative press. A better move would have been to either quietly pay the judgment. Even issuing a press release denying any wrongdoing but also stating the company is willing to abide by the judge’s ruling.

Even more damning is the line of questioning Google’s attorney engaged in at the appeal hearing (a bit long, but worth reading):

“What are these links on the site?” Google’s lawyer asked, referring to a printout of the web site in question that was part of my stack of paper.

“They’re links to essays I’ve written,” I responded.

“Do you charge for these essays?” the lawyer asked.

“No,” I said. Google’s lawyer tried again.

“Does your company charge for anything?”

“Yes, it charges for its products and services,” I said.

“But it doesn’t charge for these essays,” he half-asked.

“No, the company didn’t write the essays. I did, and sometimes I write essays for the Huffington Post, but I’m not compensated.”

“Do you sell essays to college students?” the lawyer asked.

“What?” I asked him, confused.

“You sell pre-written essays for college students, right? Like term papers?”

“No!” I said, finally realizing where he was going. “I don’t know where you would have even gotten that idea.” Little did he know that he had hit a sore spot, since I had recently written a book about education at America’s “top schools” and the many problems therein, cheating among them.

Though at that point I should have asked him how often he beat his wife, I was too shocked to think of it. Google has more access to information about people than virtually any company on the planet, yet despite its vast resources, it found it more prudent to fabricate disparaging innuendo about me before a judge. The sole purpose was to damage my credibility.

This type of covert badgering of the opposing party in a lawsuit is absolutely disgraceful on Google’s part. I’d like to know how this qualifies as “not evil” from a company which has a motto of “Don’t be evil.” Aaron has a suggestion for a replacement motto, which contains a profanity but can be paraphrased as “don’t be jerks.”

Google would actually gain some of my respect back if they issued a press release publicly stating “don’t be evil” is no longer the corporate motto in light of events over the past few years. While it would sadden me that the new, publicly-traded Google can’t hope not to be evil anymore, the candor and honesty of a large corporation would be a huge change from the mountains of PR double-speak and blah-blah-blah that usually fill the press releases of companies that have been Caught Screwing Up.

(All dollar amounts are US dollars.)

Mobile phone exclusivity agreements under fire

Reports from both ITworld and Infoworld detail an inquiry from four US Senators to the FCC, regarding the exclusivity arrangements wireless phone manufacturers (such as Apple and Palm) have been making with wireless telephone carriers (such as AT&T and Sprint).

This follows an FCC petition by the Rural Cellular Association asking the former to investigate these exclusivity arrangements.

The timing couldn’t be worse for AT&T, as the telecom giant is dragging their feet to support MMS and tethering, among other things. Apple’s other carrier partners worldwide have been able to handle this without issue.

However, it should be noted that AT&T is not the only wireless telephone carrier in the crosshairs of the Senators and the FCC. T-Mobile and Sprint are known to have made exclusivity deals as well, which would undoubtedly be subject to the same scrutiny.

All of this is definitely a step in the right direction towards respecting the freedom of wireless phone users, or in other words, the rest of us. It is long overdue, but there is still a lot of work to do once exclusivity agreements are seen for what they are: anti-competitive collusion.

There is still a lot of cleaning up to do after this, however. Most notably, it would greatly benefit the wireless telephone users if there was one and only one standard in use: GSM. CDMA needs to go the way of the dodo, the sooner the better; the network design takes a significant amount of freedom out of the hands of the user, where it belongs. I consider myself rather technologically literate, and I did not know this until fairly recently (about a year or so ago).

GSM networks and phones use SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards for authentication and identification (or how the network tells which phone belongs to which user). If one wants to change phones, one simply powers down the old phone, removes the SIM card from the old phone (usually hidden behind the battery to make it impossible to remove while the phone is powered on), inserts the SIM card into the new phone, and powers the new phone on. The carrier (phone company) never has to get involved.

On a CDMA phone, it’s nowhere near that simple. One has to take the new phone into the store and have a staff member key in a bunch of magic numbers, and make changes on the wireless network so the new phone is recognized as legitimate. The wireless telephone carriers have the control; they can choose not to let you use the new phone on their network at all if they see it fit. It is, in fact, in the carrier’s best interest to get the customer to buy a brand new phone instead of re-activating an older model.

I have been told that Sprint will not activate non-Sprint phones for their service (i.e. phones not branded for use with Sprint). I would not be surprised if Verizon (and any other CDMA carriers?) adopt a similar policy.

Fortunately, we may actually see the demise of CDMA in our lifetime. Verizon is already in the process of changing over to GSM; that would leave Sprint as the last national US CDMA carrier in existence.