What are Microsoft’s Options Regarding Yahoo?

Marc Andreessen has a fantastic post describing what Microsoft can now do to effect their hostile takeover of Yahoo. It’s a must read, well researched, and easy-to-understand post.

Filed in News.

DRM-Free, Self-Destructing DVD

A German company is reportedly developing a DRM-free DVD that will self destruct in 48 hours. The disc’s life is measured from the time it’s taken out of its vacuum-sealed package. The company also has a recycling program, and the discs themselves use fully recyclable plastic and stuff.

Will you buy a self-destructing DVD if it’s cheap and free from DRM? Why buy and not rent if you want to watch it only once? No matter how environmentally friendly the disc may be, I’m sure the manufacturing process will also have an impact on the environment.

Filed in News, Entertainment.

Seagate Fights Its Downhill Slide with Litigation

Another company that is slowly going downhill has decided to deal with it by litigation, rather than by improving its products and diversifying.

I’ve long used Seagate’s hard disks, among others, both as portables as well as internal drives. However, the newer portable hard disks are definitely of poorer quality than the ones I bought a long time ago. On the old portables, when they were plugged in, the drive was always available. On the new ones, if I use an application to access the drive after a long hiatus, the drive, which was on and spinning, will suddenly switch off, spin down, and then re-switch on again. All by itself. It’s very irritating, and adds two or three noticeable seconds to the initial time needed to access the drive.

With solid state drives on the ascendant, Seagate probably also sees the writing on the wall for its hard drives. Instead of innovating and perhaps buying into the technology, it has decided to use its patent arsenal as weapons against others manufacturing solid state drives. Their first target is the very small STEC, an SSD manufacturer.

I guess this spells the beginning of the end of another company. When companies try to fight the future in this way, instead of embracing it, it can’t be good.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Monster Cables vs Blue Jeans Cables

Monster Cables, a company supposedly delighting in sending litigation letters to competitors, sent one to Blue Jeans Cables, only to find that Blue Jeans was no pushover. Its president was a former lawyer, who quickly saw through what he saw as spurious claims designed to get companies who didn’t know better to quickly settle. According to the president’s letter, none of the Monster Cables patents even applied to Blue Jeans’ stuff - and some of the patents they cited were mutually incompatible with each other so that a cable violating all these patents at the same time was impossible to make. The claims made were also very vague - they didn’t even specify which of the cables violated which patent, and so on.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Network Solutions Hijacks Your Sub-Domains Too

Not content with stealing domain names from people who search, and being sued for it no less, Network Solutions has now been found to hijack their customers’ sub-domains as well. TechCrunch revealed that if you’re using Network Solution’s web hosting or DNS, Network Solutions will direct visitors to any unassigned sub-domains to a page loaded with their advertisements.

Why does anyone even use Network Solutions? Together with eNom and GoDaddy, they are probably the worst registrars in the world.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Creative on the Defensive Over X-Fi/Audigy Drivers Fiasco

After Creative took down a third party for fixing their broken Vista Audigy and X-Fi drivers, a huge public outcry resulted. Since then, Creative has hurriedly deleted their initial post and replaced it with a defensive note. You can still see the original post in this archive.

Anyway, Daniel K has responded in a Wired interview. I don’t know if it’s real, since it was posted on April Fool’s day, but it looks real. The update is that Creative has relented and allowed him to release the modified X-Fi and Audigy drivers minus some bits which allowed the drivers to be used on any sound card. As a result, he has posted the drivers to http://hosted.filefront.com/braziliantech/

Filed in News, Outraged, Software.

Arthur C Clarke Dies

Arthur C Clarke, one of my favorite sci fi authors during my childhood, has died. He was 90. He died at 1.30am (local time) on March 18, in Sri Lanka, where he stayed. MSNBC has a brief biography if you’re interested, or you can check up Wikipedia’s entry.

Clarke and Asimov were the earliest sci fi authors that I was introduced to as a child, and I gobbled up as many of their works as I could find. Those were the days before the Internet, so I could only rely on the local bookstore, which was pretty science-fiction averse. Amazon.com wasn’t around for me to order in those days. I can’t really pinpoint a particular story that I liked best, not even the Rama series or the 2001 books, but I generally enjoyed them all.

Now the last of the two of them are gone. I feel really old - all my childhood idols passing away. And I can’t account for this feeling of sadness. I didn’t know him personally at all.

Filed in News.

The Champion of Horrible Domain Registrars Strikes Again: GoDaddy Takes Down RateMyCop.com

GoDaddy, long-time champion of taking down domains of websites it doesn’t like, has struck again. This time it has taken down a police watchdog site, RateMyCop.com. As is its usual policy, there is no warning, and the owner wasn’t even informed. The domain is simply redirected to a page on GoDaddy.

GoDaddy is notorious for taking down sites whenever it receives the slightest complaint against it, and has a a long history of acting in this way. Maybe it was jealous that eNom was hogging all the bad publicity and wanted to return to the limelight slimelight.

If your domain is with GoDaddy, or you’re hosted there, better start thinking of alternatives. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to find a good registrar anywhere. But GoDaddy has proven itself to be the bottom of the barrel, with eNom competing to win that distinction as well.

Filed in Outraged, News, Web Hosting, Opinion.

Stage6 - The Plot Thickens: DivX Refuses $11 million Buy Out Of Dead Site

If you were to have a site that you planned to close, so that it will make you exactly $0 - zero dollars - will you refuse an offer from someone to pay $11 million for the dead site? The dead site in question is Stage6, a popular video sharing site that closed at the end of February this year. Well, DivX did exactly that. They ignored an $11 million offer to buy Stage6 five days before it closed. They’re still refusing it to-date - even though Stage6 is no longer generating any income for its founders and the offer is still open.

Is this weird or not? This continues the mystery that began with rumor that they were making millions from the Stage6 site at the time they closed.

Filed in News, Video.

New Wikileaks Exposé: eNom’s Domain Privacy Protection is a Sham

Wikileaks has revealed that eNom’s domain Privacy Protection “is a sham”. eNom’s lawyer was quoted as saying:

When complaints are received, we have a very low threshold for turning over the underlying information of the party. Basically anybody mentioning the word copyright or trademark or bought or anything can be sent the underlying contact information…

It gets worse than that - “Wikileaks has discovered a previously unreported eNom proposal from last year to bulk-release customer records to government agencies”. The quote below comes from Wikileaks:

eNom’s idea is to encrypt registrant’s confidential information and attach it to every public “whois” record. This would allow law enforcement, or anyone else with a decryption key, to obtain all confidential records automatically.

Readers of this blog may remember that eNom is the registrar that voluntarily killed a foreign company’s domain for doing something that was legal in their country and many parts of the world, without even a court order.

Wikileaks is calling for a boycott of this domain registrar. The registrar has also recently killed the wikileaks.info domain.

Filed in Outraged, Opinion, News.

Return of the Undead: SCO Still Lives to be the Scourge of the Earth

Now that SCO has had $100 million injected into it by a new sucker, it’s raring to strike back again at IBM and Novell. It will appeal the decision made by the court against it. It had tried to claim that Linux infringed on its copyright but was unable to show the court which lines of code in Linux corresponded with those from its Unix source. Later on, when it tried to take on Novell as well, Novell proved that SCO didn’t even own the copyright to Unix in the first place.

In the end, instead of winning a billion dollars from the lawsuit for their claim that IBM did not respect their intellectual property, it was found that they owed millions of dollars to Novell for not respecting Novell’s intellectual property.

SCO returns to the scene without its Head Vampire CEO Darl McBride, but I’m sure substitutes of such (low) caliber are not difficult to find in the underworld company. As they and their latest victim investor work together, I am sure they can manage to lose a few more million dollars.

Filed in Outraged, News.

IE8: What One Hand Gives, The Other Hand Takes Away

As I suspected in my previous post, the beta for IE8 is out. Although this is just a beta, Microsoft made some promises for the final IE 8 version. The commitment that will delight most developers is their aim to deliver full CSS 2.1 support in the final IE 8. At last! Nearly a decade late, but better late than never, right?

But wait, what one hand gives, the other takes away. Along with IE 8, they will create a new proprietary tag to implement their WebSlices crap. Actually, I don’t know if it’s a proprietary tag, but it sounds like it: ‘Developers can make parts of their pages “subscribable” with just a little mark-up’. I don’t know of any current mark-up that makes portions of a web page subscribable.

I guess Microsoft is trying to show that they can still innovate in their browsers. The sad thing is that when they “innovate”, they create proprietary things that lock people into their browsers, whereas when other browsers innovate, they don’t need to do that. For example, Opera brought many new features in web browsing to the masses: tabbed browsing (I don’t know which version, but I remember using tabs in Opera 5 back in 2000), mouse gestures, a built-in IRC client, a built-in BitTorrent client, a built-in RSS feed reader, sophisticated keyboard navigation, etc. Okay, maybe not the masses, but you get my point. Their innovation did not lock anyone to their browser, but improved the user experience.

What I’d rather Microsoft do is, instead of spending man-hours developing their new proprietary technology, to work on getting their browsers to render the standards correctly the way the other browsers have done for ages. I mean, CSS has been available for about 10 years now. It’s not like it’s new technology anymore. They’re holding back the progress of the web.

This is a modern world Microsoft, where no one person controls the standards. Get used to it.

Update (March 8 ): Looks like I have to eat my words above. According to the IE team, to make a webslice you just use a certain combination of standard HTML and IE 8 will interpret as something special.

Filed in Web Design, Software, News.

Foreign Company’s Domain Disabled for Allowing Foreigners Legal Access to Cuba

The domain name registrar eNom has apparently disabled access to Steve Marshall’s travel agency website at the US Treasury Dept’s behest. Marshall is an English travel agent catering to European travelers. The US Treasury didn’t like that he allowed travelers access to Cuba, so they requested eNom to shut down his website by taking his domain off the map. Which they did.

This move reminds me of the attempt of the Julius Baer Bank (of the money laundering scandal and censorship notoriety) to censor Wikileaks by taking the domain off the map. In this case, I fail to see how the US Treasury can have the authority to take out the domain name of a foreign company doing what is legal in his country. And they didn’t even go through a court and eNom just caved in.

Is it even legal for a domain registrar to do something like that? Isn’t this is breach of contract or something? Can anyone trust domain registrars situated in US anymore if any Tom, Dick or Harry can simply waltz in and disable a domain even if it’s of a foreign company doing legal things?

I’m disgusted at the registrar. But I don’t think the other registrars are any better. They cave in at the first sign of trouble. No, that’s not right - they cave in if you even look at them funny.

Anyway, according to NY Times, some of his sites are still accessible, such as cuba-guantanamo.com.

Filed in Outraged, News, Opinion.

Sanity Strikes: Microsoft Decides to Support Standards for IE8’s Standards Mode

My post title may seem like a “duh” statement if you don’t know the story of IE8’s dubious new meta tag, where Microsoft intended not to support the standards in IE8 but required web developers to add a special tag in their web pages to opt into the standards.

It looks now like Microsoft has reversed its decision, thankfully, so that those who want the non-standard IE7 rendering have to specifically opt for it. Developers who simply create pages to comply with web standards will automatically have IE8 render those pages correctly. Sanity at last. This style is in keeping with the web browser and standards traditions that have been established since the dawn of the Internet - where browsers automatically opt to render the page as compliant with the standards as it can. This sane method is also in line with the IE detection code that Microsoft developed in IE6 and later, where developers can target code designed for specific IE versions. Now you can target code for IE6 and IE7, and know that the standard compliant code of the rest of the page will be used in IE8. That’s the way it’s meant to be.

Filed in Web Design, News, Opinion.

Sorry Sir, You Are Already Dead. The Dead Can’t Pay Taxes or Have Bank Accounts

Due to a data input error by Social Security, many people have been declared dead who are not yet dead. It sounds hilarious, but the people Social Security “killed” don’t find it funny. Being dead has many side effects, including being unable to have bank accounts, receive refunds on taxes, receive social security checks and so on.

Filed in Humor, News.