Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:38:00 GMT
The Anonymous Vigilantes of Craigslist
I posted a job ad on Craigslist.org yesterday that got quickly flagged and removed. You don't get any indication as to why and ad was removed, just a link to a forum where you can post the details of your ad and get suggestions as to what you did wrong. I had no idea as to why my ad was pulled so I spent some time on that forum looking for clues. Nothing in the examples I saw there helped me understand what was wrong with my ad so I posted my ad to the forum and and awaited responses. I only received one comment about my ad. The comment was sarcastic and suggested that the compensation was only appropriate for a third world country. Maybe I'm cheap or out of touch with salary expectations (or both) but I do think that there would have been people interested in responding to the ad.
The responses to a number of other rejected ads seem to expose either personal or political agenda. People just didn't like the ads because they didn't properly address their political ideals, even if those political ideas were tangential to the posting. It became obvious that to post in any particular category and city, you have to abide by mostly unwritten "community standards". Who's standards are those "community standards"? It's not the community of people in that city interested in that category, it's the much smaller community that comb through Craigslist ads looking for ones that do live up to their standards. That to me sounds like a vigilante mob; the darker side of crowdsourcing.
I don't think that it has to be this way. I think there are technological solutions to improving moderation on websites like Craigslist. Meta moderation and sophisticated algorithms that websites like Slashdot.org, Digg.com, or even the use of more descriptive flagging, can be added to raise moderation beyond the level of vigilantism.
Of course, this may be the way that Craigslist wants their website to behave. It's certainly within their rights to do so. I actually see an opportunity here for someone to build a better Craigslist.
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT
Comcast is Making Email Unreliable
Among the many things that I look after, I manage the email for several hundred domain names. A large portion of these domains are for individual artist websites and thus have only a couple of actual email addresses. In most cases I just forward any inbound email to the artist's ISP or web mail email account. We don't filter that email in any way so everything, including spam, gets forwarded to the owners actually email address. We have avoided spam filtering because most people already have spam filtering on their email account so our filtering would not be beneficial for the recipient. I'm sure that the spam filtering efforts by GMail, Comcast, Yahoo, etc is much better that I'm going to be able to implement.
Over the last month or so we've started running into issues with Comcast and AT&T blocking all email from our servers due to the fact that they receive what they consider spam from our servers. We have gotten our servers unblocked but today, Comcast has blocked us again. So, to be able to deliver email to Comcast we have to "clean" all email that passes through our servers. We have no idea about what the triggers are for Comcast to block a server. The barrier is likely to be fairly low as we don't have all that much email traffic in total. So to keep our standing with Comcast, we will have to be brutal. We will have to consider any email that might possibly be spam as spam and bounce it. If only a tiny percentage of spam gets though our filters, we might get blocked again. The net effect is that some legitimate email will bounced.
While neither us nor our customers are doing anything wrong, Comcast is forcing us to not just tag potential spam as spam but forcing us to block it entirely. Essentially they are pushing their problems on us.
The net effect of all this is that Comcast will be forcing many smaller operations that process smaller amounts of email to find their own solutions to deal with the "Comcast" email problem. Each operator will find a way that will cost in aggregate thousands, maybe millions of man-hours of effort and will at a net, reduce the percentage of successful legitimate email deliveries. Spam has made email less useful but these efforts by Comcast will be adding some of the last few nails to the email coffin. I'd love to see email disappear but it won't until something better takes it's place.
Over the last month or so we've started running into issues with Comcast and AT&T blocking all email from our servers due to the fact that they receive what they consider spam from our servers. We have gotten our servers unblocked but today, Comcast has blocked us again. So, to be able to deliver email to Comcast we have to "clean" all email that passes through our servers. We have no idea about what the triggers are for Comcast to block a server. The barrier is likely to be fairly low as we don't have all that much email traffic in total. So to keep our standing with Comcast, we will have to be brutal. We will have to consider any email that might possibly be spam as spam and bounce it. If only a tiny percentage of spam gets though our filters, we might get blocked again. The net effect is that some legitimate email will bounced.
While neither us nor our customers are doing anything wrong, Comcast is forcing us to not just tag potential spam as spam but forcing us to block it entirely. Essentially they are pushing their problems on us.
The net effect of all this is that Comcast will be forcing many smaller operations that process smaller amounts of email to find their own solutions to deal with the "Comcast" email problem. Each operator will find a way that will cost in aggregate thousands, maybe millions of man-hours of effort and will at a net, reduce the percentage of successful legitimate email deliveries. Spam has made email less useful but these efforts by Comcast will be adding some of the last few nails to the email coffin. I'd love to see email disappear but it won't until something better takes it's place.
Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:25:00 GMT
The Internet Operating System (part 2)
My previous post about the Internet Operating System compared the Internet's structure and operation to a stand-alone computer. In this post I want to take that another step further.
I have the feeling that the state of the Internet now is much like stand-alone computers were just before the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981. A lot of the pieces of the PC revolution were there, but no one had quite put them all together. What the PC did was put control of serious computing resources into the hands of individuals. We are now waiting for the Internet analog to this revolution. I think that will happen when people control their data own on the internet.
That data control is not just in the "Data Portability" vision of being able to copy data from one walled garden to the next, but in the ability to store your data in a single datastore of your choosing and that you control completely. You can then allow selective access to to your data by external services that you want to use. I think that Amazon.com's S3 is the start of the kind of service where you could store data. Not that S3 has the complete functionality required to support this model but it could be based on top of S3. Having your own datastore is like being in control of the hard drive on your computer. You load applications and tell those applications what data to work with. In that same way, you could allow a web based service such as Adobe Photoshop Express, to access some photos in your datastore, do some online processing and after it's done, store the results back to your datastore. You can already do this with your photos stored on Flickr and a couple of other photo sites. Adobe's got the right idea but there is no open protocol for that would allow them to reach the photos on my own personal server.
In a similar vein, we have Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many smaller players fighting over control of "the social graph". The "right" way to handle this is to allow me to store and control my part of the social graph and then selectively allow other services to have access to that. There would no longer be a need to give some new tool your account credentials to your GMail, Facebook, and other services. Just point them at your datastore and tell your datastore what personal data that the service can have.
This model really is the holy grail social computing from a user's perspective. It's deadly to a social aggregator's perspective (such as Facebook) as there isn't much left for them once they the user gets rescued from their lock-in. I also see this as a significant component of the next version of the Internet Operating System.
I have the feeling that the state of the Internet now is much like stand-alone computers were just before the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981. A lot of the pieces of the PC revolution were there, but no one had quite put them all together. What the PC did was put control of serious computing resources into the hands of individuals. We are now waiting for the Internet analog to this revolution. I think that will happen when people control their data own on the internet.
That data control is not just in the "Data Portability" vision of being able to copy data from one walled garden to the next, but in the ability to store your data in a single datastore of your choosing and that you control completely. You can then allow selective access to to your data by external services that you want to use. I think that Amazon.com's S3 is the start of the kind of service where you could store data. Not that S3 has the complete functionality required to support this model but it could be based on top of S3. Having your own datastore is like being in control of the hard drive on your computer. You load applications and tell those applications what data to work with. In that same way, you could allow a web based service such as Adobe Photoshop Express, to access some photos in your datastore, do some online processing and after it's done, store the results back to your datastore. You can already do this with your photos stored on Flickr and a couple of other photo sites. Adobe's got the right idea but there is no open protocol for that would allow them to reach the photos on my own personal server.
In a similar vein, we have Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many smaller players fighting over control of "the social graph". The "right" way to handle this is to allow me to store and control my part of the social graph and then selectively allow other services to have access to that. There would no longer be a need to give some new tool your account credentials to your GMail, Facebook, and other services. Just point them at your datastore and tell your datastore what personal data that the service can have.
This model really is the holy grail social computing from a user's perspective. It's deadly to a social aggregator's perspective (such as Facebook) as there isn't much left for them once they the user gets rescued from their lock-in. I also see this as a significant component of the next version of the Internet Operating System.
Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:02:00 GMT
The Internet Operating System (part 1)
For many years, there has been talk about the coming "Internet OS". Given Google's current dominance on the internet, may feel that it will come from them and often call it "The Google OS" (not to be confused with Goobuntu. Google's internal Ubuntu based OS). The thing is, the Internet OS is already here and has been for roughly 30 years. TCP/IP is fundamentally the internet operating system.
In the stand-alone computer world, an operating system is the software that manages and ties together the hardware components, usually via hardware drivers. The operating system exposes APIs that allow application programs to interact with the hardware as well as the lifecycle of the applications themselves. Over time, computer operating systems have grown by adding layers over this fundamental "kernel". These new APIs provide rich, event driven presentation layers such as Windows and Mac OS. They also provide such things as file systems, security, etc.
Since the 70's, TCP/IP has been the operating system kernel that has tied together the various bits and pieces of the internet, (computers, switches, routers, etc.). This has allowed for a variety protocols to be developed that are roughly the equivalent of an operating system API. In fact, from a software point of view, most programs use the protocols via an API that implements the protocol. Once the TCP/IP kernel was created, a set of protocols developed on top of it. These are the APIs of the Internet OS. Those protocols started out with basic file transfers but soon added SMTP email, remote login, and more recently, the HTTP web, VoIP and to some extent, instant messaging. [There are lots of other protocols in there but most haven't become mainstream or, as in the example of DNS, we don't often think of them until they break.]
An operation system is not all that useful if it's just a bunch of APIs. You have utility programs and shells to allow people to interact with it and you have major applications such as word processors and spreadsheet software. In the same way, we have SMTP protocol clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird, HTTP clients such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera, etc. We also have lots of utilities such as ping, traceroute, etc that provide and direct interaction with TCP/IP.
So what we are living with now is Version X (no one has been keeping count) of the Internet. What people are eagerly awaiting is development of new protocols that will allow us to get beyond the "old" models of interaction on the internet that involve email and web pages and basic media viewing. We've gone a long way in creating great interaction models with these basic protocols. Web 2.0 has started to give us insight into what the future possibilities are but we need to take these ideas and encode them into internet scale protocols.
I've follow up this post with some ideas about what I see as the emerging, next generation technologies and protocols that will make up the Internet OS Version X+1.
In the stand-alone computer world, an operating system is the software that manages and ties together the hardware components, usually via hardware drivers. The operating system exposes APIs that allow application programs to interact with the hardware as well as the lifecycle of the applications themselves. Over time, computer operating systems have grown by adding layers over this fundamental "kernel". These new APIs provide rich, event driven presentation layers such as Windows and Mac OS. They also provide such things as file systems, security, etc.
Since the 70's, TCP/IP has been the operating system kernel that has tied together the various bits and pieces of the internet, (computers, switches, routers, etc.). This has allowed for a variety protocols to be developed that are roughly the equivalent of an operating system API. In fact, from a software point of view, most programs use the protocols via an API that implements the protocol. Once the TCP/IP kernel was created, a set of protocols developed on top of it. These are the APIs of the Internet OS. Those protocols started out with basic file transfers but soon added SMTP email, remote login, and more recently, the HTTP web, VoIP and to some extent, instant messaging. [There are lots of other protocols in there but most haven't become mainstream or, as in the example of DNS, we don't often think of them until they break.]
An operation system is not all that useful if it's just a bunch of APIs. You have utility programs and shells to allow people to interact with it and you have major applications such as word processors and spreadsheet software. In the same way, we have SMTP protocol clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird, HTTP clients such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera, etc. We also have lots of utilities such as ping, traceroute, etc that provide and direct interaction with TCP/IP.
So what we are living with now is Version X (no one has been keeping count) of the Internet. What people are eagerly awaiting is development of new protocols that will allow us to get beyond the "old" models of interaction on the internet that involve email and web pages and basic media viewing. We've gone a long way in creating great interaction models with these basic protocols. Web 2.0 has started to give us insight into what the future possibilities are but we need to take these ideas and encode them into internet scale protocols.
I've follow up this post with some ideas about what I see as the emerging, next generation technologies and protocols that will make up the Internet OS Version X+1.
Fri, 30 May 2008 21:18:00 GMT
Domain Tasting Games 1
I came across new "game" being played related to domain names. I was in a position to attempt to capture a domain that had expired and was about to be deleted. I had the .ca version of that domain and wanted to get the .com that was just about to be available. I employed a service that is designed to capture these domains as soon as they become available. I've done this before successfully so I was hopeful that this one would happen without a hitch.
Well the service announced that the domain had been captured by a registrar called "namevolcano.com". I knew a lot of the domain spammers capture newly deleted names to "taste" them for the revenue generation prospects. They usually drop these domains within 5 days so that they don't have to pay for them. I guess that they are looking for domains that will generate more revenue than the roughly $6/yr that they end up paying for registering them. So I was hopeful that I still might get a crack at the domain.
About 4 days after the domain was captured by "namevolcano.com", I got an email that was trying to "sell" me the domain, suggesting that the fact that I had the .net variant (I didn't have that) that I really should buy this .com from the sender, for the low price of only $557! I was careful at the time to not follow any the links in the email as that might have shown interest to the sender and they might have kept the domain. I didn't repsond.
About 12 hours after receiving the email the domain change hands to a registrar called "vibrant networks". After two days, I received a second email, substantially the same as the first, although reminding me that this was their second email on the subject.
After the second 5 day tasting period ran out, I finally captured the domain. I then went back and started checking the links provided by the email. This is how I got the $557 purchase number as it wasn't actually in the email.
A interesting fact is that the whois server for the second taster was whois.itimemarketing.com, which is the same domain where the link in the initial email was pointed at. So these two domain registrars seem to be related and were playing some kind of tag team game. I guess they figured that they needed 10 days to try to "sell" the domain to me.
I've use the words "game" and "sell" in quotes above as I actually consider this activity to something in the neighborhood of scam to extortion. Somehow think that this kind of activity is against the terms of service that registrars must follow to be accredited by ICANN. ICANN has really got to clean up the mess of scammers that are posing as domain registrars. These guys make the oil, gas and electricity market manipulators look tame by comparison in their brazen activities.
The one takeaway I can suggest from this experience is that if you run into a similar situation, don't do anything to raise the scammer's hopes of actually selling you the domain as I think that this will reduce your chances that they will just let the domain go and give you a real chance of getting the domain.
Well the service announced that the domain had been captured by a registrar called "namevolcano.com". I knew a lot of the domain spammers capture newly deleted names to "taste" them for the revenue generation prospects. They usually drop these domains within 5 days so that they don't have to pay for them. I guess that they are looking for domains that will generate more revenue than the roughly $6/yr that they end up paying for registering them. So I was hopeful that I still might get a crack at the domain.
About 4 days after the domain was captured by "namevolcano.com", I got an email that was trying to "sell" me the domain, suggesting that the fact that I had the .net variant (I didn't have that) that I really should buy this .com from the sender, for the low price of only $557! I was careful at the time to not follow any the links in the email as that might have shown interest to the sender and they might have kept the domain. I didn't repsond.
About 12 hours after receiving the email the domain change hands to a registrar called "vibrant networks". After two days, I received a second email, substantially the same as the first, although reminding me that this was their second email on the subject.
After the second 5 day tasting period ran out, I finally captured the domain. I then went back and started checking the links provided by the email. This is how I got the $557 purchase number as it wasn't actually in the email.
A interesting fact is that the whois server for the second taster was whois.itimemarketing.com, which is the same domain where the link in the initial email was pointed at. So these two domain registrars seem to be related and were playing some kind of tag team game. I guess they figured that they needed 10 days to try to "sell" the domain to me.
I've use the words "game" and "sell" in quotes above as I actually consider this activity to something in the neighborhood of scam to extortion. Somehow think that this kind of activity is against the terms of service that registrars must follow to be accredited by ICANN. ICANN has really got to clean up the mess of scammers that are posing as domain registrars. These guys make the oil, gas and electricity market manipulators look tame by comparison in their brazen activities.
The one takeaway I can suggest from this experience is that if you run into a similar situation, don't do anything to raise the scammer's hopes of actually selling you the domain as I think that this will reduce your chances that they will just let the domain go and give you a real chance of getting the domain.