Internet::Observer::Archive::Year 2002

Cyber-squatting, cyber-security, cyber-crime, cyber-terrorism, cyber-warfare... how about cyberbegging? Yahoo started a begging category with four sites in 1996, but these days Yahoo calls it epanhandling. As of late December 2002, there are 63 sites in the E-Panhandling category.

Google says... "Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase."

Goto Froogle...

Almost on a daily basis I experience the Power of the Internet. It energizes me each time it happens. It is so appropriate we call it a Hyperlink.

The Internet is an enabler of group formation.

As per the Internet Society -- The Internet is For Everyone.

The Internet Observer is almost five years young. I'm looking forward to posting future Internet observations. Will we still be using the Internet ten years from now?

Learn all you can about the Internet and let's Keep The Internet Fun.

On Monday, 01 December 2002, I got spam messages (quantity 2) for Martha Stewart stuff.

On Tuesday, 02 December 2002, I got a spam message from the Phoenix Coyotes.

Martha... Coyotes... what will tomorrow bring?

Here is a quote copied from Yahoo!

" The average American will get more than 2,200 spam, or unsolicited bulk email, messages this year and 3,600 by 2007, Jupiter Research forecasts. "

Average American needs to be defined.

What If?

What if my employer asks me to send email messages that I believe are spam -- what position do I take? Employee or Profession? If I pick Profession, then I may not be an Employee anymore. Position taking can result in losses of various kinds.

[Bonus] Here is a spam email message that I received after making this posting.

   Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 06:40:05 -0800
   From: Love Finder <ptd@primetimedirect.net>
   To: THURMUNIT@INFICAD.COM
   Subject: View Photos of Singles in Your Area

The Republic article stated that since January of 2002, the Sheriff's office has "investigated about 127 computer-related crimes and 800 complaints about Internet related fraud."

This news story is a story for primarily two reasons: 1) criminals are everywhere; and 2) most people who are users of the Internet are not Internet literate.

[Item] WiredNews::Big Retailers Squeeze FatWallet -- Retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and so on are using the DMCA and copyright law to block websites from posting upcoming sale prices before they are published by the retailer.

A blind person who uses a screen reader to browse the web is suing Southwest Airlines because he couldn't use their website to make a reservation. Man Sues Airlines for Fare Access [WiredNews::Politics]

I know that for my employer (the Maricopa County Community College District) web accessibility is a huge issue. To help make the web usable by all, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

[Side-bar] At this year's 2002 CPSR Conference, a person from the W3C's WAI committee gave a presentation and they mentioned that some people browse the web using their eye-brows instead of a mouse and keyboard. Her presentation reminded me that I am illiterate when it comes to how the disabled use computers.

[The Good] On Monday, 21 October 2002, a cyberattack took down 9 of the 13 root servers of the Internet, but the attack went unnoticed by the majority of Internet users for the following reasons.

• the design and implementation of the Internet does not depend on any single server
• measures were taken to protect against the attack
• the attack lasted for a short duration

The denial-of-service attack flooded targeted servers with 30 to 40 times the usual amount of traffic, causing seven to fail and two others to fail intermittently. [source::CNN.com]

[The Ugly] George W. Bush speaking about the Internet. I made the mistake of turning on Fox News to get an update on the sniper and there was U.S. President George W. Bush talking about the Internet. Here are some quotes that I jotted down.

	75% of our children are online.

	We've got a widespread problem.  Internet porn 
	is available to any child.

	The Internet is a tool that lures kids to danger.

	Every day we learn more about the evil on the Internet

[The Evil] The Internet was subjected to a cyberattack. [see The Good]

Article from CNN.com
DNS Root Servers
Root Name Server Operational Requirements [RFC::2870]

[The Good] The Internet Society (a group of 11,000 engineers and other networking experts) has been awarded control of the dot-org TLD (Top-Level-Domain).

There are approximately 21.2 million dot-com names. Dot-org, at 2.3 million names, ranks behind dot-net, Germany's dot-de and the United Kingdom's dot-uk.

[The Bad] Residents of north Phoenix have warned that they are going to take pictures of people who visit the newly opened Castle Megastore. They are going post these pictures to the WWW for the entire world to see. These people are hoping to scare away those who are timid soles who are unable to stand-up for the their freedoms.

Note: I am planning on visiting this Castle in order to take pictures of those taking pictures and my pictures will be posted to AzFoo.net.

[The Evil] The person suspected of an idiotic bomb attack in Finland may have used an Internet chatroom to learn about home-grown explosives. Other terrorists (e.g. "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, and members of the al Qaeda network) have admitted to learning about bombs from the Internet.

The terrorist acts are evil in and by themselves, but these type of activities can result in increased Internet regulation. In other words, evil gives birth to more evil, which in this case is the loss of our computing freedoms.

Many web developers dismiss Nielsen's teachings because they border on the simplistic, but Nielsen understands how humans interact with machines that understanding is crucial is designing and developing usable computing systems.

Here is a short list of recent Alertbox article worthy of review.

• Email Newsletters Pick Up What Websites Leave Off [30 September 2002]
• Let Users Control Font Size [19 August 2002]
• Top 10 Guidelines for Homepage Usability [12 May 2002]

[Extra] Yahoo! to Yahoo! for having a profitable third-quarter on a good increase in revenues. [ GDTStocks::Yahoo Makes Money]

[Item] ICANN may take away Verisign's (Network Solutions) ability to register dot-com domain names. ICANN's actions are " based on a broad, long-standing pattern it (Network Solutions/Verisign) has exhibited of failing to abide by its agreement to provide complete Whois data, and to take steps to correct reported inaccuracies in that data." Steps to Improve Whois Data Accuracy [ICANN.org]

[Item] I register my domain names ($10-$12 per year) and do whois look-ups using Gandi.net

A weblog is an easy-to-update online journal, with the most recent entries at the top and older entries below that, in reverse chronological order.

A weblog can be a useful tool for personal knowledge management as well as for public communication.

Personal knowledge management is what I have been doing with the Internet since 1996. And since you are reading this, then you see that I also use the Internet for public communication.

What's a blogger?

"A brash young police detective joins forces with a beautiful, ambitious Department of Health researcher to find the answers behind the mysterious deaths of four people who each died 48 hours after logging on to the Internet site FearDotCom.com."

[Update] China has restored access Google, but is still blocking some content it deems politically taboo as part of a media crackdown ahead of November's Communist Party congress. The Altavista search engine remains blocked.

[Item] Speaking of Google... it is the subject of this recent Forbes.com cover story Google: All the Right Moves

[Item] How many people in the world use the Internet? Approximately 580.78 million (about 9.6% of the total world population). Interesting observation: Europe has more people online than Canada and the USA combined (185.83 million versus 182.67 million). How Many Online?

[Item] Quote from EDUCAUSE.

"A federal judge threw out a lawsuit filed by British Telecommunications (BT) claiming a patent on Internet hyperlinking technology. The company had sued Prodigy Communications Corp., saying that Prodigy had violated BT's patent when it used hyperlinks. A spokesman from Prodigy, now a part of SBC Communications, said that because Prodigy was the first commercial ISP in the United States, it was chosen as the target of BT's patent claim."

The 02 September 2002 BusinessWeek online cover story starts with the following warning:

"Warning: You are about to enter the dark side of the Internet. It's a place where crime is rampant and every twisted urge can be satisfied. Thousands of virtual streets are lined with casinos, porn shops, and drug dealers. Scam artists and terrorists skulk behind seemingly lawful Web sites. And cops wander through once in a while, mostly looking lost. It's the Strip in Las Vegas, the Red Light district in Amsterdam, and New York's Times Square at its worst, all rolled into one--and all easily accessible from your living room couch.

The article ends with the following paragraph.

"There will always be a seedy side to the Internet, just as there is one to every city. Cleaning up the Net will take vigilance and a slew of legal and public actions. For now, though, the Web has too many dark and dangerous corners and too little law and order."

The Underground Web

[Extra] Some websites have interesting policies when it comes to other websites hyperlinking to them. DontLink.com is a website that documents what it calls "stupid linking policies." Here is a hyperlink to Don't Link to Us.

The following was copied from the Electronic Frontier Foundation Action Center.

Representative Howard Berman has introduced legislation that would grant copyright holders near-immunity from the law while attacking a citizen's computer. The bill protects copyright holders from legal action stemming from denial-of-service attacks on people whom they suspect of using material in an unauthorized way on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Exempting a single industry from civil and criminal penalties is unprecedented. This kind of vigilantism is explicitly prohibited by law; Rep. Berman wants to make sure that the law doesn't apply to copyright holders.

I've liked Dylan Tweney's stuff for a long time. These days he gets articles published by Business 2.0. In his 08 August 2002 article, Tweney claims H.R. 5211 is Carte Blanche for Hackers

The 05 July 2002 Security Watchdog posting contained this hyperlink to a 25 June 2002 press release: Berman Announces Legislation to Foil Peer To Peer Piracy.

"The U.S. Senate has begun upgrading its offices to Microsoft Outlook, replacing its 12-year-old system. The House of Representatives began replacing its aging email system in 1996, but the Senate until now continued to use 'cc:Mail,' a program developed in 1985 and in service at the Senate office since 1990."

[Extra] I guess my subscription to Yahoo Internet Life is dead. Citing decreases in advertising revenues and market share, Ziff Davis Media is ending publication of Yahoo Internet Life. I was one of more one million paying subscribers. [ More... from ZDNet.com]

[Extra] Here are a couple of articles by Tim Berners-Lee concerning Links and Law and some dangerous Myths about Links.

[Item] Simson Garfinkel writes that we should Declare Email Independence. [Damn, the days of the free Internet just keep disappearing -- now you have to pay to read some of the articles at TechnologyReview.com.]

[Item] Same query (search) string submitted to different search engines results in little overlap. From SearchEnginesShowdown.com comes Different Search Engines give Different Results.

   kill -9 ThurmUnit
   rm -rf ThurmUnit
   userdel ThurmUnit
   sync; sync; sync
   exit 1  # 1 implies failure

The National Public Radio has a website [and I like it], but they are sensitive about other websites hyperlinking to it. NPR -- Hyperlink Permission Form. [What a form!]

I checked out the FBI.gov website and encountered the following tidbit about Mildred C. Parsons.

Mildred C. Parsons will retire from the FBI on June 28th, after nearly 63 years of dedicated service to her country. At age 88, she is the longest continuously serving employee in the FBI. Significantly, "Millie" has never taken a day of sick leave in her 62 years and nine months with the FBI. [ More... from FBI.gov]

FBI... Federal Bureau of Investigation
FBI... Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity

[extra] PixelSurgeon::Interview::Jakob Nielsen
Here's a quote: " I hate difficult technology. It annoys me on a personal level to see designs that violate usability principles that we have documented years ago. Every time this happens, which is several times per day, I get motivated to continue my work and evangelize usability even harder. Computers don't have to be this difficult."

[extra] Andreessen Interview: Browser Wars Aren't Coming Back
Here's a quote: " For mass market adoption (open source) is clearly not compelling yet or (Opera) would have more adoption than it does. Other things are more important. Bundling with the (operating system) is clearly more important for adoption. When you're competing against something that's both being (promoted) by a monopoly and is free, good luck competing, have fun. My attitude is, everybody should try competing with Microsoft once in their life. Once."

[extra] FAST's AllTheWeb.com Larger Than Google
2,095,568,809 webpages versus the 2,073,418,204 (that is approximately 1.06%). 1% of a large number is also a large number. The FAST search engine has indexed approximately 22 million (22,150,605) more webpages than Google. [When it comes to search engines, I'm not sure size matters.]

[Extra] Here come the .kids.us domains. To facilitate the creation of a new, second-level Internet domain within the United States country code domain that will be a haven for material that promotes positive experiences for children and families using the Internet, provides a safe online environment for children, and helps to prevent children from being exposed to harmful material on the Internet, and for other purposes. H.R.3833: Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002

"Google is the reigning champ of online search," AOL Time Warner co-Chief Operating Officer Bob Pittman said in a statement.

[Extra] In his latest book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, Lessig argues that imminent changes to Internet architecture plus court decisions that restrict the use of intellectual property will co-opt the Net on behalf of Establishment players -- and stifle innovation. Lawrence Lessig Interview with BusinessWeek.com [29 April 2002]

VeriSign shares plunged nearly 45 percent to $10.11 on the news and it was most actively traded issue on Nasdaq. And of course, Verisign is now the subject of a shareholder lawsuit accusing the company of misrepresenting its prospects and concealing improper accounting activities. [ More... from Wired.com] (nasdaq: VRSN)

[Extra] ICANN is looking for somebody to take over dot-org administration. If you want to get a dot-org domain name, then now is probably a good time to get one. In the future, you may have to prove that you are an organization in order to obtain a dot-org domain name. [ ICANN Announcement]

Many consider Vinton Cerf to be one of the fathers of the Internet. He has been actively involved in its development since the 1960s. Cerf has authored RFC 3271. Here are some quotes from his RFC.

• The Internet is in its 14th year of annual doubling since 1988. There are over 150 million hosts on the Internet and an estimated 513 million users, world wide.
• It is sobering to realize that only half of the Earth's population has ever made a telephone call.
• It is estimated that commerce on the network will reach somewhere between $1.8T and $3.2T by 2003. That is only two years from now (but a long career in Internet years).
• The Internet is proving to be one of the most powerful amplifiers of speech ever invented. It offers a global megaphone for voices that might otherwise be heard only feebly, if at all.
• Be thoughtful in what you commit to email, news groups, and other Internet communication channels - it may well turn up in a web search some day.
• Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if Governments restrict access to it, so we must dedicate ourselves to keeping the network unrestricted, unfettered and unregulated. We must have the freedom to speak and the freedom to hear.
• Internet is for everyone - but it won't be if its users cannot protect their privacy and the confidentiality of transactions conducted on the network.

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.

[Item]
These days I suspect the Internet is not at the top of the Vatican's list of priorities, but earlier this year the Pope spoke about the Internet. Note: the Vatican has its own two-character country code (dot-va). The Vatican.va website contains the following pontification posted to it: Ethics in Internet.

[Yahoo! Extra] Yahoo! continues to foo me off. Don Henley was in Phoenix to put on a show. I like Henley's music. I saw Henley in concert a few years ago and enjoyed it completely. Henley returned a year (or two) later and put on the exact same show (boring). Prior to Henley's recent show (which I did not attend), he was asked what new music he will be doing -- his response was as follows: None, because if I do new music, then somebody will tape it and it will show up on the Internet. As a result, my new music won't generate any money for me.

Now, Henley's old group -- the Eagles -- have announced they are touring and Yahoo! is helping promote the concerts. [Hey Eagles, Yahoo! (along with Pepsi) during the 2002 Super Bowl also promoted Britney Spears.]

I have been pro-Yahoo! for a long time. I've written lots of stuff about Yahoo! I've used Yahoo! audio clips in my Internet classes. The [cszero] YahooGroup was started in October of 1999 [it was an eGroup at the time]. I find my.yahoo.com a useful application. Yahoo's website is huge and well designed. I think it is okay to have thurmunit@yahoo.com as a secondary email address.

From a computing perspective, Yahoo! is defaulting the wrong way. This requires unsolicited, uncompensated work on my part. I have to allocate my time to undo something that I didn't do in the first place. If I want a service, then I will seek it out; otherwise, leave me alone.

I'm mad at Yahoo!

[Good Stuff] I found this article on My.Yahoo.com -- Mozilla poised for revival.

I don't remember when, but Wired News wrote an article about new search engines under development. Teoma was mentioned so I added a hyperlink to it on the ThurmSearch webpage for later review.

Time passes along.

Wired News has another story about it. Teoma is going to explore the dot-com environment. Google started as a dot-edu.

I announced it to [cszero] using an obscure route. April Fools on Google is posted. Follow-up posting on Google and animal activists. I indicate that this could destroy Google. In that case I better have a backup search engine -- maybe Teoma?

Now I receive (in plain-old-text) the following from U.C.L.A. Professor Phil Agre.

	new search engine
	http://www.teoma.com/

Agre's posting confirms to me that it is time for this posting; therefore, I test Teoma by searching for Thurman.

This is a copy/paste of the first page of search results Apr 3 07:08:11 MST 2002.

  Top 200 of about 41900 matched (Showing 1-10)
  1.  Rep. Karen L. Thurman, 5th District Florida
  Rep. Karen L. Thurman, 2224 Highway 44 West, Inverness, 
  Florida Phone: 1-800-833-4352 Statement on Terrorism 
  Emergency Information Update... 
  http://www.house.gov/thurman/

  2.  ThurmUnit: Computer Programming Resources by G.D. Thurman
  Home page for Gerald (G.D.) Thurman Choice lists containing 
  links to all parts of the ThurmUnit website. ... G.D. Thurman 
  email:... 
  http://www.inficad.com/~gdt/

  3.  THURMAN Surname Repository
  Thurman & related Surname genealogical repository with over 
  47,000 individuals for on-line viewing in six major databases. ... 
  THURMAN's QUEST... 
  http://www.megabits.net/~lthurman

Wow... where's Uma?

I like Teoma. I added a hyperlink to it on ThurmLinks.

[Internet Search:  Google | ... | Teoma]

[Item -- Google Succumbs to the DMCA] Google has eliminated hyperlinks to the website http://xenu.net because of the DMCA. Here is the first paragraph of an email message Google sent to the censored website.

We removed certain specific URLs in response to a notification submitted by the Religious Technology Center and Bridge Publications under section 512(c)(3) of the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Had we not removed these URLs, we would be subject to a claim for copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URLs included in that notification are attached to this email. [ complete email message]

It appears as though Google has stopped filtering Xenu.net because it shows up as hyperlink number four when a Google search for scientology is executed.

[Item] Two catholic priests, two cops, and so on have been arrested as a result of the FBI's Candyman operations. Operation Candyman was a child porn crackdown that the FBI was able to conduct thanks to Yahoo email operations. [How dare the FBI dub one of their operations Candyman; Candyman is one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs.] [Yahoo Search: operation candyman]

[Item] AZIPA posting:

   Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 10:40:45 -0700
   From: "Paul ????????" <?????????????@hotmail.com>
   Subject: ISO:  Free web counter

   Azipians,

   Looking for a web counter I can put right in an web page 
   (javascript or ?) that keeps basic statistics (hits) and 
   perhaps origination domain (aol.com, etc...).  There are 
   a few on volition.com, but I'm looking for real-life 
   experiences.  Thanks, -Paul

Doctoral dropouts from universities in Silicon Valley are returning to school due to the dot-com correction. Example: Stanford has seen a 40% jump in graduate school applications. Professors at schools like Stanford and UC-Berkeley are happy because now they have students to help them do their research. According to the San Francisco Chronicle Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, is considering returning to Stanford. Brin was quoted saying, "The funny thing for me is that I show up on campus and people assume Google has gone out of business. So I have to be inconspicuous."

[Item]
From the Great Falls Montana Tribune comes the story of a high-school student who created a website containing pictures and bios of his school's "hottest 10 freshman girls." [More... Declan McCullagh's Politech]

[Item]
Last semester there was an Internet Observer posting about the University of Maryland and the TerpIdiots.com website [school versus students]. Thanks to 'Greg' I learn that this story continues. [ TerpIdiots.com becomes IdiotsWontStop.com]

[Item]
Every year around September a new group of Computer Science students begin learning about Usenet. And every September the signal-to-noise ratio loses signal and become noisy. [More... Eric Raymond laments about Septembers]

This decision forced me to find another posting, but the Internet Observer works-in-progress directory is full of stuff to pick from. Here is a directory listing. I can't decide what to pick; therefore this week's posting is a summary of postings to come.

• Tempe wanna-be council member becomes a cybersquatter and the Arizona Republic thinks that is okay.
• Brad Templeton may be a future ThurmDreamTeam member. [The rec.humor.funny Usenet archive.]
• John Perry Barlow may be a future ThurmDreamTeam member. [EFF co-founder and Grateful Dead lyrist.]
• Bob Bremer may be a future ThurmDreamTeam member. [The father of the escape sequence and maybe the true owner of the hyperlink.]
• Email usage after 911 explodes.
• Local cops roll their own porn websites.
• New ThurmUnit object: ThurmOogles
• Digital Angels [installing computer chips into humans]
• PayPal.com goes public and is immediately hit by class-action suits.
• EnronOwnsTheGOP.com is told to shutdown or else risk being sued.
• Olympics.com website scores low when it comes to usability. [Jakob Nielsen]
• September means back to school and that means a new round of junk posted to Usenet. [Jargon Dictionary]
• British Telephone continues to claim it has a patent on the hyperlink.
• RFC 3098::IETF::How to Advertise Responsibly Using E-Mail and Newsgroups
• WiredNews::Business::SEC to Naive Investors: 'Gotcha'
• "Terrorists Use Internet" so says the NIPC. [National Infrastructure Protection Center]
• Beaner's Heaven [a memorial website for a dog].
• Drugstore.com getting ready to turn a profit.
• Protect yourself using WPOISON.
• The pope speaks out about the Internet.

Death... a topic that I've been writing about, but keeping private for future postings.

While writing about death I stumble across the following hyperlink that leads us to an excellent resource for Learning About Computing.

The Obituary Page says it was last updated on 22 February 1999. This posting is being written on 21 February 2002 -- The Obituary Page has not been updated for three years. [The Obituary Page is fetched from a server in the Computer Science Department at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UofNcl).]

This U of Ncl class looks similar to the CIS166 I do at SCC: Comp Sci, U of Ncl: CSC820 Internet Programming 2001-2002

• Google hates webpages that do pop-ups almost as bad as I do. A computer user who uses a browser program should not have to down-load and install programs that try to stop pop-up windows from happening. Here is a Google publication that explains why there are No Pop-up Ads on Google.
• Google is offering $10,000 to the person or team that can come up with the best software program for compressing, organizing, linking or otherwise manipulating a mass of raw search data. I suspect Google will end up getting a great program written for them as a result of the First Annual Google Programming Contest.
• Google now has a section on its website that indexes several news sources in real time, aggregating the top stories. They provide a collection of hyperlinks that are the Google News Headlines.
• This is not a Google resource, but it Google related. Googlewhacking is a contest to find that elusive query (two words - no quote marks) that results in a single, solitary result.

"Google's second-most queried search term during 2001 was 'CNN,' which raises the question of why so many of Google's users are choosing Google to find CNN rather than just typing in www.cnn.com. The most compelling explanation is that many believe Google has a better chance of finding correct URLs than independent guesswork about a Web site's domain name. This proclivity for Google is tempering the frenzy for registering domain names, especially compared to two years ago when companies believed it was essential to own domain names semantically related to their business activities.

[Extra] EDUCause::TheChronicle::DailyNews::01/29/2002
Anonymous Professor A federal judge ruled last week that a web-hosting company has until 08 February 2002 to reveal the identity of a professor who has anonymously published a website criticizing administrators at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

When Netscape was just Netscape, it didn't have the size to do serious legal battle with Microsoft, but AOL Time Warner is huge company (about $40 billion per year in revenue versus $30 billion for Microsoft). Although Microsoft will have to spend more money defending itself again AOL Time Warner than some small start-up company, it can easily recover these costs by collecting more money from those of us who are stuck using their products.

CNET.com provides this article about Industry reaction to the lawsuit. Here are a couple of quotes from the CNET.com article.

Eric Raymond said he opposes the lawsuit and all suits that arise from antitrust issues. "I'm opposed to antitrust law in principle," Raymond said. "Markets solve these problems. The government doesn't. Antitrust law gives governments more power than they should have."

Raymond continues by saying "This puts me in the peculiar position of more or less siding with Microsoft, or at least not against them. I'm an open-source guy and think the things Microsoft has done are scummy and should make consumers angry and should cause wholesale rejection of Microsoft's products. But I don't think the government has any business meddling in this market or any other."

Amazon.com announced its earnings on a day that was generally a downer for high-tech stocks (.e.g. Sun Microsystems down 10%, Cisco down 4%, Intel down 5%, Oracle down 3%, Microsoft down 2.5%, Dell Computer down 5%), but its stock ignored the masses and climbed 24% to close at $12.60 per share.

Former ICANN Chairwoman Esther Dyson agreed with the analysis of Netcraft that the end of the dot-com boom is what has led to a reported decline in domain name registrations. Dyson noted that the dot-com fizzle has also led to a drop in the perceived value of generic dot-com names. "People aren't paying $5 million for just the name pets.com anymore," said Dyson. Dyson believes that these decreases in value will benefit the integrity of the DNS system as a whole, and she said that the current domain name trade has "a sense of sleaziness that I think is a pity." Ex-ICANN President Mike Roberts said that during his tenure at ICANN roughly 33 percent of registered domain names lacked websites, and what is happening now is that many unused TLDs are not being renewed.

The EDUCause posting indicates that just maybe domain names by themselves should not be able to support a variety of industries, but then Verisign comes along and buys the dot-tv for $45 million. [ press release]

Because of the constant evolution of the Internet this document could be updated every minute of every day, but that would result in way too much information. The primary objective of the Internet Observer it to open our eyes to just how expansive the Internet is and to help us realize that like-it-or-not the Internet is here to stay. We are becoming a "networked" society and if you use the Internet, then you are a member of the cyber-community. If users of the Internet are Internet-literate, then the Internet will be a better place for all of us to work and live.

The Internet Observer was started January of 1998. As of 01 January 2002, there have been 179 postings to this resource. Reviewing archived Internet Observer postings is an interesting way to get an Internet related history lesson.

Ralph Nader quote:

"The technology of the Internet is far ahead of any legal framework, any ethical framework or global framework."

I've been collecting spam email messages, but they are wasting space on my disk drive.

If I wrote a Programmer Oath, then a programmer would have to try to do the following:

If my employer asks me to send spam, then I say no. If my employer says to send the spam or risk being fired, then I say I won't do it. If my employer fires me for not doing it, then I find another employer.

I explain my firing as follows:

My employer ordered me to send spam and I ignored it; as a side-effect of my action, I was fired.

If I don't get hired because of my response, then I learn about an employer that I don't want to work with.

Time and time again I use this quote from Andrew Koenig.

One of the key characteristics of professionalism is a loyalty to the profession that transcends loyalty to any single employer.
-- Andrew Koenig {programming guru (C/C++/Python to name a few)}

For the good of the computing community, programmers must help eliminate spam.