Ho John Lee’s Weblog

It’s the time of spring when all the flowering trees bloom. There are a lot of cherry and wisteria trees in our neighborhood, it looks nice and as the petals start falling in a few weeks off later it will look like every home held a wedding recently. Good weather for being out and about. Speaking of which…

The Wachovia Bank (formerly World Savings) branch over at the Stanford Shopping Center was robbed last Thursday. This is already a little unusual, but what caught my attention was that they were robbed by an elderly man in an electric wheelchair. And he got away! He apparently stopped by The Sharper Image and asked for a shopping bag on his way over to the bank.

I just noticed that my Wordpress installation got hacked by a search engine spam injection attack sometime in the past few weeks. This particular one inserts invisible text with lots of keywords in footer.php. The changes to the file were made using the built-in theme editor, originating from ns.km20725.keymachine.de, which is currently at 84.19.188.144. The spam campaign automatically updates the spam payload every day or so. The links point to a variety of servers that have also been hacked to host the spam content. Here is a sample: http://www.nanosolar.com/feb3/talk.php?28/82138131762.html
I’ve sent an e-mail to Nanosolar, so they’ll probably have that content cleaned up before long. But the automated SEO spam campaign updates the keyword and link payload regularly, so any affected Wordpress sites will be updated to point at the new hosting victims.

Joi Ito notes the release of the final report of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance.

The WGIG is a group of experts tasked by the United Nations to think about and come up with a report about Internet governance. Many people were concerned because the meeting was kicked off by the Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) saying that this was about questioning ICANN. The comments gave me the sense that the ITU was trying to take over ICANN’s role and wanted a report to justify this. In fact, the group of experts represented a broad range of opinions and have produced an interesting report.

He also notes a handy set of resources, including illustrations of the 4 governance scenarios proposed in the report, available here.

YubNub provides a user-extendable command line for the web. The site is presently a bit opaque and buggy for non-geeks, but embodies some interesting ideas about combining existing web services. It’s also interesting to see what tasks people have defined as commands, the near-immediate arrival of spammers, and the conversation about how to go about building this sort of service.

This is another example of the “taking small steps” model for exploring new application spaces.

via Batelle:

The idea of search as the command line for the web is well established, this takes the idea one step (or more) further, letting you set up commands in the search line itself. You can use the search line as a single point of reference for searching just about any web resource, and you can add your own, if you’re geeky enough (others will do it for you if you’re challenged like I am).

Lot of interesting posts and presentations coming from last week’s Reboot7 conference in Copenhagen. The attendees are predominantly involved with new internet applications such as blogging, tagging, peer-to-peer, voice over IP, social software, and collaborative development, all of which are new, fluid, evolving, and somewhat incompatible with existing business and social models. Progress in new and evolving fields can sometimes get bogged down in “Vision” or “Strategy”, so I’m happy to see this observation about the need and value of small steps from Johnnie Moore:

A theme that seemed to run through Reboot7 was the advocacy of taking small steps over theorising. David Heinemeier Hansson, who built web application Ruby on Rails, stressed the advantage of getting something basic up and running fast. In a presentation on The Skype Brand, Malthe Sigurdsson talked about getting out frequent, small revisions.

Along similar lines, Scoble writes:

From PointTopic, via Om Malik:

This graph shows the top 10 countries by number of DSL lines deployed. China now has more than 19 million DSL lines in service, adding more than 2 million lines in the last quarter alone. Also worth nothing that line growth in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are negligible due to already-high penetration rates. Worldwide, 10.1 million lines were added in 1Q05.

 
Tomorrow is trash day. Out on the curb in the paper recycling bin are a fine assortment of Red Herring, Industry Standard, Wired, and other print artifacts circa 1996-1997. The headlines bring back some memories…the Browser Wars, the rise of Java, Kim Polese on the cover of Red Herring, endless retrofits onto Windows 95, and telecom and server hosting were booming businesses…

I’d forgotten just how thick the magazines used to be, back when their ad revenues were growing without bound. They weigh a ton, all on nice clay coated glossy paper — the trash guys probably won’t be happy about it in the morning. Unfortunately, this hardly makes a dent in the pile of technorubble still out in the garage.

A good roundup article on the use of blogs and personal video in response to the December 2004 tsunami in Indonesia

The tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, has become another defining moment in the evolution and use of blogs. These distributed, interactive resources rallied around the disaster in ways that allowed readers to learn of the disaster, find ways to help through direct donations or volunteer opportunities, and cope with the grief that such an event inevitably brings.

Moving from personal, journal-style entries, blogs have addressed politics, war reportage, and, now, humanitarian aid efforts. Their power to reach vast numbers of people quickly with eye-witness reportage, graphics, opinion, and collections of news articles, and their ability to side-step government and corporate control have made blogs powerful forums for sharing information. The current manifestation of tsunami-related blogs are another step along a road that continually sees blogs creatively reacting to world events and gaining in popularity, respect, and impact.

via Joi Ito’s Web:

David Beckemeyer writes about an R&D activity at Earthlink which has implemented dual IPv4 / IPv6 access on modified firmware for a Linksys WRT54G wireless home gateway router.

The Linksys WRT54G is inexpensive, widely used, and is similar to many other home gateways providing NAT routing and wireless access. (It’s also popular as a platform hacking wireless router code, as it runs Linux internally). After loading the modified firmware, the router still provides IPv4 NAT functionality, but in addition provides a publicly routable /64 IPv6 network, and can directly route to other public IPv6 networks via the experimental Earthlink IPv6 routing service. You do not need to be an Earthlink customer to use the free service.

Been thinking a bit lately about dealing with video, converged media, and search, came across a couple of interesting pieces on video search and digital content in general, first one on John Batelle’s SearchBlog, which in turn references a longer article by Mark Glaser at the Annenberg Online Journalism Review.

Ourmedia, SingingFish, and Brightcove are profiled briefly, along with Google Video Upload, Yahoo Video, and Open Media Network.

From the Glaser article:

Howe estimates there could be 300 million video streams online, but Singingfish has still only scratched the surface with just under 20 million streams indexed. Singingfish also crawls adult content — literally anything that’s legal — and includes a “Family Filter” with pretty conservative rules for what partner sites or individuals can filter out (including sex education material).

Tripped over an interesting blog on broadband in India this evening, written by one Dr. Abhishek Puri, who is an actual M.D. finishing up his studies in India. He apparently started writing a few months ago for an Indian site called TechWhack, and just recently set up his own site, which is also published as the TechWhack Broadband Blog, and appears to have started posting weekly reports to Om Malik’s site as well.

There is no shortage of business and trade press coverage of the Indian telecom and broadband market, which has been growing and evolving rapidly. However, there’s some good and entertaining commentary posted here, and the perspective he offers is refreshingly direct at times, especially compared with the Indian business press. Hope he keeps writing for a while in between his day gig doing surgery and orthopedics.