Sanford “Spamford” Wallace, of course, was the original “spam king” back in the 1990s. Despite his claim to have reformed at one point, he apparently has been spamming various social networks and advertising spyware. Back in 2004, the FTC investigated him and fined him $4 million. Last year, MySpace won a $234 million judgment against him. Wallace responded by disappearing. At one point, even his lawyer couldn’t find him. Earlier this year, when Facebook sued him for spamming their users as well, it seemed unlikely that he would bother to respond. Surprising pretty much everyone, he showed up in court, though claimed he was totally bankrupt. Either way, Facebook has just been awarded a $711 million judgment against him. Facebook, of course, will never see a dime of that money. But, the real question is what else can be done to stop Wallace. He’s been spamming for well over a decade at this point, and despite multiple multi-million dollar judgments against him, he hasn’t stopped. What else can be done?

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iStockphoto's Kelly Thompson

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google’s Gears technology may not have caught on widely in the world of Web programming, but operators of the iStockphoto photo sales site have become believers.

Among other things, Gears enables browsers to store data on a local computer, which most notably means that Web applications can be adapted to work even while offline. But for iStockphoto’s purposes, it primarily means better performance for people using the site and secondarily lower operating costs for the Getty Images photo sales subsidiary.

“We’re not requiring anyone to install Google Gears,” the company said on an explanatory Web site. “If you do install Google Gears, though, iStock will work much faster.”

Google launched the open-source Gears software in 2007, but so far, the sites that use it–among them Gmail, Google Reader, WordPress, and MySpace–are the exception rather than the rule.

Speed and money
The main motivation for the change was getting a faster site, which benefits iStockphoto’s financial results, said Kelly Thompson, iStockphoto’s chief operating officer.

“It was 95 percent performance and end-user experience, but let’s face it: if I can get more pictures pumped out faster, with more searches, we sell more,” Thompson said. “Cutting down a page load time for a user is more valuable to me than the money I’ll save on bandwidth.”

The company adopted Gears with no prompting from Google, he added. “We did this on our own,” with Web programmers jumping on the project because “it’s sexy for them to work on it.”

iStockphoto activated its Gears support September 30, Thompson said. In the first 16 days of use, Gears saved the company from paying for the transfer of 132GB of data over the network and lightened its Web servers by 8.7 million communication requests–and that’s with only 19,000 Gears-installed users, a “tiny portion of our traffic,” he said. Those without Gears benefit, too, since iStock’s Web servers are unburdened somewhat by those who do use it.

The technology works by locally storing various Web page ingredients–photo thumbnails, JavaScript program code, Cascading Style Sheet formatting files, for example. Older files are flushed periodically so the users’ hard drives don’t get too cluttered.

“It’s a pretty basic implementation right now: the second time a user sees any image or requests a JavaScript file, it loads instantly,” Thompson said. One of his developers described it as “the opposite of a drug dealer: the first hit isn’t free, (but) every subsequent hit is.”

Google is trying to propagate Gears, which is available as a browser plug-in. In a more aggressive move, it built Gears into its Chrome browser. And in the longer term, the HTML5 standard under development reproduces the local storage abilities of Gears, a move that stands to spread the technology more widely.

HTML5 good, IE 6 bad
Thompson is a fan of another HTML5 technology: built-in video. iStock licenses video content, as well as photos and other content, and currently streams it with Adobe Systems’ Flash technology.

“We’d love to be able to ditch Flash on the video side, but it’s probably a ways out,” Thompson said, citing widespread use of Internet Explorer.

IE is widely loathed among Web developers for its slow performance and lack of standards compliance, and even Microsoft wishes that people would upgrade from IE 6, but it’s still the single most widely used browser out there, even though Microsoft released it in 2001, just before Windows XP arrived. Microsoft released IE 7 in 2006, and it tried to improve standards compliance and security with the release of IE 8 this March.

People are gradually shifting away from IE 6, but not fast enough for Thompson’s taste–or plans.

“We announced we’d drop official support for IE 6 in 2010 back at the beginning of the year. I’m not sure we’re going to be able to it: the percentage of users is dropping–just not quite fast enough,” he said.

From August (top) to September (below), Internet Explorer lost a bit of usage share, compared with rival browsers.

(Credit:
Net Applications)

According to Net Applications statistics, IE 6 is used by 24.4 percent of people on the Web today, followed by IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3.5, and Firefox 3, in descending order of popularity. Overall, IE has 65.7 percent share of usage.

iStockphoto has more early adopters in its population and therefore different browser preferences. The top five browsers on the site are Firefox, with 37.8 percent; IE, with 34.4 percent; Apple’s Safari, with 22.3 percent; Google’s Chrome, with 3.4 percent; and Opera, with 1.7 percent.

Among iStockphoto’s IE traffic, the majority of people use version 7, but the tide is turning.

“We’ve seen an almost 2 percent migration of (IE) 6 to 8 in the last 60 days alone. We’re hoping Windows 7 will push it even more quickly,” Thompson said. “For us, even though it’s a shrinking percentage, it still represents over 1 million visits per month, so I can’t cut them off at the knees.”

“I think we’re dominated by geeks, designers, and small businesses, all who move more quickly than the enterprise–not to mention we’re 35 percent Mac, with the iPhone about to overtake Linux for third place” among operating systems, Thompson said.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

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Security companies love using stats to make something appear to be a bigger problem than it really is. Take for example this claim that links to malware are “abundant” on Twitter. The problem is that this is totally meaningless. Because you only see the tweets of people you follow, if spammers are putting up malware links, it only matters if anyone’s following them and then clicking on the links. The number of links that point to malware alone is meaningless, because one “spammer” could just post a ton of malware links, but that won’t mean a thing if no one is following them. The real question should be how often are people getting malware because of clicks on Twitter. Unfortunately, that data isn’t provided.

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With various news publications complaining about online aggregators somehow being unfair, back in August, we wondered why those big mainstream publications didn’t just aggregate or, as they prefer, “parasite” themselves. For example, they complain about other sites writing up short “bloggy” summaries of their long and in-depth news reports — but why can’t those publications create their own shorter versions as well?

As if proving that point, the website Gawker (who has been accused of such “parasiting” before) apparently tried this approach itself recently. It had a 2,000 word story that it purchased from a guy who had worked with Richard Heene (the father behind the “balloon boy” stunt). But rather than just leave the 2,000 word story, it also created its own shorter bullet-point version, which is likely what it would have written up if the original story had been published elsewhere. And, while the original story still got a ton of traffic, the summary post still scored a lot of pageviews — more than the average Gawker post.

If anything, this supports the idea that publications really have nothing to complain about with these sites that summarize their longer stories. There’s absolutely nothing stopping them from doing it themselves as well — and, who knows, it might augment their traffic as well.

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There’s been a lot of talk these days about how the big flat-screen TVs that have become quite popular are also energy hogs (or, as some say, “the SUVs of the TV world”). One interesting concept to deal with this is to use facial recognition software to fade out the picture when the viewer is not watching. So, if you just have the TV on in the background, it doesn’t suck up all that energy on the picture, but (in theory) the second you look up at the screen, the picture comes back. Of course, in the past, when we’ve talked about experiments to put cameras or monitoring equipment into TVs, it tends to freak people out a bit, and you could easily see the same technology being used for monitoring purposes. Still, it is a creative idea, if it actually works.

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The biggest problem in the telco world is the lack of competition. Most of the worst abuses by various telecom providers is because there really isn’t enough competition to make it worthwhile to treat customers better. The best thing that governments can do to encourage better broadband/telco services is to encourage competition. Apparently, Canada has different priorities. A new mobile firm was set to open up shop in Canada, called Globalive. However, Canada apparently has some rules about how telcos need to have Canadian ownership. And while Globalive was originally judged to meet the criteria in bidding on spectrum, a different government bureaucracy has now said that it doesn’t meet the Canadian ownership requirements. In other words, to the Canadian government, having local ownership is more important than real competition. This is basically a form of protectionism that (like most forms of protectionism) ends up harming consumers.

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Ron Kujawa writes to us about The Public Record and Tommy Lee’s project to collaborate with fans to produce his next album, Public Mayhem. Aiming to interact with fans and get more attention, Tommy Lee has posted some rough “stem” tracks online for anyone to download, and he’s encouraging fans to upload their own music that might go with those tracks. (This is similar to what Nettwerk’s K-OS did earlier this year with a contest for fans to remix his tracks.) Ultimately, the really good fan generated music will make it on the new Public Mayhem album with credits to the fan and royalties that go to charity. So every week, Tommy (or his production team) will release another raw track for fans to play with, review the submissions, and look to incorporate stuff into the album as he sees fit. Obviously, not everyone can make it onto the album, but if you’re an amateur musician, there’s not much to lose — and there’s a chance that Tommy might like your chutzpah or something. Either way, more music is being created and shared, and it sounds like a win-win for everyone.

On top of that, though, Tommy is also posting jamming tips for amateur rockers to help folks out with their music — which seems like a great interactive component to this project. I’m not personally a fan of Tommy Lee’s music, and the fan entries that have been highlighted so far haven’t really piqued my interest. (From the ones I’ve listened to, there’s some talent, but nothing I really like — and there aren’t even any submissions that so bad that you can enjoy them as a spectacle.) But still, Tommy is very likely training a new generation of musicians with his weekly YouTube clips filled with pointers, and the evolution of musical skills based on Tommy’s tutelage has the potential to produce ever better songs. And it doesn’t stop with Tommy, The Public Record is looking to do similar projects with other musicians, so we can all look forward to a virtuous cycle of fans creating music with more rockstars — perhaps creating more rockstars and even more great music.

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Ima Fish writes “The Supreme Court in Pennsylvania struck down a state trademark law (pdf) which essentially criminalized any use of a trademark without permission of the trademark holder. There were no exceptions at all, including free speech rights.

It’s nice to see courts get it right every so often. I wish it happened more.

There was also a concurring opinion and two separate dissenting opinions (all pdfs, of course). Definitely great to see the court get this right, but it makes you wonder what legislators were thinking when they put such a law in place.

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