fm984.net

AT&T’s existing policy has been to investigate all complaints of child porn hosted on its servers–and promptly remove any illegal images–within three business days. That will not change. On Thursday, AT&T said it will enter into an agreement with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to consult the group’s lists in addition to complaints received from other sources.

There’s just one problem with the press release. AOL isn’t doing anything different today than it did yesterday. “We have not changed any policies or procedures as part of today’s announcement,” AOL spokeswoman Allie Burns told me via e-mail.

To be sure, Cuomo’s press release also talked about AT&T changing its policies, and it was at least accurate in that respect.

All of this might be normal political posturing, except that it points to a troubling trend. Cuomo, like his predecessor Eliot Spitzer, seems to be trying to legislate through threats of selective prosecution or public embarrassment.

In his press release, which was reproduced uncritically, Cuomo claimed that AOL has “agreed to eliminate access to child porn newsgroups, a major supplier of these illegal images” and said that the company will “purge” its “servers of child porn websites.” By newsgroups, Cuomo is referring to Usenet, a free-flowing discussion area that predates the Web.

Nor is AOL doing anything different in terms of deleting illegal images on its servers. “We’ve had an agreement in place with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children since January 2007 to purge any known URLs and IP addresses that are identified by NCMEC as carrying child pornography,” AOL’s Burns said.

AT&T spokesman Marty Richter told me that the company is going to cease offering the alt.binaries.* hierarchy, which include sex-themed newsgroups but also ones such as alt.binaries.pictures.aviation, alt.binaries.drwho.pictures, and alt.binaries.pictures.vehicles. Customers will continue to be able to access third-party Usenet providers.

That’s what happened last month when Cuomo announced that Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint would curb Usenet (here’s exactly what Verizon is doing). It happened today with AOL and AT&T. It’s true that child sexual abuse is a horrific crime–but it’s also true that, last we checked, setting rules and policies for companies to follow is a job for a duly elected legislature, not the police.

It’s no secret that politicians tend to churn out press releases touting their accomplishments, no matter how mean or insignificant. But it is still possible to be surprised on occasion, which brings us to today’s announcement by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.

The press release included the obligatory encomiums from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Ernie Allen, who added: “This is another tremendous step forward in ridding the Internet of child pornography. Attorney General Cuomo continues to lead the fight against child pornography and I applaud his efforts to cut this horrific material off at the source.”

Someone on the New York attorney general’s staff probably should have informed his or her boss that AOL actually ceased to offer all Usenet newsgroups more than three years ago–for business reasons, not political reasons. Even in the bizzaro world of politics, an Internet provider can’t very well cease to offer what it already has ceased to offer. (AOL will continue to allow its customers to access third-party Usenet providers such as Giganews, and Usenet.com.)

Each year at the Office 2.0 conference about Web-based business apps and processes, paid attendees get some cool gadget pre-loaded with information relevant to the conference. In 2006–the first year of the show–the gadget was an
iPod Nano with the conference schedule built in. In 2007, attendees got an
iPhone with links to the conference information and the show’s social-networking apps pre-loaded. This year, the giveaway is an HP 2133 Mini-Note PC (the Linux version, not Windows). Given that the cost of attending the conference ($1,495–but read to the end for a discount code) is half that of two other conferences popular with the Web 2.0 crowd, Demo and TechCrunch50, one has to wonder how the organizer of the Office 2.0 is making any money. Especially since the Office 2.0 venue is leagues fancier than those other shows’ locales.

Most current conference networks, he says, “create a lot of cognitive friction.” There are always people he use them, but they’re usually the same people: “those social media freaks.” Ghalimi believes that, “we need to wait a couple of years until the large players take over the market…until everyone decides that our social graph is going to be on LinkedIn or Facebook,” or a similar service that is already working as a de facto business social network.

Office 2.0 also experiments with “back channel” concepts: community and social services that reinforce what’s happening at the show. A group Twitter feed will be projected on the side walls of the conference during sessions, oriented so both audience and people on stage can see it. Ghalimi is using Jive’s Clearspace enterprise collaboration service as the foundation for a communication during and after the show. But, he says, he still needs better tools to help attendees “get better value out of their time.”

Recently I’ve been writing a greater proportion of curmudgeonly posts than I normally do. That’s because I’ve been talking to entrepreneurs about their one-trick and derivative products. Ghalimi is helping to restore my faith in Web 2.0 by illustrating how complex and interesting inter-related Web-based businesses can be. He is involved in three fundamentally different enterprises that nonetheless reinforce each other. It makes his businesses both more interesting and more robust than they would be on their own.

The Office 2.0 experiment is about moving a business–the conference itself–and a community wholly into the Web 2.0 world, and it’s about studying which devices can help the most. The Apple devices in previous years were successes, he says. This year’s Linux subnotebook giveaway will likely be less used at the conference than the pocketable devices of previous years, but Ghalimi believes that giving people devices that are essentially just Web browsing machines will reinforce that you can in fact get real work done without having much, if any, local software on your laptop. For Ghalimi, that’s apparently worth the expense.

But I believe Ismael when he says the Office 2.0 conference is, “our collective experiment.” If he wanted to turn a profit he could start by not giving away $500+ notebooks (or he could get the giveaway sponsored, which it is not–the conference has to buy them). “We’re not in the conference business,” he says.

Ismael Ghalimi is doing this conference for the love of it. “I love the workmanship of work, the business of these tools,” he told me. “I like interacting with the people who are passionate about this stuff. Somehow it all fits together. We don’t have very sophisticated motives. It’s just plain fun.”

Here’s the secret: he isn’t.

The Office 2.0 conference opens September 3 in San Francisco. You can get a small ($100) registration discount by going through this link.

Ghalimi tries to run the conference without paper and without traditional software apps. This year he’s having better luck than last. There’s finally a good Web-delivered accounting system, he says (Intacct), solving one of the last issues he had in going fully 2.0. And like last year, the only paper he has to deal with is the sponsor fees. Many are still submitted by check.

Now, to be clear, both his business and his wife benefit from the conference. Ghalimi’s day job is is running Intalio, which provides open-source business process management software, both free versions as well as paid subscriptions for large companies; Intalio has about 400 customers, the newest of which is the Bank of Venezuela. Ismael’s wife, May Chang Ghalimi, is CEO of the Monolab Workspace, an office suite rental business designed to be compatible with the needs of Web 2.0 start-ups. Subscriptions even come with their own carbon offsets. Exposure to the Web 2.0 productivity wonks who come to the Office 2.0 conference no doubt help the Ghalimis sell their services.

I’m still not sold on the trend of video commenting. It’s a bit gimmicky, and as others have said, it makes conversations difficult to parse. Ideally I’d like to see services like Seesmic partner with Jott to add a small transcript under the comment that would save me some time, and improve the experience for search engine bots, the deaf, and others who don’t feel like watching and listening to what could be a simple sentence or two of thought.

View the forum thread.blog comments powered by Disqus

The option is turned off by default in Disqus, and must be enabled by whoever is administrating the account. We’ve gone ahead and turned it on in the Webware 100 winner pages, where we’ve been using Disqus since unveiling the 100 winners late last month. I’ve also added it to the end of this post, where you can add your own video comment after the break.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Video and text don’t always go together, but that’s not stopping video and audio microblogging service Seesmic from partnering with the distributed comment tool Disqus. Starting Wednesday, users of Disqus will get the added benefit of video commenting alongside the text entry field.

One small hiccup I’ve found is that Seesmic won’t pull in your Disqus account information. You’ve got to be registered with the currently private alpha service to have it linked up with any sort of account. Otherwise you’re limited to leaving an anonymous comment that can later be reclaimed when you get Seesmic access. Disqus founder Daniel Ha tells me the two companies are working on deeper integration for user authentication, but in the meantime anonymous recording is the easiest option for people who don’t yet have Seesmic accounts.

Adding video comments to your Disqus account is as simple as clicking a check box. By default video comments are turned off until a Disqus admin turns them on.

I have to wonder what the point is. If Microsoft really wants small businesses to get addicted to Windows Server, the offering should be free (like Linux), or provide some kind of cloud connection services as more small business reduce reliance on on-site IT.

April Fools?

Small businesses need to be wary of things that sound too good to be true. Windows Server 2008 Foundation doesn’t come close to what you can get for free in every Linux distribution.

CNET News’ Ina Fried reported on Wednesday morning about a new version of Windows geared toward very small businesses.

Perhaps a better idea would be for Microsoft to create an on-premise SMB server product that simply acts as a proxy to its online services, such as Hotmail and Live Search, and provides some kind of local or remote storage. That way, users wouldn’t have to upgrade hardware or software, and Microsoft would have them locked into its cloud services.

In my nearly 15 years of IT experience, I’ve never seen a server that didn’t eventually have to be upgraded–especially Windows servers. Think back a few years, to the advent of Active Directory, and remind yourself that you not only had to upgrade your software, but also your hardware and CALs.

Unlike Windows Small Business Server, which comes bundled with applications, Windows Server 2008 Foundation “is only the operating system and is aimed at single-processor servers with fewer than 15 users.”

Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, will speak at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Toronto on Monday, where he is expected to announce that New York utility Consolidation Edison intends to participate in a data center energy efficiency incentive program with IBM.

With the rising cost of electricity and growing environmental awareness, IBM and other IT vendors have invested in more energy-efficient computing gear.

Cole said measuring efficiency will become easier once a standard EnergyStar rating for servers and storage is completed.

Con Edison will make customers aware of an energy efficiency program that IBM offers in which companies that lower their energy consumption can sell “energy efficiency certificates.”

IBM’s top hardware executive, William Zeitler, will deliver a keynote speech at a large utility industry conference to make the case for bridging the worlds of IT and electricity.

There are several technologies, such as virtualization and techniques for lowering energy usage. Yet, for the most part, energy remains outside the purview of IT managers.

“We want to challenge the (electricity) industry to stop thinking about lighting and motors–the traditional stuff–and look at IT as a big user of electricity,” said Steve Cole, program manager for energy efficiency at IBM.

IBM's senior vice president Bill Zeitler

It is estimated that data centers alone consume about 2 percent of the world’s electricity. And the rate of energy usage–and spending–is going up steadily.

IBM is seeking to co-market with utilities to promote energy efficiency, Cole said. While IBM deals with IT professions, utilities have customer relationships with the facilities managers at companies that deal with energy procurement and management.

A recent IBM customer survey found that only 26 percent of IT managers had responsibility for energy usage; most don’t even see the bill.

(Credit:
IBM)

Even with that in mind, I don’t see why it’s so hard to accept. How have we come to a point where we denigrate the fact that women play video games and try desperately to paint it as a male-controlled industry? Evidently it stems from a total disregard for the facts, but maybe (just maybe) some people are opening their eyes for once.

As Torrie Dorrell, senior vice president of global sales and marketing for Sony Online Entertainment, explained to CNN: “Women are out there in significant numbers playing MMOs, action games, first-person shooters. What is lacking in the equation are women behind these games.”

According to the International Game Developers Association, women represent 40 percent of all gamers. And although the Entertainment Software Association pegs that number at about 38 percent, it found that the average female gamer plays games 7.4 hours per week.

Some like to say that women only play games like Wii Fit, but the reality of the situation is quite different.

According to CNN, “More than 60 percent of female students enrolled in game design programs at The Art Institutes said they believed male dominance in the industry is a deterrent to women pursuing a career in gaming, according to a survey commissioned by SOE.”

With that in mind, how is it possible that women represent just 12 percent of the video game industry? Ostensibly, it’s not for lack of interest–the numbers speak for themselves–so it must be something else. Unfortunately, it seems those same stereotypes may be to blame.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard from reputable news outlets that video games are made specifically for men and most women find little reason to play.

And therein lies the rub. Instead of inviting the fact that more women are getting into the gaming industry, the same old stereotype is ruling all else.

So where do we go from here? Certainly we can’t simply sit back and accept the fact that stereotypes exist in the video game industry and women are being forgotten. Instead, we need to finally pull our heads out of the sand and welcome the fact that women are very much a part of the video game industry and should play an even greater role in its development going forward.

It’s time we wake up and realize that women really do enjoy video games. It’s not fair to simply say that because most developers are men and video game critics are overwhelmingly male, women aren’t members of the gaming community. In reality, it’s quite the opposite.

So next time you hear someone say that women don’t play video games or listen to some uninformed loon try to tell you that the video game industry is for men, make them realize that women play video games, too. And just in case they don’t believe you, have them log on to Halo 3–I’m sure a woman would be more than happy to frag them into oblivion.

Want to know what Don is up to? Follow him on Twitter, identi.ca, and FriendFeed.

According to these neanderthals, games like MGS4 and GTAIV are designed for men, just like sports games are, driving simulators are, and most other titles are. And if titles are not made for men, they’re made for children. All the while, women are left out in the cold.

But is that even close to true? I certainly don’t think so, and to be quite honest, I think it’s insulting to women to suggest such a thing. Just because most media outlets show men playing video games and the majority of people playing games are men, it doesn’t mean women are left out, and you might be surprised to know that women really do play games and have a very real interest in the industry.

Have you noticed the ever-growing number of Google-owned sites that have crept into the search giant’s results? Doing a Google search for Diet Coke and Mentos will take you to a results page where half of the items are videos on Google’s two video sites: YouTube and Google Video. The same goes for millions of other search queries that are pulling from the ever growing number of Google sites and services.

Timo Paloheimo, a crafty developer/blogger from Finland, seems to think the all-around increase of Google-owned sites in the results is impeding with what the search engine is all about. To remedy this he’s put together a Google custom search called Google minus Google that removes all of Google properties from the equation. It’s like any other Google custom search, except for the giant handpicked blacklist of Google properties. The previous version, which was launched early last week, kept the blacklist at the beginning of each search query, making it less precise.

[via NYT and Lifehacker]

Is there a problem here? It depends on what you were looking for in the first place.

Coming back to the original “problem” of having Google’s results show up with some prominence, the initial example of the Diet Coke and Mentos is a classic case of where you’re likely to be looking for the video that is best known for getting its big break on YouTube. To Google Minus Google’s credit, doing the same search puts a Wikipedia article on top, followed by the Eepybird people, who were the creators of the video that’s the best known example of the Web phenomenon.

Neither solution is perfect, but it’s kind of startling to see the differences with some simple tweaks. SEO conspiracy fanatics will always give Google a hard time since it knows the ins and outs of its own search tool, however the majority of users are always going to want to search as much of the Web as possible.

Then there’s the unquantifiable cost of management distraction.

In any case, whether you’re an investor, an employee, or a customer of any company involved in a fraud investigation, like it or not, know it or not, you’re paying a corporate fraud tax.

It’s hard to quantify the carnage, but it’s clearly material on a company by company basis, and over a trillion dollars in aggregate if you include loss of market capitalization.

Just looking at technology-related companies, federal agencies have successfully brought fraud and related charges against executives of Adelphia, Amkor, Anicom, Apple, AremisSoft, Brocade, Cendant, Comverse, Computer Associates, Dynegy, Enron, Enterasys, Homestore, Imclone, Impath, Integrated Silicon Solution, Juniper, KLA-Tencor, Monster, Network Associates (McAfee), Prudential Securities, Qwest, Refco, Tyco, U.S. Wireless, and WorldCom.

Whenever I write about fraud at technology companies, I get the sense that there’s ambivalence among the IT audience. Frankly, I think that’s sad. I’m outraged. In fact, the risk is so high that I no longer invest in individual company’s stock, only in ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds).

How much does this all add up to? Well, let’s see.

There are also recent allegations against former Broadcom and AOL Time Warner executives, plus ongoing international investigations into Nortel’s ex-CEO and CFO, Samsung’s chairman, and executives of Siemens AG.

Corporate fraud didn’t start with Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom and it didn’t end with them, either. Fraud is rampant in the technology industry. What most employees, investors, and consumers don’t realize is how much it costs them.

And yes, we’re talking about costs that materially impact earnings, balance sheets, and cash flow. We’re talking about internal and outside lawyers, accountants, consultants, crisis PR, D&O (directors and officers) insurance, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, exit packages, and even recruiting costs to replace executives.

Of course, the biggest cost is in terms of loss of market capitalization.

The Corporate Fraud Task Force claims more than 1,300 corporate fraud convictions since its inception less than six years ago. That includes more than 200 CEOs and presidents, 50 CFOs, and 120 vice presidents. That’s a lot of fraud.

Excuse me for stating the obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people think there’s some magic pile of dough somewhere that pays for companies to comply with investigations, contest charges, and remedy issues. In fact, the costs are born primarily by the corporation. That means it comes right out of shareholders’ and employees’ pockets. Consumers also pay, albeit indirectly.

In Friday’s Daily Debrief, I chat with CNET News.com’s executive editor, Jim Kerstetter, who also happens to be the office film buff. He explains the painstaking process of the digital facelift and why the preservation of such classics is important for posterity. Also, hear what kind of directives director Francis Ford Coppola gave the technicians cleaning up pivotal moments in his masterpiece.

This fall, film enthusiasts will have the opportunity to watch an American classic like they’ve never seen it before. The Godfather trilogy has recently been digitally remastered to look cleaner, brighter, and as as fresh as its original release in 1972.

The easy-to-create wiki service pulled in 3 million page views in March, according to ComScore numbers, compared with 3.8 million for Ning, the well-funded social-network creator helmed by Marc Andreessen. Wetpaint also claims 900,000 wikis have been created, far more than the 263,000 that Ning counts (though who knows how many of those are legitimate and/or active). While Ning’s way ahead in traffic, a few months ago Wetpaint released a set of features to ramp up social-networking activity on the site, with friends lists, news feeds, member profiles, and Yelp-style “compliments” now in the mix.

Short version: Wetpaint might be one to watch.

There are also 70 “sponsored” Wetpaint wikis, like the fan wikis created by cable network Showtime for each of its programs.

Long version: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. It’s Wetpaint, a Seattle-based service we haven’t heard a whole lot from lately. The reason, Arrington says, is that it’s positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.