Archive for February, 2007

Good news for bloggers and forum owners: According to the American Constitution Blog (did you know there was such a blog? Doing research for a client I found a blog dedicated to painting finger and toe nails so there should be at least one devoted to the Constitution), blog and forum owners are not responsible for the comments or posts left by others. From the post:

Examining the impact of Sec. 230 on this case, the court noted that “Congress intended that, within broad limits, message board operators would not be held responsible for the postings made by others on that board,” adding that allowing bloggers and message board operators to be sued for the statements of commenters on their sites would have an “obvious chilling effect” on speech. Accordingly, the court dismissed the complaint against Lycos.

Amen brothers! Or Bretheren. Let freedom of speech ring!

If you are interested in the where the world is going with technology and how the North Coast could participate you might want to make time for Pulling Back the Redwood Curtain: Humboldt County’s Next-Generation Internet Opportunity, Wednesday, March 1, 5-7 PM at the Wharfinger Building in Eureka.

Joaquin Alvarado is a good speaker and has a great way of making the future seem tangible and practical. That is, of course, if we have reliable bandwidth, a big issue here in Humboldt County. The more we understand how much our economic and pesonal lives will continue to be tied to the global network, the more we will understand how important alternate fiber and broadband deployment is.

BTW, now that the Wharfing Building finally has wireless access, you can stay connected dureing the event!

Vint Cerf, the “father of the Internet” has claimed that at least quarter of the world’s PCs some 150 million are infected by programs that harness them as part of botnets for attacking servers and sending spam. Others say this number is conservative. Beyond that, consider the number of PCs harboring adware, spyware, and other evil goodies that are swarming about the global network just waiting for an unprotected computer or an unsuspecting person to click the wrong thing and you’ve got an unlimited market for PC cleanup.

Well here is a chance for you to clean up your PC on the cheap, do your part to save the Internet from total corruption, and help out a local youth tech group. Cybertribe, based in Arcata is offering a Malware Mow Down and Virus Contest February 26 to March 3. For a suggested donation of $50.00 (tax deductible) trained Cybertribe technicians will remove malware, spyware and viruses from your computer (a $120.00 value). The computer with the most infections will win the contest and will be serviced for free. If you’re interested, call 822-1015 to schedule an appointment.

This is a fundraiser for Cybertribe to cover the expense of attending the 2007 Game Developers Conference next month in San Francisco. Building computer games is a huge market. Apparently several Cybertribe geeks are interested in careers in game development. So, not only would you be helping yourself by cleaning up your computer (what are the chances yours carries malware?), helping to protect the rest of us on the Internet, you will have the chance to support this great group and their ambitions. Talk about a triple play!

Californian Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) has announced he will be introducing a Net Neutrality bill. Supposedly that would prevent ISPs such as AT&T from charging higher fees for certain kinds of data traffic from selected content providers.

I’ve been a proponent of Net Neutrality but I really wonder how this would work technically if Calfornia was the only jurisdiction where Net Neutrality was the law.  Since data flows from everywhere to everywhere, what legal constraints  can be placed on the owners of the big pipes that only pertain to the geogrphical boundaries of one state? Perhaps a network engineer could clarify this for me.

Very interesting article in the Times-Standard today about one of the owners of Sacred Grounds Coffee in Arcata who apparently registered the domain for Bayside Roasters, another local coffee roasting company, when it expired.

The article is interesting on many points. First, on a simple human level, what makes someone (in this case Tim Dominick of Sacred Grounds) act in this way? According to the article he pointed the domain to scurrilous content (redirecting the domain to the Urban Dictionary definition of the word asshole). Was he motivated by greed? Did he think this tactic would help make more money for his own company? Or was there something personal going on between Mr. Dominick and the owners of Bayside Roasters Pamela and Kregen Olsen?

Second, the suit claimed, and the jury agreed, that after Dominick removed the redirection to the Urban Dictionary he was responsible for a Google bombing campaign that made search requests for ‘bayside roasters’ on Google return a link to a pornographic web site. Mr. Dominick’s lawyer admits his client registered the name and redirected to the Urban Dictionary site but denies he had anything to do with Google bombing. I would love to have heard the evidence against Mr. Dominick on this one. Google bombing isn’t all that easy to pull off without a lot of help. If he was really responsible for this, he must have been spending a lot of time an energy at it instead of tending to his own business.

Finally, this once again points out how important domain names have become to businesses, and how foolish some business owners are in not understanding this. As I cautioned in this post: Know where your domain name is registered, know who really is the registered owner, know when your domain needs to be renewed, and be sure to renew your registration in plenty of time.

PG&E is teeming up with dairymen and bioenergy companies to convert tons of manure from dairy cows in to electricity. According to this press release the first plant will be built this spring, be on line by the summer and generate enough energy for 50,000 homes.

Since the state has already mandated that 20% of the energy sold by investor owned power companies come from renewable sources by 2010, this is one of many steps PG&E and other companies will have to take soon in order to comply.

This Business 2.0 blog post has a pretty good summary of the new plant and the issues around using biomass as a renewable source. Check out first comment on the blog for a suggested better technology that leaves no residual waste. These kinds of steps give hope that new technology can eventually overcome the curse of pollution that old technology has wrought.

In spite of the happy cow commercials apparently most of the manure production will come from massive dairies in the central valley where cows live in unhappy close quarters. The real happy cows here in Humboldt County that live in open fields just can’t mass enough manure to make such a plant viable here in the green happy north coast. At least that’s my understanding from comments on this post from a while back.

Apparently Suddenlink access was down in Eureka and Arcata for a large part of the day yesterday. Fortunately for us we have DSL at the office. By the time we got home, where we have Suddenlink (mainly because DSL has not been available at our location) was back up.

When the sale of the local franchise by Cox to  Cebridge (that has been re-branded as Suddenlink - OK, OK, stop with the commercials!) was announced, we had been told how much better things would be. Humboldt County, while a tiny drop in the Cox ocean, would become a relatively large market in Suddenlink’s system. But with a horribly handled email transition from Cox, erratic email service in general, poor technical support, the odd file upload problem and now this, things appear quite different. Did the company grow too fast by absorbing Humboldt County and other regions? Were they just not that good a company to begin with? Hard to say, now. I only hope they manage to get their act together soon. As we have all learned by the recent fiber outages, Internet access has become indispensable and must be reliable.

It appears our local cable provider is having a problem with FTP (file transfer protocol), the service that allows you to upload files from your local hard drive to a server. At the moment, evidence of this is anecdotal. Two days ago I tried uploading a PowerPoint file from home to a server and it failed over and over. We have Suddenlink as our Internet Service Provider at home. The next day we tried uploading the file from our office where we have DSL and had no problem.

At the time we assumed it was an issue with the server that had since been fixed. However, today I learned that others have had the same problem and some have tested this by trying to upload files through Suddenlink and the same files over DSL. They were uploading to different servers from the one I had been working with. In every case, the Suddenlink uploads failed, and the DSL uploads succeeded. Apparently this occurs on only certain file types like Word and PowerPoint documents.

It seems some folks at Suddenlink are aware of the issue, but so far they have not been able to locate the source or find a fix. I’d be interested to know if others have had similar problems. Perhaps we could move the problem higher up on their priority list.

Now here’s what appears to be a bright idea offered by a California legislator. According to this news article, California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, a Democrat from Van Nuys will introduce a bill to “ban incandescent lightbulbs by 2012 in favor of energy-saving compact fluorescent lightbulbs.” As much as we all hate government interference in our lives, it may take small practical steps like these to move the energy/global warming agenda forward.

BTW, apparently the bill is actually called the “How Many Legislators Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb Act”. I guess when it comes up for a vote, we’ll have our punchline.

At long last we were able to release KHSU’s new web site today. I’m really proud of the work we did on the site – everything from reorganizing the content, redesigning the interface, building several back end tools for site maintenance and information distribution. It was a long haul but well worth it, I think. There are features built in to the site that just needs some KHSU staff support such as podcasting and archives of locally produced shows. I am hoping those will come on line soon.

Take a moment to visit the site some time. If you have a little more time fill out their survey. We’d love to get some user responses to further help refine the site.