Sorry, headline of this article is an old tech geek joke. . . .

Sarah Palin’s email account was hacked into.  You know, the one she used to communicate official business whilst skirting document retention laws?  Yeah, that one.  And here’s the really funny bit.  Check out the McHacked-Failin ‘08 campaign’s reaction:

“This is a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of law,” GOP presidential campaign manager Rick Davis said Wednesday in a written statement. “The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them.”

OIC. . .  So, cracking Sarah Palin’s clandestine gubinatorial email account was a violation of law because it’s a violation of privacy.  Except that there’s really no privacy with government communications, which is why she’s not supposed to be using that email account in the first place.  Right?

Now, I’m not suggsting that you should go rooting through what’s there, but I will say that if you did want to look, you’d better do it quick.

Google has revealed it’s latest offering in its information indexing services, Google Gaudi.  Gaudi’s purpose is to utilize voice recognition software and search for words and phrases inside of Google Video and YouTube videos just like Google ordinarily would search HTML text.

This is actually a smaller piece of a larger technology, as anyone who has ever released a video with copyrighted music in it probably knows by now.  YouTube (owned, remember, by Google) scans it’s video library with audio recognition software to find audio that indicates the video might be in violation of copyright law and alerts copyright holders of the issue.  I know this because back when I was still doing video blogs (which I miss), I did a blog that was partially in tribute to James Brown shortly after his death.  I was informed last week that my video, which included a few clips of James, was potentially in violation of copyright.  Happily, the copyright holder had no interest in persuing the removal of my content.

So, those of us interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization, basically making your webpage as friendly to search engines as possible) have been hearing rumors forever that Google would eventually be developing sound and video search capabilities.  It appears we are seeing the dawn of that new era of search capability.  It wil be interesting going forward to see what this new technologies bring to light, from advanced new uses and benefits for end users to brand new “Black Hat” attacks.

Actually, it looks like it might just be anti-trust.  No big whoop: the Bush Justice Department probably just wants to look like it’s doing something.

Google recently announced a deal with Yahoo! to provide advertisement on Yahoo!’s network, sharing the profits with the portal company.  This deal, should it be put into action, would make Google the soul source of 80% of all Internet advertising revenue.  That’s a fairly staggering figure that does make you wonder about the potential monopoly.

But what is genuinely amusing about all this is having Microsoft lawyers tsk-tsking over Google’s dominance in search and advertisement:

Microsoft also has objected to the deal, saying it would unfairly foreclose competition on the Web. In Senate hearings in July, Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith, testified that “if search is the gateway to the Internet, and most people believe that it is, this deal will put Google in position to own that gateway and the information that flows through it.”

Well, now. Ain’t that rich?  Basically, Microsoft objects to Google’s dominance primarily because they want to be the dominant company.  If anybody should be sued for anti-trust, it should be Microsoft.

If you haven’t had time to do so already, you should really check out Google Chrome, which promises to be the most significant new development in computer software in about ten years.  Personally, I’m not a big fan of adapting new technology right away, prefering instead to watch others scrape their knees while the kinks are worked out of the new system.  In this case, however, I’m inclined to maybe take the leap, just because this seems a genuinely new and different technology of which I’d like to be well-familiar by the time it reaches saturation.

What Google is not saying about this new app - but everybody else who knows a thing or two about computers is saying - is that Chrome is not really a browser at all: it’s a web-based application Operating System.  Chrome allows you to launch web apps directly from the desktop - like anything from Flickr’s photo managing to your WordPress blog.  It handles file downloads on its own, has an integrated search/url/bookmarks toolbar that seems at least as impressive as FireFox’s “Awesome Bar,” which I love.  In short, this application seems built around the idea that you can virtually bypass your current Operating System and file system to store and work with everything online, making Windows optional and Linux systems at least as viable.

All of this is fascinating, but think for a moment about the consequences.  Your ISP is looking to cap your downloads, which means even accessing your own stuff could cost extra money.  Telco giants - not just your local ISP - want extra money for all that surfing you do.  Meanwhile, Google itself has left privacy advocates steaming over it’s dealings with China, and the pressure to release sensitive information in the United States and elsewhere will become more and more difficult to resist as we continue to do more things online.

I don’t particularly have any perscriptions for any of this.  All I’m saying is that we need to pay much, much more attention to the Internet as a vital resource than our current political environment allows.  We need to forget that much of the traffic on the Internet is concerned with porn or Miley Cyrus and take this seriously.

OK, so the local news media really needs to get up to speed on this one. The Consumerist is reporting that Frontier Internet is capping its users’ downloads at 5Gb per month. After that, they now say they reserve the right to either cancel the account or charge a whopping $10.80 a gigabyte in overage charges!  Best of all, they’re calling the first five gigabytes their “Free 5GB of internet usage.”  Really?  I thought you had to pay for it.  Check their Acceptable Use Policy for more details on the new, quietly introduced, policy.

You might want to consider this before downloading your next movie from NetFlix.com, eh?  And lest we forget, Frontier also charges you $4 for the modem even if you use your own and locks you into a multi-year contract.  I’m not saying TW is any bed of roses, but damn, people.

Former Google executives and web gurus have gotten together - along with 33 million dollars in venture capital - to launch a new rival to the Google search engine, Cuil (pronounced “cool”).  Among it’s many boasts is that it contains three times the index, the total number of pages searched by the engine, as Google.

That might seem impressive at first, until you consider the fact that Google specifically banned a number of websites owing to the fact that they were either blackhat SEO honey pots or copyright infringers.  Take for example this search for “dragonflyeye,” Safe Search on, Safe Search off.  Neither yeilds the domain which bears the name.  There is, however, a ClaimID account I haven’t used in three years, some spam blogs and a bunch of comments I’ve made at PHP.net.  None of this is accurate to what one might expect to find when searching for my domain name.

So, they’ve got some room to grow.  It would be nice to have another competitor in the search engine market that provides something a little different, but relevant keyword searching is relevant keyword searching, and Google seems to have it down.  I do like the basic layout of Cuil and if they improve their back end, they might really have something.  Time will tell.

. . . Long time passing.

A basic premise of the metered Internet plans Time Warner and other ISPs are cooking up is that there is simply too much bandwidth being used up by too few people. You know, the YouTube users and the downloaders. In order to be able to maintain - and presumably enhance - the network to accommodate such over usage, someone needs to pay for all that loss of bandwidth. As much as I vehemently disagree with the plan on a number of levels, I did at first take this root concept somewhat at face value.

But then, on my ride into work this morning, I happened to catch another one of those annoying Time Warner commercials for their “All in One Package” and it suddenly dawned on me: hey! Isn’t broadband phone service (VoIP to it’s friends) kind of a heavy-bandwidth activity? And aren’t people paying Time Warner extra money for use of said service?

Why, yes. Yes they are. And having now encumbered a fair amount of the overall network bandwidth with phone calls, Time Warner would like to charge Internet users extra to do what they were encouraged to do when Broadband Internet was a new and expensive novelty. I’d say that’s fairly close to “double-dipping.”

Does that sound fair to you?

Late Update: Ok, just for the sake of measurement, I checked the total download size of this video on YouTube.  It’s 13 delicious megabytes of the best comedy on television, and it’s five minutes long.  Longer videos are obviously bigger files.  Just for the sense of scale for those of you not as familiar with Ye Olde Internet Page of Weights and Measurements, if you watched this video 65 times a day - without doing a single other thing on the Internet, at all - you would fill up your 25 gig allotment for the month.  I’m not saying that’s a little, I’m not saying it’s a lot. I’m saying it’s a fact.

I’ve mentioned this in a few blog posts in the past, and news about this issue has definitely made it to the DFE news ticker. I’ve also written at length about Net Neutrality, a hand-in-hand issue with this, on both this site and at the request of Phillip on TAP. But it now looks as though the eagle has landed in Texas. Get ready for the metered Internet, where your web usage is measured and charged for just like your cell phone:

Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.

Time Warner joins many other major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in their complaint that bandwidth-hogging users and sites are driving most of the bandwidth usage. They declare their new metering system as a fair way to drive the billing to compensate:

T.W. Cont’d:

“We think it’s the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure,” Leddy said.

But ignoring the issue of fairness for this one article, moving to a metered system of billing for Internet usage fundamentally changes the relationship between the ISP and the user in ways that create troublesome new issues that I do wonder if they’ve given full thought to. The current monthly charge model is a bit like renting an apartment: you pay to live there, however much or little you use the property does not matter. A metered system is more equivalent to your RG&E - or as they say in the article, like your cell phone - inasmuch as you are actually paying for a commodity. Commoditizing bandwidth, or the amount of data you’re able to download in a given month, changes expectations quite a bit.

When you use a cell phone, the phone comes with caller ID as part of the service. This enables you to make an intelligent, deliberate choice of when to answer the phone and when to use your minutes. There is a law on the books that prevents cold-calling marketers from using cell phone numbers. When you call or receive calls from your cellular provider, you do not get charged. In short, the amount you use your phone - and therefore the cellular bandwidth commodity you’re purchasing from your provider - is very much controlled by your own choices.

But on the Internet, it’s more complicated. Yes, you get to decide what websites you visit and what websites you don’t. But the website owner gets to decide who advertises and how, from large image banners to full-animation Flash banners. The metered Internet means that every visitor to the site is actually paying to be advertised too.

Do the ISPs expect to reimburse users for these advertisements? What about pop-ups? Do they plan to provide some way of knowing just how much data a given website will require a user to download, so that users can make informed decisions about where to surf? There is also the issue of viruses, spyware, Microsoft’s “helpful” updating services and other bandwidth-sucking programs that will deplete the reserve of the commodity you’ve paid for.

There will be those who say, “but you’ve got gigabytes of bandwidth per month! You’ll never go over that just because of advertisements.” Certainly, in most cases those people are right. But whether or not you go over your allotted bandwidth is irrelevant to the fact that you are now paying for a commodity and have a reasonable expectation that this commodity cannot be abused against your will.

Secondly, there is the issue of quality. When you pay to have a service which you can use whenever and however you want, there is an expectation that outages will occur, that maintenance must be performed, that there are in fact people using way more bandwidth than you today and the connection might be a bit slower. All of that flies right out the window the minute you consider each and every kilobyte of data to be a commodity you’re paying for. Especially since you’ve paid for x-number of gigabytes per month in advance.

If you’ve paid for them, you have a reasonable expectation that they be available immediately. And what’s more, there should be no reason to expect slow page loads as a matter of course. There is also a certain liability for network viruses and other pests that lurk within the system. If they infect your system and then “phone home,” you’re paying to have a virus.  Something you got from an email is your fault, but something lurking in the system (like, say the old MyDoom virus and others) is their responsibility.

And speaking of email, who gets to pay for all that spam you keep getting?  Yes, those are downloads, too.  While you may not know it, all that mail is going in and out of your ISP’s mail servers before it gets to you.  Why should you pay for spam when they could be filtering it on the mail servers?  Or even all that crap you get from your Aunt Helga?

Finally for this discussion and potentially most important, consider the education factor: there is a vast sea of under-educated users out there that make up the majority of the ISP’s clientèle.  Or to be more charitable, there is a vast sea of computer knowledge into which most people barely wade, but all of which bares on the decisions they make while surfing.  Lacking knowledge, many users do things on the Internet which have consequences they don’t often know about. You may scoff at these people and say they need to educate themselves, but when the ISP they use switches to metering such arcane computer concepts as “bandwidth” and “gigabytes?”.  That constitutes either an unfair prejudice against the computer neophyte or an expectation that the ISP will provide some sort of training that will educate their users.

All of these are potential pitfalls and highly-likely lawsuits borne out of this need to grab more cash and do an end-run around the two-tier system and the Net Neutrality proponents that stand in strong opposition. Really, did they think this through all the way? Was pissing on their customers really the only way?

I remember getting a video pulled from my account by YouTube a while back. It was a video of The Daily Show, and so copyright was admittedly a bit murky: on the one hand, rebroadcasting clips of television shows is generally copyright violation, but since it’s a kind of current events show (some people actually learn more about the news from TDS than from their network news, big surprise) and since I’m a blogger who does the pseudo-journalistic thing, an argument could be made for “fair use.”

But as YouTube has become - along with many other social video services - a standard of presenting media on the Internet, more and more content has gotten pulled by YouTube for more and more questionable rationales. Free speech covers things like fair use, parody and other uses of otherwise copyrighted material. But with thousands of videos getting posted per day, the need to regulate copyright and the need to protect free speech in a large volume, rapid fire environment are highly competitive necessities.

Enter YouTomb, the MIT student project dedicated to cataloging YouTube video removals, their owners, their viewers and what reasons the vids get pulled for:

YouTomb Keeps an Eye on YouTube’s Graveyard | The Underwire from Wired.com

Jansen says the site’s opaque policies spurred the YouTomb project.”We aren’t trying to be antagonistic at all,” said Jansen. “We understand YouTube has a business to run. But at the same time, we’re not sure where it ends.”

Alongside a screenshot of each clip deemed in violation, YouTomb lets users see who posted the offending video, how many views it got before being pulled, when it was removed and by whom (for instance at the request of the user, a media company or third-party).

Microsoft is in the midst of a bid to buy Yahoo! Wonder why? Well, they’ve lifted the veil a bit on their newest product line, Live Mess Mesh:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft unveils its web vision

Live Mesh is designed to blur the lines between running software and storing data on a desktop and “in the cloud”.

You know? The last thing I want Microsoft to *intentionally try* to do is “blur the lines” between anything. How ’bout you folks work on establishing something clearly-delineated first, and work your way up? I remember working for Comcast as a tech support rep, patiently explaining to customers that they didn’t need to be connected to the Internet to view their Word documents. Trust me, the lines are already plenty blurred.