K-Squared Ramblings

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• My Twitter personality: ordinary sociable cautious. My style: chatty academic ROBOT [note: apparently the "robot" is because of the percentage of tweets with links]#
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• Jar-Jar Binks speaks LOLCat – or rather LOLcats speak Gungan (@alenxa on rewatching Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace) #

Yahoo vs. Microsoft

Okay, I really have been out of it the last few days. I hadn’t heard that Microsoft was planning a hostile takeover of Yahoo!.

I have to agree with this Google blog post: this would be bad. Yahoo! seems to “get it” (where “it” is an open Internet) much better than Microsoft does.

Actually, it reminds me a little of Disney vs. Pixar in the past decade. Pixar, in adddition to mastering computer animation, had a great sense of story—something which Disney lost track of in the mid-1990s. They saw Pixar’s movies doing better than their own, and while they were still getting a cut, they didn’t understand why they did better. They thought it was the 3D animation, when really, it was the fact that they were churning out forgettable animated films like that cattle movie whose name escapes me, while Pixar was doing Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.

Actually, the only way I can see a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo! being good for anyone but Microsoft would be if it went down like the Disney-Pixar merger, and the Yahoo! people ended up in charge of web services. Not that I expect it to be likely, and even if they were, I’m sure the higher-ups would cripple them. I get the impression that sort of thing is going on with the IE team as it is.

Pressing Buttons

You’ve probably heard by now that AOL and Yahoo are preparing a system by which large-volume email senders can pay to get their mail sent on to subscribers. You probably haven’t heard that it’s not just pay-to-send so much as it’s pay-to-get-accredited. Senders pay a company called Goodmail to say “we won’t send spam,” Goodmail checks them out, and Yahoo and AOL use Goodmail to bypass their regular spam filters.

This, of course, hasn’t stopped a flood of knee-jerk reactions. (via Spamroll)

What’s funny is that this conundrum has been almost exactly like the controversy two years ago over Microsoft choosing Bonded Sender as an accreditation service/whitelist for Hotmail—knee jerking and all.

Back then I wrote the following article and never got around to posting it. Thanks to AOL, it’s finally topical again. Sadly, I haven’t had to change much to bring it up to date. Read the rest of this entry »

Widget Mania

The Opera web browser has introduced a Dashboard-like Widget feature in Opera 9 Preview 2. I believe this is the first 3+ platform widget framework out there.

Dashboard is, of course, Mac OS X only. Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) is Windows XP and Mac OS X only. The KDE Desktop (mostly used on Linux and *BSD), has plans to include floating applets in KDE4’s revamped desktop, Plasma. Opera runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and a number of other platforms.

Opera’s taken a very similar approach to Apple’s. A widget is a bundle of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The most obvious difference is the structure of the bundle: Read the rest of this entry »

Toolbars that Phone Home

Many web browser add-ons have features that require contacting a central server. The Google Toolbar will show you a site’s PageRank. Amazon’s A9 Toolbar will show you information from Alexa. If you want this, that’s great—but if you only want it occasionally, you might not want someone tracking your entire browsing session.

After installing the A9 toolbar for testing, I decided I wanted to know just when they were contacting their server. I installed the Firefox versions of four toolbars and used netstat to see when they connected.

• A9 Toolbar: Constant connections to hosts at amazon.com and alexa.com, but only when the toolbar is visible.
• Google Toolbar: Opens initial connection to a Google-owned IP address. If PageRank display is enabled, or was earlier in the session, maintains continuous connections—even when the toolbar is hidden!
• Yahoo! Toolbar: Opens initial connections to a Yahoo server and to unknown.Level3.net (which, based on traceroute, appears to be on the way from here to Yahoo). Sometimes the latter remains open for a long time before closing. It does not appear to reconnect on its own.
• StumbleUpon: Only connects when you press its buttons.

Overall, these toolbars seem to behave in a privacy-friendly way. But it was disturbing that the Google toolbar keeps a connection open even when it’s hidden, and that disabling PageRank display doesn’t seem to stop the connections until you restart Firefox. (Maybe it does eventually, and I didn’t wait long enough.) If I’ve hidden the toolbar, I don’t need the functionality right then. There’s no reason to hold a network connection open until I re-show the toolbar.

If I only want to use these toolbars occasionally, I can just hide most of them through the View→Toolbars submenu. But to keep the Google Toolbar from phoning home, I have to either disable PageRank and restart Firefox, or disable the toolbar in the Extensions—and restart Firefox.

Missed it by that much

I recently picked up a new domain name for a stand-alone website I’ve been working on. Since I got a good deal from Yahoo last March when I registered googolplextheaters.com for $5/year, I went with Yahoo again. I was slightly annoyed to see the price was now $9.95, but I remembered $4.98 had been a promo price, and $10/year is still not bad. Heck, I remember when then-monopoly Network Solutions dropped the price of a domain name from $100 to $70.

Anyway, it seems that Yahoo still offers $4.98 domains—depending on how you get there. Some of their ads offer the lower price, and if you come into the service through the ad, you get the discount.

It’s kind of like an automatic coupon.

It’s also a bit annoying that I could have spent half as much if I’d clicked on a different link.

Still, it’s only a $5 difference. I spend that much on lunch.

IM Wars and the Spam Strawman

To be honest, I haven’t used any instant messaging system much since college. But every once in a while I fire up Gaim just to see if anyone I know is on AIM or ICQ. I have a Yahoo account, but I’m not sure anyone I know actually uses Yahoo Messenger, and I’ve been avoiding MSN mainly on principle.

Sadly, it seems the IM wars have returned.

This time it’s Yahoo that’s blocked other clients from connecting to their networks. The most high-profile victim has been Trillian, another client which talks to multiple IM networks, but of course Gaim was hit as well. What’s interesting, this time, is that Yahoo claims it’s doing this to cut down on spam.

Now let’s think about this: In order to send and receive instant messages on Yahoo’s network, you need a Yahoo account, correct? So no matter what software a spammer uses to connect, he still needs to log in, which means Yahoo can control them inside the network. This is where current IM systems are fundamentally different from email: instead of many independently-controlled systems talking to each other, each IM service is one system with many accounts, more like a website with required registration. Place limits on what clients can do, and (barring bugs in your server) no matter what client someone uses, he can’t get around your spam/virus/hack controls.
Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting use of technology

Yahoo has finally released its specification for its DomainKeys email authentication scheme. Included is the following patent license (emphasis added):

Yahoo! will grant a royalty-free, worldwide, non-exclusive license under any Yahoo! patent claims that are essential to implement or use any Implementations so that licensees can make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, or yodel Implementations; provided that the licensee agrees not to assert against Yahoo!, or any other Yahoo! licensees of Implementations, any patent claims of licensee that are essential to implement or use any Implementations.

Yodel?