THE HOT JOINTS » Internet

Tweet Congressmen and Porn Stars

Chris Jones — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:40:43 +0000

Twitter is taking the world by storm! Damn near everyone is Tweeting these days. News anchors, Congressman, and even porn stars are getting in on the act. If you wanna see who’s tweeting in Congress you should check out Tweet Congress. If you wanna see if your favorite porn star is tweeting you should check out Pornstar Tweet.

Be sure to follow The Hot Joints on Twitter as well!!

-Chris Jones

Death By Blogging?

Chris Jones — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:04:56 +0000

From The NYT:

SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

The pressure even gets to those who work for themselves — and are being well-compensated for it.

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

“This is not sustainable,” he said.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

The emergence of this class of information worker has paralleled the development of the online economy. Publishing has expanded to the Internet, and advertising has followed.

Even at established companies, the Internet has changed the nature of work, allowing people to set up virtual offices and work from anywhere at any time. That flexibility has a downside, in that workers are always a click away from the burdens of the office. For obsessive information workers, that can mean never leaving the house.

Blogging has been lucrative for some, but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post, and in some cases are paid on a sliding bonus scale that rewards success with a demand for even more work.

There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.

One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.

To the victor go the ego points, and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.

Some sites, like those owned by Gawker Media, give bloggers retainers and then bonuses for hitting benchmarks, like if the pages they write are viewed 100,000 times a month. Then the goal is raised, like a sales commission: write more, earn more.

Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures, and some entrepreneurs in the field have built mini-empires on the Web that are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Others who are trying to turn blogging into a career say they can end up with just $1,000 a month.

Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.

“There’s no time ever — including when you’re sleeping — when you’re not worried about missing a story,” Mr. Arrington said.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break,” he added. “But that’s never going to happen.”

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled — by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.

“The fact I have a few thousand people a day reading what I write — that’s kind of cool,” he said. And, yes, it is exhausting. Sometimes, he said, “I just want to lie down.”

Sometimes he does rest, inadvertently, falling asleep at the computer.

“If I don’t hear from him, I’ll think: Matt’s passed out again,” said Brian Lam, the editor of Gizmodo. “It’s happened four or five times.”

Mr. Lam, who as a manager has a substantially larger income, works even harder. He is known to pull all-nighters at his own home office in San Francisco — hours spent trying to keep his site organized and competitive. He said he was well equipped for the torture; he used to be a Thai-style boxer.

“I’ve got a background getting punched in the face,” he said. “That’s why I’m good at this job.”

Mr. Lam said he has worried his blogging staff might be burning out, and he urges them to take breaks, even vacations. But he said they face tremendous pressure — external, internal and financial. He said the evolution of the “pay-per-click” economy has put the emphasis on reader traffic and financial return, not journalism.

In the case of Mr. Shaw, it is not clear what role stress played in his death. Ellen Green, who had been dating him for 13 months, said the pressure, though self-imposed, was severe. She said she and Mr. Shaw had been talking a lot about how he could create a healthier lifestyle, particularly after the death of his friend, Mr. Orchant.

“The blogger community is looking at this and saying: ‘Oh no, it happened so fast to two really vital people in the field,’ ” she said. They are wondering, “What does that have to do with me?”

For his part, Mr. Shaw did not die at his desk. He died in a hotel in San Jose, Calif., where he had flown to cover a technology conference. He had written a last e-mail dispatch to his editor at ZDNet: “Have come down with something. Resting now posts to resume later today or tomorrow.”

By Matt Richtel

The Problem Of Domain “Front Running”

Chris Jones — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:47:57 +0000

Many people in the Internet game (myself included) have long suspected that when you use a domain registrar to do a domain look-up to see if a particular domain is registered, the registrar uses that information to either register the domain for themselves or sell that data to third-parties.

Imagine a situation in which you think up (somedomain.com) and type it in to your registrar to see if it’s available. To your surprise it is available, but you decide to purchase it from another registrar. Immediately you click over to the other registrar and attempt to buy the domain only to discover that it’s no longer available. Weird huh?

I don’t know about weird, but it’s certainly scandalous. It’s called “domain front running” and it’s a very real thing. According to domainnamenews.com, domain registrar Network Solutions appears to have been caught with it’s hand in the proverbial “cookie jar” with regards to domain front running.

A story is developing regarding domain name registrar Network Solutions front running domains. According to multiple sources on DomainState.com, it appears that domains searched via NSI are being purchased by the registrar thereby preventing a registrant from purchasing it at any other registrar other than NSI. As an example (at the time of this writing), a random domain which DNN searches such as HowDoesThisDomainTasteTaste.com can be seen in this whois search to now be unavailable to register at other registrars but at NSI it can be purchasedThe whois contact now says :

Registrant: Make this info private
This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com
13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300
HERNDON, VA 20171
US

The domains are likely being purchased and held in NSI ownership until the potential registrant comes back to purchase the name through NSI. If the purchase is not made at NSI within 5 days, NSI uses the same 5 day grace period that domain tasting operations use and they delete the domain. Once a search for a domain is conducted at NSI the domain name is registered and only available to be purchased by a registrant at NSI. It is not clear if NSI has increased prices on domains that have received multiple whois searches and that they are front running.

NSI also apparently has no problem taking over control of trademark domains using this practice as well. Searches for names such as microsoft-dell.com and ibm-microsoft-dell.com all appear as registered now by NSI and only available for purchase at NSI.

This so-called “front running” while not illegal, represents a major breach of trust with customers who have long suspected companies of employing this practice.

For their part, Network Solutions has responded to the controversy by promising to improve customer protection measures.

-Chris Jones

Time Warner Looking At High-Speed Internet Charges Based on Usage

Chris Jones — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:49:07 +0000

Time Warner will possibly be the first high-speed Internet provider to switch to a totally new pricing structure.

The company is set to begin a trial run in Beaumont, TX in which it will sell high-speed Internet access in a tiered structure based on how much data is download per month.

I have a bad feeling about this. Internet access has become so cheap that companies like Time Warner are looking for new ways to increase profits.

This tiered pricing structure sounds disturbingly similar to the way cell phone minutes are priced. I don’t even use Time Warner, but I hope they don’t have some fantasy about charging the kind of egregious prices that cell phone companies do for airtime minutes.

I just can’t shake the feeling that the low-cost unregulated “Information Superhighway” that we’ve all grown to love is going to come to an end any day now.

Only to be replaced by an expensive highway filled with road blocks, check points, and speed lanes. It really could be just a matter of time.

With all the talk in Congress about “Net Neutrality” and stories like this about Comcast, there are plenty of reasons for consumers to be worried.

-Chris Jones

Understand The 2008 Election At “Behind The Ballot”

Chris Jones — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 22:29:49 +0000

With the 2008 election cycle in full swing, it’s easy to get confused about which candidate stands for what in which party. A new site has recently come online that’s non-partisan in nature, and serves to make the entire election process much easier to understand.

The site is called Behind The Ballot and if features profiles of each candidate and their respective platforms. I’ve found the site to be very useful as a kind of reference guide for each candidate and an excellent calender for important dates in this election cycle. Check it out!

-Chris Jones

More Than 5,600 Websites Link To Al-Qaeda

Chris Jones — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:57:20 +0000

According to Reuters, more than 5,600 websites are spreading Al-Qaeda’s extremist ideology worldwide, with more than 900 new ones appearing every year.

A Saudi researcher has identified the Internet as a key battlefield for militants who launched a campaign to topple the U.S.-allied ruling royal family in 2003.

Khaled al-Faram gave a presentation to the Information Technology and National Security conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The conference was organized by the Saudi intelligence agency to encourage the public to cooperate more with the government and share expertise on how to survey the Internet for militant activity.

He said it was difficult to track most of the sites, though hardcore al Qaeda sites often change addresses to avoid detection or start up again elsewhere once infiltrated.

“There are some 900 news sites appearing every year, and despite the retreat of some media outlets specifically run by al Qaeda, extremist Web sites are constantly on the rise.”

“The real battle with al Qaeda is no longer on the ground, but rather a media battle, and it is a real threat to national security,” Faram told Reuters.

“For al Qaeda media coverage is more important than the actual operations,” he said.

Google to enter mobile phone market with software

Chris Jones — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:02:36 +0000

Google Inc (NasdaqGS:GOOG – News) on Monday spelled out long-rumored plans to enter the mobile phone market in 2008 by building software that could help the industry make the Internet run more easily on phones.

Google, which has no immediate plans to make phones of its own, said it was working with 30 companies, including phone makers Motorola Inc, and Samsung Electronics.

The leading Internet company has long been rumored to be working on a new class of free or low-cost advertising-supported mobile phone of its own, popularly known as the “Gphone.” Google’s Schmidt would not rule out the company developing its own devices but said it had no imminent plans to do so.

The Web search company is looking to expand the range of Internet services it now offers through computer browsers to the far larger mobile phone market, where a range of conflicting handset designs and software standards have hobbled Internet use.

Comcast Blocks Some Internet Traffic

Chris Jones — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:07:48 +0000

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high- speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

This type of interference is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file- sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.

This is just the latest in a series of reports about Comcast blocking content. There was a report recently about some users being cut-off completely by Comcast for allegedly using “too much” bandwidth. Exactly what “too much” actually means is a matter of significant debate.

Comcast’s acceptable use policy states that an individual will not restrict, inhibit or degrade any other user’s experience or put an overly large burden on the network.

All this blocking and secrecy by Comcast is not a good sign of things to come. A company as large as Comcast should have no problems providing bandwidth regardless of how much individual customers use. Let’s just hope this is not the beginning of some kind of censorship play.

-Chris Jones

Al-Qaeda Goes Dark After Video Leak

Chris Jones — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:16:05 +0000

Al Qaeda’s Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden’s September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy’s system.

The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden’s first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.

This tipped of Al-Qaeda’s Internet security apparatus that their had been a breach. U.S. intelligence officials then watched in real time as the terror group shut down there network within minutes.

What U.S. intelligence had been monitoring was Al-Qaeda’s internal communications on what amounted to a corporate intranet. This was also the method in which the terror groups media arm known as As-Sahab disseminated freshly made Jihadi videos to Al-Qaeda members for them to distribute around the world.

In addition to As-Sahab, this intranet also dealt with matters such as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Al-Qaeda operatives throughout the world. This communications network is known to intel officials as Obelisk and it took years to penetrate.

While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.

The leaking of the Bin Laden video a full four days before it was supposed to air has dealt a major blow to U.S. intelligence gathering operations.

America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw.

UPDATE:

The organization that provided the video to U.S. intelligence early was the SITE institute which is a private intelligence firm that tracks terrorist on the Internet. They often provide official intelligence agencies with information uncovered about Al-Qaeda.

U.S. agencies have responded by saying they have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web.

“We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies,” said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

-Chris Jones

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