Blog Marco

One of Sydney's Western suburbs, Blacktown, is out of phone, internet and EFTPOS services this weekend after vandals cut a Telstra communications cable around 8am this morning (Vandals are awake so early these days?!?!). The vandals severed two fibre optic cables affecting these telecommunication services in Blacktown, Rooty Hill, Erskine Park, Arndell Park and Shalvey. Sort of similar to the very recent episode of SouthPark called "Over Logging" when the whole town lost their Internet. Of course it wasn't from vandals, but rather, the Internet was lost because of too many people using the Internet and the network simply gave up.

Google has been taking photos of streets as a part of their Google Maps project. (I know this is OLD news... this is just for those who aren't aware of it yet) What Google Maps does is drivve a car around and take snap shots which they then stitch together so that instead of viewing a street from above you can view the street from a horizontal viewpoint.

I found a list of the "Types of Websites On the Internet". This list may be useful for research.

• blog
• commercial presence
• forum
• articles / news
• directory
• e-commerce
• social networking
• games
• search engine

For those that follow this blog, know that I like to collect a very vast variety of information. I like to collect snippets of information which depict the Internet as the Wild West of today. Laws are simply trying to catch up to this wildly popular "thing" we call the World Wide Web (WWW). Here's another proof of that concept: Craigslist Crime.

I'm not talking about the coaxers and the get rich quickers, I'm talking about real Criminals, real robbers that are into Craigslist Crime. These bums post up bogus classified posts on Craigslist which advertise to the world that anyone is welcome to anything in the house (furniture, lawn mower and even the kitchen sink...) since they were moving out - a house which they don't own. The criminals are indeed creative in the way they conduct crime, but please, use that creativity in a positive manner.

Facebook privacy has been a major talking point at the water cooler. Everyone - including me - are pissed at how Facebook handles our privacy. But now, things are changing. They're giving us the power to change our privacy levels! I'm not giving any more information away to my applications (besides the info that I type into their app)

It's bloody amazing at how much stuff Facebook knows about us: They have a picture, they know our birthday sex, hometown, political views, and when you last updated your profile, Personal info (activities, interests, etc.), Current location (what city you're in), Education history, Work history, Profile status, Groups you belong to, Events you're invited to, Photos taken by you, Photos taken of you, Relationship status, What type of relationship you're looking for, What sex you're interested in, Who you're in a relationship with and Religious views. That's a tremendous amount of power.

Facebook is tweaking the privacy settings on its popular online hangout to let users exert greater control over which of their friends are allowed to see personal details they post.

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Submitted by Marco on Thu, 20/03/2008 - 3:24pm.

Isn't PayPal smart with Credit Cards? When you go shopping around on the internet, find something to buy and purchase it through the PayPal payment system you are often served a page which lists how much the transaction will withdraw from your account. But which account? This is the page which you must read carefully.

First time I came across this page, I didn't read it properly and I just clicked to proceed with the transaction assuming my Credit card will automatically be charged by PayPal. But that wasn't the case. I instead got a statement from my bank a month later saying that the transaction actually went through my standard banking account and not through the credit card. I shrugged it off at that time, thinking it was a glitch and relieved I wasn't double charged for my purchase.

Second time around, I read the PayPal payment page carefully. Then I realised. You have to manually select the credit card option by clicking another link on that page to change your payment type: whether it be from your Paypal funds, your bank account (which you have on file with Paypal because you would withdraw your funds from Paypal to that account), and your credit card account. So I chose the credit card option. It doesn't cost any extra for you the user of Paypal to use the credit card option over the bank option. But for Paypal it costs them money. That's why they prefer you to use the bank option. Paypal has credit card fees to pay which they pay to the credit card companies for the privilege of using their payment system (i.e. Merchant fees). Something the end user doesn't see.

Blog Marco hits a million milestone... and I didn't even see it happen. Since I've installed the Google analytics software back on the 7th April 2006 till today, Blog Marco has had 711,468 visitors come through these very pages. About 5 percent of you came back for more. Where's the million milestone? It's in the pageviews. This blog has served 1,103,197 pageviews to its visitors since that date. Next milestone? The millionth visitor. It'll probably happen in the next quarter to a half year... Time to don the party hat and celebrate this great milestone!

I can't get enough of these court cases dealing with the internet lately. Here's another one in regards to "Virtual Stealing" or better known as "sharing" online. This is the the first US trial to challenge the illegal downloading of music on the internet where a single mother from Minnesota was ordered to pay US$220,000 (AUD$247,549) for sharing 24 songs online. Thats US$9,166.67 per song! It's crazy how this giant corporate company is chasing after the small fry: the harmless individuals. Are they desperate? If they really want to eliminate the problem of sharing songs (i.e. their intellectual property) shouldn't they be chasing down the people behind the file sharing networks and shutting them down? Jammie Thomas, 30, was the first among more than 26,000 people sued by the Recording Industry of America and six major music labels after refusing a settlement. A jury took just five hours to decide that evidence provided by the music labels showed otherwise and found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement, court records showed. The fine could have reached $US150,000 ($168,700) a song if the jury had found "willful" copyright infringement. Had the record companies sued her for all 1702 songs found in the online folder the fine could have run in the millions.

The ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) has dropped their "Deceptive Advertising on Google" case against Google's Australian and Irish subsidiaries. They will now focus their efforts on Google's US parent company and Trading Post. What's all the kerfuffle about? We're still in the Wild West days of the Internet. The frontier is being tested. There is the case of Virgin Australia being sued from breach of copyright from taking an image of Internet website off Flickr. Then there was the case of the 15 year old being sued in Finland for a YouTube video.

In ACCC's case against Google they launched legal action against Google Australia, US-based Google Inc., Google Ireland and the Sensis subsidiary Trading Post in July, alleging misleading and deceptive conduct over search results. In documents filed with the court, the consumer regulator claimed Google did not clearly distinguish between normal organic search results and advertisements at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), which Google calls "Sponsored Links". Google was therefore misleading search enginer users because they claimed to rank search results based on relevance, not the money it received from advertisers.

In typical American style where everyone gets sued for something, a Texas family has sued Australia's Virgin Mobile phone company, claiming it caused their teenage daughter grief and humiliation by plastering her photo on billboards and website advertisements without consent. The family of Alison Chang (who features on the billboard advertisement) says Virgin Mobile grabbed the picture from Flickr, Yahoo Inc's popular photo-sharing website, and failed to credit the photographer by name. Chang's photo was part of a Virgin Mobile Australia campaign called "Are You With Us Or What?" It features pictures downloaded from Flickr superimposed with the company's ad slogans. People who post photos on Flickr are asked how they want to license their attribution. The youth counsellor chose a sharing licence from Creative Commons that allows others to reuse work such as photos without violating copyright laws, if they credit the photographer and say where the photo was taken.

As the web expands with ever more content and information everyday, more and more people are getting addicted to the internet. The majority of US adults feel that they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the web. A survey asked 1,011 American adults how long they would feel OK without going on the web, to which 15 per cent said a just a day or less, 21 per cent said a couple of days and another 19 per cent said a few days. Only a fifth of those who took part in an online survey conducted by advertising agency JWT between September 7 and 11 said they could go for a week. "People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behaviour. They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family." The found the use of mobile phones and the internet were becoming more and more an essential part of life with 48 per cent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without internet access. More than a quarter of respondents - or 28 per cent - admitted spending less time socialising face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online. It also found that 20 per cent said they spend less time having sex because they are online. We're turning into a world of Internet Addicts.

The Internet is today's version of the wild west. There are outlaws running amuck and there is no true internet-wide policing jurisdiction. The young people of today are the pioneers of this brand new digital world. Technology is moving and evolving rapidly. Check out Bill Gates in 1985. Problems that are plaguing the internet wild west at the moment are figuring out the rules and regulations of human communication over this artificial electronic technology. People are testing the boundaries of the frontier everyday. Law precedents are being set worldwide.

Gmail has released a collaborative video of people passing the envelope around the world, doing various activities. Nothing funny, just an interesting video to watch. Yet another time waster.

There could be a disturbing law precedent that could be set for Australian website owners, especially those from an online community. 2Clix is suing a popular Australian website Whirlpool which has around 180,000 users, over comments published on their message board. The owner of the website, Simon Wright is being sued for "injurious falsehood", and asking for $150,000 in damages and an injunction requiring Whirlpool to remove forum threads highly critical of 2Clix's accounting software. Dale Clapperton, chairman of the online users lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said 2Clix was using the law to silence its critics. He said if Wright lost "it might mean the end of criticising companies' products and services online", as "any company will be able to demand that people's criticisms of them be deleted off websites, and if they don't comply they'll sue". Amanda Stickley, a senior law lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, said if 2Clix won there would be severe consequences for website operators as they would have to be "very vigilant in checking material on the website and remove anything that could cause injury to someone's business reputation". In a statement of claim filed with the Supreme Court of Queensland, 2Clix said the comments, published in two threads between between late last year and July this year, led it to sustain "a severe downturn in monthly sales". But Stickley said it would be very difficult for 2Clix to successfully sue Wright for injurious falsehood over comments made by Whirlpool users. It would have to prove the statements were false, that they were made in malice, that 2Clix actually suffered damage in the form of monetary loss and, critically, that Wright had intended to cause 2Clix monetary loss by allowing the material to remain on the website. "I don't think you could actually prove that for a web operator, that they personally intended the damage because of their malicious intention, especially when it's posted by a third party that they've got no relationship to," Stickley said. But Whirlpool isn't taking any chances, asking its users in a statement published on the website to "refrain from doing anything that might expose Simon to contempt of court such as making statements that prejudge the outcome of the case".

Freedon of Speech Rules! We consumers have the right to complain. All the best to Simon and Whirlpool and don't let them set this precedent.

Someone out there actually kept record of the oldest domain names on the World Wide Web. It's interesting to note that some of the first companies that signed up to a domain name on the Internet large companies like AT&T, GE, IBM, XEROX, Bell Atlantic, Boeing and SIEMENS. What is also interesting to note is that Microsoft doesn't appear in this list of one hundred first dot com domains. They registered their web domain at a later date on May 2nd 1991.