The Substantially Similar Weblog

I noticed, ironically enough, on Google News, that Google News has been sued for $17.5 Million by Agence France Presse:

French news agency Agence France Presse is suing Google Inc over what it calls “unauthorized” reproduction of wire stories and copyrighted pictures on the Google News service. AFP are seeking $17.5 million recompense from the world’s number one search engine.

I’ve come to rely on Google News as my main “quick overview” of what’s going on in the world. The new customized news is another great example (along with gmail and Google Maps) of Google’s genuine innovation in creating usable interactive applications where competitors have thus far been trapped in perceived limitations of HTTP that basically involve submitting a form for each separate step of a transaction.

Google has been taking quite a battering in France of late. It lost an appeal relating to its AdWords sale of the trademark “bourse des vols” (“flight exchange”), as well as a similar lawsuit brought by luxury goods company Louis Vuitton.

I expect by the time this is over Google may be involved in every important case that will determine the boundaries of copyright and trademark law on the Internet. Unlike many of the defendants in the file sharing cases, for example, Google (1) has an incentive, and a pocketbook, to litigate these cases, and (2) has a decent argument that its appropriation of intellectual property is productive and not merely reproductive.

If Google keeps losing in France, I wonder if it will attempt to offer a different service in France than in the United States—perhaps selecting by IP address of request, or by portal site (e.g., google.fr will deliver different content to conform with the French rulings than google.com). In either case, it will be quite easy for people in France to access the same content as Americans. My fear is that we’ll end up with a “least common denominator” result, where Google and other web service company will be forced to conform to the most restrictive legal regime of any country connected to the Internet.

According to news.com.com(.com.com.com…), Google is now an ICANN accredited domain name registrar. Google states that it isn’t going to be selling domain names any time soon, though:

However, it has no plans to sell Web addressees for now.

“Google became a domain name registrar to learn more about the Internet’s domain name system,” a company representative said Tuesday. “We believe this information can help us increase the quality of our search results.”

Isn’t this an odd claim? Isn’t the functioning of the Internet’s domain name system transparent? What more is Google going to be able to learn “from the inside” that isn’t already publicly available? And if there is such information, shouldn’t we all have access to it?

Alternatively, CNET speculates that this will give Google a seat at the ICANN table, giving it a larger role in Internet governance. This sounds more plausible than any technical reason for becoming a registrar, but is, in itself, somewhat disturbing. It means you can buy a seat at the table for $10,000. I’d like to think there would be a more democratic way of balancing stakeholders in Internet governance than “whoever can afford a seat.”

This also lends credence to one of the foundational claims of an interesting recent paper on Internet trademark law, Deregulating Relevancy in Internet Trademark Law by Eric Goldman, mentioned on the Trademark Blog. Goldman convincingly argues for the elimination of distinctions in trademark law between various forms of search: domain name, keyword, paid placement, adware, suggesting that the issues for the searcher, the publisher, and the intermediary are really the same in all cases. For two quick examples, consider that several of the top searches in Google are for terms like “www.yahoo.com” and “www.google.com” (turning search keywords into a domain name query); and Verisign’s ill-fated attempt to implement site-finder (turning domain name queries into search keywords).

is “click here.”

I’m worried about our children, the web developers of the future. Who will teach them not to ever write “click here”?

(typeahead find, aka “Find As You Type”: a Mozilla Firefox feature that jumps to links when you start typing characters in them; saves keyboard junkies countless hours from having to move their hands off of the keyboard; works poorly if all of your links are called “click here”)

There are a number of queries you can do from the Google searchbar; for example, if you query on a phone number, you get a reverse lookup. If you query define:word, you get definitions of that word.

In keeping with the goal of turning Google into the Swiss Army Knife of information retrieval, I wish Google would return domain name ownership results when queried with whois:domainname.com. I think this would be pretty low-hanging fruit for Google. If anyone reading this has access to Google’s magnaminous ear, please suggest it.

Update: It appears that Google had this feature at the beginning of the year, but Network Solutions banned it. Alas.

I got an email this morning asking me to update my ebay account information (or my account would be frozen). I was suspicious, of course. My text-based mailreader mutt rendered the link as http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run, but when I inspected the HTML it actually points to update.paypal-verifications.net.

A google search on “paypal-verifications.net” gives almost no results.

It’s obvious now that this is a scam, because paypal doesn’t own “update.paypal-verifications.net.” If you go to the domain, you’ll see a look-alike PayPal login screen, which presumably is there to collect your paypal login and do nefarious things with it, like steal money.

So I thought I’d do my little part by making it clear that update.paypal-verifications.net is a scam, and someone should shut down that website ASAP. In the meantime, at least this bit of information should show up in google searches soon.

As a general matter, for the less fraud-savvy of you out there, always beware of emails along these lines. I’m not sure there’s any bright line test to immediately recognize fraud, but at least pay attention to the actual URL, and ask yourself whether the whole thing makes sense.

Update: Someone who read this entry contacted the abuse division of afraid.org, the (free) DNS provider for paypal-verifications.net. The domain name has now disappeared from the DNS.

Working near the heart of the financial district in Boston, I’ve noticed what I believe is a new phenomenon. Just about every day, I can get either the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, or the New York Times for free. The Globe usually has a cover page reflecting a sponsor of the free newspaper (most often my recent alma mater), but the Herald and Times are just plain free, the same version you can buy for $0.25 to $1.00 at the vending machine on the corner.

One theory is that they are trying to put Metro out of business, and then they’ll stop their freebies (potentially an antitrust “dumping” violation if this is really the plan). Metro is a short, free newspaper that has been popping up in cities all over the world (they apparently only provide PDF versions of their paper on their website). The quality of the writing is terrible, but it’s short, and, well, free. For many commuters, it’s all they have time to read on the train anyway. It’s interesting how often people (myself included) will chose something much worse because it’s free, rather than pay $0.25 for a real paper, which in this day and age is also basically “free” if you earn a reasonable salary. This is perhaps also the appeal of the shoddy camcorder versions of current-run movies that circulate on peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

Another theory is that the papers make so little money from vendor sales (versus advertising) that the increased circulation from free giveaways actually increases advertising revenue more than the lost sales. Most cultural weeklies have gone this way—I remember when I first moved to Boston I accidentally stole the Boston Phoenix a couple of times before I realized that it actually cost money. Shortly thereafter they made it free and my guilt was assuaged.

There’s been a lot of talk about near-zero-cost publishing on the web and the impact on copyright, creativity, and the dissemination of information. But could it be that “real” publishing is also becoming so cheap that the same issues arise there? People are rarely willing to pay for standard news content online, perhaps the same is becoming true offline.

I expect other bloggers share my slight irritation when the traditional media run a story about the “blogging phenomenon.” On Sunday morning, NPR Weekend Edition interviewed New York Times correspondent Matthew Klam who had a story in the Sunday Times Magazine about blogging and the election. Two of the more inane questions (from memory) were:

• Are some bloggers more trusted than others?
• Why do you think bloggers are having a bigger effect in this election than in 2000?

The New York Times writer’s answer were almost as inane. He commented that in 2000, a lot of bloggers were still hand-coding HTML.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I would just prefer that they leave us alone. Let us do our thing, and let them do their thing.

I’m also struggling with the question of how an associate in a fairly sizable law firm can continue blogging. I know some of my readers are partners or solo practioners who don’t have to be as concerned about discretion; but what about for those of us low on the totem poll. Any suggestions?

Here is a great site for information about spices, “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” A friend forwarded it to me a couple of months ago, and I recently googled fruitlessly for it. I’m posting it here with the hope that its PageRank will increase so it won’t be hard to find. This guy presents the most complete information I’ve found about 117 difference spice plants (at the time of this writing), with no apparent commercial motive. The web at its best.

Need a one-time only email address to get a password for a website or register a product? Don’t want to be entered into even more spam databases? Try Mailinator. Just make up any email address @mailinator.com and go and check your mail at that address with no password. Mail gets deleted in a few hours.

This is even better than creating a one-time only email address at your own domain (if you control your own domain): less work (you don’t need to create the address first), and no accumulating load on your server.

It’s simple but clever concepts like this that continue to give me faith in the web.

Update: two readers suggest dodgeit.com and sneakemail.com for two similar “throwaway” email services. dodgeit.com is even more barebones than mailinator, and sneakemail is a more full-featured (includes greylisting).

Update 2: another comment-er suggests spamgourmet.com. When it rains, it pours.

Update 3: Hailstorms. http://spamlinks.openrbl.org/filter-client-account.htm for a list of disposable email providers.

I’ve noticed lately that increasingly irrelevant results are topping out Google searches. It’s frustrating to see the once vaunted PageRank technology start to fail in the face of determined spammers and quasi-spammers.

For example, I was looking for places to have brunch is Roslindale, where we’ll be moving in August. The top result in a search for “roslindale boston brunch” is this site, which seems to be nothing more than a list of keywords associated with Boston. Sometimes the top result in Google is nothing more than a page with a list of apparently random search terms, apparently attempting to draw you in to some commercial enterprise or pornography.

Is there anything we can do as netizens to fight back and help Google get back on track? I realize it’s not helping much for me to link to the abovementioned site, just further boosting its PageRank. But I wonder if the time has come to move beyond voting by linking, and create some sort of trust-based cooperative Google spam filter. That is, there could be a way to vote against a site and thus diminish its PageRank. Your negative vote, like your positive vote, would also be a function of your PageRank.

I expect the folks at Google are smarter than I and are working diligently to solve this problem. Probably the “negative vote” idea would eventually be attacked by the same evildoers who are screwing up the positive PageRank system. As a friend of mine once said, Google is good, but it’s just one person, and there are tens of thousands of people who are all aligned against it. Eventually it’s going to lose.