Lowell Deeds

Two years ago when Google paid $1.65 million for YouTube I thought…are they crazy. First, I had no idea how significant and popular YouTube would become. Why do I say significant? Consider this…if you missed the Tina Fey/ Sarah Palin Saturday Night Live skits, all you have to do is simply log into YouTube and they are there for your viewing, when you want, and as often as you want. Essential YouTube makes video available “on demand”. Google’s investment in YouTube has paid off with huge advertising revenue. Just image, the video-sharing site attracts an incredible 100 million people a month. Now Google has decided to begin what is called “hotspotting”. Here is how it works…you are watching a YouTube music video. You love the song and want to buy it. Just move your mouse to YouTube’s new “click to buy” button…click it and bam, the song from the video begins to download. With Google’s $1.65 million dollar investment, hotspotting music may be just the right thing to finally bring YouTube into profit.

There is an Internet battle going on that may effect the future of Apple’s iTunes. The world’s two biggest social networking sites are slugging it out for your loyalty. Its Facebook Vs MySpace and the financial stakes are high. MySpace, the older of the sites practically invented the concept of networking on the Internet, but suffers from bad PR in many circles. The latest statistics on use reveal much about their battle. Facebook, the industry’s newcomer has actually overtaken MySpace in visitors…Facebook gets 120 million “unique” visitors everyday, MySpace 115 million unique visitors. These numbers are truly astounding. Being number two doesn’t sit well with MySpace, so they’ve taken action. The site recently launched a new weapon…music. Check this out…A MySpace member can now listen to “free” streaming music on the site. Members can even make play lists of up to 100 songs…but how does this threaten iTunes? Well, not only does MySpace allow you to listen, but with one click of the mouse the site directs you to amazon.com’s digital music store …and yes, you can purchase the song there. Should Apple be worried?…time will tell.

The FBI is investigation a 20 year old college student for alledgely hacking into Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail Account. How is this possible? These people must be computer wizzards…Hardly. Most of us feel relatively safe about the security of our home email accounts, but should we? The alleged hacker, David Kernell used a pretty simple method to access Palin’s account. Almost all free email accounts like Yahoo and AOL allow users to “recover or reset” their password. And Kernell allegedly did exactly that to Palin’s account. Here is the scary part…Using readily accessible, personal information found on the Internet the hacker reset Palin’s email password. The new password…”popcorn” (get it Kernell/popcorn” allegely, of course). Later the hacker posted details of the break-in on the Web…This is from CNet: “When Yahoo prompted for Palin’s birthday, one poster said it took only 15 seconds on Wikipedia to answer that question. When prompted for ZIP Code, Wasilla, Ala., has only two ZIP Codes. As for Palin’s personal security question, “Where did you meet your spouse?” that did slow the process. The poster claimed it took several tries but eventually hit upon the correct answer: Wasilla High”. It is pretty discomforting to learn that our email accounts are so vulnerable especially considering that a national figures account was violated in minutes.

I love Virginia…honestly, my father-in-law was from Virginia (great guy), Thomas Jefferson, my favorite founding father was from Virginia, Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains are breath taking…but, what the heck are they doing down there? Last week the Virginia Supreme Court overturned an anti-spam law. Listen to this…the court said the statute violated the First Amendment right to free and anonymous speech. Sorry, to all those Virginians I love…but are these people crazy?! Since when does anyone have the constitutional right to cram my inbox with unwanted solicitations? The spammer in question is named Jeremy Jaynes.

“Jaynes was convicted in 2004 of sending tens of thousands (did you get that? tens of thousands) of emails through America Online servers in Loudoum. He was the first person tried under the law enacted in 2003, and Loudoum Circuit Court Judge Thomas D. Horne sentenced him to nine years in prison (Washington Post).

Way to go Judge!… But now the Supreme Court of the home of my beloved father-in-Law and Thomas Jefferson negated this decision…but, let us not forget, American Liberty incubated in Virginia, like it did in Massachusetts. Virginia’s Attorney General Bob McDonnell is appealing the decision to the United States Supreme Court…

”Today, the Supreme Court of Virginia has erroneously ruled that one has the right to deceptively enter somebody else’s private property for purposes of distributing his unsolicited fraudulent emails. I respectfully but fervently disagree…We will take this issue directly to the Supreme Court of the United States. The right of citizens to be free from unwanted emails is one that I believe must be made secure” (Washington Post).

Wow, I couldn’t agree more. In the words of another great Virginian…”I know not what course others may take, but as for me give me anti-spam or give me death” …or something like that.

I cannot express my deep, deep, deep disappointment in google. First, some background…Just last week I spilled my soul to you in this blog. Remember these words?: ”I am a google geek”…”if google developed it, I want it!”…If google made a G-car I’d buy it”… etc, etc, etc. I wrote those accolades last Wednesday. Why? I had just discovered that google developed a new web browser called Chrome. Now, a little more background…Wednesday night after writing that blog entry I raced home, pulled out my laptop and began to download Google’s Chrome. My excitement grew as the download status bar edged toward completion. Bam, finished…Once downloaded I clicked on the Setup File icon “this is an executable file blah, blah, blah”…I know, I know…just set Chrome up for me. The “Set Up” bar filled and filled. “This is so sweet”, I thought.…then at around 80%, the filling stopped. I waited, the bar stopped moving…finally, a message, “your download has failed”…What?…I tried again, right from the beginning… “your download has failed” again. The actual error message was much longer, but it was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to my dazed brain. I couldn’t believe it. This is google, the undisputed king of the Internet…The next day I tried again…same error message. The next day another try, then another. Finally, I stopped trying on Saturday…Why?, I thought. What is wrong? I may never know. But until google gets its act together call me FireFox guy.

I am a Google geek…if Google developed it I want it! I use Google gmail, Google’s zeitgeist, Google’s Page Rank, Google’s Tool Bar etc, etc, etc. If Google made a G-car I’d buy it. Now my dream has come true…Google has developed an Internet browser to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). It’s called Chrome? And it is open-source…that means a large number of independent programmers will be constantly improving it. OK first, why leave Internet Explorer? The biggest reason…because 80% of Internet surfers use it. And since most viruses are written to attack the most computers they mainly attack IE. A couple of years ago I lost a computer to an incurable virus. After that I stopped using IE and began using Mozilla’s Firefox for my browser. I love Firefox, but I can’t wait to try out Chrome. Here are some of the features Chrome offers…multi tabs so if one tab crashes the entire browser doesn’t…and these tabs can be opened in separate windows; the address bar is now called the omnibox (I love it)…it takes search information as well as a URL; Google officials say Chrome’s script is faster, safer and more stable… and there is more and more. The chances of Chrome overtaking Internet Explore are slim. Hey, every computer comes with IE pre-loaded (except Apple of course). But it is nice to have another alternative in the marketplace.

Google Suggests (yes, that’s a capital “S”)
Suggests what?…
Why whatever it thinks you’re looking for. That’s what.
Google’s latest innovation is called Google Suggests and it is designed to facilitate your Internet searches. Here is an example…Did you ever misspell a word in Google search and get that helpful message “Did you mean_______ ? Well, that won’t happen anymore. Instead, Google Suggest will correct your misspelling as you type (believe me I ned that feeture). And Google Suggest goes beyond just correcting spelling mistakes. Suggest is smart, very smart. Listen to this….As you type, it guesses what it thinks you are looking for, and begins to offer its “suggestions” while you are still typing. It sounds to me like Google has another winner with Google Suggests and it’s up and running right now…check it out.

The New York Times reports that just prior to the Russian military incursion into neighboring Georgia, many websites belonging to the government of Georgia came under attack from computers across the world. No one knows who exactly launched these attacks. There’s no hard evidence that the Russian government is responsible and the Georgian sites were defaced or altered in a type of electronic graffiti but were not knocked offline which suggests that it was unofficial mischief rather than a coordinated attack from a hostile government. Still, this incident should remind us that with the internet being such an integral part of our everyday lives, attacks on the internet will also be an integral part of warfare - conflict - terrorism in the 21st Century.

Look! Up in the sky, Its a bird, no its a plane…no its Fire Eagle (as of yesterday that is). Fire Eagle is a new location sharing platform being offered by Yahoo. And its Free. Fire Eagle allows you to share your exact location through your cell phone or computer (did I mention it is free?). Why would anyone want to let the world know his/her “exact location”? For one thing because it is free. And it can turn an ordinary application into something extraordinary. Let me give you an example. You’re in Washington DC. You feel like some Italian food for dinner. Log into a “place finding” application. Type in Italian Restaurants and then Fire Eagle tells the application exactly exact where you are, right down to the street…In seconds your computer/phone screen is displaying every Italian Restaurant in the area. Oh, I see, you want/need a little more privacy. Well “the service allows you to authorize just how much information you want to share with the apps” (PC World). And once a month Fire Eagle will send you an email reminding you what you are sharing. I know it all sounds very Orwellian, but it can offer some convenient services.

We’ve been experiencing sporadic outages of the www.lowelldeeds.com site for the past week and overall slow performance. We will be performing some maintenance on the site after hours today which will bring the site down for several hours. It should resume full operations later this evening.

There seems to be rising concern about the threats posed by criminals to those who use the internet to do anything involving money. Just last week there was news that a major international credit card theft ring was broken up (they were selling credit card numbers, expiration dates and security codes for as little as 8 cents apiece). Over the weekend, a couple of MIT students were the target of an injunction requested by the MBTA when the T learned the students planned to give a presenation on how to hack the T’s Charlie Card system at a big computer hackers convention (DEFCON 15) in Las Vegas. But the news that concerned me most was a story about the weakness of passwords as a security measure. We’re not talking about simple passwords like “123456″ or “password” which might be easily guessed, but about sophisticated passwords that contain no discernable words and combinations of letters, numbers and punctuation marks. Instead, the risk in using a password is that you can’t be sure that the website in which you’re entering the password is authentic. Computer criminals now have ways of duplicating legitimate websites and diverting innocent computer users seeking real sites to the fake ones. The customer has no way of knowing that he’s at a bogus site until unknown charges start to appear on his credit card bill. It seems that the best way to protect against this kind of behavior is by having the customer’s computer and the correct internet server authenticate each other using advanced cryptography. Using this method, the only risk would occur if someone else got on your computer.

A new book is creating a buzz in the national media. In “Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails”, Tom Wheeler explains how Abraham Lincoln became and “early adopter” of his generation’s newest communications technology - the telegraph - and used it to help win the Civil War. The author’s website contains images of various telegrams sent by Lincoln to his generals as well as lessons about using email that the author learned by studying Lincoln. Long ago I became convinced that studying how new technology became integrated into everyday life in the past helps guide us through the rollout of new technologies in the future. This book makes a valuable contribution to this field.

If you are interested in whats happening at the Middlesex North Registry you should consider signing up to read our Twitter. Signing up is simple and free. Once you’re signed up you can ask to “follow” lowelldeeds. We make entries at least five times a day. Each one helps give you a glimpse into the inner workings of the registry and helps keep you informed on “how” and “what” we are doing. If a piece of equipment is down…we “tweet” about it, if we are busy we “tweet” about it, if there is an emergency situation and we need to close we “tweet” about it. Twitter is the newest form of rapid communication in the technology world. Just to give you a flavor of what you’ll read on the lowelldeeds Twitter, here is a sample of the tweets from July 24, 2008:

The Interns just informed me that we are getting water in the basement where some of our older books are stored…first tool, a mop. 11:15AM July 24

The rain has stopped, for now, but the water continues to enter the basement. We have added rags to our arsenal. 11:50 AM July 24

Good job by our Interns…the water has stopped entering the basement and everything is back to normal…for now anyway.1:10 PM July 24

Preparing Assessor’s reports for the towns…they should be ready to mail out by tomorrow. 1:52 PM July 24

Things have quieted down considerably over the past 30 minutes…just one closing going on in the building 2:23 PM July 24Final number of

Documents recorded for July 24: 188 4:15PM July 24

Once again…give Twitter a try

Trust me, I don’t look like a techie geek, but lately people have called me one. The fact is, its not technology I love, its technology’s effect on our lives that fascinates me. Take politics for an example…technology has change politics forever. And what changes politics changes democracy and the way we live. Recently, I came across a congressman from Texas who seems to get “it” when it comes to this stuff. His name is Representative John Culberson. Culberson uses Twitter (like this registry) to provide frequent house updates to his constituents. When I read that I loved it. Through Twitter he is giving the average person an opportunity to get a first-hand glimpse at the trenches of congress. But listen to what Culberson has done now…This is from the New York Times “On Friday, when several dozen Republicans decided to stay on the House floor and discuss energy legislation after the House adjourned for a five-week summer recess, the cameras and microphones were turned off. So the first source of video was from a congressman who streamed live pictures to the Internet using his cell phone camera”. Culberson used a new video service called Qik to provide the public with the only record of the “informal” discussion. Qik allows you to stream live video from your cell phone to the world, pretty good huh?…now isn’t this technology with the possibility of far reaching effects?

I recently purchased a new HP computer. It runs Window’s new operating system, Vista. Many users have complained about Vista, but Microsoft is sticking with it. My attitude when I purchased the new computer with Vista was “an operating system is an operating system”…at least that is how I felt until yesterday. For the first time since purchasing my new computer I tried to download iTunes 7.7 and sync my iPhone. To my surprise I got an error…”I must have done something wrong”, I thought. I deleted and reinstalled iTunes and tried again..another error.Then a third time delete/ reinstall…a third error. ” What am I doing wrong?? I angusihed. Last night I spent numerous hours researching the problem on the Internet. Finally, I discovered it wasn’t me…there is a compatibility problem between Windows Vista and the iPhone and its little brother iTouch. I believe the only reason there isn’t more public outcry is most people are not running Vista, yet…but they will. Rememeber Microsoft is sticking with its new OS, so when you buy a new computer you’ll get Vista, simple. Luckily I came upon a solution to the problem in an Apple Support site. I tried it this morning and it worked…but, can you believe this absurdity? Vista, soon to be the most used operating sysytem in the world is not compatible with iPhone, the most popular cell phone in the world? Of course, Apple blames Microsoft and Microsoft blames Apple…me? I blame both of them.