We like doing business with godaddy.com for domain names because they are cheap, efficient and easy to maintain. Their CEO, Bob Parsons, has started his own web log. Two of the things I have liked historically about his company — besides the low prices and the fact they clearly state that you own your own domain — is that he will personally respond to comments or suggestions and he isn’t afraid to say what he thinks.
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Google has made arrangements to fully scan three university libraries as part of the “googleprint” program. Works which are no longer copyrighted will be generally available. Works with current copyright will be term searchable, and will allow viewing either of select pages, or will tell where the book can be viewed or borrowed. The University of Michigan has over seven million volumes in it’s library that will be scanned over the next several years.

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MicroSoft lost another key step in the landmark anti-trust case in the European Union. This article explains that MicroSoft must immediately release a thinned down version of it’s operating system, sans the media player, and give some proprietary information to the competition. In theory this should allow the competitors to better craft software to work within the Windows framework. A complete chronology of key steps in the litigation is here.

After a setback in Maryland last week, where a court found Maryland’s anti-spam statute unconstitutional, a federal judge in Iowa goosed some spammers really well. An article in CNN reports the damage award to be in the billions. Of course the real problem is collection with spammers playing a shell game. As that article says:

Kramer’s attorney, Kelly Wallace, said he is unlikely to ever collect the judgment, which was made possible by an Iowa law that allows plaintiffs to claim damages of $10 per spam message. The judgments were then tripled under RICO.

RICO is a neat thing and something I have some experience with (from the good side of it I might add). Showing that the activity was that of a corrupt organization may allow you to hammer them with three times what you otherwise might receive. Good luck to them on collections.

According to this article at NetCraft, the Comment Spammers (read slugs and bums), have become so prevalent that some ISP’s are disabling comments in Moveable Type because of load on the server. There are unique rebuild issues that make MT more prone to server drag than some other types of blog software apparently. A rapid fix is proposed.

We have typically choosen WordPress for our blogging (or sometimes poorboys free CMS — or Content Management System if you prefer — solution), comment spam has caused bandwidth drain and headaches for us as well. With the newest release of WordPress, 1.2.2 as of yesterday, spam relief is still not built in. They do in the release announcement offer several solutions. We have in fact used one of those solutions (after some improvements by us) to hopefully eliminate the issue for the time being.
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For those of you who have yet to experience Firefox 1.0 get with the program. Firefox is the best thing in browsers since … well the beginning of internet browsers. It is faster, safer, and well, it is just good. They are already looking ahead to Firefox 2.0 with the next major date first quarter of 2005.

There is great pressure from local governments to tax internet connection services. Several states already tax broadband and/or DSL connection services. A prior ban on such taxes lapsed at the end of November, but President Bush last Friday signed a bill to extent that exemption from local taxation. They allowed states already charging a broadband tax to continue that for two more years however.