You can go out right now, and buy a domain from any number of providers for under ten dollars USD. Or you can open your cheque book (Check book for you Yanks) and score yourself something like local.com. The difference is that a nice name like local.com will set you back $700,000. I’ve racked my brain, but I can’t think of a single way that owning local.com could possibly earn back that money in a manner that a 10 dollar domain couldn’t. But hey, I never had any real urge to buy Mayfair in Monopoly either so what would I know? read the full story at Netcraft.

Nero is one of the most popular CD/DVD burning applications available for Windows users, in fact either it or Easy CD creator is usually bundled with new CD/DVD burners. Users contemplating switching to Linux instead of Windows now have another application that they can take with them to their new platform. Nero have just released their extremely popular application for Linux, and it is free for owners of the full version of Nero for Windows. I’ve read allot of stories over the last year or so about Macromedia, Adobe and others slowly porting their products to the Linux platform as well, so it is possible that one day you can swap to Linux and not have to learn any new applications at all. (unless you use MS Office as Microsoft are not likely to port their wares to Linux any time soon.) Having said that, for those of you considering the change, you need not spent a ton of cash buying applications for Linux as with a bit of searching you will find a myriad of free choices already available. (for example, OpenOffice.org can make PDF’s and is format compatible with MS Office, NVU is becoming a valid alternative to Frontpage/Dreamweaver, TheGIMP can do nearly everything Photoshop can do and there are around half a dozen Linux applications to write CD’s and DVD’s.) Most of the above alternatives have been ported to Windows as well, so you can try them for free before deciding whether to convert to Linux and get off the Microsoft gravy train for good.

INSERT: Newsforge has done a review of Nero for Linux and compared it to Kb3 (a free GPL burning application for Linux that has been out for ages) and surprisingly (or not), KB3 trumped Nero in pretty much every way.

AOL have apparently updated their TOS “Terms Of Service” for their AOL Instant Messaging application. The new terms basically give them the rights to do a great many questionable things with your data according to Eweek. A snippet of the new TOS reads “You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the content or to be compensated for any such uses”. From memory Microsoft tried something like this with their Passport service not so long ago and ended up changing it after a public outcry so I can’t see AOL getting away with it either, particularly since companies are trying to move Instant Messaging into the workplace. If you are considering AOL IM, or are already a user, you should read the Eweek article and pay particular attention to the EULA when you install new versions of the software.

For those of you wondering about the title for this story, It’s a geek joke about a badly translated asian game that came out many years ago, the catch phrase is “All your bases are belong to us” and a quick Google will tell you more then you ever wanted to know about it.

INSERT: AOL have responded, and claim that the TOS changes were never about private person to person communications and were instead regarding public postings. My comment is that if this is indeed what they meant, why doesn’t the TOS impose this limit on itself rather then leaving it up for later interpretation.

INSERT 2: AOL have indicated that they are making 3 changes to the TOS to make it clear that private chats are exactly that, private. Read the update at Eweek. Isn’t public pressure a wonderful thing?

The Wall Street Journal reported last Friday that Microsoft has a special list of clients who receive security fixes before the general public. The only disclosed recipient thus far is the United States Air Force. The concern is that if anyone can intercept the update, analize it for the flaw being corrected, and beat the general release, then they have a gaping flaw that can be exploited on a major league level.

Let’s stop and think a minute. Microsoft updates software with patches every day. Not everyone goes for the latest update (indeed, how many users are still on Windows 98 as we speak in 2005?). Further, the updates are freely released. So the same risk exists with every update, just on a slightly smaller scale. If Microsoft didn’t pre-test the release — and they sometimes don’t install well — and instead sent that release to the general public to test, there would be hundreds of thousands of unhappy people when the install failed.

What major software maker wouldn’t want to release a beta or any update if they have the time to do it. Early reports were off-base (no pun intended) on this one, as this is probably a good thing. Read this later report to get a more objective view of the program and it’s value.

A security researcher in France was just busted and given a suspended 5000 Euro fine for publishing security exploit information for Tegam Viguard antivirus. Tegam was not happy about the published research and instigated legal action that resulted in the suspended fine. The prosecution alleged that intellectual property laws were broken by the researcher. This is not good news for Security Research in France and sets a worrying precedent for the rest of the world. The same argument that is often quoted when discussing gun control applies here. If you take all the legally owned guns, then only criminals will have guns. Likewise, if you make finding and publishing security flaws illegal, then only criminals will look for flaws, (they are not likely to publish them though.). Zdnet has the full story.

The Judge in California totally (and intentionally) blew by the question of journalistic confidentiality ruling that stolen information is just that, stolen information. Regardless of who has stolen information — journalist or not — they need to divulge from whence it came. This is exactly what we said previously.

A C|Net article quotes the judges opinion which states that in this case the confidential information “is stolen property, just as any physical item, such as a laptop computer containing the same information on its hard drive (or not) would be… The bottom line is there is no exception or exemption in either the (Uniform Trade Secrets Act) or the Penal Code for journalists–however defined–or anyone else.”

The judge did allow time for an emergency appeal before compelling the disclosures.

Sources say that Yahoo is readying a text only advertisement vehicle that will compete with Googles AdSense product. The AdSense product allows smaller web sites to display ads served by Google that are triggered by keywords contained in the page on which they are served. To date, no other advertiser is competing with a significant stake in this market.

We have offered AdSense ads on our site, but have not found it to be highly productive, despite daily ad views of between 3000 and 5500. We do better on donations (see link at bottom of this page to donate) to offset the costs of running our site. We have not sought out impression advertisements thus far, mainly due to the sales effort required, so something like AdSense makes that part of it easy because they bring the advertiser to you.

Will competition in this area increase revenue to the host sites? Do Yahoo and Google each try to pay a little better than the other to get more placements? Or does this cut in half a fixed amount of revenue for advertising?

Currently Yahoo offers sites an opportunity through it’s affiliate programs. We do not find any mention of this program at Yahoo presently, so I presume rollout may be a future thing.