FTC is urgings companies to close their open proxies. I play a small role in advising IDA to participate in this initiative.
Sure, whats the point of closing open proxy now that most spams dont even go through open proxy? But “why not?”. Yes, we can do more but that is a story for another day…
Andrew Odlyzko, author of The many paradox of Broadband, published an equally thought-provoking article:
While engineers and technologist like myself have been arguing the need for “End-to-End” principle either on ideological or technical reasons, Andrew provides an economical perspective of why the “threats” to the “Stupid Network” are just noise.
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Orkut is back after been down for the last few days for upgrade. Google, probably upset for not able to buy friendster has outdone itself this with Orkut. In certain ways, it is better the friendster (at least faster) and less annoying then linkedin.
It is best of breed of the two and I love it.
Wired ran another article on the outsourcing to India trend. I got a mixed feeling of between been proud to sad for the situation as the article confirmed the predictions i made last year on outsourcing.
But there are many lessons to learn from the article, like the one comparing the introduction of computers in the 50s which started to threaten jobs, then as it enhance productivities, workers ‘evolve’ and start using it as a tool. This validated my thinking that programmers need to move up the value chain.
Coincidently, I found some time yesterday to read Living on the Fault Line which I bought last year. Surprise, surprise, the first few chapters talks about the concept of “core” vs “context” work, and how “core” work will move to become “context” over time. Most important, why companies should outsource their “context” work as soon as possible. I am going to enjoy the rest of the book…
First thing first, happy lunar new year everyone! This year, I spend 3 days back with my parents and totally disconnected. No emails and no blogging. Refreshing but the fun ends when I saw 1500+ emails waiting for me. :-(
It been a busy two weeks, particularly at work. This is the time we plan what we going to do for the rest of the year. Nope, can’t discuss these here due to confidentiality.
APRICOT 2004 is coming next month (I am a board member). Oh, I am organizing the ENUM/SIP BoF during APRICOT, among other speaking committments I have.
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John Berresford, Attorney for Media Bureau at FCC, just published a draft on the webpage for Harvard Program for Information Resources Policy. It is called “How Government Can Bring New Communications to All Americans: Six1 Lessons from History Discovered by a Libertarian”. (via Dave Farber’s IP list)
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David Isenberg is calling for an bottom-up face-to-face meeting to discuss the end of telephony, about end-to-end principles, smart people, dumb companies, etc etc.
Please drop him an email if you are interested.
I was having a private discussion with Rojisan in #joiito who suggested to extend the mt-bayesian plugin to become an immunity system for the blogsphere when we got sidetracked.
One of the reasons we have blog spammers is because they want to get more links to their site and therefore higher Googlerank for their site. Therefore, if we remove this “feature” for them gain google rank, we would also remove the incentive for them to blogspam. Rojisan then gave me to challenge to the plugin in 30 mins so I did.
Download it here: mt-redirect-1.0.tar.gz (Documentation on Wiki)
Update 16/01: MT 2.661 already implemented this feature (and done it better) so go get it!
BBC News have an interview with Vint Cerf on his view on the development of Internet.
The next decade, he believes, will see the net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything. To begin with, he thinks, the net will stop being a part of the telephone network. Instead the telephone network will become a part of the net.
He goes on to talk about IP Telephony and ENUM! Yeppie! :-)
2004 could indeed be the year of VoIP.
2003 is a pretty good year for me. There was quite a few stocks which is quite badly beaten in the poor market sentiment despite their fundamentals. For example, I picked up Crayfish (email outsourcing company) for 60cent on a dollar just on their cash value alone and made over 100% profit when they annouce they going return the cash and delist the stock.
I also made a right “bet” that technology recovery will start from hardware. Business will started to buy hardware since they probably hold back their spending in the last 3 years in the downturn and now they have to play catch up. My play in CHRT gave me some nice gain although I probably hop off the train a bit too early. It\’s a lesson I shouldn\’t forget.
Overall, I achieved an net gain of 71.81% compared to S&P (26.38%) and NASDAQ (50.01%). Hey, I still bet the market, which is what matters to me. Lets hope I\’ll do equally well in 2004. :-)