St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for March, 2006

Judge R. Barclay Surrick of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania dismissed the lawsuit brought by Gordon Roy Parker ¹ over Google’s practice of cached web pages that people search for. This ruling deems that this particular type of caching does not violated copyright law.

In addition Judge Surrick had some harsh words ² for Mr. Parker and hios motives for the lawsuit, saying that basiclly he tried to set goole up so he could sue them, and that he was only in it for the money.

It’s not law yet, but the Republican controlled congress is trying to stop internet gambling. The proposed law¹ would put banks in charge of enforcing anti-gambling laws, and not make the gambling itself illegal, just the acceptance of credit cards. Some say this idiotic approach won’t work ². Critics say that it’s too difficult to sort out which locales are legal to gamble in and which aren’t. It’s true this would be a difficult task for banks to accomplish, but it’s obviously doable. It could be done the same way sales tax is figured.

Personally, I think gambling is a really bad thing, but I support anyone’s educated choice to gamble. I also think it’s a bad idea to have banks or other businesses to act in any kind of law enforcement manner at all.

Starting next month, AOL and Yahoo will accept payment from spammers to guarantee delivery of their mass e-mails to individuals. AOL has long done this with their “White List”, but as far as I have been able to tell, Yahoo has never done list, instead relying on a user created black-list to block spam.
The large public outcry over this latest “Pay to Spam Our Users” program has only prompted AOL to allow non-profits to spam AOLer’s for free. Instead of blocking more spam, it is allowing more spam.

There are three main reasons for opposition:

• Users want less Spam
• E-mail Marketers don’t want to have to pay a tax for each e-mail sent
• People using e-mail for legitimate purposes (like your bank), don’t want to have to pay a tax per e-mail to make sure their e-mail gets through.

Personally I also feel that, knowing AOL, which is famous for just “dropping” millions of e-mails indiscriminately daily when their servers get full, won’t be able to deliver on their promise of guaranteed delivery, and I’m almost sure the implementation will make AOLer’s e-mail service even worse than it is already.

AOL spamming its users is nothing new. Ever since they began they’ve been selling their users e-mail addresses and other personal info to mass marketing companies. Whoops, they call it “sharing personal information with our partners” like the people who make Viagra are partners of AOL, right… But Yahoo has a long standing reputation of protecting its users and having one of the first and best spam blocking programs out there.

Sources:
Wired News
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Senator Ron Wyden proposed a bill to stop the big internet providing bastards from doubling charging web designers and web sites for posting content.¹

“Neutrality in technology enables small businesses to thrive on the Internet, and allows folks to start small and dream big, and that’s what I want to protect with this legislation . . .” the Senator from Oregon said.

Some broadband providers like Verizon Communications and AT&T Inc. have said they would like to charge more for services that use faster, private Internet networks, movie downloading, music downloading or just mega popular web sites, even though these companies are already paying for the bandwidth through thier own ISP’s and Web Hosting Providors. They also say that internet users would still be able to access any web site they want. What they don’t say is that although they may be able to acess a web site, the web pages would be blank if the web site owner doesn’t pay the extra fee’s. Some broaband providors that provide internet acess to home and business users are already blocking acess to entire top level domains that they don’t like. For instance Brighthouse blocks access to any web site with the top level domain “.tk” although they deny it. How do I know? Well that’s a story for a different day.

TeWinkle Middle School in Costa Mesa California suspended 19 students for viewing another students web site they didn’t like.¹ They say it threatened another student, but the threat they quoted isn’t really as threat. They also suspended the author of the web site too.

It’s really wrong to punish students for authoring a web site they didn’t like. It’s worse to suspend students for viewing the web site. The absolutley asinine part of the story is that these students did none of this while at school. This was entirely done while not at school.

Microsoft released a statement yesterday saying that within 6 months, their search engine will be better than Google’s.¹

I’m no big fan of google, but that’s not much to brag about. Most Search Engines are better than Google. When Google first came out it’s more relevant than usual result were far better than the only other big guy out there- Yahoo. They did revolutionize the way search engines work. The problem with their search engine is that their competition embraced this revolution and changed the way they provide Search result, but Google itself did not. So there competition all provides much better results than Google now.

Doubt my claim about the inaccuracy about Google’s results?
Try these searches on google:

• st petersburg fl restaurant
  — not one single restaurant!
• St Petersburg Web Design
  — only two out of 12 of the results are web designers in St. Pete, and look at the top result – the city of St. Petersburg’s web site! – they don’t do web design.

Google does have some great things and they did change the search engine world for the better, but they suck for actually searching.