The recently announced NSA/Telco data sharing fiasco is setting off a wave of lawsuits. Make jokes if you must, in light of the situation (which I don’t personally think is a big deal - I don’t get any phone calls anyway). But I do think - how timely!

The telcos are in the middle of a “net neutrality” fight, and I wish someone would properly communicate the bigger picture - the telco’s certainly can’t.

The time is now - trade a quick sweep of this issue under the carpet in return for perpetually free access across the pipes.

Of course, that is exactly the opposite of what telecomm executives were thinking when they agreed to the data sharing plan in the first place.

***UPDATE***

Of course, BellSouth now joins Qwest in the “we didn’t do it” category. I’ve been pretty hard on telecomms for not getting the innovation thing - unfortunately, having a few players in the mix with plenty of chips remaining makes this whole net-neutrality poker game idea pretty hard to pull off.

AOL (and Yahoo) are about to implement Goodmail sender payment systems into their email, and it has already been noted that individuals have little to fear - the process is for bulk mailers. Invariably, there will be a few delivery problems, but the onus will be on Goodmail and their clients to figure this out. Or, users will simply go to another provider.

Unfortunately, the news will probably cause more problems than the system, as people will misinterpret it as a hit on them. Why do I think this? Because the news is traveling fast - I get this, this, this, this, this, and this in my “inbox” on SuperBowl Sunday.

***UPDATE***

It isn’t about to ensue - it already has. From the “inbox” - eleven more reports on impending doom, although only one really cut to the chase.

I do check site stats - I am usually looking for what other people are looking for - keywords that got them here. I don’t try putting two and two together, to figure out who looked for what, and I don’t adjust postings based on keywords (unless I get a request to remove a name or something like that). It is more about curiousity than anything else. Seems that the federal government is curious about what people are searching for too, as they are after Google’s personalized search results.

I was tired of hacking the Safari search bar to use my preferred engine in place of Apple’s hardcoded Google “suggestion” (something that has to been done everytime the browser gets cued for a regular patch), and was using Google again over the last month. I just cleaned up those personalized results from Google, after getting tired of it making suggestions for me as well.

By the way, Google has NOT turned over any results to the government - how long they can hold off subpoenas is anyone’s guess. The Feds say they need the data for research into how often pornography shows up in online searches, but with all the chatter about spying and so forth, I just have to wonder…

Why isn’t the government just running their own queries?

***UPDATE***

OK, maybe I was a little off. According to the latest from Business 2.0, the Feds don’t actually want personal histories, at least not yet.

Google is right to resist because this could be a very slippery slope. One million URLs today, one million personally-identifiable search histories tomorrow, says B2Day.

I’m still glad I clear my results.

***UPDATE 2***

Google may not have capitulated yet, but it seems MSN and Yahoo have.

BellSouth “finally” announced that they are going to throttling down internet transport for content providers that don’t pay up. Well, actually they said they would be providing better service for those that paid, but what they really mean is the former.

As Bill Smith, CTO at Bell South, pointed out: “Higher usage for broadband services drives more costs that we have to recover.”

If they can’t recover costs of transport, then why in the hell do they continue lowering prices for broadband access?!

The reason is simple: because they’re desperate, because they lack vision, because they just can’t compete.

***UPDATE***

Jeff Pulver is making a plea to Eric Schmidt of Google to simply turn off Bell South. No content, no need for broadband, no customers. Making that work assumes telcos like Bell South are rational business people. Yea, right. We’ll wait and see how it all turns out.

The saga of struggling (and stupid) telecomm companies doesn’t only continue..its accelerating.

The telcos can’t “create” their way out of wet paper bags, so they want to charge service providers for access to their lines. Of course, this will just stifle innovation and piss everyone off, but the telcos don’t care. And if you think this isn’t going to happen just because the Chairman of the FCC thinks its a bad idea, think again. Some of the players are already prepping for it by again lowering prices for broadband access - you know they are thinking they are about to pick up the lost revenue on the backside. Of course, if they can’t make up for the fact they add little value, they can always hide egregious surcharges in their terms and conditions, strapping customers when they least expect it.

The tide moving fast against them nonetheless, with the day of reckoning for the landline drawing ever so near. The latest and greatest in really bad news for the folks who can’t innovate: Netgear has announced it will soon be offering a Skype-compatible Wi-Fi phone, which means that Skype users are getting unshackled from their computers. Throw in the latest offering from the traditional telco nemesis Vonage, a similar piece of equipment and service, and you have the makings for even more lost revenue as a result of sheer ignorance.

The telcos will propose more of the same, lock and block, and piss off customers. Meanwhile, life (meaning great new services) will simply find another way, and leave the dummies out in the cold.

***UPDATE***

The innovators won’t wait, even if it means penetrating and lassoing wireless technologies into the mix. Where are the big carriers in all this? Nowhere.

Telcos are using incentives as flat out bribes, offering free iPods to people who complain about their cable company on public forums.

They can’t compete, so they combine. They can’t partner, so they pillage. They’re running out of steam, so they resort to outright deception.

Sounds like the telecom industry is turning into a training ground for wanna-be politicians.

Adobe and BellSouth are each laying off a whole bunch of people, but for different reasons. In the first case, it is about managing new technologies (and keeping it in sync with the old); in the latter it is about not managing old technology (and separating it from the new). Both serve their purpose.

In Adobe’s case, they picked up Macromedia, and now they have Flash and Dreamweaver to deal with. Both have become de-facto standards for web development; Dreamweaver will supplement Adobe’s strong presence in “hardcopy” publishing, and Flash will provide the web pizzazz the company has long needed. The acquisition created complimentary lines, and Adobe should have no problem bundling them up, and pricing them appropriately for all the publishers, designers, and tinkerers out there who were buying pieces/parts of the original offerings anyway. Many line managers, sales personnel, and a few engineers simply have to go. But I think Adobe can maintain a one-of-a-kind image for some time to come. For them, it is about positioning and growth.

BellSouth, like many other traditional local exchange carriers, has been slow to move. Yes, they have DSL and mobile service, but I hardly call that progress. All I hear is “package of these services,” “package of those services.” Meanwhile, if you talk to someone working at one of these places, you shouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t heard of disrupters such as Skype or Vonage. Add to that list a newfangled product (according to them) called the voice-enabled instant messaging client (including ones being offered by very big guys), and maybe toss in a pinch of WiMAX, and you have a recipe for trouble. Of course, I’m not going to completely blame the organizations themselves; if the folks on the chopping block had the motivation to improve instead of going about happily cashing those fat (but wasteful) paychecks for the last few years, they would have seen the train’s headlight coming long ago. The result would have been a lot of screaming for change, instead of what’s going to happen now - a lot of pinkslips. Many line managers, sales personnel, and more than a few engineers simply have to go. BellSouth isn’t a one-of-a-kind either. For them (and their counterparts) it has been about holding onto “the last mile” - now it is about simply surviving.

If you are a big service provider, and give away lots of cheap (or free) services, you are bound to get taken advantage of. The blogging world has seen its fair share of blame, much at the hands of services like Blogger.

Frankly, search engine spamming via blogs is doing little to harm anyone except advertisers (and maybe a few researchers), so you could consider it more of a nuisance than anything else. But if you are unwittingly hosting thousands and thousands of phishing sites, you have a much bigger problem on your hands. And it seems that might just be happening over at Yahoo!.

I have heard from the Yahoo! folks here at Spamroll a number of times, and just have to believe that if there is a problem, they are working on a comprehensive solution, despite feigning ingnorance at Spamhaus’s requests.

Lets face it folks..while email spam is still a problem, and a growing one, spammers know that it is all about economics. If they can’t make money off of the exploit, then it is time to move on. Secondarily, if the space gets crowded enough, with spammer and anti-spammer alike, then it is time to try something else. If the attention (and the cash) is focusing on other channels in cyberspace, then maybe some ingenuitive folks can get the jump on the rest, and the payoff, before that scam gets overrun.

Lets sit back and watch, as they take the search engines bait..

Right now, the attention is all over search engines. Keywords, ad space, search engine optimization, and other buzzwords cover the press. There are some holes in the way some search engines work and money is pouring into the sector right now, so scammers and simple cheats alike are running to it as well.

Link farming, ad click fraud, and keyword hiding are popular and effective ways of gaming results and their revenue end-sources, but these are short-term plays. Now we even have software and services specifically to sculpt keyword efficient content (see www.hotnacho.com).

I think it is all stupid, and here’s why:

The focus of gaming is short term. Search engines frequently remove “gamed” pages from search results, so cheats are constantly chasing their tails (this is true of link farms and keyword optimized pages). Second, the guys that run the search engines (particularly the big ones like Google and Yahoo) are not dumb. In fact, many are EXTREMELY smart. And they are aware of the problems with their own systems, and I doubt they are just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts, waiting for the problem to die on its own. They have a vested interest in fixing the problems, or a crashing revenue line and shareholder lawsuits are eventually going to rear their ugly heads. Last but not least, good content will prevail - if you want a steady stream of revenue, you know the kind that builds enterprise value, then you have to develop a core viewer base.

Now you may think some of the above thoughts are a little naive. Maybe they are. But they also reflect simple common sense business principals. Simple and common sense is the mean that everything in the natural world migrates towards. Simple is the shared pot for those who add real value to the online world. That shared pot is gargantuan, and gargantuan means there is plenty to go around. The trickery is the tail of the distribution curve, and I don’t think it is very fat.

You can read a little more about search engine spam in The Spamming Of Web Search, or type a popular keyword like diabetes, mesothelioma, or even SEO into your favorite search engine and see for yourself how irrelevant some of the top results are. But be quick about it, because I think they are going to disappear just as fast.

Phishing attempts have be lingering around the instant messaging environment for some time. The latest report is from Yahoo, and the exploit is purported to look as though it is coming from a buddy list contact. Upon clicking, the user is redirected to a fake Yahoo page, where Yahoo user information is requested.

You can catch the whole report, including some history of similar reports from other IM carriers, here: Phishing Dips into Yahoo IM.

On a related note, Aconix has some additional insight into the phishing over IM issue. Aconix develops enterprise security products which are designed to protect against such exploits in corporate IM networks. Read more at Akonix Security Center Warns of New Threat for IM Users in Corporate Environments.