And Now for Something Completely Different

I'm a bit overdue for an update... Last year the nice folks at Google offered me the chance to work full-time on Firefox. Who could say no to that?

This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Computer Associates Acquires Qurb

Here's the press release: Computer Associates Acquires Qurb.

The combination of Qurb's technology and CA's sales channel is very exciting. It's better than chocolate and peanut butter. We've been working with the CA folks for a while now and they've been great partners. Very professional. Easy to work with. As part of CA we'll be able to reach millions more users than we could on our own. Less spam for everyone!

Of course, when your company has an odd name like Qurb (pronounced 'curb') the press will get a little silly with the headlines announcing the deal: CA aims to curb spam with Qurb, Spam: CA plans to kick it to the Qurb, and my favorite: CA pulls up to Qurb.

The only downer in all this is that I'm no longer going to be working with the rest of Qurb crew (qrew?). I'd worked with them all before, it was great to work with them this time, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Most of the team is going to CA, but a unique opportunity has presented itself for me to do something a little different (not much, but a little). The details aren't sorted out yet, but odds are I'll be starting in a few weeks.

World Sunlight Map

This is totally cool. Aaron Hopkins has a site where he composites current cloud data on top of clear sky day/night earth images in various projections. My favorite view is dusk/dawn from far away:

http://www.die.net/earth/hemisphere.html

Regulating Internet Pollution

Handing externalized costs is a big problem for the internet. Spam, distributed denial of services (DDOS) attacks, viruses, and their infinite variations and combinations are bad now and have the potential to get much worse. As more commerce happens online the Willie Sutton effect only gets more powerful.

ISPs are in the best position to do something about these problems, but they have very little economic incentive to do so. ISPs don't bear enough of the costs of internet pollution. If ISPs want to avoid government regulation they're going to need some kind of industry-wide self regulation. Here's my suggestion:

When you get an internet connection it should come with a firewall. This might be a little box you install at your house (like most savvy internet users already have) or, even better, a big box serving lots of users on the ISP side of the network connection. I'm sure Cisco would love to sell these big boxes. The important bit is that this firewall should default to a reasonable, secure configuration. Users would be able to connect to their ISP's SMTP and DNS, use HTTP and HTTPS anywhere, but all other traffic (expect for the bits need to make IP itself work) would be blocked. Forged IP could be filtered out here as well.

With the right defaults very few users would need to ever change the firewall settings. For those users who need more freedom, they could get access to the firewall configuration settings for an additional $1 per month. If they wanted, they could turn the firewall off completely. Just by making it a tiny bit difficult to turn off the firewall, most zombies would be cut off.

If the ISPs don't decide to stop the flow of IP pollution flowing from their networks, some zealous congressman will.

Qurb 4.0 Beta

The Qurb 4.0 Beta is out. We've also launch the Qurb Blog.

X1 = PointCast;

From TechWorld: Microsoft VP Jim Allchin said the embedded search technology in the new version of Windows is aimed squarely at products such as X1 Technologies' search technology -- and others.

At Qurb we do an email search tool as well, but we always knew we were running in front of the MSFT steamroller. As a small, bootstrapped start-up we don't need to do a hundred million in revenue to achieve success. When you take $10M in VC your <pun>options</pun> are more limited.

Scobleizer wrap-up

As mentioned previously, I attended at talk on corporate blogging by Robert Scoble at Tomlinson Zisko LLP, a Silicon Valley law firm. Jeff Clavier did a real-time write-up (posted shortly afterwards due to a lack of wireless coverage). For me, the take home points were simple:

• Scoble talks just like he blogs
• Bloggers crave net.fame as judged by their rank on Google
• Getting the scoop in the blogosphere is even more important than in cable news
• Good corporate blogs bring companies closer to their customers

That last point is, I think, deeper than it initially appears. Being new to all this, I'm still assimilating blogger culture and I'll need to chew on it a bit.

Vote Spam

I generally assume there is no privacy online. However, this email caught me a bit off guard:

From: Jack Hickey [mailto:jack@capp.info]
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2005 9:43 AM
To: Voters in RCSD Tax Election
Subject: Mail in Ballot for RCSD Parcel Tax

You are receiving this e-mail as a courtesy of Citizen Advocates for Private Philanthropy, a committee of my creation.

My fellow voters, Measure V is an all mail ballot for a non-uniform parcel tax. The tax ranges from $85 for residential parcels (with a senior exemtion), up to $2500 for commercial properties with lot size > 45,000 square feet.

As of the close of business at San Mateo County Elections on 28 April, 2005 your mail-in ballot had not been received. More than 30% of your fellow voters have tendered their ballots.

I urge you to consider the information in your Sample Ballot, and vote in this election. The deadline is Tuesday, May 3, 2005 at 5 P.M.

If you have misplaced your ballot, contact San Mateo County Elections at (650) 312-5222

John J. "Jack" Hickey, Founder, Citizen Advocates for Private Philanthropy

Note: Your e-mail address was provided by the San Mateo County Elections Department from information which you provided on your voter registration form. I will not use it for non-election related purposes.

I didn't know it was possible to get a list of voter email addresses and whether or not they've voted. I write anti-spam software so I thought I'd seen it all, but this was a new one. Anyone have ideas on how these lists could be spectacularly abused?