Mario Fantoni's Blog

Why PIPA and SOPA Suck

In case you haven’t heard, PIPA (PROTECT Intellectual Property Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) are bills working their way through the US Senate and House of Representatives, respectively.  They both propose giving the government the power to censor web sites in much the same way that China, North Korea, and Iran censor web sites today.

What? How can this be, you ask. This is America, land of free speech and due process, which are both kind of fundamental to the whole American dream thing. And yet, it’s true. If PIPA/SOPA pass in anything resembling their current form, it will have a chilling effect on Internet free speech. Here’s why:

1. The bills hold websites accountable for content posted by their users

The bills essentially do away with the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the current US law protecting copyrighted material on the Internet. Under the DMCA safe harbor, sites like YouTube and Facebook are not responsible for the content posted by their users as long as they take down copyrighted material when they are made aware of it. As it stands today, if someone posts on YouTube a bootleg copy of Rob Schneider’s 1999 opus “Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo,” YouTube cannot be put out of business as long as it has a reasonable process for taking down the infringing content. Passing PIPA and SOPA will change this.

2. PIPA and SOPA would let the government compel other companies to stop doing business with or linking to offending sites

The bills would allow the government to order ISPs to shut down web sites like YouTube and Facebook that it finds have violated copyright laws by distributing or allowing their users to distribute protected content illegally. For sites outside the US jurisdiction, the bills allow the government to force DNS providers to stop resolving offending domain names, force search providers to stop returning links to offending sites, and force advertisers to sever relationships with offending businesses. 

3. The bills fail to consider the true costs of compliance

Specifically, the bills fail to consider: the technical feasibility of compliance, the  burden that compliance would place on companies, the potential damage done by errant takedown orders, and the impact that these acts might have on the underpinnings of the Internet itself. For example, if offending sites are removed from search engines, the DNS, and other directories, it would create “black holes” in the Internet.

No one is arguing in favor of copyright infringement. Such actions are clearly illegal and wrong. But the DMCA and other copyright laws provide ample protection and remedies designed to compensate copyright holders and bring copyright violators to justice. Chilling free speech on the Internet, imposing undue economic and technical burdens on non-infringing companies, inviting international tit-for-tat web site blocking, and involving the technologies and systems underlying everyone’s Internet experience in a legal tug-of-war to eradicate copyright infringement is a terrible idea.

Why Apple's marketing sucks

In these rough times disposable income is down, and consumers and businesses have to make difficult purchasing decisions. Since Microsoft is winning back market share from Apple, it appears that Microsoft is winning the war. That is, Apple’s marketing of cool, elegant design, ease of use, and less trouble… isn’t working anymore. That means that intelligent consumers do not believe that the cost of an Apple is worth it any longer. Apple is not making the case… and snarky commercials are not helping. In fact, I think they may just be sounding like some spoiled kids bragging about their newest toy and giving the finger to the establishment (that’s me and you).

It is time to kill the whole Mac vs. PC campaign. Watch the future ads here.

Google: the mother of all evil

Elinor Mills, a reporter with the tech news service CNET, ran a search on Google CEO Eric Schmidt and published the results: Schmidt lived with his wife in Atherton, California, is worth about $1.5 billion, had dumped about $140 million in Google shares last year, is an amateur pilot, and had been to the Burning Man festival. Google threw a fit, claimed that the information was a security threat, and announced it was blacklisting CNET's reporters for a year. (The company eventually backed down.) It was a peculiar response, especially given that the information Mills published was far less intimate than the details easily found online on every one of us. But then, this is something of a pattern with Google: When it comes to information, it knows what's best.

From the start, Google's informal motto has been "Don't Be Evil" . But make no mistake. Faced with doing the right thing or doing what is in its best interests, Google has almost always chosen expediency. In 2002, it removed links to an anti-Scientology site after the Church of Scientology claimed copyright infringement. Scores of website operators have complained that Google pulls ads if it discovers words on a page that it apparently has flagged, although it will not say what those words are. In September of 2006, Google handed over the records of some users of its social-networking service, Orkut, to the Brazilian government, which was investigating alleged racist, homophobic, and pornographic content.

Google's stated mission may be to provide "unbiased, accurate, and free access to information," but that didn't stop it from censoring its Chinese search engine to gain access to a lucrative market (prompting Bill Gates to crack that perhaps the motto should be "Do Less Evil"). Now that the company is publicly traded, it has a legal responsibility to its shareholders and bottom line that overrides any higher calling.

You see, every search engine gathers information about its users — primarily by sending us "cookies," or text files that track our online movements. Most cookies expire within a few months or years. Google's, though, don't expire until 2038. Until then, when you use the company's search engine or visit any of myriad affiliated sites, it will record what you search for and when, which links you click on, which ads you access.

And Google knows far more than that. If you are a Gmail user, Google stashes copies of every email you send and receive. If you use any of its other products — Google Maps, Froogle, Google Book Search, Google Earth, Google Scholar, Google Talk, Google Images, Google Video, and Google News — it will keep track of which directions you seek, which products you shop for, which phrases you research in a book, which satellite photos and news stories you view, and on and on.

So the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing — it hasn't, and it won't. Google has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and - worst of all - unscrupulous sales reps and head hunters.

If companies like Jigsaw are evil, Google is the mother of all.

Jigsaw is evil - Part 2

I wrote about Jigsaw, the contact information marketplace, on my May 05 post. I said that Jigsaw is evil and that "every Jigsaw employee and investor has dirty hands and they should be ashamed of themselves". Well, this week it got even worse. Jigsaw announced the so-called "Open Data Initiative" and declared June 4th, 2008 "Data Independence Day". Jigsaw's "Founding Fathers" Garth Moulton and Jim Fowler even recorded a clip dressed in 1776 fashion. Oh my gosh, that's so tacky! Anyhow, better get ready - your business information is now in the hands of millions of sales people ready to sell you anything from Viagra to condos in Jamaica. As Scott McNealy pithily said a while ago about the loss of privacy in the internet era, "Just get used to it".

Wikipedia is accurate...yeah right

Somebody did a research and found that there are 965 domains that simply scrap information from Wikipedia and serve it up with ads (usually Google AdSense).

So people get their information from Answers.com or whatever and don’t realize that their source is Wikipedia, a collection of facts, truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, myths and outright falsehoods written by complete amateurs. Of course those people, we are told, are idiots to believe everything that Wikipedia serves them - but they don’t know that what they’re reading comes from Wikipedia.

Pathetic.

Jigsaw is evil

Jigsaw is a marketplace for contact information, and it is very efficient. It boasts detailed personal contact information for 8 million people, and 25,000 new people are added every day. If you want the name, title, email address, direct phone line and/or address of any executive of any company, there is a very good chance Jigsaw will already have it in its database and will sell it to you. And if you are a sales guy and have no ethical concerns about where you get your contact information, you probably already know all about Jigsaw.

Unlike competitors like Hoovers and InfoUSA, which gather company information by semi-legitimate means such as scouring SEC filings, cold calling companies and asking for information, and reviewing other public documents, Jigsaw simply pays people to upload other people’s contact information. Users are paid $1 for every contact they upload, and some users have uploaded information on tens of thousands of people.  Jigsaw is also self correcting, and incentivizes people to also correct bad contact information.

That’s right, the next time you hand out a business card to someone you may be handing it out to the entire world.

Here’s how it works: Sign up and start downloading contact information. This includes name, title, company, address, email and direct phone line.

Let's see...am I there? Of course, thanks to "Osiris" (a Maven user, with 483 contacts entered):

But wait, it gets much worse.

Anyone can find out if Jigsaw has their contact information via a link on the home page, but amending or trying to delete that information simply puts a flag on the data with the changes noted - but the original information also remains.There appears to be no way to remove your own contact information from Jigsaw once someone has entered it into their database. There is no method that I was able to find on the website to do this (including in the privacy policy), and an email to the company asking about this went unanswered (it's been ten business days now).

Jigsaw has a carefully worded privacy policy to deal with the fact that they are the antithesis of privacy. They say “This privacy policy covers how, when and why we collect, use and share information about our users…This policy does not apply to our collection and use of data about companies and contacts contained in our database system.”

Is Jigsaw legal? Maybe in the U.S., although I’d love to see a class action case brought against them. Is it ethical? Absolutely not. Every Jigsaw employee and investor has dirty hands and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Like Plaxo, Jigsaw makes money while pushing costs to other people. In Plaxo’s case, its spam. In Jigsaw’s case, its making private contact information public. The problem here is that Jigsaw’s actions aren’t easily found out by people getting constant cold calls and emails - it’s very unlikely they’ll know that these people got this contact information at Jigsaw in the first place.

If they wanted to do this right, they’d set up a marketplace where individuals could choose to sell (or give away) their contact information. The owner of the data could set the price, and Jigsaw could take a cut. Would this model work? Perhaps not, but that just proves my point. The only reason Jigsaw does work is because they don’t have to bear the costs that they push to third parties - all of the people who are in their database.

Day old sushi

Here is another classic "blink-no" sign. As the photo on the left attests, a profit-minded entrepreneur is trying very hard to make ends meet. The problem with this strategy is obvious. It sends the anti-sushi message. Hey, we're not fresh. We don't even care so much about fresh.

If I ran a quickserv sushi place, I'd write the time the product was created on every single box and would offer a local shelter anything that was more than 55 minutes old. The money they make selling the old sushi can't possibly make up for the horror the full-price customers feel.

How to attract/repel customers

Last weekend I stayed with my wife at a cozy bed and breakfast in Sonoma, California. One morning we went for breakfast to a small coffee shop across the street named "Adobe Net Cafe" (now, that's a nerdy name!) and while waiting in line I saw two signs - one that created a "blink-yes" reaction in me and another that generated a "blink-no" one. In case you didn't read my post from 06/27/07 called "I Love You, I Hate You", after reading Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" I realized that most decisions that we take in life are "decided" in the first 2-3 seconds, the "blink zone" according to Gladwell. Anyway, here is the first sign that evoked the "blink-yes" reaction:

Definitely "blink-yes": funny, engaging, positive. Right below, somebody placed a classic example of a "blink-no" sign (no humor, repelling, negative):

So wireless internet access is now like restrooms, "Customers Only"? People don't get it. Technology is cheap these days, and 2 or 6 people using your wireless network makes no difference. Starbucks would not be Starbucks with a "customers only" internet access policy. The way they keep people moving is with music that is uncomfortably loud and setting the air conditioning at a freezing cold level, but that's another post.

Be careful with the snipers!

My wife's nephew decided that he wanted a Nintendo Wii video game console for his birthday. Just in case you don’t know, the Nintendo Wii is the first game that understands the movements of the player’s body. So we went to Circuit City in San Francisco, asked for the Wii and the salesperson laughed at us: “you see, each store receives 10 units per week, usually on Sundays at 9 AM. Make sure to be here this coming Sunday at 8 AM to see if you can get one.” Not for me. So I went to the natural place: eBay. I found 4,430 Nintendo Wii consoles for sale, with a selling price between $320 and $450 (MSRP is $250). Now you know why you don’t find it at the stores: they are all being sold on the black market at eBay! Anyway, I saw that the initial bids were around $100, and that the final price was reached on the last 30 seconds of each auction (that’s pretty normal for hot items on eBay), so I went ahead and set a “sniper” at auctionsniper.com for $320, with a 5 second delay (the minimum amount of time allowed). It didn’t work. I had to find another technique if my wife’s nephew was going to have some fun playing bowling at home. After some logical thought I found the solution: to set up a sniper just to use its countdown clock, to enter a $320 bid, then go to the confirmation page (yes, there are 2 pages, that’s why it takes more than 5 seconds) and to click on the “confirm” button 3 seconds before the end of the auction using the sniper countdown (eBay doesn't have a countdown with seconds). It worked! The first time I tried this system I won a Nintendo Wii for $320!  But, wait! What about misspelled consoles? A search for misspelled Nintendo Wiis at auctionbloopers.com returns 16 consoles on eBay. The top 10 ending first auctions have an average price of $222 for the misspelled and $314 for the right spelling. Here you go, this is Mario's eBay secret trick: use AuctionBlooper to find misspellings and the countdown clock of AuctionSniper and save 30-50% on your eBay purchases. You are welcome.

Threadmill

A couple of weeks ago I decided to buy a treadmill and checked Craigslist SF Bay Area. The problem was that I entered "threadmill" so I found only a single used NordicTrack C2155 for $185 (MSRP $1,199). I called the seller (a Philippine lady that did the same typo I did) and arranged to pick the "threadmill" up. I have it here in my room - I am looking at it right now. Last week I realized my mistake and tried "NordicTrack C2155 treadmill" in Craigslist SF Bay Area and found 13 for sale, from $350 to $500. Wow. The typo saved me between 40 and 60% of the cost.  I wonder how to make money with typos on auction items.

Addendum (03/31/08): No need to wonder anymore. John (comment below) found a site called AuctionBloppers  that finds items with typos on eBay. Check it out at www.auctionbloppers.com