Coyote Blog

One of the modern world's newest guilty pleasures is Googling yourself.  One of the unsung virtues of blogging is that it tends to help you dominate the Google rankings for, uh, yourself.  Anyway, I Googled myself tonight (Everybody does it.  Really.) and found that I missed a mention entirely in Business Week online, in this article about "blooks", the cutesie name for making a book out of blog content.  My logic for doing so is in the last section.  I will save you the click:

Another benefit of publishing blooks on paper? Archiving. Warren Meyer,
of Paradise Valley, Ariz., first printed out the two volumes -- 400
pages each -- of his blog entries last November as a Christmas gift for
his dad, who is 83.

"He refuses to do anything online," says Meyer, who has been blogging for more than two years. Meyer
has also kept a copy of his blook, based on Coyoteblog.com, discussing
environmental problems, for himself: "Everything I've ever written is
online," he says. "I wanted to archive my writing, and I don't trust
that electronic media is a good archiving tool, because standards and
technology change so much." While few people now use floppy disks,
paper is here to stay.

I have tried to explain this to younger folks without much success.  But for those of you who have used computers for a while, where are your old Compuserve emails?  How about those old files from your Apple II?  Does your current computer have a 5-1/4" floppy drive?  Beware keeping data only in digital form.  It may still be there in 20 years, but will you be able to read it?

Update: Forgot the link.  Added it.

I spent much of the morning blogging yesterday, and typepad has managed to lose all the data.  I will say this is the first time I have been unhappy with Typepad, but I am very unhappy.

I have been in the English countryside this week, right on the border between England and Wales.  In fact, the house I am staying in has one of those great Welsh names that don't have enough vowels, something like Cwmmau or such.  Anyway, Internet access has turned out to be nearly impossible -- I finally found a library across from the Hereford Cathedral that lets me have access in 30 minute increments.  Hopefully I can blog more from London next week.

Apparently Google is about to announce a new online spreadsheet product.  My first reaction was - that's stupid, who would want to have their spreadsheet app. online -- its slower and probably less secure.  Online applications strike me as a step back to the bad old days of mainframe-terminal applications.

But then I thought about my 30 managers who send me excel spreadsheets each week with their revenue data, and it occurred to me that this might be exactly what we need.  Its a constant headache keeping everyone on the right version and managing all these submissions.  Also, it would be nice if we can eliminate buying 40 copies of MS Office.  Currently we are implementing OpenOffice 2.0 to eliminate the MS Office expense, but a real online collaborative spreadsheet solution at Google type pricing (e.g. zero) might be cool.

I don't see it up on their site yet, but they have a lot of cool stuff in Beta I had never played with before.  Check out Google Labs here.

I have never been satisfied with the delays caused by having to approve comments, but I didn't like giving bots a free pass either.  Now that TypePad has added a Capcha step in the comment process (that is the little nonsense word you have to retype from the image) I am going to let comments go straight up, relying on technology to catch bots.  In reality, trackbacks are actually the bigger problem -- I sometimes get waves of 300-400 bot-spam trackbacks in a day, until TypePad takes steps to block that source.

Please use the comments to this post to, uh, comment on any problems you are having with the new comment process.

For the last two days I have had some sort of food poisoning or gastro-intestinal something that has made me as sick as I every remember being.  Sopranos fans, think Tony Soprano in the episode he kills Big Pussy.  Starting to recover, I hope.

Update: Little did I know that when I posted this, it was only halftime.  I am finally better, but I can certainly do without getting that again for a while.

About ten years ago, I remember Microsoft started to get pounded by observers for "missing out" on the Internet.  One of their responses was the development of Internet Explorer, which, thanks to a good design and the fact it was bundled with the OS, quickly beat out Netscape and other incumbents.

Recently, PC-Pundit John Dvorak has argued that Microsoft's foray into Explorer has been its biggest blunder.  I'm not usually a Dvorak fan (I find him to be too much of a technocrat, tending to favor top-down standard setting over messy bottom-up innovation) but I thought his take was pretty interesting:

I think it can now be safely said, in hindsight, that Microsoft's entry
into the browser business and its subsequent linking of the browser
into the Windows operating system looks to be the worst decision"”and
perhaps the biggest, most costly gaffe"”the company ever made. I call it
the Great Microsoft Blunder....

If the problem is not weird legal cases against the company, then
it's the incredible losses in productivity at the company from the
never-ending battle against spyware, viruses, and other security
problems. All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat
is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first
advertised.

All of Microsoft's Internet-era public-relations and legal problems
(in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. If you were to
put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there
would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses
column"”billions.

Yeah, I know, the Internet was supposed to be the next platform for applications taking over from the PC.  This has always been a slow phenomena to emerge (I LIKE having my applications on my own PC and available even if Cox cable is having another hiccup) and its not at all clear you need a browser to play well anyway.  While Microsoft has screwed around with Explorer and dot-net, Google has become the gold standard of web-based applications, and they don't have a browser at all.

By the way, if you are waiting for the new version of Explorer, just get Firefox instead.  It is everything Microsoft is trying to make Explorer and it is there already.  And you don't even have to think in Russian to use it.  (OK, did anyone get my movie reference there or am I a total loser?)

Hat tip to the Mises Blog.

I hate having to moderate comments.  Yesterday I had a ton of comments on my immigration plan post and we could have had a really good conversation going except I was out of the office and did not moderate the comments through until today.  Unfortunately, in the same time-frame I got 12 spam comments and 145 spam trackbacks from mp3 and pr0n and other sites trying to piggy-back on my Google ranking.  Sorry again for the delay in getting comments approved.  As always, I only moderate contents for spam - anything on topic, no matter how poorly written or how much it expresses dislike for yours truly, goes through.

I have been stuck in rural Colorado a few days, my stay extended by a pretty good spring snowstorm up in the high country.  I was visiting our new Colorado marina.  Finally getting to the airport, I found a backlog of unapproved comments, which I have passed through in mass.  Sorry for the delay, but blame spam-bots.  I hate having to approve comments to filter spam as much as you must hate the delay in seing your comments appear.

The other day in this post I, for the first and last time, wrote that my commenters needed to educate themselves.  I knew this was a stupid thing to write, leading with my chin, as it were.  I have posted all kinds of dumb stuff, and a number of things that I have been informed were outright errors (see the update to that same post, for example).  My commenters are great and often more knowlegeable than I am, so it was a dumb tone to adopt.  My only excuse is that I had about 5 emails in a row that confused the trade deficit with the federal budget deficit and the national debt, and I was ready to scream. 

I'm sorry.

In the last three or four days, the blog-bots have found me.  Believe it or not, I have had over 500 spam trackbacks in the last couple of days.  For those that don't know, these trackbacks are coming from automated blog generators that interlink each other and send spam trackbacks all over the place.  The blog generators use random text generators combined with marketing pitches and random news stories taken from RSS feeds.  They are yet another evolution in the attempt of bottom-feeding marketers to take advantage of the search engine impact of a blog without the effort of, you know, actually writing a blog.

I have turned trackbacks off for a while on new posts, and I have modified my setup so I have to manually approve comments and trackbacks.  I will only be filtering for spam -- so far, I have not had any problems with my commenters getting too far out of line, even when they disagree with me.  You will therefore see a small delay before your comments appear, but please do not stop commenting!  I will be sad if trackbacks become a thing of the past due to this spamming, since they are right at the heart of the blog model, helping readers link not only to the sources a blogger is using but to the bloggers who are commenting on that post in turn.

Blogging has been light of late.  If you are confused about why, see here.  I am also working on the first annual Coyote Blog NCAA bracket challenge, so stay tuned.

Welcome!  This site is getting a lot of first-time readers this week from our guest-stint at Overlawyered.  For those new to the site, here is some of what I do:

Real-life small business experiences:  Buying a company;  Working with the Department of Labor; Case Studies on the Minimum Wage;  What's on my Desk Today; Getting an SBA Loan

Economics:  The myth of Zero-sum Economics; 60 second refutation of socialism; Business Relocation and the Prisoners Dilemma; Technocrats, government and disasters; Roosevelt's NRA: America's Flirtation with Fascism; Gasoline Supply and Demand; Hoping for Price Gouging; Peak Oil; In Praise of Robber Barons

Libertarian political commentary:  Respecting individual decision-making, The real implications of a Privacy Right, Technocrats get their comeuppance, A defense of Open Immigration, New Alien and Sedition laws, Opposing Special Rights for the Press, Iraq war, The Kelo decision, Free speech, Danger of Politics without Philosophy  

Frustration with runaway torts:  Jackpot Litigation; Coyote vs. ACME

Camping (my business):  New American nomads;  This RV is just wrong

Attempts at humor: How to spot a dictatorship; Coyote's Law;  Making fun of the UN and the Internet;

Sports: The Baseball Closer Role is Nuts

ACME Products:  Instant Girl; Ultimatum Gun; Earthquake Pills

How I Married Well:  My Wife, the Fashion Diva;  My Wife's Fashion Awards (and here)

Enjoy.

Posting may be light this week as I am guest-blogging at Overlawyered.com.  Come visit me there!

I bought myself a squeezebox digital music server for my Christmas present to myself.  I absolutely love this thing.  I have finally ripped about 400 of my CD's onto my computer in my office at home, using a FLAC loss-less compression.  I chose FLAC because it was supported in firmware by the squeezebox (which thereby reduces the load on the network and the server) and because it was loss-less.  Hard disk space is just too cheap nowadays - for home use, there is no reason to use anything but loss-less ripping of your CD's. 

The really cool part, though, is that the music menu and server controls can be accessed over the network.  That means that you can choose music, change the volume, etc from any PC on the network.  OR, even better, from any handheld.  I have a Dell Axim with wifi capability now sitting on my coffee table.  To pick any of my 400 CD's, I just scroll through the menu on my Axim, or search via the search function, and hit play, and the music starts.  Love it!

My wife, who has about 400 CD's of her own, has resisted the whole digital thing, in large part because of the process of selecting music.  Up until now, she could find a CD on the shelf (which she keeps much more organized than I do) and pop it in a CD faster than she could find it using some front-panel menu on a server.  But she loves this setup now and browsing on the handheld, and I may soon be getting to enjoy the fun of ripping another 400 CDs.

Right now, we are going to buy 2 more of these things to put in other rooms.  The server software will control any number of the Squeezebox devices in different rooms, and all the rooms can have different music playing or the same thing playing.  Highly recommended for those looking for a music-only server (you will have to look elsewhere if you are also looking to serve pictures and streaming video).

PS-  By the way, I described previously the little blogger vanity function that comes with this device.

Via Instapundit, comes this article by Rebecca MacKinnon on how blogs are filtered and censored in China, and in particular, how Time's Man of the Year Bill Gates seems to be taking a leadership role in the censorship arms race.

Microsoft's MSN Spaces continues to censor its Chinese language blogs,
and has become more aggressive and thorough at censorship since I first checked out MSN's censorship system last summer.  On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti...

Now, It is VERY important to note that the inaccessible blog was moved
or removed at the server level and that the blog remains inaccessible
from the United States as well as from China. This means that the
action was taken NOT by Chinese authorities responsible for filtering
and censoring the Internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the
level of the MSN servers.

In addition to taking down sites that offend the overlords of China, Microsoft is also actively filtering blog content

Back over the summer I wrote a post titled Screenshots of Censorship
about how MSN spaces was censoring the titles of its Chinese blogs, but
not posts themselves. According to my testing in mid-late December,
they now censoring much more intensely.   

On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various
posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post
entries with titles like "Tibet Independence" or "Falun Gong"
(a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: "This item
includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this
item."

I understand that the business climate in China causes businesses some difficult choices.  Refusing to acquiesce to certain government rules, like censorship, essentially cedes a large a growing market to the locals.  But at some point, that's just what you have to be willing to do, when market share is just too ethically expensive.

Last week when I hosted Carnival of the Capitalists, I noticed that bots were submitting Conservative Cats form with spam entries - like having "cheap viagra" in all the fields.  Then, this week, I found that at an application site for camp host jobs that I run has been getting the same type of spam.  I am not talking about email - I am talking about data base entries coming back with spam in them.

Why?  I presume someone went through the time to program the bots, but what does it accomplish to dump your cheap viagra url into a bunch of online forms for memberships and applications.? Its just some sysop who is going to see it.  I can't believe this sells anything -- for me, its more like graffiti than real advertising.

Update: OK, I am clued in.  Apparently it is comment-spam bots that think these forms look like blog comments and are filling them in to try to get the site-link SEO bounce.  So now I need to figure out how to make my form look less like a blog comment form, I guess.

Welcome to the Carnival of the Capitalists and my second time hosting the COTC.  Note that several people tried to submit multiple posts - when that happened, I picked just one to include this week.

Many thanks to Silflay Hraka for starting the Carnival of the Vanities, of which this is a spin-off, to showcase smaller blogs to a wider readership.  Look for future Carnivals of the Capitalists at these sites (you can submit articles here):

December 26, 2005      Multiple Mentality   

January 2, 2006      Chocolate and Gold Coins   

January 9, 2006      The Social Customer Manifesto   

January 16, 2006      Wordlab   

January 23, 2006      Patent Baristas   

January 30, 2006      PHOSITA   

While you're here, feel free to look around -- this post will tell you more about what I do at Coyote Blog.

In what has now become a tradition of my hosting the COTC, and, in true capitalist fashion, I have taken on a sponsor for this week's Carnival:

This Carnival of the Capitalists is Proudly Sponsored by"¦ ACME Maker of fine anvils for over 50 years

Government Spending and Regulation

Here at Coyote Blog, I have been warning for years that government-funded health care is a Trojan horse for more regulation of your personal life.  I hate it when I am right.

Porkopolis,
a blog highlighting the insanities of pork barrel spending, offers an
out-of-the-box alternative to rebuilding New Orleans at government
expense.

BardsEyeView takes a look at the Federal Budget through the lens of Shakespeare.  Really.

Joshua Sharf at A View from a Height looks at government price and supply regulation of taxis, and wonders what's the point.

Taxes

Jeff Cornwall at the Entrepreneurial Mind gives us the happy news that 2006 will bring us more IRS audits and more people paying the AMT.

Property Rights

Multiple Mentality asks why a man in Atlanta was handcuffed and arrested for selling his own property.

This Carnival of the Capitalists is Proudly Sponsored by"¦ ACME Escalating crises since 1952

Blogging and the Internet

Kicking over My Traces observes that robot blogs are clogging up Technorati, and that Google blog search does a better job of weeding these out

Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Business World is, not surprisingly given his blog's name, bullish on professional blogging and business blogs.

Similarly, ProHipHop is bullish on the business of podcasting.

Barry Welford
brings us a fable to illustrate that InternetLand or cyberspace can be
as complex and confusing to executives as Wonderland was to Alice

The China Stock Blog has the 12 hottest search term keywords in China.   Not sure the Coyote is doing well on any of these...

Gaurav Agarwal's Blog
observes that while computers have penetrated the developed world,
mobile phones have been much more popular in the develop ping world.

Marketing and Growth

Elisa Camahort in Worker Bees Blog reinforces the idea, via two customer service tales, that a bad customer experience can last a lifetime.

Fire Someone Today goes after the difference between "small business owner" and "entrepreneur", and posits that every self-described small business owner who is not focused on growth is probably a hobbyist, a slave, or an impending failure

Jim Logan advises aiming customer communications at the customers, not at grammatical nitpickers.

This Carnival of the Capitalists is Proudly Sponsored by"¦ ACME The secret to Glenn Reynolds success

Business Opportunities

Jane's Fit by Five enjoys getting her first "press" credential and reviews the Fortune Innovation Forum

Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends is doing her annual trends series, and spoke by phone with noted futurist Watts Wacker who gave his forecast
of trends we can expect to see in 2006, along with a bit of advice
about how to interpret and use trends.

Starling David Hunter investigates the success of the $15 apple in Japan, and draws some broader conclusions about the nature of business opportunity.

Barry Ritholtz observes in the Big Picture that the film industry has been much savvier in responding to market and technology changes than has the music industry.

Personal Finance

My Money Blog deconstructs Ameriprise Financial and finds their hiring criteria and training seem to support his concerns about the company (Lots of interesting comments to the post as well with further information)

All Things Financial has a positive review of Lee Eisenburg's book "The Number", which discusses the dollar figure you need to have set aside to retire the way you want to retire.

Free Money Finance lists 10 questions you should be asking about your retirement

Why Homeschool discusses the importance of early economics training for your kids, and some approaches for teaching them outside of the classroom.

Searchlight Crusade responds to privacy concerns over real estate and mortgage forms, and explains why you have few alternatives to providing your information if you want to close the deal.

Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity describes how he saved $200 on a car repair by ordering parts himself, but still letting the mechanic do the work.

David Porter advises you to make sure you understand your ARM in the light of recent interest rate increases.

This Carnival of the Capitalists is Proudly Sponsored by"¦ ACME Leader in dehydration technologies

Wall Street & Investing

Retired at 30 announces the brand-new Carnival of Investing, which seems like a pretty good idea given how many investing and personal finance posts the CotC is attracting.

George at Fat Pitch Financials discusses the phases associated with
publicly traded corporations going private to avoid Sarbanes-Oxley
regulations.

The Internet Stock Blog analyzes what impact the new Google music search function may have on other search and music sales-related stocks.

Mike Price discusses his value-investing strategy

The Japan Stock Blog brings news that the XBOX 360 is not selling well in Japan, for reasons that may be bad news for Microsoft.

Triple Pundit reports that institutional investors are beginning to press insurance companies over their risks/exposure to global warming.

Michael Cale of Financial Methods argues that based on current inflation and interest rates, investors should
allocate more assets to bonds and gold and fewer assets to equities.

Triple Witching Friday has camera-phone pictures of the floor melee that ensued from MIzuho's $335 million trading error, potentially one of the most expensive typos in history.

Patri Friedman of Catallarchy argues that index funds using the S&P 500 are not true index funds as the composition of the index is actively managed by humans

Having just exercised some employee stock options, Early Riser explores potential investments for his money.

Economic Forecasts

Financial Options has a summary of economic indicators for release next week, with commentary.

This Carnival of the Capitalists is Proudly Sponsored by"¦ ACME Never be without a date on Friday night

Economic & Business Theory

James Hamilton in Econbrowser takes another stab at bringing sanity to the gas price "gouging" meme.

The Prudent Investor discusses a seismic shift in power in global financial markets from west to east.  "When a conflict-torn dwarf nation like Serbia can sell debt maturing in
20 years with a coupon of 3.75% while the USA has to pay 4.50% for the
same maturity it is high time to throw the old dogmas of investing
overboard."

Sophistpundit looks at the effect of tradition on journalism and the evolution of successful media companies.

The Common Room draws from a book written in the 1870s where 'Aunt Sophronia' advices her nieces on economic principles.

Thinking about Peter Drucker leads David Foster of Photon Courier to some conclusions about what is wrong with today's business schools.

Health Care and Malpractice

Good News!  InsureBlog reports that it may be getting easier for cancer survivors to get life and health insurance.

This Carnival of the Capitalists is Proudly Sponsored by"¦ ACME California Dreamin' with Earthquake Pills

Business Practices

David Daniels in Business and Technology Reinvention argues that companies' use of forced stack ranking of employees is out of date.

Ed at Daily Dose of Optimism observes that when a Japanese business struggles, its execs often get a pay cut.  He wonders why this logical practice is much rarer in the US.

Jack Yoest writes that corporations don't seem to be showing their traditional hesitation at firing employees before Christmas.

Joe Kristan tells us a tax fraud story and draws the moral:  Don't cheat on your taxes and then piss off the CFO who is helping you do it.

200Motels engages the Three Stooges to explain why Enron is pushing up daisies.

The Coyote Within (hmmm, coyotes and business blogs) provides us a business fable about finding out your true character.

Humor and Other

Wordlab looks at politically correct alternatives to "Christmas"

Noah Kagan advises the occasional reversal of holiday gift-giving.

Gill Blog has a picture of the portable inflatable meeting room

Closing Notes

Thanks to the Original Illustrated Catalog of Acme Products for the advertising copy.  You can find more ACME promotional material here.

Thanks, its been fun.  Gotta go...

This Carnival of the Capitalists is Proudly Sponsored by"¦ ACME Escape from it all with the Smoke Screen Bomb

I am sure all us Typepad users enjoyed the downtime and temporary rollback on Friday.  I encourage you to check the permalinks for individual posts made in the last 5 days or so.  I found clicking on a number of them gave me errors.  I fixed this by going into the editing screen and opening each of these old posts and just hitting save.  This seems to republish the page and now there are no errors.

Because of your support, it looks like Coyote Blog captured the bronze in our weight class in the 2005 Weblog Awards.  Unfortunately, Typepad is celebrating in its own way by bringing the site down for over an hour 20 hours now.    Apparently the gerbil that powers the server fell off his treadmill, and they are trying to find a replacement.  No ETA for a fix so far, but if you are reading this I guess it is over.

Update:  Well, since I see this post, finally, I guess we are back up.  I have always been nothing but happy with Typepad so I will give them a pass this time.  But I had such good intentions of getting started on my Carnival of the Capitalists post early, and now I am back to doing it over the weekend.

Note to readers:  This post is sticky through 12/15.  There are new posts just below this one!

Welcome!  This year we are in the blogs ranked 1000-1750, which to the un-initiated might seem like an also-ran category until you understand that last year we were in the "ranked 8751+" category, so this is a real step up!  Anyway, if you are a regular reader, you can vote once a day here.  For those new to the site, here is some of what I do here:

Real-life small business experiences:  Buying a company;  Working with the Department of Labor; Case Studies on the Minimum Wage;  What's on my Desk Today; Getting an SBA Loan

Economics:  The myth of Zero-sum Economics; 60 second refutation of socialism; Business Relocation and the Prisoners Dilemma; Technocrats, government and disasters; Roosevelt's NRA: America's Flirtation with Fascism; Gasoline Supply and Demand; Hoping for Price Gouging; Peak Oil; In Praise of Robber Barons

Libertarian political commentary:  Respecting individual decision-making, The real implications of a Privacy Right, Technocrats get their comeuppance, A defense of Open Immigration, New Alien and Sedition laws, Opposing Special Rights for the Press, Iraq war, The Kelo decision, Free speech, Danger of Politics without Philosophy  

Frustration with runaway torts:  Jackpot Litigation; Coyote vs. ACME

Camping (my business):  New American nomads;  This RV is just wrong

Attempts at humor: How to spot a dictatorship; Coyote's Law;  Making fun of the UN and the Internet;

Sports: The Baseball Closer Role is Nuts

ACME Products:  Instant Girl; Ultimatum Gun; Earthquake Pills

How I Married Well:  My Wife, the Fashion Diva;  My Wife's Fashion Awards (and here)

Enjoy.

There are several things I want to write on, but I am hosting the Carnival of the Capitalists on Monday and so am a bit stretched keeping up with those submissions.  If you would like to submit a post to the Carnival, you can do so here (though why I volunteered for the Capitalists instead of the Carnival of the Sexy Lingerie is a mystery to me).

And, by the way, thanks for your support of Coyote Blog in the 2005 Weblog Awards.

Thanks for all the votes to date in the 2005 Weblog Awards.  We are hanging in there at third, which would be a cool place to finish.  Don't hesitate to vote for us every 24 hours at this link.  And you can then vote from your kids' computer.  And when you are in the public library you can vote from that computer.  And there is nothing wrong with wandering down the row of empty cubicles at work during lunch and voting form all those computers....

Per the BBC News:

More than 5% of the net's most popular domains have been registered using "patently false" data, research shows.

A US congressional report into who owns .com, .net and .org domains found that many owners were hiding their true identity.

Congress has just discovered that people, knock me over with a feather, do not always include all their correct personal private  and personal confidential information in online web databases that can be read by everyone:

The report found that owner data for 5.14% of the
domains it looked at was clearly fake as it used phone numbers such as
(999) 999-9999; listed nonsense addresses such as "asdasdasd" or used
invalid zip codes such as "XXXXX".

In a further 3.65% of domain owner records data was missing or incomplete in one or more fields.

I personally am a fan of (555) 555-5555 in filling out web forms.  For years, I never, ever put my correct phone number in the WHOIS registry, and only correctly filled in enough blanks to get my credit card authorized.

As is usual with every privacy reduction effort, it starts with an honest desire for better law enforcement:

Increasingly whois data is being used by law enforcement
and security companies to find out who is running a website involved in
spamming or some other scam....

The GAO recommended that more effort be made to verify
the information by domain owners and that greater use be made of
commercial software tools to check who runs a website.

                   

I get the law enforcement issue, but I think it is dwarfed by the privacy and free speech issues.  There are a lot of really good non-illegal reasons not to want the detailed personal and private information of web site owners plastered all over public data bases, and there are particularly good reasons that web site owners might not like the government to know who they are.  Like every blogger in China, for example.  I don't think that US Government bodies (or major corporations, or political groups, or fringe groups like the KKK) are above seeking some type of retribution (e.g. audits) against folks online who criticize them, and I am sure China and Saudi Arabia are not above it.  If you start a web site criticizing your current employer, do you really want to reveal your name?  I for one thought for a long time about whether to blog as myself or anonymously.

As for hunting down phishing and other such scams, liscencing web owners in a way similar to say gun owners is not necesary.  Scams are illegal because somewhat is defrauded of money, and that money leaves an easier trail to follow than any electronic trail, even with better ICAHN data.  You can use zombie computers and other techniques to defeat most electronic tracing, but the money WILL end up in the bad guys hands and can be found.

Next up:  Requiring background checks before you can register for a web site.

Yes, blogging has been so light of late as to be non-existent.  We have two large proposals due next week for the recreation business so I have been just swamped with other writing. 

The reference to the Stones is because my wife and I have tickets to see the Stones tonight in Glendale.  I remember in 1981 or 82, when I was in college, my roommate and I decided we had to drive to Philadelphia to see the Stones in concert.  After all, we thought, they are older than god and surely this was about their last tour.  LOL.  25 years later and I am seeing them again.  What odds would you have given in 1980 that Keith Richards would even be alive in 2005, much less touring?

Porn sites, penis enlargement, Nigerians with money to expatriate.  Spam has gotten so repetitious.  That's why I kind of enjoyed finding an email selling this in my inbox:

Only $640,000.  Perfect for my 2 mile commute to work.