Where’s a good trademark lawyer when you need one? I got this email (screenshot) that for many users would be a dead ringer for an official MS email (exhortations that Microsoft doesn’t distribute software by email notwithstanding). Virus writers do seem to be getting smarter, don’t they?

Update: I believe this worm is W.32/Swen. Be careful while downloading attachments!

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Digital Bugles:

The music sounded fainter and less crisp than a live instrument. But it had a haunting, far-away quality. And as the final, tremulous note faded in an extended diminuendo, a woman dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief before leaning her head on a companion’s shoulder.

Of course, The digital bugle has no smarts, but in an age where the ability to play a musical instrument is diminishing fast, I’m a big believer in smarter instruments that create innovative ways for even novices to create music, like the Future Music Blender.

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The Intarweb (sic) is a small in-joke among the geek set. It’s a dig at the web-is-the-internet attittude prevalent among large numbers of newbie net-users. Today, however, the Intarweb is one step closer to reality, thanks to one of the companies charged with one of the crucial pieces of the Net’s infrastructure — and ICANN, the organization responsible for Internet names, is asleep at the wheel as usual.

Starting today, all nonexistent entries in the .com and .net top-level-domains will resolve to a Verisign server called sitefinder. From an viewpoint of an interactive (”Intarweb”) user, this may seem harmless enough, but this makes life much more difficult for the anti-spam community, network operators and ISPs, not to mention hapless developers who now have to add && !(isWildcardAddress()) snippets all over their host lookup code.

Technically, if implemented right (which it isn’t — sitefinder’s Mail Reject Daemon seems to be a flawed SMTP implementation), Verisign will not “break standards”. DNS does allow for top-level wildcards, but this move is bad for users from many practical standpoints, including privacy and flexibility. Verisign’s best practices document (PDF) notes that several other TLD operators provide such a service as well, for example the .nu domain takes you to a generic page for sites which don’t exist. Which is fine, except that vanity domains like .nu don’t get used anywhere as much as the staples of .com and .net, and does not change the fact that wildcards are not a good idea at any gTLD level anyway.

PS. chaoszone is a dot-org, the registry of which is maintained by ISOC, not Verisign. Misspelt dot-orgs are not likely to get you misleading pages anytime soon.

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Read this a while ago, but forgot to comment: Ray Ozzie’s possible prior art for plugins doesn’t surprise me. As someone who has worked a bit on Lotus Notes and Domino (and whose workplace has some serious Notes gods), I went through a phase of continual surprise at the richness and sophistication of Notes’ workflow model (truth be told, it was combined with disgust at its UI excesses). Microsoft could do worse than make Ray Ozzie their new best friend and centerpiece of their appeals claim.

PS. It’s an article of faith with the Notes devs at work that “this new-fangled web thing” is nothing special, Notes Had It First™ anyway. It’s also an article of good natured jest among everyone else that Notes may have had it first, but it was so damned hard to use that you had to take Certified Lotus End-User Training just to comprehend the majesty of it, and end up not using it anyway :-).

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Via Shanti: Major anthropology find reported in India:

Scientists report they have found evidence of the oldest human habitation in India, dating to 2 million years, on the banks of the Subarnarekha River… The 30-mile stretch between Ghatshila in the province of Jharkhand and Mayurbhanj in Orissa has reportedly yielded tools that suggest the site could be unique in the world, with evidence of human habitation without a break from 2 million years ago to 5,000 B.C.

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On this weblog, two years ago:

Sixty years ago, a sleeping giant was awakened, and though we do not have a president of FDR’s calibre at the helm today, if the giant even half-awakens today, something good will have come out of the all the mayhem and destruction of yesterday.

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Set-top box activated (on Tuesday, 48 hours after signing up). The most helpful feature of this is the Electronic Program Guide, which means I no longer have to wait for ages to find out what movie is playing when I tune in mid-way.

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Clay Shirky on the NEC list: don’t take products with vanishingly small marginal cost and make them too expensive for your target audience to want to use.

In other news, as I wrote on Sep 5, starting Sep 10, inter-city SMSes will now cost Rs 2 a pop, up 2x the previous price of Rs 1. I wonder what the GSM marketers had in mind: India’s price-sensitive teens/college student market — the biggest users of SMSes — can’t be very happy about this.

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Set top box update (boy, that’s sure a lot of posts for something I won’t be watching most of the time): not yet activated. Apparently Hathway will process the OCR-friendly form I filled up and then activate my set-top box, this is expected to complete by Monday afternoon. Sucks — SCV, a competing operator, has apparently already activated its customers.

Notes on the technology used by Hathway — their set-top box is a Humax box running News Corp’s NDS (of chequered history) VideoGuard. Interactivity is possible, although the manual says “this feature is not currently available”. Pay-per-view is possible, again, not implemented. Overall, not quite up-to-the-minute, but very decent technology: it brings India’s cable tv business out of the technological dark ages and frees the viewer from the whims of the neighborhood cable op. Of course, the unfortunate bit is that most Indians would gladly pay a pittance (Rs 100) and watch the all (free+pay) channels on offer, a sleight of hand possible in connivance with their cable op, which under-reports viewer stats to upstream cable ops.

While writing this post, called up Hathway and cribbed about the activation lag, and a couple of other issues (Here’s one of them: the audio gain on NDTV 24×7 seems to be set too high, sibilants are cracking as a result. This isn’t a TV set problem — NDTV Hindi and other channels are fine). My impression: for a cable op that’s set to get into a direct billing relationship with households in some of the world’s biggest cities, they have a lot of work to do on customer support helplines. They do have a customer helpline (96220 01122 in Chennai) but the support folk seem confused and only too ready to pass on the buck to the local cable op, and only after much pushing on a string did they even listen to the issues I have. Unlike Airtel (which has a decent helpdesk) or HSBC (which in India has a kick-ass helpdesk in my experience), this one is new and raw, and its rawness is compounded by what I believe is a failure to make up its mind about whether it is a wholesaler or a retailer.

I believe I can help Hathway make up its mind: their logo is plastered all over the set-top box and the set-top box remote control. When things go wrong, who do you think customers will curse? Especially when things seem to work fine for their neighbors running SCV set-top boxes? If it’s your brand name and goodwill on the line, you better take ownership of customer complaints and solve them fast.

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Got a set-top box from my Hathway-affiliated cable operator for Rs 999 + Rs 1 a day. Plus a Star/Sony-heavy package that lets my cable bill stay relatively constant around the 250 mark. Folks used to paying ~Rs 100 a month for cable tv, though, will get a rude shock in the CAS regime, which I’m still not convinced is going to fly.

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