BBC NEWS | Technology | Yahoo rebuffs plan to oust board

Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock has written to Mr Icahn saying it was not in shareholders’ interest to allow him and his “handpicked nominees” to take over. Mr Bostock also criticised efforts to use the board fight to as a way to “force a sale of Yahoo to a formerly interested buyer”.

“May I remind you that there is currently no acquisition offer on the table from that company (Microsoft) or any other party,” he wrote. “That said, we have been crystal clear in our stance that we have been and remain willing to consider any proposal from any party including Microsoft if it offers our stockholders full and certain value.”

Microsoft has already said that, contrary to rumours of it possibly making another move later in the year, talks with Yahoo are over.

To help his bid to remove the board, Mr Icahn has reportedly bought around 59 million Yahoo shares – a 4.4% stake in the company. He has declared a desire to buy up to $2.5bn worth of shares – a 7% stake.

By comparison Yahoo boss Jerry Yang and fellow co-founder David Filo hold 10% stakes in the company.

Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft

Maybe if I spent more time working on increasing my Google pagerank, fostering online friendships and general self-promotion instead of packing my posts with bad puns, the fact that I pointed the same thing out here 4 months ago might have been picked up.

Maybe…

But this post is about why I didn’t write them while I was there.

Being a real nerd when it comes to toys and technology, when I travel overseas (actually, when I’m away overnight) I carry around a considerable amount of technology with me. My laptop is something I tend to take with me whenever I’m going to be out of the flat for more than 24 hours. But while I could use it to make notes and connect to the internet with, I’ve also got an iPod Touch (which is essentially an iPhone but without the telephone- thinner, but with wireless internet connectivity), which I now use on almost a daily basis at work and at home to check emails, websites and so on, as it’s usually much quicker and easier— and far more portable— as well as to use as a music and video player to keep myself entertained with.

As a result, the laptop is increasingly becoming little more than a portable hard drive and screen for saving and showing off the photos from the digital SLR, which is also one of the regular things I carry around whenever there’s the slightest chance of getting a photo opportunity (along with a small collection of lenses, filters and other bits and pieces. As they say, I’ve got “all the gear, but no idea.”)

However, something went wrong with my iPod while I was out there- it suddenly would do nothing other than show a plain white screen- which not only meant that I couldn’t use it to check my emails or what was happening in the world through online news sources, but it also meant that I was cut off from the carefully selected highlights of my music collection I’d brought with me, the handful of videos I’d put on it to entertain myself, my collection of photos, and the notes I’d been making about things I wanted to either write about, or to research into further when I had the time. Very frustrating…

As I was waiting for the purchase of a flat to go through, I was happy to use my laptop to check my emails and make sure that there was nothing important going on that I needed to know about.

But when we moved on to our second port of call in the South African wine regions, things changed slightly. For one thing, the second one of the places we were staying in was quite remote; hidden away behind some vineyards in the Western Cape, where the only other internet connections available to me involved my UK mobile phone (which in the past has resulted in some pretty shocking bills when using it overseas, so I don’t use it out of principle overseas) and the PC in the owners’ office, and I don’t really feel comfortable using other people’s computers.

The other thing was that I started asking myself questions about my online behaviour, and it occurred to me that the last time that I was “offline” for more than 3 or 4 days was at least 3 or 4 years ago, and possibly as many as 9 years ago.

The thing is, I use the internet a lot. I use it to read the news, I listen to music through Last.fm, and there’s about a dozen websites that I visit at least 2-3 times a week. I use it to organise my thoughts through blog posts I write, and I use it to send myself notes and reminders— emails that I pick up on my PDA with directions to where I’m meeting someone later that day, for example. In my spare time I play computer games, and most of them involve the internet in some way. When I’m not online, I’ve got videos and podcasts that I’ve downloaded that I watch and listen to. At work, if I’m not looking for information on the internet, I’m looking for information about it.

So I decided to go without for the rest of the holiday. No visits to cyberspace for a week- I would restrict myself to living in meatspace. That strange parallel dimension where nothing is cyber, meta, inter, e-2.0 or virtual. Where everything you see is offline, “user generated content” and happening in real time, and everyone’s Avatar, their personalised representation or embodiment in this world is a careful arrangement of meat.

In fact, I have to confess that I did actually use the internet once in my “offline week” (after remembering in the middle of a bout of insomnia on a hot night that I had a note on my iPod to remind myself about a website I’m responsible for updating), but I made an effort— which turned out to be a surprisingly strong effort— to not check up on my emails, Facebook etc. or anything other than the job in hand “just while I was there.”

So how was it? Well, I have to say that it wasn’t something that I really missed. I had my mobile phone, so if my old flat burnt down, or my new flat’s sale fell through, people could contact me. (Including the O2, who decided that while I was in South Africa and paying them a premium to receive calls would be a good time to get their call centre to call me every day to try to sell me their new broadband package…) It meant that I had a huge stack of personal email to clear out, as well as an overflowing inbox at work. But I think the best analogy is that it’s like giving up drinking— not really a problem when you’re out and about, doing things that you don’t usually do— just so long as you don’t find yourself sitting in a pub with people and watching them getting slowly louder and more obnoxious, and wishing that you were killing some brain cells, dulling your senses and getting louder and more obnoxious with them.

So needless to say, I was straight back at the computer the moment I got home. But as soon as I realised that I was going to spend the next half hour deleting spam and reading out of date news and blog posts, I switched off and went back to spending some time with my lovely wife. Maybe I’ll be able to learn a lesson from the exercise and make some more time for her in the future.

I hope so.

(PS- I’m pleased to report that my iPod Touch was replaced without too much fuss by Apple- just the fuss of arranging an appointment at the “Genius Bar” with a booking system that asks for your email address and mobile phone, but doesn’t offer you any sort of confirmation or reminder. Sadly, all the notes and email drafts were lost though. :o( But the purchase of the flat went through OK, and we are now the proud owners of a first floor Victorian conversion in north east London.)

I can’t quite believe this;

Google’s April Fools joke last year;

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

(Excuse the overly-wide image/inflexible blog theme;)

From BBC News today;

UK homes to get super-fast fibre

The UK’s first “fibre town” could go online in the autumn, delivering speeds of about 100Mbps (megabits per second) to consumers’ homes.
Fibre firm H20 provides super-fast broadband via the sewers and either Bournemouth, Northampton or Dundee will be offered the service first.
The service will be delivered to individual homes via a four-inch box attached to the house.
It will also serve local businesses and council services.
Bournemouth, Northampton and Dundee have been selected because H20 has already installed its fibre service to local council buildings.
The fact that the sewer-based fibre takes advantage of existing ducting means there is no need for expensive and disruptive road digging, making the system faster and cheaper to deliver.
“While deploying traditional fibre over a two-kilometre area would be six to 12 months in the planning. We can do it in four hours,” said Mr Thomas.
Mr Thomas said the sewers solution was a lot cheaper than the conventional route of digging up roads.

A case of life imitating (f)art?

(Sorry…)

The first one was the announcement of the iPod Touch; essentially an iPhone without the phone, or to look at it another way, a touchscreen iPod with wireless internet capabilities. This led to speculation about whether it would be able to connect to a microphone and run VOIP software like Skype, which allows telephone calls to be made over the internet. There are rumours that the iPod Touch has bluetooth capabilities, although whether the hardware is actually present as it is in the iPhone isn’t yet confirmed (it seems unlikely though.) However, even if it isn’t then it seems that there’s no technical reason that it couldn’t be able to pair up with a headset of some sort and be used to connect to the internet as a VOIP telephone.

Obviously, that sort of competition would be somewhat disappointing to the mobile telephone networks, as VOIP is much cheaper than using a land line to make calls, let alone mobile calls (especially long distance calls.) It would also significantly undermine the partnership between Apple and various cellular netoworks in selling the iPhone— announced earlier this week to be released in the UK in November on the O2 network. But, if speculation is to be believed, it seems that Steve Jobs wouldn’t be too bothered by ruffling some feathers.

The way the existing mobile phone networks work (or rather, mobile phones since 1984) is based around cells; each cell covers a certain area, with handsets connecting to one while monitoring the neighbouring cells. This means that if a phone moves out of range of a cell, it can switch to another cell without the caller even noticing. As a number of cells can overlap, if one cell uses it’s entire range of frequencies and has as many phones camped on it as it can take, other handsets can camp onto other cells instead. There are basically two types of networks in use; GSM and UMTS (3G).

3G technology has been fairly slow to take off; when the network licences were first sold, they came under criticism for being overpriced; as a result, 3G phones were seen as being very expensive. Also, 3G networks are reported to use more battery power, resulting in either bulkier or poorer performance from the handsets. In addition, the networks were marketed as being primarily for video; downloading video clips or making videophone calls— functionality not seen as being particularly useful by most people. Whether internet access would have been a more appealing marketing hook is debatable; as a gadget lover myself, I know that I would have been much more interested in an internet phone than a video phone (I’ve personally been using web browsers on 2G phones since about 2002, with varying degrees of success and always at frustratingly slow speeds and high costs.)

The second item that got me thinking about the next generation of mobile phones, and an alternative possibility to the idea of cellular phones is raised in an interesting story on the BBC last week, about a Swedish company who has designed a new type of mobile phone network. Apparently inspired when on safari in Tanzania and unable to call his friends in a jeep just a few metres away, the network uses handsets instead of base stations as network nodes, so instead of calls being relayed through a centralised network, information is transmitted between handsets with a range of about 1km, with handsets then relaying communications and working as a peer-to-peer network (technically, much like those used for filesharing on the internet, particularly well-known for their use in illegal sharing of music and videos.)

The designer of the system said that large mobile firms did not like the idea of using a peer-to-peer model to make calls.

“One of the biggest things against us is that the big operators and technology providers are really pushing against us, saying this technology doesn’t work and it doesn’t have a business model [...] This is fine – just join us in Lund and see how the technology works, and ask our customers how our business model works.”

He also said that mobile phone manufacturer Ericsson had invested around £3m in TerraNet, and this indicated that the business model for the network is sound.

A possible reason for this reaction from the networks is that the collaborative nature of the network means that, in theory at least, there are no running costs for the network to operate; meaning an obvious threat to the networks’ own business models…

It’s designed for remote areas, where base stations are uneconomical or unfeasible, so in more built-up areas, there are problems with the frequency range available. This raises an interesting possibility; in built up areas, it’s more likely that cellular networks or WiFi internet access will be available; whether this wireless peer-to-peer networking would be able to be integrated with an internet-based phone network like Skype (which also happens to be built around a Peer-to-peer network), or simply with existing cellular networks is a challenge that I would guess would be more political than technical.

Of course, there is an alternative on the horizon; as analog television is being moved over to digital (beginning soon in the UK in Whitehaven, Cumbria in October 2007), the frequency bands currently being used for broadcasting analog TV channels will be available for other uses. It’s thought that these will be the last part of the spectrum with the capabilities necessary for creating a wireless broadband network.

There is some speculation that Google or Apple could be bidding for a share of the frequency bands when they go on auction in the US— which could make it a very interesting auction to watch…

Any email address that’s visible on the web is virtually guaranteed to start receiving Spam emails. Blogs gets indexed by search engines; automatic processes can check through indexed sites and fill in online forms, for example to add comments on blog sites with links to drive traffic to sites (usually sex related), so any public blog will receive comments and pingbacks from unrelated sites (usually sex-related), either trying to gather links to improve their Pagerank, trying to attract visitors to their site, or simply to send more generic emails to any email addresses they find. (Which sometimes makes me wonder if more machines than people read my blog…)

When I get back from a weekend away from the city, computers and the internet, I tend to come back to about 30 or so comments on my blog; all spam, mostly selling prescription drugs, but one or two directing to pornography. That might not seem like much, but considering that I’ve put very little effort into promoting my blog, it makes me much more sympathetic when I see blogs which have shut down comments due to floods of spam. I’ll also have a few dozen emails that are pure junk, which I have to sort through before I can start checking my “real” emails. It seems that the more efficient I get at using the web, the more time I have to spend sorting through spam.

This year (on the 12th April) was the 13th anniversary of the first unsolicited commercial “spam” email. Although unsolicited bulk email had been sent before (the first documented spam on Usenet was sent by Rob Noha on May 24, 1988, asking for money for his college fund), on April 12, 1994, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel (a married couple who were both lawyers in Arizona), took spamming to a new level of abuse when they posted an unsolicited commercial offer to help immigrants enter an upcoming “Green Card lottery” to over 6,000 Usenet newsgroups. To many people, this particular event, coming not long after the internet was opened up for commercial use, marked the end of the Net’s early period, when the original Netiquette could still be enforced, and its (unrepentant) authors are seen as having fired the starting gun for the legions of spammers that now occupy the Internet. Prior to that, spamming had been a fairly sporadic and even desultory phenomenon, mostly limited to off-topic postings in newsgroups. This year, it’s expected that the volume of spam will overtake the volume of “real” email.

Over the last couple of weeks, the main email address I use for personal mail has started receiving more spam than “real” email. In the space of a single day, I have apparently won “Five Hundred Thousand Great British Pounds and a brand new Mercedes-Benz Car” from Mercedes-Benz, one hundred thousand dollars from a Microsoft-AOL Anniversary Draw (from a Microsoft executive with a Yahoo email address, oddly enough) to get people to use Internet Explorer. (Apparently, the draw was held in London, but I have to collect my winnings from West Africa.) Meanwhile, the “head of Secretary and Delegation to the World Bank in West Africa” wants me to help him claim 22.2 million (he doesn’t say what, exactly) in exchange for 20% of the fund— unfortunately “the code of conduct bureau forbid me to acquire such amount of money.” Perhaps I could collect my lottery winnings while I’m over there. Oh, and a born again christian with £10.4 million in the bank, 4 months to live and a burning desire to pass it on to a good christian to avoid a “Situation where this money will be used in an ungodly Manner”. Meanwhile, dozens of “friends”, “admirers”, “worshippers” and “classmates” apparently want to send me e-cards at my work address, and more recently a flood of emaillers want to ask me questions about videos they seem to think I’ve filmed.

Although the temptation to send a reply and try to enter a dialogue with them is more motivated by potential for entertainment than any misplaced greed, simply identifying them and removing them from my inbox is already taking more of my time than I want to spend on them, and now that my personal address is on at least one mailling list, it’s a safe bet that it will be on several more before long. (Incidentally, if you ever have to send or forward on emails to large numbers of people, please do the rest of the world a favour and a) put the addresses in the BCC field, so that everybody who receives it can’t see everybody elses, and b) delete all the email addresses that are already on the email before forwarding it on. If you really want to have a conversation with large numbers of people at once, use something like MySpace or Facebook, or even start your own blog. Or better still, go to the park and get some fresh air while you’re doing it.)

Spam has also made it’s way into other areas of the internet- spam comments on blogs, with nothing but links to unrelated commercial (and often pornographic) websites, spam blogs, even spam websites— entire sites made up of nothing but content ripped from other websites to attract search engine traffic, links to improve search engine positioning, and paid-for advertising.

Aside from the inconvenience caused to us as individuals (having to sift through the spam we receive, as well as problems caused by legitimate emails being falsely blocked by anti-spam filters), spam is now a significant wider problem on the internet.

Firstly, there is the impact that the volume of spam being sent has on the internet itself- because of the free and open nature of the internet, the real cost of sending large volumes of email is borne by the network itself- a tragedy of the commons. The low barrier to entry and low cost of sending spam emails (especially compared to other similar forms of communication) has led to an ever increasing volume of unsolicited emails, and both increasingly sophisticated methods of filtering spam emails, and increasingly cunning ways of circumventing spam filters. An estimated 55 billion e-mail spam were sent each day in June 2006, and a study by the Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group estimated that 80% of internet traffic in 2005 was what they classed as ‘abusive’ email (that is, abusing the medium of email.) However, it is thought that these numbers are only the tip of the iceberg— it’s decentralised nature makes it difficult to accurately monitor internet traffic, so they are measured by monitoring messages received in mailboxes; as spammers lists often contain a large percentage of invalid email addresses, the actual impact on network traffic is thought to be even higher than the statistic suggests.

Secondly, there is the problem of where spam is being sent from. As it has been possible for some time to identify the sender of spam emails and block their addresses, spammers prefer to send their mail from other people’s computers. In June 2006, an estimated 80% of e-mail spam were sent by “zombie” PCs- an increase of 30% from the prior year. These “zombie” computers are usually part of a “botnet”- a network of computers which have, usually unknown to the owners, been compromised and can be controlled by someone else- to send spam emails, or to perform other malicious functions, such as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Because the location of the machine that is sending spam emails may not be the same as the location of the person actually responsible, and the website that the emails try to direct people to may be in a different place again, it’s difficult to track down those responsible for the problem.

Because it’s so cheap to send and only requires a minimal percentage of actual responses to become profitable, there is lots of money to be made through spam, so there are lots of people and organisations who will work hard to stop this situation from changing. Last year a company called Blue Security, an anti-spam company which provided software to reply to spam mails with automated complaints, was driven out of business by globally coordinated DDoS attacks from the spammers whose businesses were being blocked, which overloaded Blue Security’s servers, rendering it’s services useless.

The big question is how to deal with, or escape from the problem. One method is to use a number of different email addresses- for example, keep one address that’s purely for private correspondance and only circulate to your trusted friends and family, and keep one or more further addresses for use when it might be exposed (such as for registration to websites, or for use in online message boards or blogs.) That way, the more likely a mailbox is to contain spam, the less likely it is that you’ll need to check it. Another method is to simply avoid giving out your email address anywhere it might be publically visible online. Definitely avoid replying to spam emails— this simply serves to confirm that your email address is valid, and could prompt even more messages.

Ultimately, my problem is that I don’t like using spam filters because I quickly end up trusting them too much and ignoring the email that gets blocked, and I really don’t like the idea that a genuine email from someone not in my address book (or maybe using a new email address) could go unread, and someone might think I’m ignoring them/have forgotten about them/just don’t care about them. I’m also slightly concerned that one day a phishing email purporting to be from a service like Amazon or Paypal that I use that will actually come to the same address that I use for that particular service, so when an email address starts to attract significant volumes of spam, I’ve just moved on to a different address. (Of course, this means that it’s quite possible that “genuine” emails are being sent to one of my abandoned addresses, but that’s a problem I’ve just not been able to figure out a way around.)

As there are plenty of email services from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that are free and easy to register, it’s not hard to do and probably saves me more time than I would otherwise spend checking through spam folders. The fact that I own a couple of domain names and some server space which effectively gives me an infinite number of possible email addresses is pretty useful too, as it makes it easier for me to set up systems to forward emails to different addresses, but that’s probably not an option for most people.

Perhaps the future of the internet is going to be something like the increasingly popular social networking websites; a centralised service with an ‘authority’ to oversee it, and restrictions to prevent antisocial activities, where the line between “friends” and “strangers”— and their level of access to and interaction with you and your information— is clearly defined and controlled.