Month: March 2004

Yesterday, Nortel Networks Corp. put its top two financial officers on paid leave , including chief financial officer Douglas Beatty (pictured). This move comes a few days after the company announced it was going to restate its financial results for 2003. Nortel made a profit — it's first in six years — in 2003 of about $750-million (U.S.). Nortel did not say yesterday if it expected that profit to be smaller or larger as a result of the restatement. In fact, to the frustration of many investors and analysts, it said almost nothing yesterday beyond announcing the suspension of its chief financial officer and comptroller. I did a piece on this for CTV's national news and my Globe colleague Dave Ebner has more details in his piece in this morning's paper.

In high school, the Head brothers of Kitchener, Ont. called themselves the Canadian Jack Asses. Yahoo. Inc. is calling themselves something else: The world's worst spammers.
Eric and Matthew Head and their father Barry were named yesterday by Yahoo as defendants in a series of lawsuits filed by the world's biggest e-mail service providers. Paul Waldie and I have a story on this in today's Globe and Mail:

Four major e-mail providers have launched a legal attack on what they say are the world's worst spammers, including a Canadian father and his two sons.
Yahoo, Microsoft, America Online and Earthlink filed a series of lawsuits in the United States yesterday in a bid to crack down on unsolicited e-mails, or spam.
The companies claim that last year, Internet users received more than two trillion unwanted e-mails, accounting for about half of all e-mail traffic. They also say spam costs North American businesses $10-billion (U.S.) annually in lost productivity, network upgrades and unrecoverable data.

If you'd like more information, there is a press release here. You can also view the statements of claim filed by the various companies.

I've got this story in today's Globe and Mail:

Canada's public sector organizations are doing a better job than private sector companies when it comes to buying and using communication and information technologies, a new study suggests.
Public sector organizations also are doing a much better job than private sector firms when it comes to training their employees to use new technology, the study says.

“The Canadian public sector is leading the private sector in technological change and in supporting new technology acquisition change,” Statistics Canada researcher Louise Earl wrote in a report published by the federal agency yesterday.

Ms. Earl's report looks at the rate of technological change among public and private sector organizations from 2000 to 2002.

“That was just after the tech bust,” said Lynn Anderson, a vice-president with Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Ltd. of Mississauga. “A lot of spending was ratcheted back.”

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority is the group that's responsible for running the .ca domain, that's the top-level domain assigned to Canada. I've covered the establishment and activities of CIRA since it took over administration of the domain a few years ago. The domain used to be run by a guy named John Demco, a technician in the computer science department at the University of British Columbia. Not exactly Canada's version of Jon Postel but close enough. It was Postel, incidentally, who actually assigned administration of the .ca domain to Demco, who continues to sit on the board of CIRA.
Jon Postel, of course, was — and I'll get some argument over this broad generalization because he had and often sought help — the guy who ran the broader Internet's top-level domain naming system (DNS) of .com, .edu, and .gov for years. What he did was taken over by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Jon died before ICANN really got going but, those who knew him, say he would have been less than impressed with what ICANN morphed into.
Its critics say it has got involved in way too many fights over politics and technical standards that it was never supposed to and, as a result, has weakened itself and made the Internet itself less robust.
CIRA does not have the scope ICANN does: It does, after all, only look after Canada's little corner of the Internet. What it does have that ICANN sometimes seems to lack is a sense of modesty about its own importance. It has largely confined itself to running an efficient (if a little expensive) domain naming system for .ca and it's got 403,000 domains and counting!
Every year, CIRA elects a new board of directors and that time is upon us again.. Not anyone can run and not just anyone can vote. By and large, you have to be the registered owner of a .ca domain (or its representative) to vote. I've never liked that system. I think some seats — we could argue over majority or not — on the board should be elected directly by domain name owners but I think some seats should also be elected by all Canadian Internet users. Students and academics, at least, I would think, would be interested in some of the issues CIRA deals with.
And if I wanted to change things that way, I suppose I could run for the board and do my darndest.
The currenct board of directors though is, by and large, a pretty good group of smart and reasonable people.

I've got this story in today's Globe and Mail:

When Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.'s chief executive officer, unveiled iPod mini in January, critics frowned.

They said that iPod mini, a slimmed-down version of Apple's runaway hit, the iPod digital music player, was too expensive and that cheaper versions from Apple's competitors would eat its lunch.
The critics couldn't have been more wrong. Even before it hit the stores on Feb. 20, Apple had received 100,000 orders for the $249 (U.S.) iPod mini. (The item goes on sale in Canada next month, the company says.) The product has also won raves from reviewers, one of whom said using one was close to being a “religious experience.” Sales of iPod have also helped to win new fans among investors …
Read the rest of the story here

At my first paper, The Orangeville Banner, I wrote a column. It was called “Across the Street”. I called it that becuase I was the city hall reporter for the Orangeville Banner and the mayor's furniture store was right across the street from the paper's office. I don't think a lot of readers — or even my colleagues — saw the connection. Then I moved on to the Orillia Packet & Times where the only opinion pieces I wrote where theatre reviews. After that it was on the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal for my first job as a business reporter and another column. This one I called “All Business.” Don't laugh. I thought that was a catchy title.
I don't write columns anymore. They're too hard. You have to have strong opinions about something day in and day out and you have to express them well.
And you also expose yourself to people who disagree with you filling up your inboxes and voice-mail with nasty messages.
I think Neil Steinberg, a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times has a good solution to the problem of flames. He's got a form letter. You can read it for yourself at Jim Romanesko's blog but let me give you a taste here:

Dear Reader:

I received your e-mail message. Sadly, I no longer permit myself the pleasure of personally responding to snide remarks from dissatisfied individuals, as doing so inevitably leads to time-wasting arguments and annoying exchanges of insults. Since such encounters often end with the reader complaining to my boss, it seems that this is what rude writers really want to do all along — to provoke me so they can satisfy some inner schoolyard desire to squeal. You may do so now by e-mailing the editor in chief, Michael Cooke, at mcooke@suntimes.com, though I should point out this is a form letter, so his reaction probably won't have the sense of fresh outrage you desire.

Otherwise, I would like to point out — since so many fail to grasp this point — that the piece of writing that upset you is a column of opinion, that the opinion being expressed is mine alone, and the fact that you disagree with or were insulted by my opinion really is not important, at least not to me. This is not a dialogue, this is a lecture, and you are supposed to sit in your seat and listen, or leave, not stand up and heckle.

I do not write the column for people who disagree with me, nor am I concerned with trying to convince them of the falsity of their worldview at a one-on-one level. I've done that for years, and it's a waste of time, both mine and theirs, since such readers are not typically open to ideas other than their own, and cannot even entertain the notion that they may be wrong . . .

I've got a new feature on the blog this evening. It's over there at the top of the right-hand column. It's some paid advertisements from the good folks at Google. This is their AdSense program in which Google's bots crawl my blog, determine what kind of content is here, and then serve up relevant advertisements based on what the robots found on my blog. If there are enough clickthroughs from visitors to this site, then Google earns some money from those advertisers. If Google earns a buck, they've promised to send me a chunk of what they earn.
I have no idea what this might pay and I have no idea how this ought to be used. Will the ads be tasteful? (Google says they will.) Will they be for products and services I abhor?
One think I do want to put on the record here:
My relationship with Google's AdSense program is much the same as my relationship with the Globe and Mail's advertising department, that is: They sell the ads and my job is to provide interesting content. And just as the ad sales staff at the Globe or CTV never tell me what I ought to write about, so too do the Google AdSense folks have nothing to do with all the content on this site — except for the 250 pixels by 250 pixels box on the right. The content in that box is 100 per cent Google-generated and I have nothing to do with it (although they do let me choose the colour scheme). One other important thing — just as the presence of an ad in the Globe does not imply any endorsement by Globe and Mail journalists of the product or service in that ad, you should also assume I do not endorse any product or service advertised by Google at this site.
Let me know what you think. I won't know whose ads are being served up at my site all the time but if you see one you like or don't like, let me know

A few weeks ago, (Canadian!) Clive Thompson had a piece in the New York Times Magazine about virus-writers. It was called the e-infectors. Neat piece. Should be more like them in mainstream media outlets. Thompson's piece generated significant response in terms of letters from readers last week and this week, there is a letter from a reader about those letters. Now, while I think virus writers are unambiguously criminals and should be punished, I'm inclined to agree with the viewpoint, reprinted below, of letter writer Danny Holstein:

Clive Thompson's article was well written and informative. The representative responses to it seemed to be uniformly negative and included descriptions like “reckless,” “criminal,” “Luddite,” “arsonists,” “extortion” and “terrorists” (word of the decade). In my opinion, these responses all miss the point. It is silly to believe that these kids are doing a disservice when they clearly describe how the viruses work and clearly show how susceptible computers are to attack. Being the cynic I am, I wonder who would listen if they merely complained to Microsoft. Do we believe anyone at Microsoft would take a call from an 18-year-old about why Windows isn't secure?
There are far more sinister forces out there: programmers who stand to gain from a computer breach will not boast about it on a Web site; most of the commercial victims (banks or insurance companies) would not even report the crime, being concerned about public loss of trust. I, for one, am glad that these kids are yelling, “Wake up and smell the coffee — your computers are not safe from attack!”