Subic to Anvaya and back

I used to think that biking in the Philippines couldn’t possibly compare to biking in Europe - how could we compete with the cool weather, snow-capped peaks, brilliant blue lakes, and pine-forested mountains, plus the excellent food that you can grab along the way? And there are the traffic-clogged roads.. But the reality is that if one bikes between the months of November and February, you generally get good cloud cover, and on January-mid March, you get good strong winds, that make it possible to bike the whole day without breaking into a sweat.  My favorite rides so far have been the stretch along Marcos highway from Boso-boso to Tanay (a really beautiful road, with very little vehicular traffic, and climbs up to 3000 feet - you even get a glimpse of pine-covered hills, and the blue Laguna de Bay), the road from Sierra Madre Hotel (still on the Marcos highway), all the way down to Tanay/Sampaloc junction, then past Erap’s resthouse all the way to Infanta (this is currently an unfinished highway with zero traffic. - I’ve actually biked here with my then 10 yr old and 8 yr old son), the climb from Pililia up to Bugarin (which spectacular views of Laguna de Bay), and the climb from Pagsanjan up to Lucban.

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On fil-estate, on how it continually manages to dupe the unsuspecting, and how irate fil-estate clients should blog about how they’ve been royally screwed.

This is a post that’s long overdue. Sometime in 1997, I purchased a parcel of land in Antipolo developed by Bob Sobrepena’s company, Fil-Estate. Eleven years have passed, and the roads in Forest Hills  are yet to be completed;  there is no electricity available on our property, and no water. Needless to say there are no telephone lines availabvle. The last time I checked, there were less that ten houses in the entire subdivision - which isn’t much, given that there are easily more than 2000 lots in the entire project. Numerous calls to Fil-Estate have gone unreturned.  When one visits the Fil-Estate office in Pasig, you get the run-around.  No one can tell us when the project will be finished. No one will give a timetable.  No one with any decision making power will agree to meet with us. Clearly, this company is in financial trouble and does not have the resources to complete its obligations to its customers. Or perhaps - it just doesn’t care?

But what really stuns me is the obscene manner in which Fil Estate’s main shareholder, Bob Sobrepena, is thumbing his nose at his long-suffering clients. (which I’ll get to later)

I’ve since written off the parcel of land that I bought. But I know of too many people who are just too scared to speak up or complain, simply because they hope they can still negotiate a deal with Fil-Estate to return their hard-earned cash (even if it is without interest).  They file lawsuits, they complain quietly, but publicly - they’re just not going to speak up.  And because everyone  remains quiet,  Fil-Estate continues to do business, and it continues to dupe people who unwittingly fork over cash for housing developments that Fil-Estate will probably never complete!  

It’s bad enough that their Real Estate contracts are written in such a one-sided manner.  One buys a parcel from Fil-Estate Land, but Fil-Estate Land is not responsible for any promises made by Fil-Estate Marketing, the sales arm of Fil-Estate Land. In other words, Fil-Estate Land doesn’t care if their sales agents promise you  a huge recreational park and a clubhouse with 2 swimming pools, 10 tennis courts, a jacuzzi and sauna. If all they give you is a wading pool and a barbecue grill, that’s not their fault!  It’s the fault of their aggressive sales agents!

So if you run a company, and  your company is ailing, and you don’t have the cash to fulfill your obligations, then for god’s sake, you tighten your belt, you cut costs, you sell off assets. You do everything you can to honor your obligations to your customers, who have entrusted their hard earned cash to you.  But somehow, Bob Sobrepena doesn’t think that way.

Their game plan seems to be to squeeze as much as they can out of Fil-Estate, then hide behind a legal firewall. The very best locations at Camp John Hay - the officer’s housing - they don’t sell to the public. They reserve these for internal Fil-Estate use. Instead they try to sell off land that is impossibly close to the golf course.  When Bob Sobrepena stays at Camp John Hay, he stays in a six bedroom log cabin house - not at the John Hay Manor Hotel (where he has a suite).  He doesn’t drive down to Manila, like everyone else - he and his family take a chopper.  (I know, because I saw them with my own eyes). When he flies to the US, he goes first-class (I see him at the airport lounges).  (Hey Bob, I was the guy behind you in San Francisco Airport many years ago when the mercant refused to loan you a mobile phone because your American Express card had bounced.)

I think it’s time people really speak up - otherwise others will be duped. Blog about it!   The CAP fiasco has taught the Sobrepenas how to create a legal firewall that allows them to take their client’s money, siphon it out of a company, and remain immune from legal attack.  Emboldened by this, they’ve adopted this game plan in all their companies.  If you’re an aggrieved real estate client of Fil-Estate, it’s time to realize that your hard earned money is GONE GONE GONE!  Sadly, all you can do now is to stop the Sobrepenas from ripping off more people.  

toyota.me now bidding at $90,000!

The dotME launch seems to have gone pretty well. Seemingly worthless domains like oglasi.me are now bidding at $40,034 (supposedly "oglasi" means "ads" in croatian, and perhaps other slavic languages).  Match.me (which I am actually bidding for - but will probably drop out) is now at $17,000. (now that’s probably a worthwhile price, given the big business in online matchmaking - just check out match.com, which I’ve seen actively advertising on US television). Then there’s Toyota.Me - which is bidding at $90,025.  Now - how is that possible? Is DotME not implementing UDRP?  Has toyota abandoned its trademarks in Macedonia or in other countries?  I simply can’t understand why someone would bid $90k on a domain that can be taken away via a simple UDRP dispute. 

Rest in Peace, Mario

I'm sitting here in Tagaytay with Noel Morales, and we're both completely stunned to hear that Mario Sison has passed away.  Mario was in great physical shape. He was probably the best biker in our group, and to hear that he succumbed to a heart attack (after a bike ride around the La Mesa Reservoir with Angel Gomez and some other friends - I'm guessing Miguel and Oye were there a well) is just unbelievable.  Hell, if he can die, then I can probably go any minute too.  Angel  (who is a doctor) says they had just completed their ride today and it was at this time that Mario started to complain about chest pains. They asked him to lie down on the ground, and raised his legs. But pretty soon he was convulsing uncontrollably, and no amount of CPR would resuscitate him.  

On Dec 23, 2007 we (Mario, Angel Gomez, Miguel, Isaias, and Alex) completed an epic ride, starting at the Sierra Madre hotel (in Tanay), going all the way down to Pillila, then barreled our way up to Bugarin, then down again to Siniloan/Famy. We had a great lunch at Siniloan (by which time I was surprised to hear that Mario was suffering from cramps and would be unable to continue).  We then started a slow and tortuous climb across the Sierra Madre range. Mario follwed in our support vehicle.   I think we must have climbed up to 3000 feet before descending again, this time into Real.    When we finally glimpsed the Pacific Ocean, we were ecstatic (as none of us had scouted the toue before, and we had no idea how much longer the trip would last).  We started at around 9 am and hit the ocean at approximately 430 pm. We then found a nice resort near Infanta where we were able to swim, have a few beers and eat a great dinner. 

It was fun riding with you, Mario. We'll be thinking of you on our next ride. 

More pics of Samoens

Here is the house we stayed in: (The cost was 1000 Euro a week for 5 bedrooms + 5 bathrooms, w/ a very nice kitchen!)  It certainly beats staying in a hotel - and we saved  a lot on the food. Best of all, I liked the fact that the kids were able to just walk from the house into town and back -  we felt very safe here. The house is about 3 mins away from the town center).  

Here is the area immediately surrounding the house. We liked going for walks along the river.

Here is Sixt-fer-a-cheval, which is a 5 min drive up the Giffre river: (this was the launching point for our white water ride into Samoens).

The kids really enjoyed the zip lines in Morillon. Caolan likes to challenge himself; so if you ask him - this is what he'll say he liked the most.

Samoens

This is for  Judy, who I ran into last Friday. Here are some pics of Samoens:

Samoens

This is for  Judy, who I ran into last Friday. Here are some pics of Samoens:

Google APIs

Interested in using google APIs? Here's an article that describes the more popular APIs pretty well, a  beginner's guide on how to use Google Base, and finally, a listing of some of the more oustanding Google Maps mashups. 

Using i.ph for CEO blogs

One of the greatest features of i.ph privateblo.gs is the ability to create private posts - so that you can blog about sensitive topics and not have your story quoted by some public blog, or be spidered by Google, or seen by people who are not supposed to know about your corporate strategy (or corporate problems). This  article writes about the rise of the CEO blog, and how it's used to handle problems within the enterpise. And here's another article.   I.ph privateblo.gs is a great tool for CEO blogging!

typepad launches templates for the iphone.

I wonder when i.ph will do likewise? Hmmm….

 See the announcement here.

Myspace to launch an API to mimic Facebook’s?

There seems to be a lot of evidence to that effect.  See InternetNews.com and  Minger.net.

A different Cindy Lauper

I wasn't much of a Cindy Lauper fan while in college, but  look at these youtube videos below - wow! She's really matured as a singer. Check it out:

that's my favorite - her rendition of "Carey", a song originally by Joni Mitchell.

la vie en rose. (an Edith Piaf song, but alas, in English).

 a more mellow version of "true colors".

and last but not least, "time after time", in a duet with Sarah Mclachlan. 

Iphone sales exceed all smartphone sales in the US for July!

Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc.'s iPhone, the wireless handset that doubles as a music player, became the best-selling advanced U.S. mobile phone in its first full month of sales, research firm iSuppli Inc. said.

Apple sold 220,000 units in July, 1.8 percent of all U.S. mobile-phone sales, El Segundo, California-based iSuppli said today. The firm estimates that customers in 2007 will buy 4.5 million of the phones, which went on sale June 29.

Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs's goal is to sell 730,000 iPhones this quarter, for a total of 1 million through September. The Cupertino, California-based company has forecast sales of 10 million units in calendar 2008, to capture 1 percent of the mobile-phone market from rivals such as Research In Motion Ltd. and Motorola Inc.

“It's likely that the speed of the iPhone's rise to competitive dominance in its segment is unprecedented in the history of the mobile handset market,'' iSuppli said in the statement.

Apple rose $5.68, or 4.1 percent, to $144.16 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. San Antonio-based AT&T Inc., which has exclusive rights to sell the phone, climbed 41 cents to $40.28 on the New York Stock Exchange.

The iPhone topped July sales of Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices, Palm Inc.'s Treo handsets and advanced phones from Motorola, Nokia Oyj and Samsung Electronics Co., iSuppli said. Advanced phones, also known as “smartphones,'' are designed to send and receive e-mail, browse the Web and, in some instances, run software.

Jaffray Estimates

ISuppli's conclusions, released in a statement today, are based on a monthly online survey of a panel of 2 million U.S. participants.

A Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst said Apple probably surpassed its estimates for iPhone sales. Apple may sell about 804,000 iPhones in the quarter, analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to investors.

AT&T is using the phone to lure customers from competitors such as Verizon Wireless, co-owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc. About one-fourth of iPhone buyers switched to AT&T from other mobile carriers, iSuppli said.

Original story from bloomberg.

Please Help GMA come up with a domain name!

There's going to be a new Top-Level Domain for Asia called, appropriately enough, .asia. 

The domain won't be available to the general public until next year, but as a first step the dotAsia people are asking the Philippine Government what names it would like to reserve.  Succeeding stages will allow trademark holders to stake their claims and finally the general public will be able to get their piece of the .asia space.

As of this posting our Gov't. reps have yet to submit their list of reserved .asia names.  Maybe its a case of writer's block or maybe its all the ah, flux that the CICT has gone through lately:

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/infotech/view_article.php?article_id=68994
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/infotech/view_article.php?article_id=69442

So let's all do our bit to help by suggesting names that you feel should be set aside for government use.  The more obvious ones are place names like philippines.asia, phil.asia and manila.asia.  But you can get more creative with mabuhay.asia, malacanang.asia, maybe even strongrepublic.asia.

Put your suggested domain names in the form of a comment, we'll compile the list and then send it to our friendly Gov't. rep. No need to limit yourself to one or two names — after all, the more domains they reserve the better protected our government will be against cybersquatters.

Domain names that our government submits to DotAsia will be permanently reserved, and will be for the exclusive use of our Government.

Independence day is coming up so let's all be patriotic and help protect our government's piece of cyberspace. 

Yahoo to implement "quality-based pricing".

 I just received the letter below from parked.com (note that it will apply to all parked domains that use Yahoo, including SEDO et al). It seems to indicate that Yahoo will soon be giving domainers less $ for "parked pages" (as these will probably be seen as low-quality sties), whereas blogs with real content will be seen as high-quality sites, and will thus earn more $.  This could be really interesting if Google follows suit (as it normally does). 

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Pulitzer Prize Photo

Cyndie rocks her dying son as the song, "Because We Believe," plays on a cd. She sings along with Andrea Bocelli in a whispery voice. “Once in every life/There comes a time/We walk out all alone/And into the light…” From left, family friends Ashley Berger, Amy Morgan and Kelly Whysong offer comfort as Cyndie tells Derek, "It's OK, baby. I love you, little man. I love you, brave boy. I love you. I love you.“ Derek died soon after in his mother’s arms on May 10, 2006. 

For more photos of Derek's short life, click here.  

google acquires Web conferencing company

What's next, Webconferencing integrated with Googletalk and Videoconferencing? What's the next step for Cisco (who just bought Webex)? Or Skype?

Google has bought online video-conferencing software company, Marratech, the latest in a barrage of software application announcements by the online giant.

Google announced the acquisition on its blog, saying the Sweden-based Marratech will be great for Google’s own workplace because Googlers “thrive on casual interactions and spontaneous collaboration.”

Video-conferencing is a logical next move for Google, given its dive into online video recently with the acquisition of YouTube. It’s just the latest front in its battle against Microsoft, which has its own web conferencing software Live Meeting. Cisco, meanwhile, just acquired another major player in the industry, WebEx, for $3.2 billion.

The difference, of course, is that Google paid pennies relative to what Cisco paid. As a consumer oriented company, Google can presumably distribute the software easily and perhaps even for free. Marratech, founded in 1998, raised at least the equivalent of $10 million. Investors include Slottbacken Venture Capital, the investment unit of Telia Sonera, the Sixth Swedish National Pension Fund, Emano, Hagstromer, and Qviberg.

Britepic

Interesting simple product from AdBrite. Use their Javascript when you embed an image in your blog, and you get zoom/pan functionality on your pic. In exchange, Adbrite will serve Ads to your pic. Hmmm. 

skype launches click-to-call feature

this is a bit old, but still good news. Via a Firefox extension, Skype adds "click to call" icons beside each visible phone number on the site that you happen to be browsing. Click on the icon, and your Skype client launches and a SkypeOut call is made (via your Desktop Skype client). I need to check if this works also for regular Skype to Skype calls? For example, Dotph has a skype-to-pbx gateway. Dial our Dotphofc skype account, and you'll get our regular PBX greeting. 

Here is  a review. And here is the press release. 

Moguling

Buy lots of interesting domain names first (especially ones that will do well on Google searches), slap on some blogging and search optimization techniques, then look for Bloggers to put content on the site. This technique seems to be catching on since Jason Calcanis sold his blogpubishing empire (of 50 sites - including the popular  Engadget) to AOL for $25M in October 2005. At that time, Calcanis claimed Weblogs Inc was making $1M monthly in Google Adsense  clickthroughs.  

i've always wondered what the business arragement is like on these blogs - what happens if the blogger/writers leave and set up their own competing blog? The answer seems to be, as far as DotVentures is concerned, is that - it doesn't matter  if the writers leave, new writers can always be found  - it is the domain that matters. The domain  has the google ranking and will bring in the hits. 

Dotventures calls this technique "Moguling". More info here and here. 

hiking in Ronda (Andalucia)

Pics from our recent trip to Lisboa and Granada (Spain)

One of the most impressive palaces I've ever seen is the Alhambra, in Granada, Andalucia. It is hauntingly beautiful, set amidst the snow-covered Sierra Nevada (and the highest mountain in the Iberian Peninsula, Mount Mulcahen - which I briefly considered climbing, till I realized I needed crampons).  It was built by the Moors back in the 12th-13th century. Quite surprising were the hammams  (aka Saunas).  I didn't realize this technology was actually applied way back then. The saunas were massive - perhaps enough to service 250 people. Water was piped in, from several miles away. Servants would burn firewood  to would  heat the hammam's floor. Then cold spring water, when allowed to flow through the hammam's floors, would burst into steam. The Hammams had curved glass roofing, so you could see the sun while enjoying a steam bath. When we were there, temperatures were at 5 degrees Celsius; you could very well appreciate what a luxury these baths were.  Man, these guys really knew how to live!  

Even more impressive, were the painstakingly ciphered halls. Upon close inspection, you notice that the arabic print on the stucco walls repeated the same phrase over and over. Over and over, room after room, from bottom to the valuted ceiling. It said "There is no Winner but Allah". How about that. The moors build this achingly beautiful palace, set it at  a high promontory, fill it with well-manicured gardens, and the best creature comforts that 12th century technology can offer, subjugate the Spanish, and in the end, this is phrase they chisel into their walls over and over, millions of times, to remind them to be humble; to remind them of their place in the world. Makes you wonder why the Spanish conquistadors thought of the Moors as barbarians.  

Google Developer day!

Are you into mashups? If so, you'll want to check these upcoming conferences out:

Ignite Where - May 28 (San Jose, CA)

Where 2.0 - May 29 and 30  (fairmont hotel, San Jose , CA)

google developer day  - May 31  (mountain View, CA)

 Where camp - June 2 and 3 (San Francisco)

More info from Radar O'Reilly.  

People sometimes ask me, why go to  these conferences, when one can read up on them on the Web. The answer, my friends, is that there are many things you learn by talking to people at conferences that you won't get  from reading RSS feeds. Like what other developers think of Googe Maps vs Yahoo Maps.  Or what new products will be coming out in the next 9 months (that they'll gladly tell you over dinner or whisper conspiratorially, but will never tell the press). Or which companies are throwing a lot of marketing behind a product, and which ones just happen to have an impressive Webpage.

Apple WWDC schedule

It's June 11-15

Early Registration ends on April 27.

Will they be previewing the Iphone?

Almost 25% of Europeans use Firefox

The images above are from xitimonitor.  Once Microsoft loses control of the browser market, things may unravel quite quickly for the Redmond based company. IE  is integrated tightly with MS Office, and, I suspect  Microsoft's .NET strategy .  (after all, if innovations need to made, it's nice to make modifications on both  the server side and the client (IE) side).  With Microsoft now forced to make its online  offerings work with Firefox, Microsoft is now at the level of any other Web 2.0 company, without any of its usual built-in advantages. 

It'd be interesting to see at what point MSFT stock starts to tank. Will we see Bill Gates rush back from an early retirement?  

A possible showdown between ICANN and the US Government?

For the longest time, many ICANN observers have felt that ICANN was not a truly independent organization,  and that the ones really calling the shots was the US DoC. This became evident when the Bush administration successfully blocked the .XXX domain.  Now comes an even more potent dilemma:

 Who gets to sign the ROOT? That is, who keeps the DNSSEC private keys that authenticates the root (and thus, every gTLD and ccTLD, and by inference, every domain and subdomain thereof).  He who holds the private key to root will be the only person able to successfully spoof a cached Nameserver entry. The person holding the root DNSSEC key could, theoretically, spoof the PH nameservers, and then spoof the  Nameservers handling malcanang.gov. If that person were to spoof the MX as well, he could then intercept all incoming mail for gma@malacanang.gov. The only indication that there was an interception would be in the SMTP header (and even then, code can be easily written to alter that).  Interesting, eh? (who knows, the CIA may be spoofing GMA's mail as we speak…)

If the US governent were to hold the keys to the root,  then only the US Government would be able to intercept mail to a DNSSEC domain.

So it's really interesting. Some people are expecting ICANN to move its HQ out of the US (to prevent US meddling). My guess is, either (a) DNSSEC is delayed interminably while this is debated over and over  (thus allowing ICANN to save face) or (b) the US will agree to let some neutral entity like the UN Security Council to hold the key (or even ICANN).

My preference is (b), of course. But my guess is that the Bush Govt will push for (a). Should be interesting.

Afilias to raise .INFO prices as well

In a letter to Paul Twomey, ICANN’s CEO, Afilias advised the fee charged to registrars for a .info domain will rise to $6.15 on 15 October 2007. This follows VeriSign’s announcement of a fee increase for .com and .net domains effective on the same date.

For the letter, see:
http://icann.org/correspondence/laplante-to-twomey-13apr07.pdf

Verisign recently raised prices for COM domains. What's next? A .EU price hike?  A recent study (made available at Lisbon two weeks ago) by Verisign showed that a huge % of COM domains were actually in use (as opposed to being "just parked").  I believe the number was hovering around 85% (this includes domains owned by domainers, and being monetized through companies like SEDO, DomainSponsor, Parked.com, Skenzo, et al).  I guess Verisign sees that if they raise COM prices to $10, probaby 95% of their clients would keep their COM domains. (What's the alternative? Get a cheaper domain and -  Junk our calling cards? Redo our marketing brochures? Invalidate all the advertising money we've spent?) 

It could just be that the only reason keeping Verisign from ratcheting up the price of COM is political. Verisign has to be "nice", or at least, perceived as being "nice", otherwise the DoC may get on their case.  

Google launches click to call

This  is supposedly a free service on Google Maps (perhaps for a promo period, or only within the US). What will probably happen is that Google will tie this in with Adwords and Pay-Per-Action (now on beta). The idea being that if you find the Ad and click on the call button, then Google will charge the Advertiser a premium for the Call (similar to  the pay-per-click adwords model).  Original post is here.

dotAsia sunrise period

A few local domainers have expressed interest in joining the .ASIA sunrise  for trademarks and registered companies.  If you're interested, please send me a private email at jed@i.ph, and we will contact you once we are ready. 

Here is the latest info from DotAsia:

.ASIA Sunrise Period for Trademark Holders to Launch in September  
The dotAsia registry has released a draft launch schedule for the new .ASIA top-level domain name, as well as proposed registration requirements and processes for trademark holders and other organizations before registrations become available to the general public in next year’s Land Rush. 

The Phase I Sunrise Period is expected to begin in mid-2007 with registrations for local government agencies, followed by Phase II in September for trademark holders. The registry has indicated that companies may be asked to provide such details as owner name, trademark name, filling date, registration date, trademark class and type, and country of registration, but has not confirmed if copies of documents will be needed.

The Phase II Sunrise Period will have three stages:

• Reserved for trademarks applied for before March 16, 2004 and registered at the time of the domain name application.
• Reserved for trademarks applied before December 6, 2006 and registered at the time of the domain name application.
• Reserved for trademarks applied for during phases "a" and "b" with the actual class description. For example, Trademark ABC registered under a class for chemical goods could apply for the domain name “ABCchemicals.asia.” More than one application will be possible based on the number of classes in which a given trademark is registered.

The Phase III Sunrise Period for legal entities is tentatively scheduled for November 2007. The registry has indicated that a copy of a business registration certificate will be required and posted on the WHOIS for third party objections and challenges, but details have yet to be finalized.

Much as .EU is restricted to members of the European Union, at least one of the contacts for .ASIA domain names will be required to have a presence in one of the 73 countries defined by ICANN as being part of the Asia-Pacific region, including India and China as well as Australia and Japan. Global Reach estimates that more than 64 percent of Internet users are non-English speakers and that Asian languages alone make up 33 percent of the online population. While current gTLDs tend to focus on a vertical group (e.g. commercial entities, network providers, organizations, etc.), .ASIA is designed to allow organizations and individuals to demonstrate membership in the Asian community.

 

 

global domain performance in 2006: 32% increase over 2005

Domain Name Industry Brief Reports 32 Percent Rise in Registrations Over 2005  

The latest issue of the VeriSign® Domain Name Industry Brief reports that as of the end of 2006, total domain name registrations reached 120 million, representing a 32 percent increase over 2005 and an eight percent increase over the third quarter of 2006.

The domain name industry continued to experience strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2006, with more than 11.6 million new registered domain names, a three percent increase year over year and a 23 percent increase from the third quarter.

Registrations for ccTLDs increased 31 percent year over year to 43.7 million, and 10 percent from the previous quarter with more than four million registrations. China alone added more than 500,000 domains in the fourth quarter, a 43 percent increase over last quarter.

The base of .COM and .NET domain names grew to 65 million domain names by the close of 2006, representing a six percent increase in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter of 2006, and a 30 percent increase year over year.

PLDT myDSL call

I recently came across this Odeo post of a myDSL customer sales representative being berated by a customer. The irate customer first begins by repeating and repeating his problems with myDSL. Then this escalates to swearing at the female customer rep. He swears "P* I*" at the rep,  gets her to break down, and not the least bit affected by the girl's emotional state, continues to swear P* I* about 15x!  Not content with that, he later edits the dialog, posts it  online, perhaps to highlight the inefficiency of PLDT's customer service, or my guess is,  as an attempt to get the young girl fired. But what amazes me more, is how the vast majority of comments to this post are unsympathetic and actually  blame the girl - for crying, for being unprofessional, for being uninformed!

 What is clear to me, is that there is a glaring  discrepancy in the way our society treats the poor. Kung hindi lang nag-tagalog yung sales rep, I don't think the (male) customer would have sworn invectives at her. If the girl had answered the phone with Call Center English, the customer would have assumed that girl was educated and perhaps of a higher social strata, and would have probably been more courteous. 

Just because the poor are powerless doesn't mean the rest of us should treat them callously, or  forget they are human beings in the first place.

Dotph prices revisited

It looks like my comment on Yugatech seems to have generated a lot of comments. Now I can appreciate why Yuga's blog has pretty high Alexa rankings (rank = 22,186) compared to say, Cebupacificair.com (27,794),  FHM.com.ph (24,915), or www.gov.ph (43,108).

My original post was addressed  to the SEO/Adsense community, in an attempt to find out what their needs were and to create a product that was suitable to that segment. 

Instead, the responses seem to come more from individuals , and along the lines of "well, what about the rest of us"?

So let me address that.

First of all, there seems to be this misconception that DotPH prices are expensive, vis-a-vis those of other countries.  If you compare how Registrars retail PH prices compare against other ccTLDs, you'll see that PH is actually cheaper than most countries. An adsense ad on Yugatech's page, for example,  leads to this AsiaRegistry pricelist.    You'll see that in Asia, only NZ and Australia  retail substantially more aggressively than PH (and that's not because of the Registry price, but because of the volumes these ccTLDs can command). 

For instance, here are .AU's Registry prices:

http://www.ausregistry.com.au/news/news84.php

 The starting wholesale price for a com. AU domain is AU$50, which is roughly US$40.98. Note that PH wholesale prices start at far less ($27.50), and for both Registries, there is a drop in price the more volume you buy.

So I think the real issue should not be - why is a PH domain expensive, but why can't it be as cheap as a COM domain?

I thought the answer to this was obvious, having been touched before by other posters. But I'll recap.

 The main reason PH is more expensive than COM is that all the good domains in COM are all  gone. You can be  the owner of "Maldita" and use a domain like Maldita.PH or settle for Maldita-clothingforwomen.com.  You might save a little by buying a COM domain through a discount domain company, but then you'll have to spend millions more just to get people to remember your COM domain name. Because in the end, domain names are like 1-800 numbers. In the US, one pays thousands of dollars for expensive 1-800 numbers because they are easy to remember. I will have no problem remembering the URL of Maldita.PH but It will take millions in Advertising for me to remember the URL   Maldita-clothingforwomen.com. So in general, the extra $ one spends on a memorable PH domain is money well spent. 

The other reason why PH is sold at a premium  to COM, and perhaps a less obscure reason, is that Search Engines like Google only have 2 ways of determining if a website is in the Philippines. One is its IP address, and the other - is if it ends in PH. So if you're shopping online for clothes, and you want Google to show you all  clothing websites in the Philippines (by hitting the radio button "only show pages in the Philippines"), Google will not find Maldita-clothingforwomen.com (given that most philippine companies host their websites abroad), but Google will easily find Maldita.PH.  (Note that if the COM domain is hosted in the US, Google will assume that the COM website is NOT Philippine-related.)

So - in a nutshell -  this is why ccTLD domains are priced higher than COM. People may want to save a little buy buying a COM, but if their market is primarily based in the Philippines, and if  Search Engine Traffic is important to them, then getting a PH domain (even at a higher price) makes more sense.

Having said that, let me also point out that DotPH has not forgotten individuals, and the blogging community. Three years ago, we created  the i.ph domain - a Free domain that comes with mail-forwarding, blogging software, customizable templates, photo gallery, podcasting,  free webhosting, and even free livechat support. It's 100%  made in the Philippines, and lot better than Blogger or Livejournal or Myspace, or Multiply. Check it out at http://i.ph.  And feel free to post your comments on our forums.

Beware of entering passwords at local Internet Cafes!

Here's a report I saw on ISAW:

ISAW reported about the proliferation of keyloggers in almost all Internet cafes in Manila. I have experienced it first hand yesterday. By pressing CTRL + ALT and A, a password dialogue box will appear for administration, to my surprise the password of the Perfect Keylogger of that internet cafe is "password1". I tried their other available computers and all have the same passwords.

It seems that for Internet Banking, Online Stock Trading, or any Online Financial Service to take off in the Philippines, financial institutions will need to  use something like Brian Cartmell's mypw.com. Brian Cartmell is the former CEO of DotCC; he sold his shares to Verisign around five years ago. As of Domainfest Los Angeles in January 2007, Brian said they were still in Beta. (if memory serves me right). 

Are you a webdesigner who wants to service foreign (eg US) clients more effectively?

I know there's a huge community of Philippine webdesigners out there seeking to make good $$ by getting foreign contracts (while working remotely in the Philippines). If you're one of them, you know that one of the biggest obstacles you face is that clients like to talk to you face-to-face, to discuss design changes and alterations. Programming contracts are easier to complete remotely, but Webdesign contracts require a lot of artistic input from the client, and sometimes face-to-face meetings is what your client will demand! If you're in this category, then check this out.

It's a tool for collaborating artistically remotely - it allows your client to annotate your artwork, suggest different colors or designs, or paste a link to the kind of design he prefers. It'll never replace face to face meetings. But it may be good enough! It's called Conceptshare.   

Visa invests in DotMobi

Originally posted on CircleID: 

dotMobi, a consortium to offer the first and only Internet address created for mobile phones, today announced that Visa International has made an investment in dotMobi and will have a representative on dotMobi’s Board of Directors. This investment adds Visa to a consortium that already represents 13 leading mobile operators, network & device manufacturers, and internet content providers.

The addition of Visa to the range of dotMobi investors represents a vital addition to dotMobi’s mobile “ecosystem” represented by dotMobi’s investors. Visa brings to dotMobi extensive mobile commerce and payment capabilities, including solutions for contactless mobile payment, Over the Air (OTA) personalization, coupons and direct marketing.

“Visa’s strategic alliance with dotMobi puts us at the forefront of working with mobile operators and technology providers to develop practical and achievable best practices for the delivery of enhanced mobile commerce services,” said Patrick Gauthier, senior vice president, innovation, Visa International. “This alliance, coupled with our recently launched Visa mobile platform, positions Visa to advance the adoption of mobile services that provide convenience to consumers and value for those within the delivery chain.”

Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi. “We’re absolutely delighted to welcome Visa on board as our fourteenth investor. As always, our goal is simply to make the internet mobile. The addition of Visa to our company and to our board is the next step in making that a reality.”

With more than 450,000 domains having been registered with dotMobi since the .mobi domain launched to the public in September and with mobile web sites going live on a daily basis, accessing the Internet on mobile phones is fast becoming a day-to-day reality.

 

I saw the dotMobi presentation at the ICANN Lisbon conference and came away unimpressed. It's not clear to me what the need is for a dotMobi domain. When will a mobile user want to visit a company's dotMobi site?  The only uses I see are (a) to see where a company - eg - dotph.mobi - might be located, and to get that company's contact info.  (b) to click-to-call once the contact info is found.  

 Unfortunately, this isn't useful for big companies - like IBM - who have multiple locations and contact info. Yet it is these companies that will be buying dotMobi. The SMEs will probably just  put their maps/contact information on their existing COM websites. Webservers can detect if the browser is a mobile, and return the simplified page. So I expect more COM websites to be mobile enabled, than dotMobi sites!  This means that the mobile domain that most users will search first will be the COM domain (or the ccTLD domain), rather than the dotMobi site!

It's also clear at this point that DotMobi doesn't have an m-commerce strategy, which to me, is the key rationale for a mobile domain. (This was our conclusion with our  dotPhone foray). Unfortunately, dotMobi's answer is to create dotMobi policy formation group, external to DotMobi and composed of members of various industry groups. This will only make it more difficult for dotMobi to come up with a cohesive and innovative strategy. Innovation isn't really possible when left to industry committees. 

Dotph domain Prices too high?

Here is a comment I made in response to a thread I found on Yugatech.

I just recently discovered this thread, and I thought I'd directly respond to the group. Hopefully, people are still willing to discuss this topic.

My understanding is that most of the readers here are Adsense/SEO people? If so, I'll try to address my thoughts appropriately.

First of all, DotPH pricing at $35/year is the retail price. The wholesale price is a lot cheaper, and goes as low as $15/year, depending on your volume of registrations. This has been the case as far back as 2000, when very few ccTLDs were selling below the $35 level. The Registrar prices are located here.

As you can see, the discounts begin once you have at least 12 domains to register.

So it might make sense for some of you to join forces, and buy in bulk - so you can enjoy larger discounts - or work with one of our existing Registrars. We have over 150 Registrars - practically every ISP in the Philippines and Webhosting company is a Registrar. (Now whether they wish to pass on the discounts to you - that is entirely another matter).

If your need is to get lots of domains so that you can point them to your main website (so as to increase its Google rank), then perhaps we can discuss creating some price that favors the SEO community.  If some of you recall, we actually gave a way 18+ character domains several years ago  - for free. This way you can get domains with your desired keywords, then direct people to your main money site. Or you can monetize them with SEDO, DomainSponsor, or some similar domain monetizing company. We've also toyed with the option of lowering price for net.ph & org.ph - but we'd like to get more feedback first.

But if you are domainers and want to buy domains, hold, and sell them later, you might want to look at mail-only domains. These only cost $5/year and can be later updated to full functionality (once you pay $35/year). So this means you can speculate (if you wish) and grab all the domains that you think will be of value in the future. They you can sell them later at a profit.

I am currently at the ICANN conference in Portugal, and Tim Schumacher of SEDO tells me that the average resale price these days for domains is about $20k. That's a pretty impressive amount. Naturally, ccTLD domains don't sell that high - but once more and more Philippine businesses get online, you should find the aftermarket price for PH domains going up.

If you have ideas, please feel free to post comments on my blog at jed.i.ph (it is unmoderated). Or if you prefer, you can call/email us directly. (The contact details are here.

This way, we can respond more quickly to your concerns.   

I haven’t received my Adsense checks since November 2006. Have you?

Looks like there is a racket going on in the Post Office Department, and Adsense checks from Google are being routinely stolen then encashed in provincial banks.  Perhaps Google should just wire funds directly from Citibank to Philippine banks? It'll be easier for everyone, including Citibank.

Here is what one Pinoy blogger has to say:

Stolen Adsense Check Found in Benguet

Just to give you an idea on how far Benguet is from Quezon City, look at the image above. I haven't been to Benguet but according to Kuya Noli, it's an approx. 8-hour drive.

Google just sent the copy of my stolen check and according to the stamps and computer prints on the check, it was deposited last February 15, 2007 at the La Trinidad, Benguet branch of Allied Bank.

I've already called the branch and according to Allona, the person I talked to, my check was deposited by a Money Changer. The money changer apparently bought my check from the person who "stole" it. Deja vu?

The bank said that they will immediately notify the account holder (money changer) and would contact me again in a few days. She was even surprised when I gave my phone number as the area code is (2). I asked her, "Hindi ba kayo nagtaka at Quezon City yung address nung check at dyan pa umabot sa Benguet?". She keeps on apologizing and said that she would do her best to help me. She also said that I shouldn't be worried and I will get my money back once they've notified the account holder and receive a notice from Citibank.

Not to be worried? Suuure… my Adsense check for this month might already be in the hands of these postal bastards and I should be worried? Everyone using the Philippine Postal Service should be worried.

 

 

Google doesn’t care about Blogger?

Reprinted from Valleywag: 

Google hasn't really cared about Blogger since the start. The search engine company bought Pyra Labs, maker of Blogger, on a whim, after Sergey Brin ran into Evan Williams and thought what he was doing was cool. The blogging platform, like many acquisitions and whimsical internal projects, has always had to wait in line for engineering time. Google's hardcore techies don't really get blogs. The product's interface has been cleaned up, and reliabilty improved, but the functions have been neglected. And now there's a new charge to the indictment.

Jason Goldman quit as product manager of Blogger, back in August. That happens. He'd been working at Google for more than three years, he was nearly fully vested, and he wanted to travel. The APM — or assistant product manager — is supposed to be pretty good. But Goldman's role has been left unfilled for nearly three months, and no word on a permanent successor. Sure, it's hard to find technically and managerially competent PMs, but it looks as if Google HR can't really be bothered.

Does it matter? Blogger seems to be holding its own against competitors such as Myspace and Livejournal. (Health warning: bogus Alexa numbers behind that link.) One could argue that the blogging platforms often fail by adding too many features; Blogger's virtue was always its simplicity. Blogger has benefited from integration with Picasa, which makes it easy to upload photos to a weblog.

But Blogger could be so much more. Since the long-term competitor is Myspace, how about enhanced friending, to allow bloggers to see what's new on their favorite blogs. That's not too complicated, is it? At the very least, Google ought to be able to index the Blogger content as soon as it's posted, to allow for search as close to realtime as possible. I always thought that the thinking behind the initial acquisition. Turns out there wasn't much thinking at all. If Google's not serious about Blogger, let some other company make the most of it.

bike trip - what i’d like to try next: candaba swamp

Pulag via Akiki

Just got back from what must have been my best Pulag trip ever. The weather was good (no rain, and the wind was mild).  It was actually possible to walk around camp barefoot and step right into the tent and not have to worry about tracking mud into the tent (just dry grass).  What we did was to climb the Akiki trail in one day, and have the rest of our gear (kahuna tents, barbecue, chairs, tables, cots, wine et al) brought up by porters on the easier ambangeg trail. This works out well as (1) we get to try the more challenging akiki trail (2) we get to traverse the akiki trail quickly, as all we have to carry is survival gear and (3) it's cheaper to hire porters to carry gear via ambangeg than via akiki!  (P1500 via akiki vs P500-600 via ambangeg).

 We were able to scale the Akiki trail and make it to the saddle camp in 7 hours. PAO Superintendent Albas seemed surprised at this time, so I'm guessing we must have been lucky - what with the trail being dry and all. Our guides were estimating the climb to take 13 hours, and the most aggressive climbers seemed to take 10 hours to scale Akiki. So perhaps the trick is to go ultra light and have all your gear waiting for you at camp when you get there!  The climbers I was with - Isaias Seronio, Cyril and Aidan Rocke were carrying far heavier gear than I was and made the same time - I'm guessing that the trail is actually doable in 5.5 hours - provided you don't stop to admire the view, take pictures, go ultra light (just carry your food, water, and raincoat/sweater/headgear/gloves/lamp).   

Pardon me monsieur, would you please pass the Grey Poupon?

It got so cold at night, there was enough frost on Aidan's tent to create a small ball of ice! Wow.  

directions to Mt. Pulag from Baguio.

This is for one of our climbers, who will be making their way to Pulag tonight.

From Wright Park take Pacdal Road up past (what used to be) Montepino condominium. This road goes direct to Ambuklao. It starts to descend at Beckel and you should get to Ambuklao Dam in 1-1.5 hours.  You'll probably catch the sun rising on your way to  Ambuklao, and it should be quite a sight. Be careful though as there is one fork in the road which can be deceptive. It occurs around 45 mins from Baguio. The left fork will look like the main road but it's actually the right fork that you have to take. The right fork leads upwards and the left fork is level. I wish I could give you more detail, but that's it. You'll just have to ask for directions to Ambuklao dam if you feel you've come to a deceptive fork in the road.  This fork occurs well before you start to see the lake (or more precisely, the Ambuklao reservoir).

Just before you reach the Ambuklao dam (perhaps 5 mins before), you might want to make the "mistake" of driving through Ambuklao town. The road will have signs directing you to go right. If you go left, you go through the town. There is some old American architecture here, much like the houses in Camp John Hay. One gets the sense that when the dam was built, the Americans running the project wanted good housing, and they seem to have gotten it. It's a bit surprising to see these structures, as the rest of the area seems really poor.

When you get to Ambuklao, you might notice  a road on the left that leads to Halsema highway. This is one of the bike trails mentioned in Action Asia (Baguio to Ambuklao to Halsema then back to Baguio). You'll come across this road just before the bridge that crosses over Ambuklao.

Ambuklao will be a sight for sore eyes as the area is relatively arid and there will be this immense body of water that will feel very cool to the eyes. Go over the bridge. From here on, it is about1.5 hours to Mt. Pulag National Park.

The road will now lead up and up will get quite dusty.  You will notice some bancas plying through Ambuklao dam, and your first thought - at least my first thought was - can I get a sailboat down there?  I didn't see a way to do it, but if you notice a path, do let me know.

There is only one major fork in the road, and that is the road leading to Aritao in Nueva Vizcaya. This fork occurs about an hour after Ambuklao. The right fork goes uphill and leads to Nueva Vizcaya. The left fork leads to Mt. Pulag. The fork is well marked. But in case you miss it, you'll know because the region will suddenly become very green. This is because the winds from the East are moisture laden while the winds from the West are generally dry. This is why Ilocos is so dry in this summer. And this is why when the winds are blowing from the East, you can expect clear skies at Mt. Pulaog.

About 45 mins from Ambuklao, you will be passing along a small river. You'll notice rice paddies on the left and actual scarecrows. My kids are always fascinated by these as the locals tie wires to the scarecrows and attach strips of paper to the wires that makes the scarecrows actually move everytime the wind blows.  I guess it actually works as there are dozens of these scarecrows along the way, all dressed in clothes and straw hats.

As you come close to Pulag National Park, you'll see a sign leading to a hospital on the left. keep going straight though (not left). The DENR office in Ambangeg is approximately 10-15 minutes away. You'll soon see a cemented road on your right (perhaps it was just well-paved; i'm not sure anymore). I believe there may be a sign here that says this is the way to the DENR office. Make a right and take the cemented road and you should be at the DENR office in less than a kilometer. The DENR office will be on the right, up a steep hill.  There will be a school on your left (close to the DENR office).

Park your car by the road, go to the DENR office, pay the minimal hiking fee and you're all set!

Crazy kids

I recently bought a Macbook, which comes with a built in camera and Photobooth. I left it alone for 30 minutes, and then when I returned, here is what I found Caolan and Aralt had done:

Porto & the Duoro River

This is about 4 hours north of Lisbon, away from Andalucia (but  near Fatima):

Lisbon

For the guys travelling with us to Lisbon - hopefully this will help you decide where to go during your free time:

pics of mendoza, argentina

For Gigi, who now wants to be part of BA:

Indian Springs at Calistoga

I'm uploading these pics for a friend who is travelling to Calistoga.  I thought it might be of interest to others. We were wandering from Mendocino sometime in December (2006), trying to find our way into Napa when we hit the small town of Calistoga. I'd heard that mud baths were all the rage here, and so we pulled into this huge resort (on the main drag). It didn't look impressive from the outside, but what interested me was the 19th century-like proportions and architecture. First, one notices the geyser in the background. Then, when you approach, you see the massive pool paviliion, which actually has an Olympic size pool that is heated really hot. (So hot, that I couldn't do any laps - and this was in December, when temperature is extremely cold). When you jump into the pool at night, you can hardly see more than two feet away - the steam is that thick! One can actually swim naked in the pool (at night) and no one will notice because (1) it's just so massive and (2) the steam is so thick and (3) there aren't that many lights turned on at night. So this was real bliss, especially after a day of wine tasting. The mud baths are $75 apiece, but they had a winter promo where we could get a hotel room for $200 and we got two mud baths for free. So this was a no-brainer: we went for the room.  

chaos on the Philippine Internet

 I pulled this off the marketwatch site, filed at 3 pm Dec 28 Manila time. At around noon today, one of our major Telco providers (Bayantel) seems to have gone down.  The initial report was that an underwater cable to the Philippines had gone out. The report below, however, seems to indicate that it is the link between Taiwan and HK that has gone down, and not an RP-Taiwan or RP-HK  link. This outage has caused HK providers to reroute their connections through other links, primarily US-HK links. As a result HK-US routes are heavily congested. In the same manner, RP Telcos are now probably rerouting their traffic to not go via HK (or Taiwan) but through RP-US links (perhaps routed through Singapore?).

As of this writing, only our ETPI connection seems to be OK. Bayantel service seems to be intermittent (from our servers in the US, we have intermittent access to our Bayantel servers). Surfing through our Globe DSL 1Mbps link is impossible (bizarre - given the Globe SingNET connection); Attempts to connect to servers on the PLDT network have failed, indicating that PLDT connections are down as well.  So that's really interesting… ETPI is the only provider with a solid connection at this point. Erwin Oliva at INQ7 reports that Digitel is out as well.

We've written some code to monitor all the 4 major Telcos: PLDT, ETPI, Globe, and Bayantel through this crisis and I'll try to report on the results from time to time. 

 

Taiwan quakes kill 2, disrupt phone/Internet communications

2:09 AM EST December 27, 2006

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — A series of powerful earthquakes off Taiwan's southern coast killed at least two people and injured 42, damaged undersea communications cables, and crippled Internet and mobile communications on Wednesday to parts of China, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and the U.S., according to reports.

Bloomberg News reported the casualties, citing the Taiwan National Fire Agency.

Repairing the cable could take as long as three weeks, but service should improve gradually each day, the Associated Press reported, citing a spokesman from Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan's largest phone company.

Taiwan was hit by four earthquakes Tuesday, according to Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau.

The first, which was a magnitude of 6.7 on the Richter scale, struck at 8:26 p.m. local time Tuesday and was centered off Taiwan's south coast. Three more earthquakes ranging between magnitude 5.2 and 6.4 occurred between 8:34 p.m. and 11:41 p.m. All four earthquakes were centered in the same region according to reports.

A fifth quake of magnitude 5.9 occurred at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday and was centered 53 kilometers (33 miles) south of Kaohsiung City.

The quakes interrupted 98% of Taiwan's communications with Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Hong Kong, according to the AP.

The service disruption also hampered Internet service in Hong Kong, making it difficult to download from some sites in the U.S. and Asia.

Why RP will soon be Firefox country..

Developing websites and testing only with IE? Think again. Microsoft has recently released IE7. But before you rush off to upgrade, note what CNN has to say:

…people using automatic updates will have to agree to let Microsoft check whether their copy of Windows is pirated before they can get IE7.

Original post here.

China breaks the Root!

Now it begins. What's next - a pan-arabic Root Server, using arabic TLDs?

Fearless forecast: (1) ICANN isn't going to sanction China or CNNIC. (2) ICANN will speed up the deployment of more gTLDs (before alternate root server systems "consume" the unused TLD space).

Here's a letter from Michael Geist to Dave Farber regarding this development:

>From: Michael Geist >Date: February 28, 2006 9:24:09 AM EST >To: dave@farber.net >Subject: China To Launch Alternate Country Code Domains

Dave,

China is preparing to launch what appears to be an alternate root. Starting tomorrow, they will establish four country-code domains. In addition to the current dot-cn, they will offer Chinese character versions of dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com. As one article puts it, this "means Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States."

Coverage from China is at http://english.people.com.cn/200602/28/eng20060228_246712.html

I've got some quick commentary at

which includes:

"The alternate root has always lurked in the background as a possibility that would force everyone to rethink their positions since it would enable a single country (or group of countries) to effectively pack up their bags and start a new game. The U.S. control would accordingly prove illusory since a new domain name system situated elsewhere would be subject to its own rules. While the two could theoretically co-exist by having ISPs simply recognize both roots, the system could "break" if both roots contained identical extensions. In other words, one root can have dot-com and other other can have dot-corp, but they can't both have dot-com.

It is with that background in mind that people need to think about a press release issued yesterday in China announcing a revamping of its Internet domain name system. Starting tomorrow, China's Ministry of Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains. In addition to the dot-cn country code domain, three new Chinese character domains are on the way: dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com. As the People's Daily Online notes this "means Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States."

In other words, the Chinese Internet becomes a reality tomorrow. With it, the rules of the game may change as 110 million Internet users will suddenly have access to a competing dot-com (albeit in a different character set) and will no longer rely exclusively on ICANN for the resolution of Internet domain name queries. This change was probably inevitable regardless of the status of ICANN, however, the U.S. position can't possibly have helped matters. Indeed, some might note that while Congress has been criticizing U.S. companies for cooperating with Chinese law enforcement and thereby harming Internet freedoms, those same Congressional leaders may have done the same by refusing to even consider surrendering some control over the Internet root to the international community and thereby opening the door to an alternate root that could prove even worse from a freedom perspective.

This week's announcement certainly doesn't mark the end of a global interoperable Internet. It does move one step further toward that path since in Internet governance terms, the credible threat is now real."

MG ********************************************************************** Professor Michael A. Geist Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law 57 Louis Pasteur St., Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Tel: 613-562-5800, x3319 Fax: 613-562-5124 mgeist@pobox.com http://www.michaelgeist.ca

china alters definition off cybersquatting

BEIJING, Feb. 21 (Xinhuanet) — China will narrow the meaning of “cybersquatters” and will now only use the term to refer to those who register Internet domain names and sell them to rivals of a company that owns the rights to the name.

According to the latest definition offered by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the country’s .CN domain name administrator, cybersquatters will no longer be referred to those who register a domain name “for the purpose of selling or renting it”. It now refers to those who actually “sell or rent it to competitors of a company whose rights are infringed upon.”

The definition came as part of a package of new rules set by the CNNIC in the hope of settling disputes over domain names, according to an anonymous official with the CNNIC.

The new rules, which will come into effect March 17, will safeguard the interest of the first registered domain name, following the common practice in the world, the official said.

“With the coming of the new rules, .CN domain names will be more orderly,” said Hu Gang, an Internet expert.

According to sources from the CNNIC, there have been more than 1 million registered .CN domain names and the lowest cost for a month’s use has plunged to 5 yuan (about 0.62 U.S. dollars).

Prince Charles’ diary entries on the Philippines

An irate member of Prince Charles staff recently released parts of the Prince’s diary to the press.

After leaving Hong Kong, the prince visited the Philippines. He describes Manila as “an awful, smelly polluted harbor absolutely clogged with filth and rubbish.”

But he also states: “The Philippines were incredibly friendly and warm-hearted and pleased to see the British.”

The reader will recall that Prince Charles travelled via his yacht Britannia from HK to Manila after the 1997 handover ceremonies. I actually like his candid thoughts better.

Here’s what he does in support of the Dalai Lama and the situation in Tibet:

Mark Bolland, a former aide, told the court on Tuesday that the prince saw himself as a “dissident” and had boycotted a 1999 Chinese Embassy banquet out of respect for Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Both Charles’ lawyer and current private secretary, Michael Peat, have denied the prince boycotted the banquet. Bolland worked for the prince for six years and resigned in 2002 amid media reports of a clash with Peat.

And here’s what he thinks of the Chinese and the HK handover:

“All the locals were being outwardly thoroughly optimistic about the immediate future but in the background was the sneaking worry about creeping corruption and the gradual undermining of Hong Kong’s greatest strength — the rule of law,” he wrote.

“Apparently in China itself the army is heavily involved in pretty corrupt business practice, so one can only hope they are confined to barracks in Hong Kong.”

One wonders why doesn’t express himself more openly?

Steve Ballmer: I’m going to f**king kill Google!

Here’s testimony from a former Microsoft employee who joined Google:

Prior to joining Google, I set up a meeting on or about November 11, 2004 with Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss my planned departure….At some point in the conversation Mr. Ballmer said: “Just tell me it’s not Google.” I told him it was Google.

At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.” ….
Thereafter, Mr. Ballmer resumed trying to persuade me to stay….Among other things, Mr. Ballmer told me that “Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards.”

Read the full story here.

LogicCMG to bypass India, prefers to outource in Philippines!

In 3 years outsourcing will probably be the biggest industry in the Philippines.

Announcing the company’s preliminary half year results yesterday, chief executive Martin Read said he was thinking of moving application management and software development to the Philippines.
“It’s lower cost than India and there are very good people,” he said.

See the full story here.

Time to start investing in office propery with good local loop connections?

When there’s corruption at the top….

It filters all the way down. Here’s a story from the New York Times on corruption in Bangladesh:

August 30, 2005
Where a Cuddle With Your Baby Requires a Bribe

By CELIA W. DUGGER
BANGALORE, India - Just as the painful ordeal of childbirth finally
ended and Nesam Velankanni waited for a nurse to lay her squalling
newborn on her chest, the maternity hospital’s ritual of extortion
began.

Before she even glimpsed her baby, she said, a nurse whisked the
infant away and an attendant demanded a bribe. If you want to see
your child, families are told, the price is $12 for a boy and $7 for
a girl, a lot of money for slum dwellers scraping by on a dollar a
day. The practice is common here in the city, surveys confirm.

Mrs. Velankanni was penniless, and her mother-in-law had to pawn gold
earrings that had been a precious marriage gift so she could give the
money to the attendant, or ayah. Mrs. Velankanni, a migrant to
Bangalore who had been unprepared for the demand, wept in frustration.

“The ayah told my mother-in-law to pay up fast because the night duty
doctor was leaving at 8 a.m. and wanted a share,” she recalled.

The grand thefts of rulers may be more infamous, but the bitter
experience of petty corruption, less apparent but no less invidious,
is an everyday trial for millions of poor people across Asia, Africa
and Latin America. Increasingly, it is being recognized as a major
obstacle to economic development, robbing the impoverished of already
measly incomes and corroding the public services they desperately need.

(more…)

The blog market on a country by country basis

Here’s some interesting market information -for people in the Blogging business. Clearly, blogging is a US phenonmenon, and it’s spreading faster in Asia than it is in Europe. Africa lags behind, as usual.

Seronio wins!

Isaias Seronio, the Philippines lone entry in the Men’s Singles at the Asian Table Tennis Championships won his first match against the Mongolian entry, Tumurbaatar Enkh-Tur, 4-1! Today he faces the youngster Yang Zi from Singapore at 4:20 pm at Table 8 in Jeju, South Korea. Our prayers are with him. Yang Zi is a superior player and it should be an interesting match. Isaias is ranked 7th on the Philippine National team. If he somehow hurdles the match against the Singaporean, he then faces either Achanta Kamal of India or Ahmedov Rashid of Turkmenistan. The winner of that group ends up playing Hao Shuai of China. And if by some miracle Isaias should make it past Hao Shuai, he will then find Wang Liqin waiting for him in the semifinals.

Yahoo is coming on strong!

I’m very impressed with the way Yahoo has come on really strong. First they acquire Flickr, then they introduce tag-based searching in MyWeb 2.0 (which, I believe will be a far more efficient way of searching than using google in the near future, if only because it is humans that are tagging webpages, rather than google’s algorithms). Yahoo local is really powerful too (too bad it isn’t available locally). Yahoo Adsense is now beta, and they promise to release it at then end of the year. Yahoo 360 is a worthwhile challenger to Myspace, and now we see Yahoomail leapfrog Gmail! Holy cornball batman!

As anyone who’s used both Gmail and Yahoo Mail knows, one of the standout features of Gmail is its search ability. But Yahoo seems to have leapfrogged Gmail’s search, for now, anyway. The Sunnyvale company has rebuilt its search capabilities, expanding its indexing to include photos and attached documents, and designing a user interface aimed at making it easy to drill down to the messages you want to find.

There are lots of little improvements to Yahoo’s mail search that make it far smarter. But especially clever are the photo and attachment views. A single mouse-click will bring to the surface all the photos in your in-box, displayed as a page of thumbnails. Ditto for document attachments.

Yahoo has also added a side panel that lets users refine search results by sender, date or other criteria.

Power users can also build more precise search queries right in the search box, such as “from:michael” (only messages from michael) or “tahoe -from:bob” (anything on “tahoe” not from “bob”)

It’s incremental innovation, but important as it helps nudge up the bar for the whole industry.

Rebuilding the search capability was a massive undertaking, Yahoo’s Drew Garcia tells us. Until today, Yahoo only indexed the subject and sender fields of an email message. Now, the company is vowing to go back and index the entirety of every stored email message and attachment in every Yahoo Mail account in the world. That’s many, many terabytes of data stored across a dozen data-centers. Because of the scope of that task, Yahoo says it will take several months to roll out the new search capabilities. Some users will see it starting tonight. Others will have to wait.

The original article is available here.

.XXX underscores US control over the DNS

James Seng makes an excellent point about how this entire .XXX domain episode highlights one thing - that it’s really the US that’s in charge of the DNS - not ICANN.

James goes on to say

why are we wasting time in ICANN? The industry, registries, registrars and also ccTLDs should start hiring their own lobbists in Washington now!

Want to raise VC cash for your company?

Here’s an article that tells you what the Sand Hill Road VCs are looking for.

Podcasting Hype

I have a lot of respect for Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger. But I have very serious doubts about his new Podcasting venture, Odeo.

Sure, the iPod is big, and yes - there are lots of people who take hour-long commutes the way Ev used to do from Google in Mountain View to San Francisco, but I don’t think there are many people who are “type A” enough to want to listen to podcasts rather than good music, or rather than lose themselves in their thoughts at the end of a busy day.

So when really impressive people like Mitch Kapor (lotus 123) and Tim O Reilly (O Reilly books) fork over good money as seed capital for Odeo, I can only shake my head. Because of the impressive work Ev has done on Blogger, I won’t rule him out just yet, but let’s see if he has something else up his sleeve?

The only angle I can see is

1) iPod will soon support Video.
2) Odeo uses the same technology to distribute videos (as it uses for podcasts)
3) Odeo inserts video ads into the video stream.

but that seems so far from Odeo’s vision…

Bloglines

It’s not often that I rave about a website, but bloglines.com is truly life-altering technology. The time will come when most of us will rely on blogs as our primary source of information - rather than the Inquirer or Philippine Star. Why? Because blogs are news that have been filtered by people whom we know to be authorities in their own fields. PDI, on the other hand, as well as most of the local press, does very cursory fact-checking on its stories. (I learned this first-hand when the local press would write about me). So if I hear a story in PDI about a new rule on VoIP, I prefer to wait and see what my brother’s blog would have to say about the issue.

Today, about 40% of my news comes from blogs. 40% comes form online sources like cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, and - of course - espn.com. The other 20% comes from print (Time, PDI, etc). I think the time will come when 70% is derived from blogs. With technology like bloglines.com (which is an RSS-feed aggregator), I’m able to read far more blogs than I normally would have time for.

Check it out!

Make a skype call on your Nokia mobile!

Useful Apps, from Handango, is a Symbian client that works on most types of Nokia phones. The mobile connects to your PC notebook via Bluetooth, and a Useful Server (running on your PC) processes the voice packets and interfaces with the Skype Client on your PC. This is excellent if you travel a lot or go to conferences with free Wifi. Merely leave your PC running, and you can walk about the conference (or your hotel room) and receive (as well as make outbound calls) via Skype! (When you see the $$ Globe and Smart charge for roaming, you’ll immediately see the benefits!)

There’s also a DECT phone solution for those who need greater range that what bluetooth offers.

Government to back off in regulating ccTLDs

I just love it when I know I’m right, and everyone else thinks I’m wrong. Or crazy.
In 2000 people thought it was absurd to put PHone features in the DNS. We were pilloried in the local press for this. I think we counted no less than 60 negative stories. One particularly vocal critic went on to say that “we [the Philippines] would become the laughingstock of asia”. Yet a few months back we saw ICANN issue not just one but two domains for phones - the .mobi and .tel domains!

And in ‘99, fellow ccTLDs were panicking as governments hovered above, threatening to seize control of “the national public resource”. A few actually signed tri-partite contracts with their government and ICANN. So it’s quite interesting to spot the bellwether signals that show change is in the air. The first was Paul Verhoef’s statement in Cape Town that ICANN will not intervene in the event of a dispute between the ccTLD and the Government. Then, less than 2 months ago, the Bush Government went out and said that the US will never relinquish control of the Root Servers. Now we see the University of Ottawa Law Journal publsh a paper, that essentially says “there is no point in the Government regulating its ccTLD”. Beautiful.

The paper is available here.

Here is an excerpt:

Several arguments can be brought forward in favour of increased gov-
ernment regulation of CIRA and of the .ca domain-name space. Yet this paper
argues that none of these arguments is really strong enough to warrant govern-
ment regulation. Such arguments as the qualification of ccTLDs as national or
public resources are weakened by examples of countries “selling out” their
domain names and marketing them as generic names. While domain names are
important for internet communication in general, specific domain names, such as
.ca, are not. Therefore, they cannot be seen as a public resource. Another argu-
ment against government intervention is that there are already policies and pro-
cedures in place like the CIRA dispute-resolution process that deal with certain
issues arising in the context of domain names.

Furthermore, government regulation cannot be justified on accountabil-
ity grounds. Even if domain registries do in fact make public policies, the power
to make such policies is a consequence of users allowing their computers to “lis-
ten” to their name servers and of users thereby assenting to the way that domain
registries administer the name space. Given the fact that the infrastructure con-
fers such a built-in freedom of choice, governments should allow the system to
regulate itself and should abstain from imposing their own representative
democracy over the existing grass-roots, democratic architecture of the DNS.

If the Canadian government were nevertheless to choose to regulate, it
would face some further difficulties. Legislation can effectively only be passed
within the boundaries already set by ICANN. Furthermore, as with many internet-
related issues, government regulation of a particular phenomenon within cyber-
space such as ccTLDs poses the problem of harmonizing this new and specific
regulation with the existing general law. Contracts, as a different way of influ-
encing CIRA in order to meet regulatory objectives, suffer from the same fault of
not involving ICANN and of therefore facing restrictions set by ICANN’s delega-
tion policies. Furthermore, if one justifies contractual regulation with the argu-
ment that CIRA administers a public resource and makes public policy, then the
question arises of whether such regulation can legally be delegated by entering
into contracts without greater public accountability and control.

The Big Find

Ok - I loved biking the Vosges. But more than that - I loved biking in Holland. Loved it! No - that wasn’t good enough. I loved it so much, I will go back again and again. I will do it with my kids so they can appreciate what a real countryside should look like. I will do this for as long as I have the power to do so and still love the taste of beer and herring. I will do this till I am old and my knees can no longer take it.

Holland is a flat country. It’s completely flat. Cycling is such a joy here. You can bike and bike for hours without tiring your legs. 10 minutes out of Amsterdam - and you’re in the countryside!

First you take a short ferry ride w/ your bike (it’s free, mind you). Just go to the back of the Central Train Station.

And this is the view you get 10 minutes out of town! Really! (It’s called the Overland Route, btw, just in case you do attempt this one day).

The route is full of quaint little towns, with cute houses and neatly trimmed lawns.

Pit stop! Time for some beer and sausages! I don’t know about you, but I can do this all day. All day! And the next! No, seriously. I can’t stop raving about this. It’s really great fun, if you love the outdoors and your idea of fun is spending a day in the sun, drinking beer, and eating sausages, herring, and cheese. Check it out!

Prague

It’s a really beautiful city - but way too many tourists! It’s best viewed at night -when the crowds are gone.

Passau

Passau is about 2.5 hours from Cesky Krumlov. It’s a really beautiful ride to Passau, passing through a long lake, rolling pastures, forests, and a few quaint towns. Passau is at the confluence of three great rivers - the Ilz, the Inn, and the Donau (aka the Danube).

Here we are at the junction of the three rivers. The current looks really strong. One thing about the German countryside - it’s more orderly than the Czech countryside - but it’s also more sterile! Eg - one gets the sense that German houses are only allowed to have certain colors, or certain roofing materials, or specific styles. That’s not bad, and it looks very pretty. But the Czech houses though seem to be more varied - and I personally find the Czech countryside to be more charming!

In fact, I think Prague is even prettier than Paris. Prettier because of all that baroque architecture that one doesn’t find in Paris. The architectural landscape is just more diverse, and somehow that gives Prague more individuality - and more character.

And here we are running into some locals in an Oompah band wearing lederhosen. What could be more German than that?

Cesky Krumlov - Part II

One of thing that amazed me about the Czechs was their appreciation for the Arts. Cesky Krumlov, in particular, seems to attract a good number of artists (for such a small town). A Slavic Sagada, if you will. You can tell from the breadth of art supplies (eg canvas, oils, acrylic paints, paintbrushes, pastels, etc) available locally, that there’s a strong artist community here. There were concerts twice a week - TWICE a week! And the locals seemed to patronize the concerts as much a the tourists.

One of the most fun I had was going to an open-air opera, held inside the enormous garden of the Cesky Krumlov palace. Now, I’m not a big fan of Opera. In fact, prior to this, I’ve never watched Opera in my life. And I’m certainly not the sort of person who enjoys listening to a play in a foreign language. But, first of all there is the stage - or more precisely, the theatre. The whole theatre revolves around the garden! There were 5 sets in the garden, and everytime the story would switch from one scene to another, the whole theatre would revolve! What a novel concept. And there was the setting - it was a bit chilly in this “theatre”, and many of the locals brought blankets. When you looked up above, you could see the stars. If you looked above the sets - there were magnificent trees (which I preferred to stare at some times). And the girls - some of them were really gorgeous. (really helps when you don’t understand a word they’re saying! They say the Czech Republic is the porn capital of the world - now I know why). A really enchanting evening - all for P100 per ticket!

Oh - and the music wasn’t bad either! (But I’m no fan of Dvorak)

Cesky Krumlov

After my last trip to Europe, I’d become pretty much jaded with this whole travel thing. After all, what’s the point in seeing all these quaint towns? It’s the people that count - they’ve always been more interesting to me than the sights. But traveling when you’re middle-aged (how I hate calling myself that) is clearly not the same as traveling when you’re young! Because middle-aged travelers don’t hang out in piazzas with Eurail passes and say “hey - what country do we feel like going to next?” And there are very few middle-aged travelers millling about in train cabins looking for company and conversation. But Cesky Krumlov has changed all that.

First of all, the Czechs are very nice people. They’re not as busy as the Western Europeans. In my short stay there, I’ve run into several people who would say “where are you from?”, “the Philippines! Really?” “Well, welcome to the czech republic! Please enjoy your stay here”. In general, my theory is, the richer the country - the more dour and gruff the people are. The poorer the country, the friendlier it is. That’s why I still like the Philippines - for all its faults - because the people are nice - and they’re not as dour and gruff as I am! And that’s why I like the Czech Republic!

But back to Cesky Krumlov. It’s cheap. How cheap you say?

Our hotel cost us $40/night, w/ breakfast. (this is high season, double-occupancy, mind you). And if you think that’s expensive,

you can crash at this hostel for $8/night, per person.

A good meal will cost you about P130. And if you want something really good,with wine, you’ll have to shell out about P500. (that’s how much I paid at this restaurant for a good steak and some Czech Budvar beer).

And it’s amazingly beautiful. (Or as Lonely Planet would put it - “achingly beautiful”). I didn’t realize it then, but I do realize now - that expensive prices dull one’s sensitivity to beauty. It’s true! You get to appreciate beauty more when it comes cheap! Cesky Krumlov is just plain gorgeous. Gorgeous!

Riding through the Vosges

My wife has a sister who once had a farm on the foot of the Ngong Hills - er sorry - it’s really on the mountains of the Vosges. (A nicer setting anyway, than Nairobi). The Tour de Lance had just passed through these same mountains a week ago (I missed it, because I was so busy with the ICANN conference). So I did what any able-bodied tourist would do caught up in the Tour de France frenzy. Why, I picked up a mountain bike, and went ahead full-steam for one of Cols! (Boy, was I ever sorry - or more accurately, was my body ever sore!)

Meet Angelique, her son Hans, and her Canadian-German husband Rick. Angelique is a University of Illinois - Chicago graduate, who has given up her life in the US to live on a farm in the Vosges. They make their own cheese, grown their own herbs, tend their own sheep, and cook some of the best lamb I have ever tasted. Seriously. Behind us is their home, a 200 year old structure.

There’s something that has to be said of Angelique and the quality of life here. On our way up to their farm, she waves at a lot of her neighbors - and they wave back. If she meets someone she knows while driving on the road - they stop and chat. (Never mind that the two cars are blocking oncoming traffic) Her friends - they are simply some of the warmest people I have ever met. I don’t understand a word they say, and they don’t understand a word I say - but the affection is just so palpable - that I keep visiting her friends everytime I drop by this part of the world! It’s a good life - and I do envy them sometimes.

Here’s the outdoor barbecue Angelica prepared for us on the day we arrived.

We also stayed for a few days here. Wow! What solitude! (that’s a ski slope by the way, at the top of the last picture) That’s Hans (aka “tout”) trying to evade the camera.

The weather got warm one day, so we decided to cool off on this lake. I don’t know about you, but all I could think of when I was swimming on this lake was - MY KIDS WOULD LOVE THIS. It really is as pretty as it looks, and sometimes I wonder why we Filipinos have to live with so little. Why don’t we have enough parks so our kids can kick a football around - barefoot, or play w/ frisbees? Why don’t we have any clean lakes or rivers close to Metro Manila that we can swim in? (Ok - so we have Caliraya and Taal lake - but, it just isn’t the same, you know?)

Sigh. I can stay on this topic forever. So I’ll leave it at that; There’s only so much we can do about the situation in the Philippines. There’s no reason why the sins of our forefathers (or more accurately, our politicians) should be visited upon our children.

Incidentally, Angelique and Rick conduct biking tours of the Alsace-Vosges-Switzerland area in the summer, as well as skiing tours in the winter. The Alsace-Lorraine area is also known for its wine tours. The Vosges area is known for its FOIE GRAS. So if you’re a high cholesterol type like me, go for the biking tour and pig out on the cheese and foie gras! (If anyone is interested, contact Angelique Molzahn at angelica.molzahn@tele2.fr) Feel free to cc me (jed@i.ph) if you have difficulty contacting Angelique.

a short glimpse of Europe’s most expensive city

Since I was busy working, I didn’t get much time to check out Luxembourg, but someone else did!

but I did get a whirlwind tour of Europe’s most expensive city (we had an hour to spare to before the train ride out of the city).

It’s an intriguing place. Want to set up servers that cater to the European market? The locals suggest the we use Luxembourg. Why? Because they have the lowest VAT in Europe. (Unlike the US, Europe requires that online sales in Europe be assessed VAT, regardless of where the merchant is located.) This is why Microsoft and Skype host in Luxembourg.

Want a numbered bank account? The Luxembourghese will do that for you. Want to spend your ill-earned money anonymously? The Luxembourg banks will issue a numbered credit card with your numbered bank account. Think about that for a while - a credit card without a name! “We are the pirates of Europe!”, a local gleefully enthuses. Hmmm - I’m a bit amazed you guys were accepted into the EU!

ICANN Luxembourg 2005

Just got back from the ICANN conference in Luxembourg. This is the first time DotPH has set up a booth in an International Convention, and the experience has been quite interesting.

Would you buy a used car from these people? OK - maybe not. But hopefully, some people will buy blogging technology.

We’re pushing Calliope Blogs - the technology that powers i.ph blogs. Want to bundle blog hosting technology with a domain (gTLD or ccTLD)? Talk to us.

Domainers

There is a unique clique of people who treat the domain name business the way a day-trader would treat the stock and options market. They do nothing all day but buy and sell domain names! I was intrigued that such a lifestyle was possible. Here’s the scoop: Good domain names are sold every day for somewhere in the $1T to $10T range. The brokerage will normally charge 4% for the transaction. If the name is good, you can hold onto it for several years and make money *purely* on the traffic that goes to the domain. This is normally enough to cover the cost of renewing the domain. Generally this revenue will come from targetted advertising from Google or Yahoo. (Not Google Adwords, which only pay about 3% of the cost-per-click). A good deal with Yahoo or Google will get you 20% of the cost-per-click revenue. Intriguing.

The key to domain name investing - is to understand the sort of people who buy domains for six to seven figures. Generally these are young people - flush with venture capital cash. These people have a great idea for a product, and want nothing more than a domain that matches this new product. Creating a brand is terribly expensive; you need $20M in the US alone to create brand recall - so a $1M investment on a good domain name will be money well spent for these people. So if you want to make money on domains - think high-tech. Think voip.com or wifiphones.com or wimax.com or wimaxcentral.com. Or think callcenters.ph or outsourcing.ph. You get the idea - think of forthcoming business trends, and imagine the businesses that will rise to exploit these trends - and the domain names these businesses will want to have!

Full disclosure - I run the PH Domain.

Steve Job’s commencement speech at Stanford

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505

Text of Commencement address by Steve Jobs
This is the prepared text of the address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, who spoke at Commencement on
June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of
the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college.
Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college
graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.
That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then
stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I
really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed
college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.
She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates,
so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer
and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last
minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a
waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have
an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My
biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated
from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.
She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a
few months later when my patents promised that I would someday go to
college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college
that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class
parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six
months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted
to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me
figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents
had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that
it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but
looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute
I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t
interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the
floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits
to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every
Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my
curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me
give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy
instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every
label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I
had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided
to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about
serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space
between different letter combinations, about what makes great
typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle
in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh
computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the
Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had
never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have
never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And
since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal
computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have
never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers
might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it
was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in
college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only
connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots
will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -
your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let
me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

(more…)

So here’s the deal

So you’re an opposition congressman and there
you are fiddling your thumbs, wondering what kind of dirt the President
has on you, what with her wiretapping expertise.
After all, you did spend a fortune on the last election, and you have
an expensive lifestyle to maintain, and there are these business
interests your family that depend on your political protection. Your
wife is looking to be a Congressman after your three terms are over.
You just can’t afford to lose your job.
What are you to do?

Hmmm.

I don’t normally help
people like you, but in this case I’ll make an exception. Because it’s
in the public’s interest. And because it is a cause that is dear to my
heart.

Here’s what you have to do:

1.Pass a bill to
approve VoiP now! The sooner you have VoIP services, the sooner you can
have end-to-end encryption on all your VoIP phone calls. This way, no
Telco can wiretap your phone. No ISAFP operative can listen in on your
phone conversation. Your ISP won’t know if that is you on their
network. And even if the ISP did suspect it was you, it would be
difficult - but not impossible to decrypt your conversation. Run, don’t
walk! Pass a VoIP bill now! (caveat - VoIP encryption can easily be
improved in the near future, as it’s all done in software, and PCs
today have enough CPU power to use bigger encryption keys)

2.
Break the Telco monopoly. Allow ISPs to become phone companies without
requiring a legislative franchise or an NTC franchise. Why? Because the
Telco will know it is YOUR house that they’ve installed DSL to. And
whatever encryption you put on your VoIP calls, the Telco will know if
a phone conversation is coming from your house (or office), and if they
are determined enough (or if your enemies are determined enough), they
will find a way to decrypt and record your conversations. What you need
to do is to be able to get your last mile service from other providers.
If there are enough small last-mile providers out there, then you’ll be
able to find a DSL provider whom you can trust. [Remember, as long as
your VoIP conversation does not go over a Network whom you do not trust
- then you are absolutely safe!]

3. Allow anyone to be a
Mobile Carrier. It’s a lot easier than you think. IP.Access makes a
picocell GSM/GPRS base station. So it’s possible to create your own GSM
phone company *using DSL lines*! This way you Congressman can have your
own GSM network! (And you’ll have true security as well - provided you
keep your switches in a secure location!) And the rest of us can have
cheap GSM service!

4. Reimburse Meralco for its use of the
Wifi frequency and open it up. This way you can do true end-to-end
encryption of a mobile conversation. VoIP over WIFI is still in its
infancy, but it is coming, and you can bet that it WILL BE HUGE! Once
anyone can set up Wifi base stations and offer VoIP over Wifi, you will
see a lot of people switching from GSM phones to WIFI-equipped PDASl
Why do you need Wifi? Because calling within your own Congressional GSM
network won’t suffice! You’ll need to call people outside your network.
And once the signal leaves your GSM network and enters PLDT’s network
it is UNENCRYPTED!

Remember - VoIP calls do not require the
signal to pass from one carrier that is interconnected with the other.
It stays encrypted all the way. So even if two parties are on different
VoIP networks (eg Vonage and FWD), they can still talk to each other
w/o the signal having to even pass through the Vonage “network” or the
FWD “network”.

Hope that helps!

Wiretapgate

I’ve been watching the news about GMA “uncovering” a destabilization plot hatched against her. Supposedly the opposition had wiretapped a mobile phone conversation she had with Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano. In this conversation, GMA is heard to ask the Comelec Commissioner to see what he can do about bringing her winning margin (over FPJ) to 1 million. GMA claims the recording has been doctored, and produced her own copy of the original conversation. She even says that she changed her mobile phone number several times - precisely to avoid being wiretapped.

Here’s what really bothers me. If what she is saying is true, then how in the world did GMA get a hold of a recording of her original conversation with Garcillano? Was she recording all her conversations - ala John F Kennedy? That’s not possible - as she was using a mobile phone. I have yet to see a mobile phone with a built in recorder.

Did she have a device in her office to record all wireless conversations in the vicinity? That’s possible - but the GSM encryption code is very hard to crack, and requires a pretty expensive black box. I’m told the Israeli military has one such device - but it would be pretty absurd for GMA to use it. If she wants to record her conversation, all she has to do is to tell her caller to contact her on the Malacanang landline. It is far easier to record landline conversations.

Did someone in the opposition slip her a copy of the original “unforged” recording? First of all, I seriously doubt that someone plotting against GMA would be so negligent as to not destroy an original “unforged” recording. Secondly, this story in the Inquirer today says that “the Palace claims that it owned the original version of the President’s conversation”.

So where did the President get her recording? An ex-CIA operative once told me that ISAFP has about 30 lines connected to PLDT’s switches. With this, the AFP can listen in on virtually any phone conversation in PLDT’s network. (I have no doubt that ISAFP also has lines to Globe, Digitel, Sun, and all the other carriers). It is important to note that wiretapping today is very different from the way things were in “Mission Impossible”. Nowadays you wiretap with digital devices. It is certainly possible for a device to listen in on various phone conversations simultaneously, and identify the speakers (and then record the conversation). For this to happen, you need to have a huge database of audio recordings of people you wish to monitor. There are algorithms to analyze the frequency spectrum used by each speaker (z-transform, fourier transform, etc). There are algorithms to use this data to fingerprint and later ID the speaker. In fact, some stock brokerages today utilize this software. (eg - if the stock market is crashing and you can’t get through your broker, and automated attendant will ID you then let you enter you stock trade using touch-tone keys. Identification is done by having you say random words that the auto-attendant generates. eg say “five seven three one”.)

So it’s certainly possible for the President to have a device (at ISAFP) that records the conversations of all her “destabilizing elements”. The fact that the Comelec conversation occured over a year ago, indicates that she would also have to maintain archives of all these recordings. The fact that she was able to uncover this plot very early - with enough time to recover this old recording - probably indicates that she’s wiretapping Erap and associates this very minute.

The disk space consumed by such recording isn’t much. 8kbit/sec is enough to get a decent VoIP conversation, so a 2 minute conversation will occupy 120KB. If the average person GMA wants to monitor has 20 conversations/day, then that’s 2.4MB/day or 72MB/month. If she’s monitoring 200 people at any given time, then that’s 14.4Gig of disk space used up per month. It’s certainly doable.

If the recordings didn’t take place at ISAFP, they could also have taken place inside Globe or Smart. (As an aside, I wouldn’t be surprised if both Globe and Smart routinely record conversations of their enemies). While both companies have issued statements about how difficult it is to decrypt a GSM conversation, when they have neglected to tell you is that once the conversation enters their switches, it is no longer encrypted. It is only encrypted when the signal is travelling through the air.

Pretty interesting stuff!

Are there other alternative explanations? The only one i can think of - if she’s not engaging in wiretapping - is that her “original” recording is in fact doctored. It is not the opposition that doctored the recording. It is GMA herself who took the opposition’s recording and created a fake”original”. Either way - it’s pretty diabolical stuff!

The great firewall of China

This is what happens when morons control the Internet. [China is requiring Websites to register with the authorities.]It’ll just push the chinese to register non-CN domain names, and patronize non-Chinese Webhosting companies. The government may initially be able to maintain a blacklist of sites, but as more and more free-speech sites and blogs come up, they won’t be able to maintain an updated list. The Internet is just too big - and it’s just not possible to keep track of what everyone says and thinks and figure out which blog is pro-government and which blog is anti-government. Pretty soon China will have to block international news sites such as cnn.com and bbc.co.uk; they may even have to black out the entire .TW domain! Later on, when the Govt sees that their plans aren’t working, then may choose to just maintain a whitelist of allowed sites, or black out entire segments of the internet. Then businesses will complain because they can’t stay competitive anymore. It’ll be interesting to see how long this lasts. I’ll bet THREE YEARS MAX!

My Reply to Winthrop Yu on his PICS letter

I received an email today from Winthrop Yu of PICs. Apparently, Winthrop is writing the PICs paper that I talked about earlier. Since I am not a member of the PICS mailing list, I thought I’d post my comments here.

> [Joel]
> I was given the delegation for PH by Jon Postel in
> 1990 based on the fact that we were connected at
> that time to the Internet via uucp to UUNET, and
> I had the necessary Networking background, having
> worked on Macintosh Networking & Communications
> products in Santa Clara, CA for five years.

[WYn]
Thank you. My understanding is that EMC was not
connected to the (TCP/IP) Internet directly and
that there were others who were doing this at
the time, IIRC - some people at Clark (and/or Subic),
Obet Verzola, FEBC (the Far East Broadcasting Corp.),
etc.

Hello Winthrop. Actuallly, in 1989 the Internet was mostly uucp-based. There were many networks, but TCP was only starting to emerge as the dominant protocol. Apple was pushing Appletalk; IBM was pushing SNA; Novell was pushing IPX/SPX; Microsoft was using Netbeui; the Telcos were using X.25; the BBSes were using FTSC. It was only when the Mosaic browser came along in 1992 that the Internet gained steam, and hosts began to switch from uucp to TCP. UUCP connectivity was all that Jon Postel required of us in 1990.

The information you have on local connectivity in 1990 seems to be incorrect. Obet Verzola was using his own BBS, which - in 1990 - wasn’t connected to the Fidonet network, much less the Internet. (I believe Obet updated Andromeda later to support FTSC connections; Obet was one of the latter BBSes to connect to the local Fidonet network because he had written the code for Andromeda BBS, and thus had not put in support for the FTSC protocol). Bill English at Cubi Point ran his own BBS, but Bill would only dial the US to connect to the US Fidonet, and not the Internet. Jonathan Marsden of FEBC was also running FTSC - not uucp - to connect with another Christian BBS in the US (and later, in Korea). Jonathan’s group in the Philippines was receiving wire feeds which they would edit for “christian tastes” and re-transmit this to their Christian network in the US/Korea. It was much later - I think 1992 when the Christian BBS (in the US) connected to the Internet (using uucp, I might add).

> [Joel]
> DotPh is in full compliance with all ICANN
> regulations, especially RFC-1591.

[WYn]
Only RFC-1591? What about ICP-1 which is an
elaboration of RFC-1591

It is a bit complicated, but the ccTLDs generally regard ICP-1 as a document crafted by ICANN staff, and not approved via the ICANN process. Hence it doesn’t have the same status as RFC-1591.

> [Joel]
> Only a handful of ccTLDs have signed a contract
> with ICANN. …

[WYn]
Thank you, it’s good to clarify the fact that there
is no formal documentation of the current .ph domain
management and that this is something that simply
continues on a day-to-day basis.

I’m not sure what you are trying to suggest here. Our relationship with ICANN is exactly the same as DotHK’s, as InternetNZ’s or Nominet’s (UK) or DENIC’s (Germany) relationship. If you think we are running on a day-to-day basis, then you’ll have to conclude that the world’s largest ccTLD Registries (UK and DE) are day-to-day as well.

(more…)

What? Me - worry? Er - Engaged in Adversarial Relationships?

I quote from Chin Wong’s Manila Times article:

The [PICS] draft paper also noted Disini’s “antagonistic and adversarial relationship with the Philippine Internet community.”

When people criticize me, I try to make it a point to listen to them and figure out where they are coming from. It was somewhat surprising for me to hear the PICS paper refer to me as having “antagonistic and adversarial relationship with the Philippine Internet community.”

Sure, I have had some antagonistic relationships with members of the Internet community, but as far as I can tell, this is probably the case with people who have attempted to take over control of the PH Domain. It shouldn’t be surprising that there would be some discord, given that

1) these people have failed to articulate any valid reason for taking over control of the PH Domain.
2) there has been little regard for the time and money we’ve invested in building up the DotPH brand and infrastructure. The people we’ve dealt with seemed to have no problems appropriating our investment without any sort of compensation. I felt that was unfair, so it’s only natural that things have gotten testy at times.

But have there been other people who feel I’ve been adversarial with? Perhaps! And I thought I’d like to clear the air on that.

I note that the head of PICS is Maan Tolentino, an AVP for BPI, whose company sued us over a year ago because a cybersquatter had been using the domain bpiexpressonline.com.ph. The suit was settled amicably, but I sometimes wonder if the PICS paper has something to do with the lawsuit.

Here is what happened. One day, Emil Avancena of DotPH received a call from Maan Tolentino requesting us to disconnect the bpiexpressonline.com.ph nameholder. Maan’s reasoning - which is how most “cybersquatees” feel - is that

1) we (Maan) are obviously the rightful owners of bpiexpressonline, and you (dotph) know it!
2) it would be a simple matter for Dotph to disconnect the current user and pass control of the domain to BPI.

What Maan failed to understand is

1) It is not our job a DotPh to determine who is the rightful owner of the bpiexpressonline.com.ph trademark. (It would turn out, during our court case, the BPI in fact DID NOT have the rights to the trademark. BPI had filed for the mark, but the trademark had yet to be approved!)

2) It was possible that the nameholder did in fact have the rights to the bpiexpressonline trademark in another country.

3) ICANN expressly discourages ccTLDs like DotPH from getting involved in these kinds of disputes and has set up a dispute resolution process to handle these kinds of issues. We actively encouraged BPI to contact WIPO, and told them that in our experience, WIPO normally settled these kinds of issues in less than sixty days. If BPI was indeed the rightful owner of the mark “bpiexpressonline”, it should have no problem getting WIPO to rule in its favor.

BPI was not pleased and preferred to sue us. Why? I’m not sure - but I think it’s something unique to Filipino culture. She (Maan) probably expected us to bend the rules for her, and was probably felt insulted when we would not do so. I recall JR Contreras - who was largely responsible for trying to take over control of Dotph four years ago, and with whom I used to enjoy excellent relations - being miffed that I refused to register the domain “powerup.com.ph” w/o prior payment. When people know you, they expect special treatment; and they are put off when you don’t accord them that. The flip side is that when I help people, they are overly grateful - and are a bit surprised when I tell them that it was nothing - I was simply doing my job.

Not too long ago, we had a Telco who was having a major problem with some of their domains. It turns out that the Registrar (for the domains) and the Telco had a financial dispute, and the Registrar was refusing to change the nameservers (of the domains) to point to the Telco’s. As a result, the nameholders were caught in the middle, and their email was bouncing. The nameholders were getting upset with the Telco (whom they had paid to register their domains).

In this case, it was not DotPH’s job to determine who owed whom. But the fix was elegantly simple - DotPH employs two domain locks - one so that the user can’t transfer from one Registrar to another. We implemented this lock so that Registrars had some protection against nameholders who still owed them money. So the fix was to teach the Registrar to enable the transfer lock (so they still had control over the domains) while allowing the domains’ nameservers to point to the Telco’s (so that mail would be properly processed). The Telco and Registrar could continue to work out their differences in court, while the Registrar could continue to exercise control over the domains, yet the Nameholder’s domain details could now be managed by the Telco (w/ the proper authorization from the nameholder)- to avoid any disruption in service.

The Telco was profuse in their thanks - thinking I had done them a special favor - but they didn’t realize I would have applied the rules equally for any Registrar.

We in the Philippines had a President who once said “walang kamag-anak dito”. Yet we don’t know what to make of people who actually practice this policy. I live in a neighborhood where security is strict and the guards call up the resident before allowing any guest in. People understand that this is done for security reasons, yet there always are people who are insulted when a guard subjects them to this kind of security check. “Hindi mo ba ako nakikilala? Sino ka ba?” etc. etc.

If the PICS people are listening, I think it would be good for them to document these “adversarial and antagonistic relationships”. It would be good for me and it would be good for the community.

Fermat’s Last Theorem solved?

While on the subject of inaccurate stories in the press, I came across this story on ABS-CBN and the Manila Times:

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=4433

It talks about a Filipino mathematician, one Edgar Escultura, who claims to have proven Fermat’s last Theorem (FLT) to be false.

Now this is spectacular stuff. To a mathematician, proving or disproving FLT is an even more amazing feat than completing Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, or mapping the human genome.

So it was somewhat a disappointment to me when Rony Diaz, the Times CEO, “wrote” the above story, without as much as doing a little basic homework.

Just listen to the story:

Escultura’s refutation sparked much discussion on the Internet that has spilled over to other fields such as physics, astronomy, cosmology, intelligence, learning, chaos, turbulence, gravity and nonlinear analysis

.

Uh - Fermat’s last Theorem has implications in cosmology? Intelligence and Learning? Chaos Theory?

[Escultura] took the position that the failure to resolve [Fermat’s Last Theorem] for over 360 years reveals the inadequacy and defects of foundations, number theory and the real number system. [Escultura] undertook a thorough critique-rectification of these fields and found, among others, that the real number system in basic algebra, the foundation of mathematics, is defective.

Uh - the real number system is defective? That’s like saying that 1+1 <> 2. (More accurately, he claims that 1+ (0.9999…) <> 2, but then i digress). This guy doesn’t just claim to “solve” Fermat’s Last Theorem, he’s actually starting a whole new branch of Mathematics!

More on the Manila Times hoax is available on Alecks Pabico’s blog:

http://www.pcij.org/blog/?p=73

It turns out that Mr. Escultura even used fake letters from renowned mathematicians - congratulating him on his work - to buttress his theories.

Here is one such letter from a world-famous mathematician to Escultura:

Your work is incredible, I read all of it just yesterday and let me tell you I respect you. I am going to review all my ‘proof’ which I am sure is wrong (thanks to you!).

How could the Manila Times not see through this self-serving crap?

A plea for accuracy in the local IT media

Some time ago, I ran across an article by Chin Wong (dated May 16) in the Manila-Standard-Today. It leads by saying:

The country’s biggest association of online businesses (eg - PICS) will support the appointment of a new administrator of the PH Domain.

I’ve met Chin Wong before, and I’ve tried to talk to him about his attempts to sensationalize news about DotPH, and it’s unfortunate that he keeps doing this. A more accurate story might have been:

“PICS - an organization w/ 40 individual members and 30 corporate members will meet later this week on May 18, to discuss a draft paper written by one of its members regarding the appointment of a new administrator of the PH Domain”.

I understand the IT beat is tough - and journalists, like all of us, have their bills to pay. But to sensationalize news in this way is completely irresponsible. It gives the public the impression that there’s a huge clamor to replace the administrator of the PH Domain. It could make our suppliers wonder about extending credit to us. It could make our clients think twice before dealing with us. It could make our employees targets of recruitment agencies.

An overreaction on my part, you might say - but this is exactly what we happened four years ago, when all sorts of inaccurate stories were popping up in the local press.

I have no quarrel with PICS; in fact some of its members are good friends of mine. But for Chin Wong to characterize PICS as “the biggest association of online businesses” is - misleading. If we go by their Yahoogroups membership, a quick check will reveal that PICS has 229 members. To give you an idea of how this compares, here is the online membership of some other business groups:

Centralized Decentralized Business Network - 1,684
Digital Filipino- 2,358
Makati Business Club - 10,998

Four year ago, I called Chin to complain about a story he had written for ComputerWorld, which went something like “ISPs support petition to replace PH Domain Administrator” or something like that. Chin had attended a PISO meeting, where ISPs had been asked to sign a petition, and at the end of that meeting, only two ISPs had signed up. I reminded Chin that we (at DotPH) had a separate petition - already signed by 20+ ISPs supporting DotPH. And I can’t forget Chin’s reply. (paraphrasing)

“But I was accurate, right? Two ISPs is plural - hence the headline ‘ISPs support petition to replace PH Domain Administrator’”!

I was shocked. Welcome to the world of the sensationalist press, where the Truth only gets in the way of a good story.