Bayosphere

Losing one’s mother or father is never easy. But Doc Searls, via his blog, has turned his loss into a peaen to a parent who was, from all of his eloquent words, a truly amazing person and had a life to match. Now he’s getting back to his own everyday affairs, and posted a lovely note this morning. Doc’s one of the good guys in this world, and it’s obvious that his mother is one reason why.

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Dave Winer announced he’s created an RSS feed of presidential candidates’ New Hampshire appearances. Clever, and helpful.

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AP: SCO Group’s Web site target of hacker attack. It’s the second time this year the Linden, Utah, company’s Web site has been the target of such an attack, in which hackers use multiple computers to overwhelm the site with traffic.

I’m as unhappy with SCO’s abuse of the legal system and its outrageous attack on Linux as anyone. But a denial-of-service attack on SCO’s website isn’t just foolish. It’s totally counterproductive, because it will make people sympathetic with a company that doesn’t deserve sympathy in most respects.

Whoever is doing this: Please cut it out. You’re only hurting your own cause.

UPDATE: There’s some dispute about whether SCO’s being DDOSed or not. See, for example, this Groklaw piece.

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As you may have noticed, I’ve not posted since Saturday due to an outage, having to do with a misconfigured DNS. We appear to be back up now. Sorry…

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Phil Gomes explains why he reads reporters’ blogs, citing this Infoworld TechWatch note, which says: “In the next 48 hours I’m going to be inundated with pitches about disaster recovery and remote mirroring. Please make it stop.”

Amen.

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I’m at the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit, where Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell has just given the back of the hand to moves by U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) and others to overturn the FCC’s recently passed media consolidation rules.

(Note: The Progress & Freedom Foundation takes a forcefully pro-market, anti-regulation approach to just about everything. That view pervades the panel line-ups at this conference.)

Powell sounded almost contemptuous of Dorgan, saying the proposal would not restore a status quo that would please the opponents of media consolidation. Rather, he said, it would create a situation they might find even worse.

First, he said, the commission restricted radio deregulation somewhat. Overturning that would give a free hand to further radio consolidation.

Second, a federal appeals court has repeatedly told the commission it can’t do much in the way to restrict consolidation in the first place. Does Dorgan want those rulings to be the law of the land?

A simple repeal “is not a sound policy result for the American people,” Powell said.

He did acknowledge that the rebellion against the media-control rules demonstrates deep public concern, and said policy makers need to wake up to this. But then he slapped the worriers, saying the public statements of doubt over his policies, show “how little the facts seem to matter anymore.”

Asked whether regulators need to step in to ensure “network neutrality” — an assurance not to discriminate against certain content online — Powell said it’s best to keep an eye on the situation but not regulate unless a visible problem crops up. (He seems to believe the architecture won’t itself discriminate, thereby making a fix nearly impossible or at least hugely disruptive; if he’s wrong we’re all in trouble.)

By the way, Powell won’t be quitting his post anytime soon, contrary to rumors. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

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Apologies for the outage during the last day or so. We seem to be back up now. Let me know if you’re having any problems making comments.

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AP: EU Alleges Microsoft Abuses
. Backed by new evidence, the European Union on Wednesday accused Microsoft Corp. of trying to monopolize markets for server software and audiovisual players and gave the U.S. giant a last chance to defend itself before demanding changes in its Windows operating system.

It probably won’t matter. Microsoft can use the legal system there the same way it’s used the system here — fight like hell, delay wherever possible and stall when the inevitable settlement is written. And then, of course, fail to honor the terms of the settlement, forcing the legal system to step in again. So by the time any serious action is undertaken, it’s too late.

Worked pretty well in the U.S., except that Microsoft got the government itself to change sides. Let’s see, $50 billion in cash, and counting, and more power than ever in its monopoly markets, plus real (if not yet appreciated) inroads into vital new markets.

Thanks to our amazingly short attention span, Americans are bored with the Microsoft story, another great advantage for the serial lawbreaker. Well, guess what? The boys in Redmond aren’t bored with pursuing their control over choke points of tomorrow’s commerce and communications. They’re working hard, as aways, and making serious progress. By the time people notice again, it may be too late.

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In my Sunday column I talked about why I’ve moved to VoIP, voice over Internet Protocol, for my domestic and international long-distance phone calls. I chose Packet8 over Vonage for several reasons, only one of which was price.

The other key reason had to do with a pet peeve: the terms of service. Packet8’s “Terms and Conditions of Service” could be better, but they were miles better than Vonage’s “Terms of Service.”

Now, I’m accustomed to ridiculous terms of service from the technology industry. Most of the time we end up with little or no choice — and virtually never do potential customers actually read this legal boilerplate that tends to give us no rights while explictly permitting the vendor to treat us as chattel.

In this case, the difference turned out to be stark. Vonage prohibits business use by residential customers.

I called Vonage to ask if any of its residential users were not, therefore, technically in violation of the agreement. After all, it’s impossible to imagine a home user of such a system not making, at the very least, an occasional call to the office.

A Vonage spokeswoman said the purpose of that language was to prevent people from “gaming” the system — that is, setting up such abusive things as call centers or fax-blasting operations that would amount to cheating. Trust us, said a spokeswoman, we’re not looking to bust our customers.

I believed her, and some of my friends are extremely happy with Vonage’s service. But she was missing the point that was a deal-killer for me — that Vonage reserves the right to change customers’ deals in mid-stream. No one using the service for a home office, for example, could be certain that Vonage wouldn’t suddenly decide that he or she was in violation, and order a change in service tiers.

Packet8, a unit of 8×8 Inc., had similarly restrictive terms of service when I first checked. Again, I asked some questions and pointed out that virtually all residential customers would be technically in violation.

Hmmm, said Huw Rees, vice president of sales and marketing of 8×8, those terms did look a bit Draconian. and the next day, they’d been changed. Now Packet8, which also sells an Internet videophone service, specifically permits “reasonable business use” by its residential customers.

True enough, Packet8 could also unilaterally decide that my business calls — maybe a dozen in a day when I’m working from home — are somehow abusive. But Rees, like his Vonage counterpart, said the goal was to prevent gross abuse.

Notice the difference. Both companies reserve the right to challenge customers whose calling patterns are abusive. But one starts by saying “No.”

I’m more likely to patronize businesses that start by saying “Yes.”

Reader challenge: Let’s collect all the most ridiculous or overbearing terms of service. Please post them in a comment here (note: just list the page URL on a line by itself, as blog postings here don’t recognize embedded HTML). Or send them to me by e-mail at dgillmor@mercurynews.comand I’ll post them here. Thanks.

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Few if any postings until late Saturday or Sunday…

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