Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

Another form of Splog is a blog that intentionally links to websites for the sole purpose of coming up on a list of “who links here” so that the blog author may, out of curiosity, visit the linking blog. The business model is to display paid placement advertising on that site and hope that a certain percentage of visitors will click on the ads.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there are now such linking blog sites that attempt to inject a virus/trojan when visited. I came across one this morning, Onlinemeetingsolutions.com - don’t go there. I can’t confirm whether the operators of the site are in on it or whether the site has simply been hacked. However, upon visiting the site, it will (according to my antivirus program) try to inject a JS/Wonka Trojan into your system through the browser.

I thought Splogs were bad but now I’ve discovered there are even worst things out there.

The New York Times has an article about Spam Blogs or Splogs:

During one weekend in October, persons unknown used Google’s blog-creation tool, Blogger, to generate more than 13,000 fake blogs. Hosted on Google’s free BlogSpot Web site, these splogs consisted of nonsense text, postings swiped from legitimate blogs and, most important, links to sites that sploggers were trying to promote. Because search engines base their rankings in part on how many other sites link to a particular site, splogs can propel the sites to which they are linked to the top of search-engine results.

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Vonage is still working with UTStarcom on a wi-fi voip handset. Currently still in beta, the service is expected to be ready before the end of the year. Based on the information made public to date, its hard to see what is so exciting about this offering.

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In recent Security Now podcast segments on VPNs, Steve Gibson reviewed the importance of using VPNs when accessing the Internet through public Wi-Fi hotspots or even Ethernet connections (as for example, those available at hotels). The problem with Wi-Fi is that it can be intercepted, while the problem with even an Ethernet connection is that other hotel guests can run software to capture information and even passwords which are sent in the clear by many programs, particularly POP3 email programs.

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Andy Abramson is happy that the airport he’ll be flying into in January has free wifi. But I think the real question is what is free wifi? Is it wireless Internet access without port blocking (so that VOIP will work)? Is it wi-fi access without a click through page one has to first visit so that wi-fi voip handsets will work. Maybe we should have a color system to describe different levels of access for public hotspots and hotels.

See also VOIP Roadblocks.

30 pages from San Francisco’s draft RFP for its wireless initiative. An interesting use for Flickr.

From Daily Wireless, via Webnetic.

The Micro Persuasion blog is reporting that its content is being reproduced by two other blogs without permission, one of which is even running Adsense advertising in order to profit from the activity.

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With the support of the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a new grass-roots organization, Online Rights Canada, was launched last Friday in order to give Canadians a new voice in critical technology and information policy issues.

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