The FBI , worried about its budget, announced a few days ago that the taskforce keeping the DNS Changer Virus at bay, was costing them several tens of thousands per month. In an effort to not spend their whole budget on one Internet issue, the program will be pulling the plug on July 9, still leaving a possible half a million PCs and Macs infected. Without the FBI’s safety net those infected computers will no longer be able to access the Internet.

Several tens of thousands per month. How much is “several tens of thousands?” I guess it could be $30,000. Or maybe $80,000? How many is several? In my opinion, it would have to be more than 2, but probably less than 10. So let’s average it out to 6.

The FBI is spending a whole $60,000 per month to save the world from this virus/malware that could shut down the Internet for up to a half a million computers so they don’t want to do it anymore. I wonder what the financial impact will be on the world when 500,000 computers stop connecting to the Internet? Will it be less than $60,000? I doubt it.

For more information on the DNS Changer Malware please check out the following links and become informed on the real story…

DNS Changer Working Group
Technolog
Huffpost Tech
ZDNet
Search Results

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Since 2006, TED conferences, which now take place all over the world are taped and available FREE for online viewing. TED is one of my very favorite 12 to 25 minute distractions on the Web. Everytime I watch a TED video I learn something I never knew or learn MORE about something I thought I knew a lot about.

My favorite TED category (I assume I am not alone!) is “Jaw Dropping.” And while the largest percentage of presenters are male, women are well represented. Below are a few of my favorites. But don’t rely on my recommendations. Visit TED.com and find your own favorites!

Isabel Behncke:Evolution’s gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans

2011 Google Science Fair Winners – Teen-age Girl Scientists

Julie Sweeney on letting go of God

Check out TED once and you’ll have a new Online distraction too!

Great article in AdAge Digital on QR (Quick Response) Codes and the lag time in consumer use. From the article by Kunur Patel published yesterday:

…in practice, while QR codes are affixed to everything from rental cars to Bratz dolls, only 5% of Americans who own mobile phones actually used the 2-D barcodes in the three months ending July 2011, according to Forrester Research. And those 14 million early adopters tended to be young, affluent and male.

Experts cite three reasons that QR codes haven’t caught on. First, people are confused about how to scan them. Two, there’s little uniformity among the apps required to read them. Last, some who have tried the technology were dissuaded by codes that offer little useful information or simply redirect the user to the company’s website.

None of this deters marketers, who seem to be slapping the codes on products for all age groups and demographics.

It’s worth the read because while the smart phone readers for QR Codes are still a bit clunky and inconsistent, the potential is too great to go by the wayside. The most genius use of this new technology that I have read about was the use of the codes at SxSW last March. Kind of goes with the demographic that is leading the demand for QR Codes – young, affluent and male.

Takeaway message? These odd little images – kind of modern day treasure maps -  slapped on everything from magazines to tombstones are not going away.

PS – If I planned on having a tombstone I would be all over this. Since I am going to be cremated, maybe a QR code would come in handy in that way as well. No sense mixing up the relatives’ ashes with one another!

The impending 2012 IPO of Facebook keeps the dream alive for every tech entrepreneur slaving away developing killer apps fueled by large doses of caffeine and sugar. The dream is that anyone can launch a start-up from a dorm room – (okay…it was a Harvard dorm room) – that could be worth $100 billion in 8 short years.

Or maybe your dream is a bit more scaled down. In your dream the killer app you developed and tweaked to perfection in the middle of the night while your kids are asleep becomes THE top seller in the Android Market.

Dreams like these exist because optimism is contagious even in the midst of the deepest recession since the Depression. (Which in and of itself can CAUSE depression.) And despite the dreary economy, the technology consumer responds overwhelmingly when a useful or playful hardware device or piece of software is introduced. In these cases technology becomes the great equalizer in an increasingly unequal society. Smartphone Killer Apps can just as easily help someone keep an eye on their stock portfolio as they can help another individual organize a flash mob for an Occupy Wall Street gathering. Same platforms supporting different “platforms.” It’s the American way.

We head into 2012 with a healthy dose of uncertainty – it’s an election year after all and there’s also that Mayan calendar issue. In my own life I have to remind myself to turn off the news. Pick up a Lynda Barry comic, check out Tina Kugler’s latest brilliant illustration, Shimon & Lindemann’s most recent masterpiece or Norb Blei’s current masterstroke in text. Maybe even watch an old DVD of Strangers With Candy. After all if my Killer App is going to appear to me in my dreams, I need to clear out the clutter and the anxiety that is an anathema to creativity and nurture my work with the mental composting of other people’s musings. Only than will my app garden sprout.

Here’s to nurturing your dreams in the coming year and to the birth (perhaps in multiples) of your own Killer App be it digital or analog.

Image from the cnet.com article featured below

From a December 29, 2011 article by Declan McCullagh of cnet.com:

The Internet’s most popular destinations, including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter seem to view Hollywood-backed copyright legislation as an existential threat.

It was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act “would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.” Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argue that the bills give the Feds unacceptable “power to censor the Web.”

So what are the titans of the Web considering:

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option–possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP–but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.” (See CNET’s SOPA FAQ.)

That is prediction number one in this end-of-year round-up from McCullagh. Check out the rest and if you scroll to the bottom of the page you can watch a video of a Parrot AR Drone that you can control with your iPhone. Will drones buzzing overhead become a familiar sight in 2012? Here’s one person that is NOT looking forward to that.

dajaz1.com, a hip-hop website, was originally seized by the government in November of last year, because the government claimed that it frequently shared unauthorized copyrighted material. However, the owner of the website, who goes by the moniker Splash, shared emails with the New York Times which showed that songs he posted were given to him by record companies for promotional purposes.

When the website tried legal channels to get the website back, they came up against what TechDirt’s Mike Masnick compares, in a lengthy post about the website, to “Something out of Kafka or the movie Brazil.

Read the post here and listen to the story here. Kudos to On the Media for bringing this to the attention of their listeners. If you are not already one of their listeners, I suggest you change that now.

We’ll have to wait to see what the implications of this new program are. In the meantime, proceed with caution when posting third party material on your site. Make sure you have the approval of the creator of the material. Or simply share a link to the content on their site.

Fast Company’s Farhad Manjoo had a great cover story in the October 19, 2011 issue about the coming battle for supremacy between Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon. The mega success all these companies experienced in their own niches has left them cash rich and they are now pivoting to take on each other.

Manjoo offers 4 different scenarios in which each company would be declared the winner of the Tech War. In fact Fast Company offered 4 different covers to declare each a winner. We get two subscriptions and we ended up with the covers declaring Facebook and Apple the winners respectively, personified in the images of Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs..

Here are some of Manjoo’s numerical nuggets that justify such speculation:

$28,571,000,000 In the third quarter of 2010, Apple booked $15.7 billion in revenue, a record. A year later, it made $28.57 billion–almost double–and that wasn’t even during the holidays. Meanwhile, its cash reserves eclipsed the entire net worth of many small countries (and, during the debt crisis, even the U.S. Treasury’s).

800,000,000Facebook now boasts more than 800 million users around the world. More than half of them log in every single day, and more than 2 billion posts a day are liked and commented upon.

12,500,000,000Google powered 12.5 billion of 19.5 billion total searches in the U.S. in August 2011, according to comScore. Google’s dominant position in search is the platform that lets it aggressively target mobile, social, local, and other new frontiers.

$900Amazon Prime, the $79-a-year subscription service that gives customers free two-day shipping and access to movies and TV shows, creates Amazon addicts: In the year before a customer joins, he spends $400 a year, on average; in the year after, $900. Prime growth exceeds 50% annually.

Being part of very recent history makes this cover story fascinating to everyone who remembers their first experience with an iPod; discovering a virtual bookstore named after a river in South America; understanding what “unfriending” means; and reading about a company whose name sounded like it was made up at a child care center. It’s a lengthy read but well worth it.

Who do YOU think will win the tech war?

On Tuesday, November 15 we were notified by the provider that houses our website servers that as of Saturday, November 19, our servers would be turned off and physically transported (along with a semi of other servers) 200 miles to a new location. They promised to get everything back up and running by Monday. Recently however, we found this provider service in drastic decline and could not be sure that they would keep the promised reconnection deadline of Monday. In addition, servers should not have to be physically transported when the migration can be done “in the cloud” thanks to the power of broadband. The message we received Tuesday kicked a planned website migration process into high gear.

To back up a bit, we had been with this provider for 6 years. We received reliable service and response time when issues arose. In that entire time we had 80 recorded pages of “trouble tickets,” messages we sent them with problems to clear up.

Fast forward to July 2011. Our service provider was purchased by a giant corporation and almost immediately we saw a drastic decline in the quality of our service. Since July we had issued in excess of 900 pagesof “trouble tickets” many of which were repeated problems that were slow or never to be resolved. In September and October the search was on to find a replacement. A replacement was found and we targeted early December as the beginning of the migration. Our original plan of migrating one site at a time turned into a mass migration made in 72 hours instead. In addition we were traveling to our daughter’s graduation overseas and our ability to communicate quickly during travel time was inadequate. However, greatly aided by Skype (what a wonderful service) we worked on issues from abroad and have been doing so ever since.

As part of our plan of action, we have engaged our new provider and their team. We are monitoring all websites, blogs and email. We’re working through the list of your issues and want to wrap it all up in the next couple days.

As a thank you for your patience, we have decided to give every client 6 free months of MXLogic, our excellent spam filtering software. Become a subscriber to our blog (its free) and you will automatically receive this service for each domain name you have. You can sign up later this week at 3WDesignMedia.com (our blog is waiting in line to be reinstalled just as others are).

Thank you again for your business and your patience. Again be sure to sign up for 6 free months of MXLogic later this week. And spread the word to other 3W clients you may know.

Thanks again.

Barb and Gregg