Friday, June 2, 2000

6/2/2000 5:01:39 PM

• A welcome asset. According to this BBC report, the city of Vancouver is wooing Microsoft, urging the company to move its headquarters 100 miles north. British Columbia is promising the company favorable treatment, possibly including a loan to construct a new headquarters, the report said. No mention was made of favorable anti-trust treatment, but such clearly is the subtext of any such conversation. Microsoft denies having engaged in secret discussions with the office of the man in charge of attracting investment to British Columbia. That man, Gordon Wilson, told the BBC that Microsoft would be "a welcome asset."

  [03may, 7:54 am] This later piece from Reuters throws tepid water on the idea of a Microsoft move. Gordon Wilson opines that the source of the rumor was a California newsletter on technology stocks. Still, I find suggestive the careful wording of his demurral:

  I haven't had any formal talks with anyone with Microsoft.

6/2/2000 3:33:19 PM

• Jargon Scout: C2C, beltware, geek keys. The Jargon Scout introduces three terms, one of them a much-needed, value-neutral term for distributed networks of programs acting as both client and server.

Thursday, June 1, 2000

6/1/2000 7:28:09 PM

• Domain name hijacking, laundering. Read this article in the Toronto Star and be afraid. Person or persons unknown pulled two valuable domain names out from under their rightful owners and succeeded in "laundering" the names through several registrars so that all traces of the original owners were lost.

  The domain names in question are prime pieces of naming space -- web.net and bali.com. After a number of transfers, bali.com had apparently lodged with someone in Spain and web.net, whose owner is in Toronto, had fetched up in Hong Kong.

  At least one of the names was hijacked by a forged email to Network Solutions. Yes, it really is that simple. NSI offers a way to use PGP authentication to protect a name, but the web.net owner apparently wasn't using the option. (NSI struggled for years to get the rather simple PGP mechanism working, and I have no recent knowledge of its state of grace. It used not to work at all reliably.)

  According to whois at this moment, both names have been returned to the owners identified in the Toronto Star article. Their modification dates are both today.

  Thanks much to Jeffrey Sorenson for the tip.

6/1/2000 4:09:53 PM

• 10 new Siliconia. I've done a large update to the Siliconia pages, adding the following listings. The catalog now encompasses 78 Siliconia used in 105 locations.
  • Cyberabad
  • Digital Rhine
  • DSP Valley
  • E-Country
  • Flanders Language Valley
  • Silicon Parkway
  • Silicon Saxony
  • Silicon Spires
  • Silicon Village [2]
  • Silicon Vineyard [2]

  The Siliconia pages formed the backdrop for a televised CNN report hosted by Brooks Jackson this week. My face got 8 seconds of prime time last Monday evening. I expect it will be deducted from my 15 minutes.