Category: Internet

Why Internet filtering is bad for business

The proposals for an internet filter risk hurting innocent businesses by blocking websites.

This article orginally appeared in SmartCompany on the 14th November 2008

As reported in SmartCompany last week the Federal Government is proceeding with trials of internet filters that will restrict Australian access to the world wide web.

The aim of internet filtering is to block child abuse sites from Australian web surfers. While the idea is well meaning, the proposal will be an additional burden on business and won’t fix the problem.

There certainly is a problem – a study by the University of California, Berkeley, found around 1% of websites contain pornographic material. With over a billion websites indexed by Google, this translates to around 10 million sites containing things you’d rather not be seen in your workplace or by your kids.

To deal with this problem, most computer operating systems, browsers and search engines have built-in adult filters, and the Federal Government provides free software for home computer users on its NetAlert website.

The new filter will go a number of steps further, with it being compulsory for internet providers to deny access to around 10,000 sites, a number that falls dramatically short of the 10 million estimated pornographic sites and who knows how many terrorist, gambling and euthanasia sites that will probably be added to the list.

The task of deciding which of the billion websites to be blacked out will fall upon the Classification Board. In 2005-6, their 65 staff considered 9425 movies, video games and websites. To say the board will require a massive injection of resources is an understatement.

Under the current proposals, the banned list would be secret, and it’s uncertain if your business inadvertently found itself on the list how an appeal mechanism would work.

One serious risk for business is that many of the people who post illegal and inappropriate material do so on others’ computers to avoid detection. Hacked personal computers and corporate servers are frequently used by criminal gangs for exactly this purpose.

There is also the risk of sites being blocked for political reasons. Canberra has form on this, with the Federal Police using spurious copyright reasons to close down Richard Neville’s spoof John Howard site in 2006.

Recently, a staffer of the present Federal Government indirectly pressured a prominent critic of the filtering proposal through his industry association.

So there are real risks to your website if someone in your company does something illegal, messes up a security setting, or simply upsets the wrong person in a minister’s office.

However it’s not the censorship aspects of filtering that should be the main concern for businesses. The indirect consequences will be deep and far reaching for Australian commerce.

The immediate effect is filtering will increase internet costs. Given 98% of businesses use the internet, the increased ISP charges will be a tax on almost every Australian enterprise.

Business relies upon fast, reliable communications. Trials to date of the filtering systems show a decrease of speed between 2% and 84%. The filters will also add another level of complexity to the system, which in turn reduces reliability.

Those additional costs will become another barrier to entry. At the very time the Federal Government is struggling with competition in the communications industry, this proposal will eliminate many smaller operators and favour the larger incumbent providers.

Overall, this proposal will add costs and reduce the reliability of one of the modern economy’s critical business tools. The real tragedy is the filters simply won’t work.

Are we coming to the end of spam?

The BBC reports the results of a US study on the profitability of spam networks. Seven researchers set up a fake pharmacutecal website and used the Storm network to drive traffic to it through spam messages.

Out of nearly 350 million messages sent 28 people attempted to buy something which the researchers estimate would have returned about $US 100 a day.

Not bad money, but hardly worth the effort of setting up a fake site, arranging the merchant facilities and getting on to the Storm botnet. 

The return also assumes all the potential purchases were genuine. There’s a good chance many of them would have been fraudulent which would have further eroded the returns.

If those returns are typical, then we’re probably seeing the end of the mass spam, although I’m worried that a new breed of 419 type scammers might take advantage of people in financial straits as the economy worsens.

The full study is available at the UCSD website.

Everything old is new again

It was a funny week last week. It seems everybody wants to announce Software as a Service websites.

The first SaaS experience I had was over a cup of coffee with Mark from MyWorkSpace on Tuesday. I like to hear what smaller, Australian operations have to offer and this one seems quite good application.

On the Wednesday I went to the Telstra-Microsoft Joint Venture announcement. This was a strange beast as the current T-Suite services are simply managed Exchange and Sharepoint and in that don’t seem to be anything new over what Telstra was reselling from WebCentral until recently.

The main thrust of the press conference was that you’d be able to do this on a mobile phone.

Unfortunately none of the mobile phone manufacturers has had an opportunity to put Telstra’s new application on their Windows Mobile smartphones, which meant we only saw demonstrations and had no opportunity to try it ourselves.

From a distance it appears the mobile service is just the same synchronisation tool you get with a Windows Mobile device setup to use the Telstra servers.

On a positive side, both the MyWorkSpace and the T-Suite applications are reasonably priced and a good deal for smaller businesses, particularly those start ups wanting to save cash.

In my Smart Company column tomorrow l’m explaining what SaaS, cloud computing and Web 2.0 mean.

The funny thing with all of this is everything is new again. We’re going back to the 1970s way of running computers.

IP TV arrives

ABC IP TV logoWe’ve heard the promise of delivering TV over the Internet and now the ABC will follow the BBC with an IP TV service.

Coupled with the increased downloads we’ll see from the uptake of smart phones, we’re seeing the end of most Australian ISP’s business model of soaking users with excess use fees.

iiNET has done a deal with the ABC that traffic won’t be counted for their customers using the ABC’s service and you’d have to wonder how long it will be until others offer it.

The interesting thing with IP TV in Australia is just how badly the commercial TV stations are falling behind.

A good example is Channel 7 where their tie up with AOL should have made this easy, but they seem to have lost it. The other two networks have nothing.

Under the current pricing structures it’s difficult to see IP TV taking off in Australia, but this will change. The big question is just how visionary Australian Internet providers are and just how the commercial TV stations will deal with the challenge.

Will the iPhone see Australians embrace mobile Internet?

Reports the iPhone has triggered a rise in mobile Internet use in the US raises an interesting question on its effects on the Australian market.

Early this year Three Mobile touted their own report which found Australians were reluctant to do surfing the net on their phones due to the risk of copping a monster bill.

Sadly this belief is quite fair when you see some plans charging up to $3,000 a Gb if you go over a 5Mb monthly allowance.

While Optus has sweetened their plans slightly by offering better usage allowances on their iPhone plans, all the providers have done little to improve their mobile phone data offerings.

This stingy attitude to data by the Australian mobile operators is going to continue to cramp the growth in the Australian mobile Internet market.

Until one of the players drops their restrictive plans and outrageous excess use charges Australians will quite rightly shy away from embracing mobile web surfing.

Forget the domain name hype

New top level domains won’t change things for most businesses

Last week the proposal to allow a new breed of internet domains triggered talk of another “internet gold rush”. I’m not sure this is going to happen, however it is a timely reminder of the importance of protecting your own business name.

The Global Top Level Domains (gLTDs) are the suffixes such as .com and .net at the end of internet addresses. There are 22 of these and they are controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is chaired by an Australian, Dr Paul Twomey.

ICANN has proposed to make new gLTDs available to anyone who makes a suitable application. So somebody can apply to create a .smartcompany or .australia domain to replace the boring old .com or .com.au.

I have to admit my first reaction was “this was just a revenue grab” by ICANN but Twomey, in an interview on ABC Local Radio last Friday morning, stated the expected “low six figure sum” for registering a gTLD will only recover ICANN’s costs.

Those costs are going to be substantial as the ICANN announcement indicates there is going to be quite a rigorous evaluation before any are approved.

The cost and evaluation process means we won’t get a repeat of the mess we have seen in spaces like the .com domain where the low cost and ease of obtaining an address has meant many opportunistic registrations.

Because of this, I doubt there will be a “gold rush” as the barriers for entry are too high. The business model of registering hundreds or thousands of potentially valuable names in the hope someone will offer big dollars for a few of them doesn’t work when each registration costs over a hundred thousand dollars.

I also suspect the branding aspect is overplayed. The cost and time of buying, setting up and establishing the new top level domains will put even some of the bigger brands off unless there’s a compelling business case for doing so. Many will simply defend their brands through the disputes system.

In his interview on ABC Radio, Twomey indicated this will probably be a similar process to the existing domain dispute mechanism – which only makes the risks for cybersquatters even greater.

At the moment, it’s cheap to register a name but expensive to dispute it. This works to the cybersquatters’ advantage as most business owners will pay $10,000 to buy the domain rather than $25,000 in legal costs to dispute the ownership.

Under the ICANN proposal, the legal costs will still be high, but not as high as the cost of registration. This means speculating on global Top Level Domains becomes a very risky proposition and probably beyond the resources of most speculators.

Another aspect working against a gold rush are the popularity of the current suffixes. Of the 21 existing gTLDs most haven’t worked; when was the last time you saw a .coop, .pro or .jobs internet address?

If you did see one of these addresses, did you automatically type .com or .com.au the first time you tried to use it?

This is the big problem for any new domain; internet users are already conditioned to identify .com, .com.au and similar suffixes as internet addresses. So any new domain owner is going to have to spend a lot of money and time convincing the community to use the new address.

Long time Crikey subscribers will remember Stephen Mayne’s struggle to remind radio interviewers to include the .au at the end of the Crikey web address. All too often it was back announced as crikey.com which sent potential subscribers to the personal website of a Seattle based British expat.

To overcome this confusion I suspect brands that do grab their own gTLD will also retain the equivalent .com addresses and point those to their new domains. So for instance were Gucci to obtain the .gucci domain they would arrange that when customers type in gucci.com it automatically resolves to the .gucci address.

Where I think the new names will be successful is in large corporations where it’s relatively easy for the system administrators to setup the entire company’s computer network to use the domain.

For instance Telstra would get the .telstra domain then have internal addresses like sales.mobiles.telstra or servicecentre.ballarat.telstra. These addresses could be exposed to the wider public internet when necessary.

Most businesses though will find these domains have limited effect. It may be that buying a new address on a domain like .shop or .sunshinecoast will be worthwhile, but registering your own global Top Level Domain is overkill and beyond the means for all but the biggest corporations.

Where business may be affected by this is with trademark infringements. So this is another reminder to protect your enterprise’s most import asset; its name.

For the moment, it’s not worth worrying about the new names, especially given they won’t be around until at least the end of 2009. In the meantime, stick with your existing internet addresses and make sure you are protecting your brand names.

Telstra’s $0 plans

Telstra’s new bundled plans offering a free laptop with their wireless plans is a good move to improve take up of wireless Internet.

It’s surprising none of the providers haven’t offered these deals sooner given entry level laptops are cheaper than mobile phones and these plans have proved an resounding success in the mobile industry.

As with all these deals, the devil is in the small print. You may be getting a “free” laptop but the cost of the wireless broadband will easily make up for this. The total price of the plan over the 36 month contract is $3,564 which would buy you a lot of laptop.

36 months is a long contract and we can expect to see prices drop and better deals appear as the other companies respond.

Also, a $700 laptop is a pretty basic beast many business users will find doesn’t meet their needs.

Overall, this is an interesting deal that’s going to radically change the business market. However I’d recommend most users sit and wait to see what other deals become available.

A ship of fools

To accompany the launch of their new protect yourself website eBay Australia have released a survey claiming an amazing 93% of Australian Internet users don’t understand what phishing is and 72% engage in behaviour that increases their risk of falling victim to an online scam.

This is truly mind boggling given the amount of publicity that is given to these scams.

More depressingly, the press release claims that one in three Internet users believes that only dumb people fall for phishing attempt.

You can see why the smart scammers do so well with attitudes like this. We look at one of the good scams at our PC Rescue and Cranky Tech sites.

We’ll probably make this the main story for the next ABC Nightlife spot. It looks like we have a long way to go in educating people on Internet security.

Fourth Estate Domain, 2 October 2007

This month’s Sydney FED featured Richard Webb, CEO of Blue Freeway. As usual it was well attended night and we should thank Sally Mills for organising these valuable events.

Blue Freeway’s an interesting beast. They have pulled together a number of disparate companies with the aim of offering a “one stop shop” for interactive and digital marketing.

It’s certainly an attractive model and a number of others are looking doing likewise.

The problem I see with this model is that it becomes a jack of all trades and struggles to do any of them well. The alternative is you end up with the dreaded “siloing” where each business unit doesn’t communicate with the others.

Richard addressed this in his discussion. His solution is strong branding, my suspicion is that it will need some very strong management as well.

There were many other issues raised but I’ll have to wait for the podcast as I didn’t take notes and things started getting hazy later (thanks to Sally and Hazel for the drinks).

Choosing a broadband connection

You need to be careful when choosing a broadband connection

The ongoing spat between Telstra and the Federal government is a symptom of the problems Australians face when going online.

To protect their revenues and investment, Telstra had to slow the adoption of the Internet in Australia. To do this they introduced a unique pricing policy with their broadband Internet packages which still affect us today.

Rationing data through punitative excess use charges meant that customers were exposed to big bills. It also meant smaller ISPs using Telstra’s wholesale Internet plans couldn’t offer unlimited plans like their overseas counterparts. Those excess use fees have proved pretty profitable for Telstra.

A few years back Bigpond CEO Justine Milne said that around half his broadband customers upgrade to more expensive plans. This is barely surprising, as the cheaper plans leave all but the lightest user with a big excess use bill. So it’s important to choose the right plan.

The right plan for you depends upon what you are going to use your broadband connection for. If you have teenage kids, you can expect to have massive music and video downloads, if you have have friends and relatives overseas you might find yourself using Voice over IP. The most important deciding factor is how much data you will send and receive, this determines your plan and it’s cost.

Data Allowances

Every time you go on the net, you transfer data. Every connection, every email and every web page involves data moving between your computer and the net. A light Internet user can expect to use around 400Mb a month, a typical user a Gb per month and a heavy user (those teenage kids again) over 5Gb a month.Most broadband Internet plans include a data allowance. If you go over that allowance you will either be capped, which means your connection is slowed or start paying excess fees. Those fees vary dramatically between 0.5 and 20c per Mb.

The cheapest plans generally offer a 200Mb allowance. The Telstra $29.95 plan charges 15c for each additional Mb. The light 400Mb a month user that does little more than check email and read a few web pages would end up with a monthly bill of around sixty dollars. For sixty dollars a month, you can get a much better plan with Telstra and an even better plan with one of their competitors.

Remember these assumptions are based upon a light user. If you have teenagers, or you like listening or watching streaming media your usage will be much higher. To help you figure out how much data you will use, Telstra have a usage calculator, use this to figure how much data you can expect to use then double the amount to be safe.

Capping

One way to avoid huge bills to choose a plan that caps your usage when you go over the monthly limit. Most broadband providers offer these plans. One thing to watch is the speed when you exceed these plans.

While speed caps protect against massive bills, they are frustrating. It’s best to choose a plan with a generous allowance that means you won’t get frustrated. Remember you will use double what you expect.

Speeds

With broadband plans you can choose what upload and download speeds you want. Naturally the faster you choose, the more you pay.This is another area where the unsuspecting consumer needs to be careful. Many of the cheap plans are the slowest available.

The slowest speed is 256/64, which means the download speed is around six times faster than a dial up modem, while the upload speed is only a little faster.When comparing plans, it’s important to make sure plans are of a similar speed. Faster is definitely better.

Pre Selection and Bundling

A lot of the cheap plans are linked to you agreeing to use that company for telephone calls. While they can be good deals the plans are insanely complex. Customers don’t like them and I agree.

Contract Lengths

Many plans try to lock you into a contract, just like a mobile phone. The longer you committ to, the cheaper the price so many cheaper plans have long contracts. With broadband prices are dropping all the time, getting locked into a two year contract may not be a good deal.

Installation

A number of providers are offering free installation. Read the fine print as this offer may only apply if you sign up to a longer contract or more expensive plan. For the average user, we’d recommend getting the ISP to send a tech out to install it for you, even if you have to pay an extra $200.

Free Months

Some providers are offering a number of ‘free” months. Like the “free” installation offers you’ll pay for these over the extended contract length or won’t get the cheaper or more flexible plans. Read the fine print.

Free equipment

Another “freebie” to get you in. All broadband connections require a special modem. For cable connections this is included as part of your plan. ADSL customers can supply their own modems.

Most ADSL providers will sell you a modem as an extra. While they tend to be more expensive than buying your own, we recommend buying their modem as it becomes more difficult for the ISP to play the traditional blame shifting game if anything goes wrong. This usually adds around $200 to the setup cost.

Like the other “free offers” a free modem may cost you more over the length of the contract. Keep reading that fine print.

Comparing providers

Telstra Bigpond is not the only provider. ADSL is a very competitive market and there are a lot of providers offering good deals. Broadband Choice is the site to visit when you want to find who can offer the best broadband deals.

Broadband is the best way to connect to the Internet but the plans are complex and are often designed to catch the unwary. Make sure you understand what you are getting into before you sign a contract. Shop around to find the best deal for you and remember that if it is too good to be true, it may well be.