During the September 7 edition of his NBC-syndicated television show, Chris Matthews played a clip from Gov. Sarah Palin's September 3 acceptance speech as the vice-presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention and asserted that Palin is "a conservative version you think perhaps of some movie heroes like Norma Rae, the factory worker fed up with minimum wage, who did whatever it took, even jail time, to get the union organized." Matthews then played a clip from the 1979 film, Norma Rae (20th Century Fox). Matthews also said of Palin: "[B]eing mayor of little Wasilla got her ready for some big fights, a strong female up against the odds fighting for justice. It's a familiar theme." Matthews did not provide any evidence of Palin being "up against the odds fighting for justice."

From the September 7 edition of NBC-syndicated The Chris Matthews Show:

MATTHEWS: Before we break, Republicans think they've found a pit bull in Sarah Palin, but before she became the governor battling big oil, she was Sarah the neighbor, the friend, the mom. In fact, her first foray into political action was the PTA.

PALIN [video clip]: This is America, and every woman can walk through every door of opportunity. I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom and signed up for the PTA, because I wanted to make my kids' public education even better.

MATTHEWS: She calls herself average but being mayor of little Wasilla got her ready for some big fights, a strong female up against the odds fighting for justice. It's a familiar theme. She's a conservative version you think perhaps of some movie heroes like Norma Rae, the factory worker fed up with minimum wage, who did whatever it took, even jail time, to get the union organized.

[video clip from Norma Rae]

MATTHEWS: I love that stuff. And when we come back, Palin will fight to the end, but how will that play against [Sen.] Joe Biden?

“Some say Google is God,” Sergey Brin once said. “Others say Google is Satan.”

The confusion about Google’s identity may not be quite that Manichean, but it does run deep. The company, which today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its incorporation, remains an enigma despite the Everest-sized pile of press coverage that has been mounded around it. People can’t even agree what industry it’s in. The many businesses that see the young company as an actual or potential competitor include software houses, advertising agencies, telephone companies, newspapers, TV networks, book publishers, movie studios, credit card processors, and Internet firms of all stripes. If your business involves information, you probably fear (and admire) Google.

The sheer breadth of Google’s influence and activity - just this past week it unveiled its own Web browser, introduced face-recognition software, and shot a satellite into orbit - can easily be interpreted as evidence that it is an entirely new kind of business, one that transcends and redefines all traditional categories. But while Google is an unusual company in many ways, when you boil down its business strategy, you find that it’s not quite as mysterious as it seems. The way Google makes money is straightforward: It brokers and publishes advertisements through digital media. More than 99 percent of its sales have come from the fees it charges advertisers for using its network to get their messages out on the Internet.

Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business. Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That's why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle.

Because the sales of complementary products rise in tandem, a company has a strong strategic interest in reducing the cost and expanding the availability of the complements to its core product. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that a company would like all complements to be given away. If hot dogs became freebies, mustard sales would skyrocket. It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than anything else, explains Google’s strategy. Nearly everything the company does, including building big data centers, buying optical fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions, supporting open source software, launching browsers and satellites, and giving away all sorts of Web services and data, is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants information to be free because as the cost of information falls it makes more money.

There’s one more twist. Because the marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero, Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it. Those two facts — the vast breadth of Google’s complements, and the company’s ability to push the price of those complements toward zero — are what really set the company apart from other firms. Google faces far less risk in product development than the usual business does. It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas” because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.

But while Google has an odd business model, it's not an unprecedented one. The company it most resembles is, ironically, its archrival, Microsoft. Just as Google controls the central money-making engine of the Internet economy (the search engine), Microsoft controlled the central money-making engine of the personal computer economy (the PC operating system). In the PC world, Microsoft had nearly as many complements as Google now has in the Internet world, and Microsoft, too, expanded into a vast number of software and other PC-related businesses - not necessarily to make money directly but to expand PC usage. Microsoft didn't take a cut of every dollar spent in the PC economy, but it took a cut of a lot of them. In the same way, Google takes a cut of many of the dollars that flow through the Net economy. The goal, then, is to keep expanding the economy.

God or Satan? When you control the economic chokepoint of a digital economy and have complements everywhere you look, it can be difficult to distinguish between when you're doing good (giving the people what they want) and when you're doing bad (squelching competition). Both Google and Microsoft have a history of explaining their expansion into new business areas by saying that they're just serving the interests of "the users." And there's usually a good deal of truth to that explanation - though it's rarely the whole truth.

Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It's been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it's on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you'll find that either comforting or not.

This post draws on my article The Google Enigma, which was published last year in Strategy & Business.

Part 2 of “Briefs from the elections” from Angolan blogger, Koluki: “Earlier on Saturday, the main opposition party, UNITA, announced its intention to impugnate the election, claiming a “collapse” of the process in the capital, Luanda, and “numerous cases of organisational failures, forceful prevention of some electors from exercising their right to vote, violence and political intolerance” in the 18 provinces, of which they were in the process of collecting evidence to submit to the Constitutional Court.”

A new trend is surfacing, as spammers have sent out millions of emails targeting BitTorrent users. The emails, that claim to come from MediaDefender, warn the receiver that he or she has been logged using BitTorrent and points them to an attachment supposedly containing evidence, but which is in fact infected with a virus.

Over the years BitTorrent has attracted some shady figures. We’ve reported on malware ridden BitTorrent clients and media players, a BitTorrent site that infects its users with spyware, and several other scams.

Although most scams can be avoided easily when a few simple rules are followed, they still manage to trick thousands of novices every day - and this is not going to end anytime soon. Since BitTorrent has become more or less mainstream, with millions of users worldwide, it also proves an interesting target for email spammers.

The latest scam, unlike the others we have reported on before, is one that is sent by email. The email is disguised as a message from the anti-piracy company MediaDefender (using their logo etc.), and warns the recipient that his or her download behavior has been logged. The email has a report attached with more details about the infringed material, which turns out to be a virus.

Dear User!

Your recent internet activity was logged on the following sites:

* Btjunkie
* SumoTorrent
* isoHunt
* Btscene
* Mininova
* Fenopy
* Monova
* Yotoshi
* GetInvites
* Btmon

We have attached a report about the copyrighted movies, music, softwares you
downloaded or searched on these webpages. We strongly advise you to stop any
future activities regarding the downloading of illegal content or you can
expect prosecution by 17 U.S.C. §§ 512, 1201?1205, 1301?1332; 28 U.S.C. §
4001 laws.

Sincerely,

MediaDefender Inc.

To the more experienced and BitTorrent savvy users it is clear that the email is a scam. First of all, MediaDefender has never been involved in anti-piracy enforcement. The only thing they do is spoofing, flood BitTorrent sites with fake files, and the occasional DDoS attack on Revision3.

In addition, the email claims to have data on what the user searched for on the sites, which is irrelevant and practically impossible. It seems that the spammers should have done some more research on the topic. A good spammer would have included The Pirate Bay in the list of sites instead of Getinvites, which is a BitTorrent invite trading site, and not a search engine

A related scam email, sent out by the same group of people judging by the style and format, is also targeted at filesharers and threatens to suspend their Internet connection. The email claims to be sent by the Internet service provider consortium, and again includes an infected attachment with a report.

The email is a clever scam that shows how mainstream BitTorrent has become. The emails are sent out randomly, but many recipients, scared by be cut off by their ISP, or sued for downloading copyrighted material, might open the infected attachment without realizing that it is a scam.

This is an article from: TorrentFreak

Anti-Piracy Scam Emails Target BitTorrent Users

The main stream media (MSM) is all abuzz today about the lie that Governor Palin told in her acceptance speech on Wednesday evening. I thought to myself, as I read all of these accusations, "I do not recall her saying she sold the jet on e-Bay" but rather that she listed it there and sold it. But one commentator after another is writing about her lie. So I decided to go back and read her speech and find the offensive line that is being debated so heatedly.

Here is what she actually said:

"That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay."

Read her words slowly. She doesn't say she sold it on eBay but that she "put it on eBay." The truth is that is exactly what she did. It did not sell on eBay so it was sold later and thus she said nothing untruthful or misleading at all. If this is how we hear speakers I fear we can never recover anything like civility in the election.

Why do I sense a desperate attempt here to try to show that Sarah Palin is a liar so that she can be discredited in this silly kind of plea?

This is why I do not trust the Internet "rumors" and the news media analysis in general. Someone ought to go back and listen to what she said and read the text itself. In the day of instant Internet accessibility it is not that hard to do.

I was also sent a You Tube copy of a short message Governor Palin gave to a Christian school that meets at First Assembly of God in Wasilla. I can see how the media will truly pounce on this when it gets circulated. I watched it very carefully. The pastor some things about the "last days" that I found rather typically off base and Governor Palin offered no response. Does this prove she is dangerous because of "last days" theology of this pastor who is not even her pastor now? (I can see a tit-for-tat going here. Obama had a pastor say some crazy things for sure so now we will try to dig out something a pastor related to Sarah Palin also said. It made me wonder what I might have said over the years that could be clipped and used against me.) There is no hard evidence I have seen that Palin is a "last days" zealot in her personal views but I would expect this will make the rounds as well since the MSM has next to no ability to discern Pentecostalism in any serious sense at all. I expect this clip will freak out a lot of non-Christians who see it.