The debate over which site had the most November page views reflects the difficulty of tallying Web traffic, and billions of ad dollars are at stake

IBM continues to find itself embroiled in ongoing litigation surrounding the wrongful termination claims of former employee James Pacenza, who is suing the company over his dismissal after it was revealed that he had utilized his office computer to access sexually oriented chat rooms.

Are Employers Safe From Porn Surfers?

Wow, where do I even begin with this one?

One could debate the obvious points of whether or not Internet addiction is a valid clinical disorder, an issue that my colleague Mike Sachoff took on in a piece from yesterday.

There’s also something to be said about the frivolous nature of lawsuits in the United States these days. You can literally sue just about anyone, over just about anything you want. Anyone remember when McDonald’s got taken to the cleaners over the temperature of the coffee?

It seems to me, however, that there’s a deeper issue for business owners, whether small or enterprise, that is lurking beneath the surface in a situation such as this, the story behind the story, if you will.

The pervading theme here revolves around workplace responsibility, and in particular, where it lies when dealing with sensitive and controversial topics such as addiction and sexual misconduct. Do employers take on an assumed liability when hiring individuals who could possibly be harboring such tendencies?

In what I like to think of as my own brand of investigative journalism, I took to the blogosphere to check the social temperature regarding the IBM case, and the perhaps larger debate of employer vs. employee liability.

Some bloggers, such as Lady Aeval (the only flippin’ name listed on the post) have taken the direct approach in speaking out against the lawsuit:

Your employer is not responsible for your addiction to the Internet. Please. IBM has policies against employees using the Internet for personal use such as sex chats so how can this guy even hold a case against them? People will sue over anything.

Others, such as Pastor Tom, try to tackle the concept of personal responsibility with a little more subtlety, even attempting to draw upon corollary elements that could cause such behavior:

The bigger problem evidenced here is the ever increasing lack of responsibility that people feel for their actions. No one is just simply responsible. We have become a culture that shifts the blame to everyone and everything else. It is our upbringing, it is our parents, it is our lack of schooling, it is the fact we were abused, it is whatever we can come up with to deflect the responsibility to someone or something else. Which enables us to never have to look in the mirror and deal with the reality that we are at fault and therefore we must do something to correct the situation. This is why we are a dependent needy culture addicted to addictions. We spend more time diagnosing and defending our addictions than we do dealing with them.

Ultimately, what questions need to be asked here? Is there a simple, catch-all method of effectively approaching these types of situations? Sarah Moore of MooreThoughts.com ponders the quandary:

Where do we draw the line on being responsible for our own choices? Or, even in dealing with behaviors that seem to be out of our own control, to what lengths must an employer go in being lenient with destructive personalities? If a teacher is an alcoholic who repeatedly shows up to work drunk or suffering from a hangover, should that teacher be allowed to seek treatment while taking a paid leave of absence? I don’t think so.

Does the burden of liability fall squarely on the shoulders of the transgressor, or does IBM (in this case) share some of the blame?

At first, the answer would seem obvious. How can IBM be held responsible for the action of a single employee, especially when those actions are clearly in breech of a contract signed by both parties in good faith?

No, IBM cannot be expected to personally hand-hold each of its employees. However, it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to question why the company seemingly had no procedures in place to monitor employee activity and block access to restricted content, a sentiment which is echoed by Robert Gerace:

Here’s an idea: how about preventing him from reaching those types of sites before this ever has a chance to become a problem? How about a way to monitor his use of the Internet, notice when his usage is above average, counsel him - even get him help. I’m not saying whether it is or is not a true addiction - all I’m saying is that somewhere, an IT Guy failed.

It’s our job to convince the people we serve that there are things that just need to get budgeted and paid for. Internet filtering and security software is one of them. Today we are looking at a case where an employee made an inappropriate post about an adult topic. Tomorrow it could be illegal acts, gambling, hate speech, or things that could bring shame, embarrassment, and even lawsuits to a company.

Or as I would say, “It takes two to tango.”

As both small and enterprise companies become increasingly dependent on the Internet to function on a daily basis, the danger of misuse begins to loom heavier. Provisos in contracts and finger-crossing isn’t going to be enough to protect a business from having its reputation smeared from one side of the web to the other should a misguided employee engage in unsavory activities when using the company’s computers.

Instead, companies such as IBM need to be proactive in squelching this type of behavior before it ever has the chance to become a serious issue. A rogue employee may be the source of the problem, but a well-protected employer is the source of the solution.

More on Sex Surfing at Work: Employers Need Protection

Not its domain names, of course, but ones that people may want to register while signing up for Google Apps for Your Domain services. It could be an indication of Google’s future intentions for the Apps services too.

Domain Registration The Google Way

Come for the applications, stay for the domain. That’s Google’s approach to enhancing the Google Apps for Your Domain service. The company has partnered with a pair of registration services, eNom and GoDaddy, to offer .com, .net,.org, .biz, and .info domains for $10 per year.

Google engineer Costin Manolache also noted the offer includes private registration. This keeps personal information out of view of whois lookups.

Google Apps for Your Domain offers five services that can be private-labeled by the organization. It’s a quick and currently free way to offer members of an organization email, IM, and calendar services branded with the organization’s name and logo.

A Google feature change article wouldn’t be complete without a comparison to Microsoft. The competition between the two has been a wonder to watch, as Google poses a challenge to Microsoft that few technology companies ever have.

Microsoft offers a free domain registration as part of its Office Live service. There are three tiers of service, and they focus on establishing a website and email for the domain; higher tiers provide the Office Live Business Contact Manager service.

But Microsoft tucks in something else with all three tiers. They provide a free copy of the Office Live adManager beta tool, which is used for managing adCenter campaigns.

Google has kept its focus on effective communications over a variety of options. They have noted ever since the launch of the Apps service that a premium version will become available in the future.

Maybe that version will roll out an e-commerce edition of Apps. Google has Base for storing product information, Checkout for processing payments, and of course AdWords, their revenue generator, to promote a website and its products.

Google also has a partnership with Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks accounting software, in play. This placed management of AdWords, item posting to Base, and an option to get listed in Google Maps, in most of Intuit’s 2007 product line.

The pieces are mostly there to make Apps a gateway to e-commerce. Instead of Microsoft, maybe Google will compete directly with Yahoo’s small business e-commerce service.

USATODAY.com - SAN FRANCISCO - Banks and credit card agencies are gearing up security for financial transactions over cellphones and other handheld devices. Aware that a growing number of consumers - especially those under 35 - are comfortable using cellphones as digital wallets, leading financial institutions are concocting mobile-security options to protect them from hackers and cyberthieves.

The Download Squad details how to set up your own WDS (Wireless Distribution System) using the wildly hackable Linksys WRT54G with DD-WRT and an Airport Express.WRT54-wha/DD-WR-who? If you…

The minds at Google have taken the less-than-intuitive search process for finding patents in the USPTO database and made it as easy as their signature search service.

Searching For Patents The Google Way

The government always seems to make the process of getting from point A to point B a more difficult undertaking than Hannibal taking elephants through the Alps. Not to mention how they welcome their taxpaying visitors with as much enthusiasm as the Romans had for the arriving Carthaginians.

There has been some improvement on a general level with the relaunch of the portal FirstGov, which uses Vivisimo’s clustering technology to help people find what they need from among the voluminous stores of government data. It didn’t help with the patent search though.

Google has stepped up to make patent search a friendlier process. It is a beta product, with features like saving and printing patents planned for a later release.

A post on Google’s Official blog by software engineer Doug Banks noted how Patent Search functions like another Google product:

Google Patent Search uses much of the same technology that powers Google Book Search, so you can scroll through pages and zoom in on text and illustrations just like you can with books.

It’s a natural extension of our mission to make this public domain government information more easily accessible using Google’s search technology.
The search works best by querying for general concepts. Google gives some examples on the main patent search page, one of which is for “litter box.”

Clicking that brings up the patent summary, any accompanying drawings, and a list of other patents that reference the one being viewed. There is also a link to view the patent at the USPTO website.

The litter box patent example is for people in cars, and not cats. And it’s an under-the-seat trash can, not a substitute for a rest area on the interstate.

Google’s new search indexes over seven million patents. They note in a FAQ how recent patents issued in the past few months may not be in the index yet. Also, they only index patents, not patent applications like this one on Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data.

Can you guess the company that submitted that application?

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Tag: Google

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The concept of consequences associated with an Internet that is not neutral has been scattered and nebulous, difficult for the layman (and, unfortunately, Congressman) to understand why it matters, and proof of concept has been rare or insignificant. Thanks to the Pirate Bay and a Swedish ISP, that proof of concept may be before us.

Blocking Internet Access For Others

Though the Russian website allofmp3.com is legal under Swedish law, an ISP named Perspektiv Bredband, based on a somewhat arbitrary moral conviction, blocked its subscribers from accessing the site. This move cheesed off (herringed off?) Swedish torrent search engine the Pirate Bay so much that they blocked Perspectiv subscribers from accessing their own site.

And so, you have an access war because neither side is neutral. In the end, Perspectiv customers suffer most by having what they can view limited because of two companies and their grudges.

This has been one of the main arguments about what could happen, the slippery slope Net Neutrality proponents have feared and the telcom industry has discounted for lack of proof.

There have been similar discussions, based on Google’s support of Net Neutrality and easy ability to set up its own ISP, that if a company like AT&T or Bellsouth cordoned off faster speeds for the highest bidder (which they’ve publicly admitted to desiring), say Yahoo, then Google could block off AT&T subscribers in protest.

While free-market loyalists argue that this is a situation that is self-correcting - AT&T changes its policy eventually due to loss of subscribers - the Internet surfing public suffers while it works itself out.

(The same case has been made for globalization: though the middle class diminishes and jobs are lost in the interim, eventually, perhaps even a hundred years later, the problem self-corrects. Thus, a certain level of poverty and despair is acceptable until the long-range goal is met. People suffer, the rich get richer and the powerful acquire more power.)

“One can only imagine the broader network neutrality impact if everyone erected blockades to settle digital disputes,” writes a TechDirt blogger (Karl). “AT&T bans Google video to hinder U-Verse competition, Google bans AT&T DSL customers in kind, and pretty soon the Internet is little more than a cratered out highway, riddled by vendettas.”

“[I]n this case the consumer is caught in the middle,” says Wired.com blogger Scott Gilbertson. “Now not only can Perspektiv Broadband users not access allofmp3, but now they can’t access TPB either.

“The end result could be: enough Perspektiv users complain and company gets rid of its blocking software. But even if the outcome does go the way TPB seems to want it to, the burden of boycott is not on Perspektiv directly, but rather its customer base, the individual user.”

Or in an extreme case, entire organizations can campaign against a website operator or blogger based on fundamental disagreement about what is said there. Ask the controversial writer for thebestpageintheuniverse.net, who is the target of a group of mothers for his edgy and offensive viewpoints, and is also blocked by Websense. Though their displeasure with the content is understandable, denying free speech is a chilling proposition.

Network Neutrality legislation, at its heart, would seek to prevent these situations so all could enjoy the Internet as they see fit, without subjective moral enforcers moving beyond a virtual picket line to an outright roadblock.

Beyond that, and much more lucrative for cable and telecoms, is that no solid protection of Net Neutrality allows access providers to carve out a path for the consumer to follow. Not only is that path inherently costly for the consumer, but trying to exit the path is even more so.

To imagine this in terms of sidewalks, visit Bob Frankston.

Tag: Net Neutrality, Pirate Bay

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