First Google, Now AOL Copies Yahoo!

Remember last year when Jeremy Zawodny said Google had copied a Yahoo ad for their version of IE7? Well, it looks like AOL is getting in on the act now, they are beta testing a new version of their homepage, here, and it looks almost identical to Yahoo’s homepage. AOL says they are just doing what works, and apparently Yahoo’s homepage works for them.

Nice portal…but it is nearly identical to Yahoo home page, which was redesigned last year. Click on the image above for a larger view. Internally, I’m hearing AOLers refer to the new portal as “the Yahoo Portal” although its official name is AOL 3.0.

AOL says they are building best of breed products, not simply copying things from Google, Yahoo and others that are proven to work and porting them to its less cutting-edge audience. In the past year, though, we’ve seen them largely copy digg and then release a new mail product that would have been awesome two years ago but which stacks up poorly to the current versions of Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Source: AOL One Step Behind Again: New Home Page Identical To Yahoo

Now, I can understand the positioning, feel of the page, and putting your stuff where it will get the most clicks, but come on, surely they could do it without it looking so much like Yahoo’s homepage. Right?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Yahoo No Comments » April 2007

Jason Calacanis Leaving AOL

It’s official, [tag]Jason Calacanis[/tag] is leaving AOL, and after reading his post about Jim Miller, I would say it is largely because of his departure as well, although it could just be an easy time to say adios. This appears to be big news in the blogosphere, posts are all over the place about it, Jason, in case you didn’t already know built Weblogs, Inc, into a multi million dollar operation that includes Engadget and many other high traffic blogs, that was bought for about 25 million by AOL. Jason had no agreement that meant he had to stay, so the year he put in at AOL was of his own free will, and leaving now will not cost him a cent, other than his normal salary, I guess.

It is being covered by the NYTimes,

Jason Calacanis, the outspoken blogger and entrepreneur who ran AOL’s Netscape division, resigned on Thursday in the wake of the firing of AOL’s chief executive, Jonathan Miller.

Mr. Calacanis sold his company, Weblogs Inc., a network of blogs, to AOL last year and continued to run it from offices in Santa Monica, Calif. This year he took over Netscape.com, transforming it from a Web portal into a site that lets users vote and comment on news articles. Source: NYTimes

.

It is being covered by Techcrunch, who first broke the story,

We just heard from a source that Jason Calacanis has resigned from AOL. Jason joined AOL just over a year ago when his startup, Weblogs, Inc., was acquired. Most recently, he took over management of Netscape, which relaunched earlier this year as a Digg-like news portal.

I just spoke to Jason briefly on IM - his response as of now is “no comment”. He also spoke to me off the record but that’s, well, off the record. Source: TechCrunch

Jason confirmed it on his blog,

TechCrunch broke the story (less than two hours after I told everyone here), and the New York Times confirmed it with me by phone this afternoon.

I’ve got a lot to say, but I’m thinking that I’ll just talk about it on the final episode of the Gillmor Gang podcast–which we happen to be doing tomorrow (crazy coincidence I know). Source: Jason Calacanis

Valleywag has had several posts about Jason quitting,

Jason Calacanis, the energetic and annoying publishing entrepreneur who once thought he could rise to the top at AOL, is leaving the internet media company. He’s not commenting on the record, but his blog describes Jonathan Miller, ousted CEO of AOL, as his mentor, and Miller’s departure as a sad day. He’s out.

Calacanis first came to notoriety as an internet promoter in the late 1990s as the founder of Silicon Alley Reporter, a print magazine which fulfilled in New York the same role as Silicon Valley’s Red Herring. At the height of the boom, Calacanis brushed off a rumored $30m offer for the title by Time Inc., though accounts of that approach vary. Source: Valleywag

Beet.tv had an article on it, but they covered a different angle,

If AOL is smarting from Jason’s departure, they still have their superstar blogger Peter Rojas, Editor in Chief of Engadget, which is ranked the world’s number one or two blog by Technorati. I saw Peter tonight at the TechCrunch party in New York City. He confirmed he’s staying with AOL.

Peter was a big part of the acquisition of the Calacanis blog network, which I understand netted some $25 million from AOL. Source: Beet.tv

They will certainly miss Jason, he is one of those go getters who doesn’t understand the word fail, much like Thomas Edison, he just finds ways that it hasn’t worked yet, until he hits the right solution. But, since AOL retained Peter Rojas, regarded by some as the number one blogger because of Engadget, they will not loose anything there, although, I am sure he will take some of the Weblogs bloggers with him, you know he will. Wonder what will happen to Netscape now and who will take over for him and what will it mean to all of the Netscape Navigators, the ones they are paying to promote the community?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Blogging, Netscape, Paid Blogging 2 Comments » November 2006

AOL Triton Active Update Fix

Note: Everyone should check the later comments below out, as people are always leaving different ways to remove the AOL popup from this and later versions.

If anyone has been getting the damn active update popup from AOL Instant Messenger, Triton version, here is the way to get rid of it.

Anotify.exe is the program that controls all of those annoying popups you get asking you to upgrade this, upgrade that, the only reason I have ever upgraded to a newer version of AOL is because I’m using a different computer and can’t find the last version of the software, so I have to download the latest version. Triton is really a resource hog and those popups suck. So, here is easiest way to get rid of them.

Search for anotify.exe on your system, when you find it, rename it or delete it. Bamm, right there AOL, hehe. Now gotta reboot and make sure it doesn’t reinstall the software. Nope.

Allright, no more AOL Triton popups, woohoo. I was so tired of hearing my kid complain about it, I had already moved to Trillian, so I still had to figure out how to stop it for AOL IM users.

Added: I had a friend who was having the same problem, yet her system did not contain anotify.exe, it ended up being aolsoftware.exe, so I renamed it and it quit working. If you cannot find anotify or aolsaoftware, when you get the popup, hit ctrl-alt-del and click on applications on the box that pops up, then find the active update program, right click it and click on Go to Process. This will give you the name it is currently using, so you can search for the file and rename it or delete it. No more popups.

This is why I hate to update AIM at all, everytime I have upgraded, it’s gotten slower, hogs more resources and is more intrusive.

Added: Don noted in the comments that it has been a few months and I might want to clarify a few things. It’s entirely possible a user might find BOTH anotify.exe and aolsoftware.exe, you should be able to delete both with no problems. In order to find them via Windows Explorer, you have to include system folders in the search, and possibly also hidden files and folders. If you go into Windows Explorer, click on tools, then on folder options, if will bring up the properties screen, click on the view tab at the top and select show hidden files and folders, and it should include those the next time you search.

This is some stuff I probably should’ve included to start with, I always include the hidden stuff in mine etc, so, if some of these instructions have been confusing I apologize. I will rewrite this page one day to make sure it is a lot better.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Instant Messaging, Research 152 Comments » November 2006

AOL Members Suing AOL for Privacy Violations

Three AOL members have filed suit against AOL LLC, the internet division of Time Warner, the lawsuit, which was filed as C-06-5866, says AOL violated their privacy by posting their searches online. In a previous post I mentioned AOL Releasing the Searches From 650,000 Users , thats 20 million online searches, and lots of privacy lost. Users were easily found, and I’m sure many are hiding and hoping no one figures out they were the ones searching on how to kill my wife, or the many searches by pedophiles. I hope they make them do something, maybe it will getother search engines, like Google, thinking about the storing of user data, and maybe they will stop storing user searches as well. The suit seeks $5,000 per user whose data was exposed and a prohibition that would keep AOL from storing search data altogether.

The complaint states that on July 31, AOL posted on its publicly accessible website a database containing roughly 20 million Internet search queries entered over a three-month period by approximately 658,000 different AOL members. Plaintiffs claim the database detailed the date and time the AOL member conducted each search, as well as any websites the member clicked on after AOL’s search engine returned its results. No AOL user names were attached to the database, but the complaint says search terms contain personal information, enough to identify the AOL member. The Complaint alleges that although AOL later pulled the database from its website, the database had already been downloaded, reposted, and made searchable on other websites. Source: Yahoo Finance

If you are an AOL member and your search queries were posted online, without your consent, then you may wan to contact the lawyers about the case, here are their contact details:

C. Oliver Burt, III
Manuel John Dominguez, Esq.
Marc J. Greenspon, Esq.
222 Lakeview Avenue, Suite 900
West Palm Beach, FL 33401
(561) 835-9400
Lawfla@bermanesq.com

More Coverage from Good Morning Silicon Valley,

“As of the date of this complaint it is the understanding of plaintiffs and their counsel that AOL has not done anything to help the members whose personal sensitive and confidential records were released to the public by AOL,” the complaint alleges. “AOL members who sought assistance from AOL about the disclosure of the Member Search Data were not offered any assistance. AOL’s only response, if any, was to offer the victimized member a free month of AOL service, a service which AOL is now offering for free.”

A whole month of free service, how on earth could they turn that down? Especially considering they are giving it away to broadband users anyway.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Privacy No Comments » September 2006

If Only…

If only AOL searcher 4417749, Thelma Arnold, could’ve had access to some of these new “tools” coming out, she might not have been so easy to find. Lost in the Crowd hopes to give back the anonymity that has been lost to us as search engines like Google and AOL store more and more info about us. Found via Realtechnews.com.

Lost in the Crowd is a free service to help you search the web more anonymously. As you probably know, when you use a search engine what you search for is associated with a unique identifying “cookie” stored in your browser. Because what you search for tells a lot about who you are, this creates a number of privacy concerns. These concerns were directly illustrated by the recent release of user search data by AOL.

In the past, the only way to prevent this association was to routinely clear the cookies from your browser. Lost in the Crowd takes a different approach: automatically and over time placing a number of random queries through the search engines you use from your actual tracking cookie. What searches did you care about versus those that were just made up? There’s no way for the search engine, or anyone else, to tell.

Clicking around the site it says they are running searches for 682 users, so they aren’t burning the world up yet, but people are using the site.

There is also a Firefox plugin that does the same thing, TrackMeNot. “Protects against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines with fake data.” Available here.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Google, Privacy, Search Engines No Comments » August 2006

AOL Releases CTO and Two Others for Data Leak

The fallout is starting at AOL for the release of search data of 650,000 users, with AOL releasing it’s CTO and two others. They’ve apologized and gotten the attention of capitol hill, now it’s all over but the firing.

Maureen Govern, who joined AOL as CTO last September, will leave the company immediately along with two other employees who thought publishing the details of 19 million Web searches performed by 600,000 users to the Web was a grand idea. Source: SiliconValley.com

From Techcrunch,

From my discussion with Andrew Weinstein, the AOL spokesperson who apologized on behalf of AOL after the data dump, my understanding this entire event was caused by a single clueless researcher and a complete lack of oversight by his managers. Hopefully these firings are tied to the actual people responsible and not just for the sake of holding someone, anyone, responsible.

So, this makes it sound like it was part of some plan, and not just one clueless guys mistake. So, I wonder which it really is?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Blogging, Current Events, Search Engines No Comments » August 2006

More on the AOL Data Release

Apparently the AOL release of data now has the attention of Capitol Hill, not sure if this is a good thing or not, as the more the government gets involved with the internet, the worse it will be for it.

AOL’s recent privacy gaffe that exposed user search histories may breathe new life into a proposal to slap strict rules on what data Internet companies may collect.

Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Wednesday that AOL’s disclosure of the search habits of more than 650,000 of its users demonstrates that new laws are necessary. AOL has apologized for the disclosure.

“We must stop companies from unnecessarily storing the building blocks of American citizens’ private lives,” Markey said.

Markey’s proposal, called the Eliminate Warehousing of Consumer Internet Data Act (EWOCID), was introduced in February after Google’s courtroom tussle over search records with the U.S. Department of Justice.

This proposal seeks to micro manage websites, all websites as all Web site operators would be required to delete from their logs personal information, defined as everything from a name and e-mail address to–in some cases–an Internet Protocol address. Talk about a pain, I think I would just copy the data out of my logs that I needed and then delete them. This is another one of those slippery slopes because once you get government involved, they never go away.

Not sure whether I should mention this site or not, AOLPsycho Psychic analysis of AOL users and discussions. This site has the data online and you can see the searches and the analyze and post your opinion on the user. Several already look really bad, such as this user, 336865, who searched for child rape stories, incest stories, preteen sex stories, illegal child porn, preteen nude pics, 10 year old nude pics, 10 year olds sex, 10 year olds having sex, child sex sites, little my maid and many others. Makes me sick just to see the search terms where someone was searching for 10 year olds having sex. But, this is the kind of data that has been exposed, and I’m sure there’s worse stuff in there, and I’m sure someone will end up getting hurt because of it, we may not know about it, but I guarantee something will happen to someone because of this data being released. I hope I’m wrong.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Search Engines No Comments » August 2006

Google Says We Will Keep On Storing User Search Data

Even though it’s been a terrible week for AOL, and 650,000 of it’s users, Google Inc CEO, Eric Schmidt, said the mistake by AOL will not change Googles practice of storing the user search data for use in it’s search engines.

“We are reasonably satisfied … that this sort of thing would not happen at Google, although you can never say never,” Schmidt said during an appearance at a major search engine conference in San Jose.

I’m sure AOL and all the other search engines were reasonably satisfied that “bad things” would not happen for them either, but it did, and now people are actively trying to take advantage of the data that was released. Websites are already popping up to use the data, although I won’t like to any of them from here.

News.com also has an article called, Google says it won’t pull an AOL,

“We have systems in place that won’t allow it to happen,” Schmidt told reporters Wednesday after a keynote discussion at the Search Engine Strategies conference here. “Our No. 1 priority is the trust our users have, and that would be a violation of trust, so the answer is that would not happen.”

Let’s hope so, I use Google as much as the next guy, I KNOW anyone who gets hold of that data could find out lots of stuff about me. The thing is, as Wayne Porter reminded me recently, Google uses a unique id for each user as well, even on separate computers, no two id’s are the same. This data ends up in the wrong hands and it’s hard to tell what could be figured out with it.

Don’t say I didn’t warn anyone about Google’s use of a GUID. A globally unique identifier (GUID) is used for unique IDs. No two GUIDs are the same no matter what computer they were generated on. One day the police might start playing match the “GUID”.

Schmidt also said,

“We’ve always wanted to expand our advertising reach and our advertising network and monetize other forms of content,” Schmidt added.

Oh, we already know that, ask any of the thousands of webmasters whose sites are no longer listed in Google, they already know it, if you are currently making money from Google, don’t count on it always being there, it’s their search engine and they want to be the only ones who make any money from it. Period. Do no evil? They should change their motto to “Give us your money”, as long as users are happy, it will continue going in this direction. They’ve proven that by making people who pay Google for visitors, to pay more money for “quality” purposes. The pages Google said I need to pay more money for, earn more money per click than sending the visitors straight to the same merchant, no lie. I am also working on a post about Google and Censorship, but am not completely done with it yet.

“Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to release the data,” Schmidt said in the conference session.

You think so Eric? I know it was, User 4417749 knows it was, as do most other people, so, keep that shit under lock and key, encrypted and offline.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Google, Search Engines, Security No Comments » August 2006

AOL User No. 4417749 Found Easily

Just finished reading this article from the New York Times about how one reporter easily found search user No. 4417749, a user found because AOL Released the Searches of 650,000 users.

Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently searches for her friends’ medical ailments, problems, or researches issues just to help, and she loves her three dogs. Over the three months of data that AOL released “by mistake” she conducted hundreds of searches on topics ranging from “numb fingers” to “60 single men” to “dog that urinates on everything”, or “termites,” then “tea for good health” then “mature living,” all of these searches and the others she conducted lead to a reporter finding her and asking if these were her searches.

“Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her. Ms. Arnold, who agreed to discuss her searches with a reporter, said she was shocked to hear that AOL had saved and published three months’ worth of them. “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life,” she said. “I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder.”

That’s one of the troubles with the Internet, it is way to easy to figure out who someone is, where they live and lord knows what else. This is one example of what can go wrong online, and how one company can help ruin your life. Not saying that AOL did this intentionally, but when you keep data like this, you have to have strong policies on keeping this information safe from people who will use it for their own profit and or other motivations. Either someone bypassed the chain of command at AOL, they didn’t give ANY thought to releasing such data or someone seriously dropped the ball, none of which is good for surfers using the AOL site.

Asked about Ms. Arnold, an AOL spokesman, Andrew Weinstein, reiterated the company’s position that the data release was a mistake. “We apologize specifically to her,” he said. “There is not a whole lot we can do.”

Mr. Weinstein said he knew of no other cases thus far where users had been identified as a result of the search data, but he was not surprised. “We acknowledged that there was information that could potentially lead to people being identified, which is why we were so angry.”

We know, we already saw the lame apologies, and they aren’t going to be as angry as some of these searchers are going to be, I would imagine, this reporter tracking down Ms. Arnold is just one example, and certainly one of the most public, so far. And, as this story notes, it would be easy for these searches to look like one thing, but be something completely different. Ms. Arnold frequently searched for all kinds of ailments, like numb fingers, hand tremors, nicotine effects on the body, dry mouth and bipolar, leading one to think she might have some medical problems, which, in this case was completely wrong, as she frequently searched for friends ailments to assuage their anxieties. But, what about the more extreme examples, as noted on The Paradigm Shift and this blog entry AOL Search Data Shows Users Planning to commit Murder, where users were searching for “how to kill your wife”, “how to kill a wife”, “wife killers” and many more. What if that user was trying to help a friend, say a friend who is abused and in fear for his or her life? I know by looking at the searches it would seem like they were researching for themselves, but without context, what does it really show? BTW, that site has received 207 comments, definitely some interesting reading. As an example,

If you were an author of thriller/horror fiction, you might commonly enter “how to kill my wife” into Google…
Search is an extension of our inner thoughts. Doesn’t mean we’re going to do anything about it (recent case in Sweden aside).
Perhaps Google will be the real-world incarnation of the Minority Report law-enforcement model? I hope not.

Another interesting possibility, and another reason no one should have access to this data, user 17556639 could already be marked by police as a potential wrong doer, and it could be for the wrong reasons. My friend Wayne Porter is a security researcher for Facetime Communications, and in a recent post talked about how he had researched a case of UA pornography, if he was one AOL at the time, he could already be marked by someone as a pedophile.

It reminds me of my reaction to some of the chat transcripts from Perverted-Justice.com. After investigating a case of UA pornography during my job as a security researcher I realized how little I knew about the subject. I went to the site and began reading one of the transcripts and became physically ill. I simply stopped and cried and could not even finish the first transcript. Was it ugly? Yes. Was it terrible? Yes. Did I need to read it? Yes. I am a security researcher- it is my job to understand the criminal and how they operate and not assume I know what is really going on. I didn’t know as much as I thought- I was naive.

Wayne is most definitely not a pedophile, he is a scholar and a gentleman, even if he is hated by many people.

Ms. Arnold says she loves online research, but the disclosure of her searches has left her disillusioned. In response, she plans to drop her AOL subscription. “We all have a right to privacy,” she said. “Nobody should have found this all out.”

Exactly right Ms. Arnold, but AOL has let the “cat” out of the bag, so to speak, so what do we do now? Should companies like AOL, Google, MSN, and other search engines keep this kind of data, or should they purge it frequently, or not even save it at all? Using it internally for improving search is one thing, but this kind of data should not be saved for very long, and it definitely should not be released in the “wild.”

As one commenter on Techcrunch noted, this is only the tip of the iceberg,

Anyways, search engines aren’t the only ones keeping logs, I find ISP logs thousands of times more scary…

And another,

I imagine anyone who isn’t a prude or bland tends to momentarily wonder about various topics with queries that, at face value, sound twisted or odd. Imagine being judged just for being curious about life (something as tame as medical conditions to the diverse range of literature and depths of dialogue). The ability to have curiosity and freely explore information is the greatest ability of a free culture. When people become afraid of seeking information — from fear of being viewed as a criminal — it will set society back into repression and darkness.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Google, Research, Search Engines, Security 4 Comments » August 2006

AOL Apologizes for Releasing User Data

From News.com, AOL is apologizing for releasing the user search data that was released yesterday.

The randomly selected data, which focused on 658,000 subscribers and posted 10 days ago, was among the tools intended for use on the recently launched AOL Research site, according to reports on various blog sites. But the Internet giant has since removed the search logs from public view.

“This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant,” AOL, a unit of Time Warner, said in a statement. “Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.”

Little too late now, but they mean well, right?

Added: Jason Calacanis just posted his response to the release of the user search data, here. His solution, to not even save it to start with. Great idea, but I somehow get the feeling the people in charge of AOL are more worried about making money from such data than they are about it getting out in the “wild”.

Also, Andrew Weinstein has been posting comments on blogs, like TechCrunch, apologizing for this, as referenced in this post by Michael Arrington.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: AOL, Research, Search Engines 2 Comments » August 2006

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