Such a fuss over new version of the Firefox web browser today and Apple opening a new shop in Sydney tomorrow! The feral goldfish are all a’flutter, feeling left out if they don’t have the latest news this very second. Thank the gods for Richard Chirgwin.

In a discussion about how digital rights management will affect sales of Vista, he writes:

The actual adoption of Windows-based broadcast TV recording among mainstream users is pitifully small. It’s easier in every way for Joe Sixpack to buy a black box hard disk recorder.

Hence, although in many ways I think Vista is a dead duck anyway, DNR flagging won’t change its future one way or the other…

I can’t get the excitement about media centres, myself. Quite simply, why would I rearrange the house or run cables just to hook the TV to the computer, when I can put the recorder where the TV is?

PC-based Media Centres, whether Apple or Microsoft or Linux, have a specific target market: people for whom getting this sort of crap to work creates a sense of achievement which serves as a surrogate for the ability to do things that are actually useful…

Hear hear!

In a follow-up, Avi Miller said:

I challenge you to find an HD-PVR with the same functionality, size and form of the Mac Mini.

“Challenge”, eh?

Yes, let’s issue “challenges” about arbitrary mixes of functionality in a particularly-shaped black (or, in this case, white) box. Lets “challenge” someone to find something that isn’t a Mac Mini that looks like (has the “form” of) a Mac Mini.

As first glance, this looks like precisely the kind of techno-macho-wank that Richard was talking about.

Running water and sewerage, people, then health care and education… and then perhaps we can worry about what shape the digital TV recorder is…

[Update 8.40am: Avi Miller writes: "Sorry, I seem to have misplaced the in the original email. My reply was intended to be the exact techno-macho-wank previously implied." Ah, irony! Such a tricky beast...]

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Background

This blog gets attacked by comment spam, just like everyone else. Automated software agents (”spambots”) attempt to post comments which link back to the spammer’s website. The more links they generate, the higher their website will rate in search engine results. Just like Ed did the other day, only faster.

Spambots promote the usual stuff — sex, drugs, cheap money and get-rich-quick scams. A bit like a weekend on the Gold Coast. But over the last week, roughly 25% have linked back to Google — some even go as far including the text “Google is the best search engine”!

Could these spambots really be controlled by Google? Well, as I say, they have both motive and opportunity…

Motive

Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 7, the new version of their web browser for Windows. They’ve flagged it as a “critical update”, so every properly-configured Windows PC will download it automatically. The user has to confirm this action, but my experience is that the vast majority of users will always click a button labelled “OK” — usually without reading what it does.

One new feature of IE7 is a search box. Now Firefox has had this feature for ages. Both browsers allow you to choose which search engine you use. But while Firefox is initially set to use Google, IE uses (surprise surprise!) Microsoft’s Windows Live Search — unless you take specific action to set it to something else.

So right now millions of Internet users could be switching to Windows Live Search without knowing it. Naturally Google would want to stop this — especially given that Google’s market share has been declining over recent months.

Opportunity

Google is “only” the world’s 439th company, but that’s still a market value of US$107 billion. And spambots are cheap to hire.

Google could even do it themselves and be difficult to trace. Google’s own software runs on many people’s computers, including Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search. Both update themselves automatically — so either of them could download code for a spambot, fire off a few comments and then erase the evidence without anyone knowing.

But is it really Google?

Have you got a better explanation?

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