If I wanted to have the great firewall of America

Meco Plays The Wizard of Oz
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This is one of the most difficult blog entries to write, one it is hard to tell the truth, and in some ways I think the sponsors and supporters of SOPA are trying to pull a fast one. I am reminded of the scene is the Wizard of OZ where Dorothy is not told to look behind the mirror to learn that the Wizard is really a short fat little man with a penchant for fighting off flying monkeys.

Here is what we know so far, which is stunning in its own right, that the head of the MPAA, a leading company in the country is advocating bringing to American shores the same system that is used in China to filter and otherwise make invisible sites around the globe.

Think about that for a moment, the company mouthpiece for Hollywood, that is primarily supporting SOPA thinks that the great firewall of China is an awesome idea that should be implemented in America.

This has lead to us becoming a laughing stock in China, they see the hypocrisy of lambasting them for their own Great Firewall while America contemplates their own.

When did America seek to become like China? There is nothing wrong with China, but somewhere in my education, we learned about the Bill of Rights, and amendments, where things like habeas corpus could not be taken away (but it is under the new defense authorization act). Or that we had free speech (within limits, I am aware of the Comstock act and the thousands of other examples to stifle speech in the name of the children, or morality, or against specific religions, belief systems, against abortion, laws, etc).

When did we become a laughing stock over our espousing of free speech and democracy when we have suddenly turned our back on all those things we put as founding stones of our country, in the name of protecting the job creators.

When did changing technology mean we needed to support a company long past its failure point?

Did anyone come to Bethlehem Steel’s rescue when they went bankrupt because of mini-mills, how’s about saving Enron or WorldCom from their own bad decisions, or the Savings and Loan system that went under, during Ronald Regan’s presidency?

When did we start bailing out banks and big companies that were too slow or sluggish or too large to move fast enough for smaller nimble companies? Wasn’t Hollywood predicated on the piracy of technology?

Many of the companies and businesses infringing on the patents of Thomas Edison should be easily recognizable today. William Fox, for instance, was running his own Nickelodeon in Brooklyn, which eventually became Twentieth-Century Fox Studios. [*24] Harry M. Warner founded his first film studio in 1907, which eventually became Warner Brothers. [*25] By 1898, Jesse Lasky already owned part of a film production company, which later would become Paramount Pictures. [*26] In 1903, Adolph Zukor invested in his first cinema outlet, eventually becoming a co-founder of Paramount Pictures. [*27] Source: Punkerslut

When did we laud China and hate Google, which started out as two guys in a garage who thought of something really cool? When did Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and other systems become roads to unrepentant piracy that must be stamped out at all costs, think of the job creators, think of the loss of workers, think of the children, think of every kitten that dies when you download an MP3 single track from ITunes rather than buying an album full of filler.

When did the rich become a protected class?

SOPA, PIPA, and the new version called the Open act have opened up a kettle of worms, where the MPAA’s head boss thinks that Chinese censorship rocks, that unremitted takedowns of web sites regardless of if they are pirating or not, and the disaster that will become the internet in America if these acts pass.

When will Congress step up and realize the disaster they are creating in the name of security, the children, kittens, and puppies?

When did we lose our sanity, when did we decide that the bill of rights was to be torn up in favor of “job creators” who see all new technology as a danger to their current business model rather than something that could be really awesome for business. Hollywood has a long history of fighting new technology, new technology that in the end ends up making a pot of money for them. Maybe it is time for saner heads to prevail, because Susan Powter said it best:

“Stop the Madness.”

 

 

 

 

 

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Mesh net Darknet plans over on Reddit in response to SOPA

Reddit Sticker
Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

Just thinking about the difficulties in rolling out a network is enough to make anyone’s head spin, but the boffins over at Reddit are thinking about doing just that in a direct response to SOPA. While this is an interesting idea there are some security things they are going to want to take into planning when doing this. Right now the plans look highly immature, but I expected something like this amongst the technical folks who know how the internet works, and how to build something separate.

While the discussion on Reddit has also taken into account TOR and the P2P darknets already available, there are some serious security things they also need to think about. The recent actions of Anonymous on TOR with the DDoS attacks, social engineering of plugins for browsers, as well as track and trace down to ISP of people who are doing illegal things on TOR are something to take into account. A node that is not owned and operated by a trusted person or company is a danger to the entire network.

The interesting part is that SOPA is unpopular on both sides of the isles in political circles, and could just be the worst idea this year.

So here is my list of things to consider as part of the network design, because network design implies the security design that will go along with that network. Failures in network design will equate to failures in security design.

  1. End to End Encryption – the traffic has to be encrypted end to end from user to provider, this makes it more difficult to snoop on what is happening.
  2. You will want your own DNS SEC system with heavy monitoring for false updates that will propagate in from the regular internet.
  3. Your gateways to the Darknet will be exposed on the internet; these gateways have to have a level of trust with the end user and the network at large. As Anonymous has shown, an evil gateway for any reason exposes the people who are using the system.
  4. There has to be security built in, things like DDoS, flooding, spam, and other associated evils need to be filtered on the tiered backbone, and at the gateways. This means the gateways and intermediate systems need to understand and have software that will filter for those issues.
  5. Your entire core infrastructure has to be outside the continental USA. You have to plan on seizure of systems over time, anything in the USA is easily seized under SOPA, and you need your core infrastructure away from that potential mess.
  6. SOPA and a number of laws being proposed allow for the extra-judicial rendering of systems, people, and otherwise. With the EU Parliament looking at similar or same legislation, you also have to think through the people problem, what happens if the administrator is arrested compromising a huge segment of the network?
  7. People, you have to plan on people being stupid and doing stupid things, like being social engineered into downloading software that will allow track and trace across the darknet.
  8. You have to plan on hackers, both civilian and military, because they are going to want in, and they are going to want to monitor what is happening on the network. Most if not all commercial software has bugs that are easily exploited that could damage core systems, or turn core systems into monitoring bastions.
  9. Speed, you are going to want to have awesome speed along the Darknet so that people will actually use it. While TOR and Peers are awesome, they are slow networks and while people might be willing to learn to use a slow network, it will be difficult to ensure adoption.
  10. I have seen a proposal for a wireless mesh on Reddit as well, that carries its own liabilities that need to be better explored. At some point though any wireless mesh needs to hit a land line to reach services, gateways here are going to be exposed and subject to seizure.
  11. You are going to have to monitor the network for things that we all agree are illegal; if the darknet becomes a safe haven for crime or criminal activity then its purpose is over with. This goes beyond “information wants to be free”, information does not want anything, but there are things we all agree universally that are illegal and should not be supported on the darknet. That means we will have to censor, and that means we need the tools to censor.
  12. Blue Coat and other monitoring systems present a real challenge, you will need dedicated security and network folks who are familiar with industrial grade track, trace, and monitoring to get around, inject false data, or otherwise compromise those governmental big buck items.

Some things to think about from a security viewpoint, there is more, but this is just the initial things that come to mind. If there really is going to be a darknet in response to SOPA

, then it by its nature has to be exposed in places, and if we care about the people who are using it, we want them to be as safe as possible using it.

 

 

 

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Why SOPA is going to be unenforceable

Joint Session of the United States CongressI would lay odds that SOPA is going to pass, and pass by a majority in the house and senate; it is debatable if the president will sign it. If you have been involved in Bittorrent or P2P systems for a long time, you know that the minute something passes like a law against something, the community fragments. We have seen the fragmentation in P2P software since the shutdown of Grokster, Bearshare and Sharazza. We have seen a similar fragmentation in Bittorrent indexing sites since the shutdown of the Pirate Bay and others. We have seen the abject failure of personal lawsuits against downloader’s, while a couple of cases have been won; it is still not enough to stop downloading across the internet.  The problem is not that laws don’t work, the problem is that the more the laws become draconian the more people work their way around it.

You can see this in classic corporate security, you tell your employees that they can’t do something, and they figure out some really clever ways of working around it. Classic information security can throw up road block after road block, but users still manage to get their computers infected, surf porn at work, use Instant Messaging, and other generally prohibited programs in many corporations. Companies can’t even block Facebook because people will just use a proxy system somewhere that is not in the web server filtering software.

SOPA presents the same opportunity for the c community to fragment along interest lines. It will most likely pass and be challenged in the Supreme Court if the president does not Veto it. There are some big corporate players that are against this bill along with the maddening hordes of casual users who are looking at being shut down because someone does not like what is being done on a web site. The brilliant part is that people route around damage, and SOPA is damage, like most networks there will routes around the damage imposed by SOPA and the industries that are supporting this bill will find themselves going after an increasingly fragmented audience that will be easier to hide, and easier to fly under the radar of the big mega corps. This will happen, it has happened with P2P, it has happened with Bittorrent, and it will happen to streaming video and other ways of downloading stuff. When two or three years from now the big content industries are still whining about losing money to pirates, remember this, people will find a way to do something, even if there is a law in the way.

Rather than go draconian, there are some very interesting surveys on what happens when a legitimate channel to download is opened. Honestly, take a look at what Techdirt posted today on their web site about the general mood around SOPA. Many people will default to legitimate pay for services if they carry what you are looking for. Netflix works for me because it has a pile of really bad B grade horror movies I can watch whenever. This is so much better than the spotty download speeds on Usenet, Bittorrent or P2P. Take a look at Hulu, if I want TV it’s worth paying for it, if I want movies, it is worth paying for it, look at ITunes. People will spend money.

Ah but then there is availability of content, there are some movies I really want to watch, but can’t get on DVD or in legal channels. I keep on looking for the legitimate copies, and would stream them in a heartbeat if I could get them. Oh and that stream would be a legitimate service, cause I love Netflix and Hulu. I pay for those services and enjoy them.

Rather than some draconian not going to work because people, ordinary people will find a way around restrictions, lets open up all the catalogs from all the music and movies. Let’s bring every movie ever made into legitimate channels, let’s do same day as release streams and downloads, let’s just open this puppy wide open so that people can make the decision to watch it in the comfort of their own home, or go to some nasty movie theater and pay 20 dollars for popcorn.

That would be a much better challenge than SOPA. Remember people route around damage, we will be here again in three to ten years with even more stiff laws and regulations, because SOPA isn’t going to work quite the way the supporters are thinking it will.

 

 

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Facebooks new Needs Review feature

I like Facebook a lot, and spend significant social media time there talking to people and otherwise engaging in the usual social media voyeurism. What was very cool today though was the “needs review” tag that is automatically opt-in rather than the usual don’t sweat it you have to manually figure out how to opt-in on this. Facebook is doing the right thing here, because I get tagged in some pretty obnoxious pictures that have nothing to do with me.

We have all seen them, the perennial taggers who decide to tag a wide swath of people for a picture, even though the picture does not have anyone in it. Another abuse of social systems to try to get page views or in some cases injects malware into someone’s computer. The new approve tagging feature looks like the right thing to do for Facebook right now. Facebook has always had problems with privacy because user data is just too important to their economic model to give up willingly.

Is this a new series of choices being made on Facebook’s part? Will other social media systems follow suit? Google Plus suffers from the same thing; you can tag someone in a picture even if it is not really them, regardless of what the picture is about. Approving these kinds of tags for pictures and articles is going to be very important for people to control their own public image.

Facebook needs Review Feature

In the longer run, you are the image that you have on Facebook or Google Plus, being able to have some control over that is going to be very important for a very long time.

 

 

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Seattle Startup Weekend some thoughts

Image representing Startup Weekend as depicted...
Image via CrunchBase

It has been over a two years since I went to my last startup weekend here in Seattle, and the sad part is that it really did not leave an impression. You would think that something like this would, but two years ago, it did not. This year however, I was able to go to Startup Weekend at the F5 building and ended up walking away with not just good ideas, but some amazingly awesome observations of how teams of people can do something very cool.

There is about 2 hours of video footage that need to be edited, and I will be posting those later on, but wanted to write down my general impressions of what it was like this time, because I walked away from the process feeling really good about the state of Seattle Startups, and what I was seeing there.

Unlike the recent controversy down in Silicon Valley about not enough color or women in technology, every team had at least one or more women on the teams. There were many colors sitting around the tables collaborating, talking, joking, and having a good time doing neat things. There were not a lot of white men, but there were many white men amongst the leaders, mentors, and press people who were there. We need to get more diversity of opinion on the outreach side, but the enthusiasm and no barriers amongst the team members were remarkable.

I got to spend some time listening to Tech Stars talking about making the pitch, and it was interesting some of the things they said. The most remarkable and memorable was to shy away from the live demo, because the internet in many of these places is at times unreliable. In a world of reliable internet, it is surprising that the places we are supposed to pitch our companies would suffer from poor internet. The focus on mockups or running them on a computer without accessing data on the internet defeats in my opinion the whole idea of the pitch. I want to see it work, not look at mockups of the product. I was also interested in the idea of not doing a team presentation, rather having one person speaking for the team during the pitch. This keeps the divergent opinions to a minimum when asking for money.

I was also surprised that Tech Stars advocated always asking for money even if money was not the reason to be there. It gives the people you are pitching to an idea as to the valuation of the idea you are presenting, or at least your opinion of that value. You should also have a deep market viewpoint of who else is in the space, how much they are making, what their traffic looks like and other details. It is not enough to be a coder in a garage; you need to get the business and money side of your startup as well. There are not a lot of well-rounded people, so if you are starting a company, make sure you have a businessperson as a core team member to help marketing, modeling, and projected financials for the idea.

Too many teams chasing the dream, by trying to make something that everyone else is making. Original ideas are scarce, but sometimes you really can build a better mousetrap. There were many people and many teams rehashing older ideas from the dot com boom years. I am not sure this is a good thing, but delivery of groceries has shown itself to be a very difficult model to be successful at. It might be time to move on from some of the failed ideas of the 1990’s and see if we can really do something new and novel. That will be tough, again because new ideas are very difficult to come up with and have be successful. We need to teach more original creative thinking in school, work, and play.

Startup Weekend is a remarkable community, passionate in ways that often get drilled out of people as they work for whatever mega corp. they work for. It is an outlet, a creative way of having geeky fun on a weekend and you should understand technology to be there. However, there was plenty of room for other skills, from market analysis to logo design, like all companies they needed support in ways that did not show up at Startup Weekend. I would think that this is an awesome addition to a resume, and a great way of getting hands on experience in what it is like to be in a startup. I think that people with business, marketing, and UI skills need to go there, they would find plenty to do.

I have about 2 hours of video to edit, and will hopefully get it ready by this weekend. In the mean time, it is worth leaving behind this simple thought.

“Those things we do are important, even if no one else thinks they will amount to anything real”. Startup Weekend is like that, important, even if the company never really truly takes off and becomes the next Google. The things you will learn there are lifetime lessons, not just, what you can do in 54 hours of intense company building.

 

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Kingdom Conquest from Sega, ITunes, and Theft

From what I have been able to research the Kingdom Conquest in app purchases that are unauthorized just keep on coming. It has been about a year now (based on what I was able to find) that this has been a known issue, with Apple giving refunds to customers. Given the amount of data, it is looking like a significant number of people have been impacted, myself included this week. The interesting part is that I am a security researcher, so I did a little bit of digging around on this one.

The first clue that this had happened was a nice e-mail from Apple stating:

Your Apple ID, rmorrill@e-mailaddress.com, was just used to make a purchase in -KingdomConquest- from the App Store on a computer or device that had not previously been associated with that Apple ID.

If you made this purchase, you can disregard this email. It was only sent to alert you in case you did not make the purchase yourself.

If you did not make this purchase, we recommend that you go to iforgot.apple.com to change your password, then see Apple ID: Tips for protecting the security of your account for further assistance.

Regards,
Apple

The idea being if they knew about it, then they should have been able to stop the purchase until I authorized it. After duly changing my password after seeing the 43 dollar bill that wiped out my ITunes account (thankfully nothing other than my prepaid card money was stolen), I did a little bit of digging around. Learning that this has been going on over a year with some 500,000 data points in Google on this one, it is a bad thing to let a known security flaw that influences purchases continue for a year. This is what they bought from me.

The weird part was that they changed all my billing information, I consider this hacked data, not real, even though it points to a real person who really does live at the address, I did not try the phone number, but on a people search, this person really does live at this address. The phone number is registered to the same address. That at least gives me something to work with.

The other surprising part was that the game remembered the user ID that was used to register the game in Apple Game Center and with Kingdom Conquest; I’ll be resetting my hacker’s information when I get a more reliable network to work with this afternoon.

afna67 gamer tag

Searching on the gamer tag takes me to a motorcycle enthusiast in Malaysia, telling me that some of the data is pretty well buried in the system, and that it will take Apple working with me to uncover just how deep this rabbit hole goes in regards to who is the actual hacker. I doubt it is both, but it looks sophisticated enough that maybe gold farming, reselling, or otherwise is going on with the game. At least I had it set in ITunes that anything that is downloaded is also downloaded to my local computer and IPad, it gives me something to play with in terms of I got a new game but I don’t know what to do with it.

The sad part is that this is so well known, that at 40 dollars a pop, even if 50,000 people are influenced this means millions of dollars in fraud, a well known well documented, well discussed, and otherwise that I am surprised Sega Kingdom Conquest is still allowed on the ITunes network. Any source of fraud should be investigated. Having it go on a year is not good information security, and while I do want my 43 dollars back, I’m also writing it off because it does not look like I will get the refund. Rather, what will end up happening is stopping all purchases through the Apple Store until I am certain that this kind of fraud will not continue, and that Apple/Sega and any other party is working diligently to restore faith in the ITunes store.

 

 

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The Day Network News Died

The Day Network News DiedI have been reading an entry over on Torrent Freak about the shut down of one of the few Tier-1 Usenet servers on the planet. Usenet is a holdover from the very early days of the internet and has been one of the major ways that people communicated and shared information before P2P and long before Bittorrent. Usenet is almost impossible to police, it is impossible to track, and it is impossible to comb through all the logs trying to figure out who is doing what. Even a cloud powered hadoop server would have a hard time dealing with the monumental logs that are generated by the service.

It is also one of the few somewhat safe ways of transmitting data over the internet, and yes, there is a lot of pirated content on the system. It is much more reliable than P2P or Bittorrent without the logging and tracking downsides that P2P and Bittorrent have. With the shutdown of News-Service.com the end of UseNet is really just around the corner because the Tier-1 servers are the top of the system. While other UseNet servers might be Tier-2, it is the top of the pyramid that matters for Usenet, much like Bittorrent indexing sites matter to Bittorrent users. On their site they posted:

 

Dear visitor,

On 28 September 2011, the District Court of Amsterdam reached a verdict in the procedure on the merits of the case that Stichting Brein had brought against News-Service.com. The Court has ruled that News- Service.com is to cease ‘recording and offering material protected by copyright and neighbouring rights’ on pain of period penalty payment.

Unfortunately, News-Service.com sees no way of complying with the Court’s verdict. As a consequence, on 28 October, we started interlocutory proceedings and asked the summary Judge to order Brein to cease the execution of the verdict. We have learned today that the summary Judge has denied our claims. This means that we are forced to cease our operations with immediate effect.

However, for reasons of principle, News-Service.com will not accept the verdict and has lodged an appeal.

We would like to thank all relations of News-Service.com for the pleasant working relationship and the trust they have placed in us during the past 15 years.

Kind regards,

Patrick Schreurs and Wierd Bonthuis

 News-Service.com

 

The reality is that with the loss of a tier-1 server the only thing that will be left once the channels start to dry up is going to be the Rapidshare style sites. Where people store their private files and allows others to download them. Of course that means that pirates and in many cases simple users will post something out of their ITunes catalog to share it, or will share the ripped files from just released DVD’s and music that are then posted to forum sites or are indexed in Google for people to find. The sad part of all this is that all UseNet servers are now in a lot of trouble, because there is a court victory (even if it is in Europe, that will be used as a precedence in the USA, and there is always ACTA to keep things interesting) now, so UseNet as we understand it will limp along like Bittorrent for a while as people move over to Rapid Share.

Which leaves Rapid Share, Mega Upload and others dangerously exposed and in the cross hairs of intellectual property protection people. I am a regular user of Drop Box and other uploading systems so that I can share files between people that I am working with. I also use ICloud to share my music amongst some of my Apple devices, and I am wondering now at what time in the future am I going to lose these services as well.

The good part is that something else will come along, and we will have our golden age of using it until someone gets annoyed enough to try to shut it down. We seem to be in stalemate right now, that for every system that gets shutdown, we have another system that spins up that is different enough to fly under the radar of BRIEN or IFPI or RIAA/MPAA. That is until people start using it to share rips of data that they do not own or have not paid for. We seem to be stuck in this game right now, and as long as it is worth it that is ok, but in the longer run, this seems like an expensive way to go when we should be finding some other way of solving the problem

What that would be, I am sadly without an answer.

 

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Law Firm going after individual sellers on Amazon for Patent Violation

Image representing eBay as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

I don’t know enough about this right now to go and make the statement of if this is a valid legal issue, or if this is simply “patent trolling”, but apparently a law firm representing Kelora Systems is now going after individual Amazon sellers over patent 821.  Patent 821 covers part of interactive search used on many web sites from Amazon to Ebay to Google to Bing.

This is interesting because individual sellers on Amazon who are using Web Store are basically buying the service from Amazon. By going after individual sellers who are leasing Web Store by Amazon, it is a way to get people scared enough to pay upfront for software they are leasing for their e-commerce solution. Apparently Magneto had the same problem in 2008 before they were purchased by Ebay for the same issue.

I am not a lawyer, not even close to understanding the patent system we currently have, but it seems very interesting for a law firm to go after individual sellers who are purchasing a service from Amazon for violations of Patent 821.

There is a lot of information about Patent 821 and its current court case against Microsoft, Adobe and others if you are interested in reading them; it is an eye popping set of documents to read. What I am more interested in though is the tactic of going against individuals who are leasing software from Amazon, much like we lease software from Ebay for our own web store. We have no control over what goes in it, how it is developed, or how it is managed by Ebay. Going after individuals who are leasing the software should in my opinion, contact a lawyer and roll the complaint up to Ebay legal or Amazon legal depending on where you are hosting your shopping cart out of.

The idea though of going after individual sellers or individuals makes for an interesting case of trying to get money before the final legal case is finished on the 17th of November 2011. This tactic has been used very successfully by the MPAA and RIAA in getting money for people who are doing illegal downloads. Most individuals looking at a 40,000 to 70,000 dollar payout to a legal firm for a patent violation would drive all but the largest Amazon and Ebay sellers out of business overnight. The average amazon seller only sells some 5,000 to 10,000 dollars worth of product a year on those sites. If you are looking at a fine of 4X to 7X annual gross revenue you are going to panic.

Get a lawyer; see if there is a way to charge back the legal fees to the party suing you. Engage with Amazon and any other party that is counter suing the legal firm and see if you can become part of their countersuit. Again I am not a lawyer but that is what I would be doing today if I got such a letter.

If anything is going to kill off e-commerce and the small to medium seller on Amazon who is leasing their shopping cart from them are things like this. This would seriously stop many sellers from even thinking of using Amazon Web Store, or other products like Amazon Web Store from other companies if there was even a chance of litigation that could wipe out a smaller seller’s business.

This one is worth following, and if you are interested in seeing what happens to people who lease commercial level web stores from Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo and others, you need to be following this case. In my non-lawyer thinking, I am leasing software much like I lease Microsoft Office or Adobe Reader because most EULA’s do not let me directly own the software to do with what I want. Commercial web stores are very similar in the EULA’s that we sign to use the product.

If it ends up that individuals can be sued for leasing software from any company if there is a patent violation, the end of software as we understand it is right around the corner. Because these kinds of lawsuits are going to kill the software industry as we understand it, and I’ll be asking to make sure that any software I purchase is “lawsuit potential free” before using it. When individuals have to police larger companies to make sure they are in compliance with patents, we all lose this game.

 

 

 

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The end of business as usual by Brian Solis

Brian Solis
Image via Wikipedia

It is fairly unusual for me to take a week to read a book, but the new book by Brian Solis is one of those books you need to take nice and slow to get all the nuances in it. I think personally that this is Brian Solis at his best, this is him at his peak performance, and as his skill as a writer. The book is that good, with very good stories and homilies to help sink home what he is saying. In many ways social media has transformed us all into highly connected people, with quality online relationships, and new ways of getting information into the hands of consumers.

I like the way that people are broken out into various types, from passive people who consume but take no action, to spammers, observers, trolls, and the perpetually whiny that live with us every day. The internet is a macrocosm of who we are as a society. If anything we are building the very first universal global society with its own culture, standards and morality. Everyone is invited in, people, companies, government, military, and the occasional passerby. Brian captures that in all its detail, with guide posts and road maps to how these work, and how these fail. The birth of the first global society tied together in all its functions and all its glory is going to be an interesting birth, and we are fortunate enough to be here at this time, helping, hindering, and changing to accommodate the growth and formation of that society.

There are so many things that stand out about this book from my own personal observation of the classroom and my students, to the interactions I see at large gatherings of people that this book was easy enough to bring home and make comparisons to my own real and online life. Brian hits all the major things I have seen on the D-list on the internet, and in my own interactions with both online and in person realities.

This is why this book rocks, this is why I get this, I see this every day in the school room and in my own life. Go into any Starbucks, most are connected in one way or another to the internet. Go into my classroom and you will see students fact checking me, using the internet for support, and engaging with their friends when the other students are catching up to the quicker students. He hits this one on the head, rather than haves and have not’s, we are in the era of are you connected. While the book will not transform my life and make me a multi-zillionaire, what it does do is validate my own experience on line and in person. What he sees I have seen, what he has experience I have experienced, we all live here in one way or another, and the most impoverished person is the one without connections, contacts, or a visible online life.

While he really does not go into the downsides of a public life, that is also just fine. We are just starting out, and observations matter at this point. Welcome to the global society, we are all here in one way or another, what we do with it matters. How companies intersect with the new global society matters, how people intersect with companies, authority, schools, and others matters. Brian captures that beautifully, making this the most important book you should read this year if you are interested in how the world of online and offline are intermixed, and valuable to those who chose to live life that way.

Rating this 5 of 5 stars, as a must read for anyone who is interested in what changes we have to make to accommodate and be successful in the world’s first global culture.

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A Tale of two customer bases Amazon and Ebay

Image representing eBay as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

My company is four years old this week, and while we do have our own web site where we sell from, we need to be on Amazon and Ebay as well to make sure we get the largest audience possible for our products. Going through the data over the last year, and over the last four years some interesting if trivial data points are showing up in terms of how successful someone can be on someone else’s system. Admitted there is no way I could spend the money on advertising to reach 88 million visitors a month like Ebay or Amazon, what is interesting though is the customer behavior exhibited by buyers

on both of these systems.

No worries Amazon and Ebay, I won’t give out the customers names or addresses, I won’t name names or talk about things I should not talk about.

There is a huge difference between Amazon and Ebay Customers. It is almost startling how much of a difference in terms of customer connection, interaction, and support we provide based on either system.

Amazon is a black hole, the only time we really hear from any customer is when we messed up an order, or they want to do a quick return and keep the product.

Ebay is hugely interactive in that we can do custom orders for products, our customers talk to us on a regular basis, they know when we are getting in product and will pre order it from us to we can almost do a “pull box” for customers before we get stuff in. Then we post their special links to their custom order and off we go selling stuff.

Amazon customers seem like they are getting increasingly frustrated, all of our feedback this year that has been negative or neutral has been about pricing. Amazon Toys and Games, many of the list prices are pennies above what I pay in wholesale. If you charge anything above that, Amazon customers have no problems providing negative feedback that then in turn kills your customer service ratings. For us, this means we have been slowly moving toys off Amazon and onto Ebay because pennies above whole sale list pricing means I lose money on each toy no matter what.

Ebay customers seem like they are enjoying the ability to negotiate prices, and we do haggle through the best offer system. People seem to like that a lot, and it leads to happier customers.

2% of our Amazon customers are unhappy with the service they got from us, 0% of our ebay customers are unhappy with the service they got from us.

Nearly 100% of our orders on Ebay get feedback, on Amazon about 8% of our orders get feedback; this makes a negative or neutral feedback on Amazon more likely to influence our overall feedback scores than they do on Ebay. I never hear from customers on our own web site, so I don’t know if they are happy or sad about what they got.

Pricing pressures and downward margins are higher on Amazon than they are on Ebay, we get a better price for our product (near retail) on Ebay than we do on Amazon, for a small company that means the difference from going out of business to surviving the recession we are in.

Batman sells best at 10AM on Amazon, but sells best at 5PM on Ebay, Superman sells best at 6AM on Amazon, but does not sell on Ebay.

Of all the systems, and reflected in the latest Ebay quarterly sales statistics, Ebay pound for pound, item for item sells better, performs better, fetches a nearly full retail price, and is much easier to work with customers on. Amazon has been difficult this year with an amazing amount of negative feedback from customers thinking they are not getting a deal from us, and the way that toys and game pricing is reflecting wholesale (what I pay in wholesale) rather than retail. In the longer term, the best strategy for my company is to focus on Ebay, and start reducing what we are doing through Amazon.

 

 

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