‘She’s just a devil woman, with evil on her mind,

Beware the devil woman, she’s gonna get you from behind.’

In 2006 Sir Cliff Richard had a conservatory built onto his house on the Wentworth Estate in Virginia Water, Surrey, but it had been erected without planning permission. On the 30^th June 2009 he applied to the Planning Committee of Runnymede Borough Council (RBC) for retrospective permission. Instead the Council ordered him to demolish the £30,000 structure.

Sir Cliff was upset, but his fans (mostly female) were furious. Quite spontaneously they started e-mailing RBC to express displeasure. They wrote in their thousands, in their tens of thousands. The Council system was overwhelmed – and crashed.

I’ve been trying to e-mail two of my councillors since last Sunday – today is Wednesday. All I get is a message telling me that my letter has been ‘enqueued’ and is ‘undeliverable.’ They should have added ‘Congratulations!’

Cliff’s Devil Women have succeeded in getting RBC from behind with a classic example of a denial of service attack!

So Facebook has joined Myspace and Twitter in enabling personalized web-addresses, with half a million addresses grabbed within minutes of the scheme going live. According to the Sunday Times www.facebook.com/princecharles went to a guy in Hawaii. Surprise, surprise, the cyber-squatters have moved in. Girls Aloud, Rolls-Royce, Waitrose, Morrisons and thousands more celebrity and company names have all gone to hijackers.

No doubt these cyber-squatters think they can sell back the addresses to legitimate owners wanting to reclaim their own names. These fast-acting squatters think they’re so clever with their extortion racket (because that’s what it is). What they don’t realize is that they are about to lose out big time. The world has moved on since cybersquatting was profitable in the early days of the internet. Numerous missives from WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) have ruled that such actions are in breach of intellectual property rights (IPR). If you use Marks & Spencer’s name to attract visitors to your site, then their lawyers will take you down – not for extortion, but for breach of IPR, which is much easier to prove.

The extortionists think they are cleverly playing the Deep Pockets game – believing large organizations will pay up to retrieve their names. There’s no point in stealing from poor people. But Deep Pockets can also operate in reverse – they can afford to defend themselves.

What is more, companies and celebrities are being helped by new sharks on the block. Now there are groups of lawyers who specialize in going after IPR infringers on behalf of these companies. It’s an open and shut case, and they have the resources to bankrupt the squatters. If your name isn’t Harrod then mere ownership of www.facebook.com/harrods is a slam dunk for the opposition – who with malice aforethought will grind you into the dirt.

Of course Facebook could stop all this nonsense. They reserve the right to close accounts. If they made it a condition that names cannot be transferred for payment, then any evidence of a demand for money could lead to closedown.

All the while the sharks are circling. My advice to cyber-squatters is to give up these addresses immediately. I already smell blood on the water.

Another topic that fascinates me is how rumours spread over the Internet. On April 1^st 2003, All Fools Day, someone at CNN thought it a good joke to post a spurious story about the assassination of Bill Gates in Los Angeles. It spread around the world like wildfire, and caused the South Korean stock market to drop $3 billion.

What was the hot topic among the Chinese students on my 2007/2008 lecture course? Demonstrations for/against the Olympic Torch? No! China and Tibet? No! It was the web-spread rumours about the Edison Chen sex scandal.

Edison who? For those of you who, like me, have never heard of him, Chen is a famous singer/actor from Hong Kong. He is now infamous for using his celebrity to entice a string of beautiful actresses into his bed. The cad also photographed his conquests, and stored them on his laptop.

Obviously, the steamy scenes were too much for his PC, which soon also demanded ‘servicing.’ He carefully deleted the incriminating files before taking the laptop to a local computer store – but not securely enough. Edison didn’t know of the numerous products on the market that can recover deleted files. He should have asked at that same friendly neighbourhood computer store!!

Here is a warning for every celebrity – prurient shop assistants can’t resist having a look at your files – both undeleted and deleted. That is what happened in Chen’s case. The sordid images found themselves out onto the net, and soon everyone in China had seen the pictures. Wildfire is an understatement.

The subsequent furore forced Edison to announce his ‘retirement’ from the entertainment business. The actresses’ careers were ruined, their families shamed, one even attempted suicide – there were even rumours that Triads were threatening Chen’s life.

Isn’t it amazing what Information Systems professors at the LSE can learn about the Internet in China from their students!

We are all aware that spam pollutes the Internet, but did you know it also pollutes the planet! That’s what a new McAfee-commissioned report produced by green consultants ICF says. Check it out for yourself:

http://img.en25.com/Web/McAfee/CarbonFootprint_web_final2.pdf

It’s a fascinating read, and you’ll find lots of data on the coherent behaviour of spam. For example, I didn’t realize that 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008! The world population is around 6 billion, so that means an average of 10,000 spam e-mails for every man woman and child on the planet!

Managing the spam – deleting the junk, and finding e-mails falsely filtered as junk – is a black hole for energy. Each spam message averages out to the equivalent emission of 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide – that’s the same as driving a car for a metre. Scale it up, and the annual cost of spam is the same as driving a car around the globe 1.6 million times.

But why stop at spam. Feel guilty every time you log onto the web!

Mike Morgan has just received a cease-and-desist notice from the mighty Goldman Sachs; GoDaddy has locked his domain names.

‘Mike who?’ I can hear you ask. I didn’t know about him either until an article appeared in the Daily Telegraph telling of how he had set up a blog with the intention of dishing the dirt on Goldman Sachs. Naturally, I checked his blog, along with many thousands of others who had never heard of him either.

Why would Goldman’s even bother? How could a Goliath like Goldman’s fall into the trap of this tit-for-tat nonsense with a David investment advisor from Florida – a nobody? It’s not as if Morgan was an insider who knows where the bodies are buried. He is just one of a long line of malcontents with a pathological hatred of ‘Goldmine Sachs’, J.P. Morgan, and the rest. The web is full of rage and hatred focussed on Wall Street .

It’s most peculiar. If they’d left him alone Morgan’s sites would have slid back into oblivion. But now he’s hot news. This is a classic example of the coherence that Web Ecologists love to study. A Blog is dribbling along, until suddenly a press story singles it out for particular attention. In e-mails, other blogs, and in the self-referential popular press, the word spreads outward, and the hit rate of Morgan’s blog rockets skyward. A law suit is oxygen for blogs hungry for publicity.

And even if Goldman’s lawyers manage to close him down, he can pop up elsewhere. Others will join in. Just Google ‘Mike Morgan Goldman Sachs’ and you’ll find them. It’ll be interesting whether there’s a critical mass here, or whether it will flare out, and just fade away. I’ll be following the story with interest.

All good research material for Web Ecologists.

And as usual the legal eagles will be raking in the cash. It’s as I’ve always said: “The Internet is a job creation scheme for lawyers!”

Some call it ‘entertainment shopping,’ to others it’s gambling; some even say it’s a scam. Welcome to the controversial world of ‘penny auctions’ like Swoopo, in reality a highly innovative web-business model, a ‘bidding fee scheme,’ which budding Web Ecologists should check out – although having said that, they should be very wary of getting sucked into any bidding.

The idea is simple. The site will show a wide range of very desirable products, like expensive digital cameras, laptops, games consoles, TVs and mobile phones; each to be auctioned. The auction is run simultaneously around the globe, although each country has its own unique interface showing prices in a local currency. Clever. It maximizes the audience, and ensures a 24-7 auction.

The current bidding price is shown on the screen (starting at zero), and each bid entered with the simple click of a button adds a ‘penny’ to the auction price. The successful bidder will pay the displayed price for the product, usually a fraction of the full retail price.

However, each bid actually costs a UK bidder 50 pence (75 cents in the US). Note that not all auctions are ‘penny auctions’ – some increments are 10 pence or more with each bid, but we’ll stick with the penny’ variety here as they are typical.

A date for the end of the auction is given, often a couple of days or more away. But there’s a twist. There’s a running clock that starts with the auction, but it is set to a much shorter time (typically the order of hours). It clicks down second by second, and if it reaches zero then the final bidder wins the product. And there’s twist. Each new bid not only adds the one penny to the price, it also extends the time on the running clock by a few seconds. The 24-7 clientele means the clock won’t run down in the middle of the night, keeping the auction going and maximizing Swoopo’s profits.

It’s fascinating to watch an auction. When the clock goes down below fifteen seconds it glows red, and when it gets close to zero the bids start coming in, and not only does the price go up, but also the time on the running clock is extended. It’s fascinating to watch the behaviour patterns of individual bidders – very easy to do since the site displays the bids as they come in.

What a brilliant business model. If the final ‘penny auction’ price is £x, then the total number of bids will have been 100x (100 penny bids for each pound in the final price); and the income for Swoopo is £51x pounds. (For every penny in the final price Swoopo gets 50 pence for each bid, plus that penny from the sale). This is a profit of £(51x-y), where £y is the original retail price of the product. The break-even point is just less than 2% (1.9607…) of what the product cost Swoopo.

Take a real example: a popular brand of TV (retail price £679.99) sold for £86.83 in a penny auction. The income for Swoopo was £4341.50+£86.83 (that’s £4430.34): profit £3750.34. Not bad! Swoopo would have broken even at £13.34, and that’s always assuming they bought the TV at the full retail price.

The rational Web Ecologist in this situation would note that if Swoopo can make £3750 selling a £680 product, then there will be a lot of losers out there. Granted the winner gets the goods at a very reasonable price, but hundreds of failed bidders will have spent a lot of money. A classic example of the “victory of hope over experience.”

So it was bound to happen! Now there are sites that sell books purporting to provide a strategy to win on Swoopo. Let me give you a word of warning from Game Theory! If more than one bidder is operating according to the same strategy, then the non-linearity introduced into the situation will negate the strategy.

It only goes to show that the great American showman Phineas T. Barnum was right: “There’s one born every minute!”

The Web is an exciting place. Crazy things happen there. Don’t take my word for it – find out for yourself.

The Internet is a chaotic system, populated by millions of users, each with unique purposes and priorities. Out of this primordial soup, coherent islands of order have emerged: search engines, e-mails, social networks, user generated content, viral marketing and so much more. Such phenomena are worthy of study – not only by academics, but also by ordinary users. Web Coherence aims to help user-investigators with tools to observe the exotic creatures inhabiting this environment, and to publish their findings among members.

In July 2005 a young woman was travelling with her lap dog on a South Korean subway train, when the dog was ‘taken short’ and defecated on the carriage floor. A fellow passenger gave the woman a tissue, and she promptly cleaned up her pet, but left the mess on the floor. Angry passengers demanded she wipe it up; the woman rudely refused and left the compartment. A few elderly complainants on the train then did the job themselves.

But the story didn’t end there. One passenger had taken photographs of the drama with a mobile phone, and incensed, posted the pictures on the internet. The story spread like wildfire and it wasn’t long before the ‘dog-poop’ girl was identified, and her details broadcast on the net. Consequently she and her family faced a barrage of abuse from ‘netizen vigilantes’, and according to some sources she was forced to terminate her education programme.

This is no isolated incident. One of my Chinese students, who will remain anonymous until I have permission to use his name, has told me that in his country organized vigilante groups are forming on the web with the sole aim of ‘naming and shaming’ alleged corrupt businessmen and officials.

He cited the ruination of Jiugeng Zhou, a former senior official from Government of Nanjing, the capital city in Jiangshu Province. In November 2008, Zhou stated that soaring property prices were beneficial to the economy. Some members of a large internet forum took great exception to this statement, and published his home address, mobile phone number and other private data online.

With attention now firmly focussed on Zhou, someone posted the information that he had brother, a property developer, who had won many lucrative government contracts in Zhou’s own precinct. Comments were made about Zhou living the good life in a large house. Questions were asked as to how he could afford this on his annual salary, and why the official media hadn’t investigated this fact. More postings and angry comments poured in. Soon everyone in the province saw Zhou as a hate figure. Eventually the mounting coherent attack on Zhou forced his supervisors to sack him.

If you have any examples of web vigilantes let us know.

There were stupid virtual gifts, offers of a virtual knighthood, adverts for stuff I wouldn’t want in a million years, tedious facile applications and surveys (do I really care what proportion of the brain-dead prefer Pepsi to Coke?) I’ve been shown lists of favourite books, and what passes for music: bands with daft names like Flatulent Freddie and the Snot Nosed Psychopaths droning some tuneless ditty.

Personally, I use Facebook as a private personal network. During the odd break I like to find out how ex-students are getting on with their lives. I’m looking for the odd short message telling me of how their lives/careers are progressing – the odd photo of their families or on vacation is fun. It’s perfectly OK to ask me for a reference (although strangely they seem only come in LinkedIn, not Facebook!) I am not interested in friends of friends; one degree of separation is as far as I want to travel. One aspect of social networks that is often forgotten is exclusivity. Far from inviting everybody in, many network members want to keep everyone else out – and why not?

Yet most of what I see are lists of superficial facts, invites to parties (where they play the junk music), adolescent ‘I hate Manchester United’ jibes shared with the world, and facile comments about ‘what I’m feeling now!’ The scale of garbage postings seems to be increasing exponentially. Don’t people realise that this drivel is being read by HR departments – postings say far more about you than your CV ever does.

How do we filter out this overload? It seems we’ve lost track of what the network is for. If we’re not careful we’ll throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’m already seeing a sharp rise in postings like ‘X is withdrawing from Facebook until further notice.’ This is only to be expected when social networks become a nuisance.

The Daily Mail headline screams out “Girls at Risk.” Apparently young girls are being incited by friends to post provocative pictures of themselves on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc., … because it’s cool! What are these silly adolescents thinking? They are putting themselves at immediate risk from predatory paedophiles. But they also have a much more long-term problem. Once the photos are out there, they can never be called back. What will these girls say when sometime in the future prospective mothers-in-law check up on their Web history?

Never put anything on a computer (on Facebook or in e-mails) that you wouldn’t want the whole world to see – because they will see it. The ‘cool’ guy who shares his innermost secrets online, or his risqué photographs, or his humorous anecdotes; or who vents his spleen about ex-colleagues and ex-employers, or brags about drug taking or other illegal, antisocial or inappropriate behaviour, is … an idiot with tunnel vision. His material will be seen, not only by like- minded people, each with a ‘fun’ sense of humour, but also by others with malice aforethought.

Potential employers are scanning the web to check out job applicants. According to CareerBuilder.com, a large US online job- finder site, HR departments are using search engines in their due diligence checks, uncovering incriminating evidence posted on social networks. Disloyal comments about past employers, or the release of their confidential material, the use of inappropriate screen names, sloppy or lewd vocabulary, even a poor writing style, can all lead to that rejection slip.

I know of one young lad who was offered an interview for a place on an MBA course. The university Googled him, only to discover that some years earlier he had posted a blog on how to subvert the local telco charging system. The offer was immediately withdrawn.

Be sure, on the Internet your sins will find you out.