February 28, 2012
AT&T Data Scampaign
Adam Curry,
Weblog, February 28, 2012.
Adam Curry's post is worth restating in its entirety: "I was just one of many AT&T customers who received the now infamous 'throttling' threats. In today's WSJ the company uncloaks their ultimate goal. They plan on offering big media companies a reverse billing service for bandwidth. Not unlike a toll-free telephone number, the cost of the bandwidth used can be billed to the provider. Once implemented, you could watch a Netflix movie via 3G on your tablet without it affecting your personal bandwidth usage. This cost I believe will of course be passed on to the media companies customers one way or another, as they are now effectively paying for the bandwidth twice. The biggest problem with this Scampaign is that smaller and independent media companies will start to get squeezed out of the market."
How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy
Carlos Bueno,
Weblog, February 28, 2012.
Amusing story of bots engaged in a price war selling books that don't exist. It begins with them creating books out of Wikipedia pages and selling them for inflated prices (pictured, above). It ends with them getting into a price war over resales of a book offered on Amazon.com. "A computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it." Via Boing Boing and Wolfgang Greller.
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