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Thursday August 10, 2006

UK terror plot foiled

Anglosphere

A major terrorist plot to blow up planes in mid-flight has been disrupted, says Scotland Yard, says BBC.

Passengers will not be allowed to take any hand luggage on to any flights in the UK, the department said.

Only the barest essentials - including passports and wallets - will be allowed to be carried on board in transparent plastic bags.

Glad I'm not flying today.

Interesting how this happens just a day after home secretary John Reid warned:

The UK might have to modify its freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their "misuse and abuse" by terrorists, John Reid has said.

He conceded that was never an easy request, but it was up to everyone to ask: "What price our security, at what cost can we preserve our freedoms?"

The UK faced its "most sustained period of severe threat since the end of World War II", the home secretary warned.

I think Benjamin Franklin would have a few words to say about that..

Fantasy Baseball ruling

Anglosphere

Neil has a good short summary of the Fantasy Baseball ruling:

If they're going to publish stats in newspapers across the country, then people get to use those stats, including the player names.

I recall this has been a debate in Europe as well, mostly about football games. I'm not sure whether FIFA won or not, but plenty of unlicensed fantasy games (or pools, or betting) do exist.

There might however be a limit to the extent of player name usage. Most games featuring all players tend to be made by big publishers who very well might have made a deal with FIFA. On the other hand, not having the full dataset of player names might simply be a matter of practicality for smaller players.

Top paying keywords?

Software

I found a page which claims to list the 100 top paying keywords, at least for their (Search7) network delivery. And guess what? It's all pills and gambling: "tramadol online", "buy tramadol", "cheap tramadol", "buy phentermine online", "black jack card game", "buy soma", "online gambling", "online casino", "online poker", "texas holdem".. and so on, and so on.

The on-line advertising world seems to miss out on Nigerian scams, mortgages and webcam teens, but other than that I spot an interesting correlation with popular topics in e-mail spam. One might wonder if these are sometimes the same people, although I doubt it: spam appeals to some because it is dirt cheap, compensating marginal conversion rates with bulk numbers. CPC rates of over $6 however indicate the opposite: strict targetting, to obtain optimal conversion rates. Perhaps some people run hybrid campaigns, but to me there seems to be a completely different business attitude between the two marketing efforts.

Aside from the fact that spam sucks, of course.

Next day: Saturday August 12, 2006 Previous day: Tuesday August 8, 2006

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