If you're really good at answering questions there are now two ways you can earn money.

You could enter "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" -- or you could become a Google Researcher.

Yes, the search engine giant is trialing new service it calls Google Answers, and it's looking for people to come up with paid answers to questions posed by other websurfers.

However, given the number of "expurts" out there, I wonder if they might not get totally overwhelmed by the burden of vetting all those highly qualified "web desinaz" and "Internet konsultantz" that are now out of work in the wake of the dot-com crash.

The Great Web Fraud (part 2)
I'm sorry I didn't get time on Friday to publish all the excellent feedback that was received in response to my comments on the transparent caching web proxies now being used by many ISPs.

One point that came to light in the correspondence received might well explain why Telecom/XTRA still refuses to differentiate between local and international traffic for users of its JetStream DSL service.

Think about it for a moment -- if XTRA charged international prices for content that was actually served up from its local proxy cache, wouldn't they be in breach of the Fair Trading act?

As it is, you have to wonder whether there's some extreme profiteering going on here. When a regularly accessed page is cached, the cost of delivering it to a local user is virtually nil (especially when you own the copper, the PSTN and just about every other part of the connection from a user's PC to the caching server concerned). Charging 20 cents per megabyte for that locally served-up data is nothing short of highway robbery!

It's also no wonder they're throttling P2P traffic for JetStart users -- after all, you can't easily cache that stuff so it must really hurt that they can't play the same cheap tricks as is done with some web content.

Readers Say (updated hourly) Nothing Yet Have Your Say

ING's Day In Court
Regular readers will recall that last year an Australian company by the name of the Internet Name Group copped a lot of flack in this column when they were stupid enough to try and dupe local businesses into thinking that their domain names were in jeopardy.

You'll probably also remember that after I exposed their little scam, they threatened to haul my arse through the courts.

Naturally I told them what they could do with their legal threats -- but it seems that now they're the ones facing court action. According to this story (NewsBytes), their unscrupulous tactics have come to the attention of the ACCC.

What is it about the domain name registration business that seems to attract so many ex used-car salesmen? Even Verisign in the USA has had their butt kicked for trying to dupe businesses, and a good 30% of the spam I get is from shonky fools trying to flog me a dot-biz name.

Have Your Say
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IMPORTANT NOTE
Due to other higher-priority calls on my time and resources over the coming days, the publication of this column may be a little erratic.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible however.

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