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From Blorge and Engadget: the iTunes Store has passed Best Buy to become the number two music retailer in the USA. Wal-Mart is still number one.

Apple says 50 million customers have bought over 4 billion songs, with 20 million sold on Christmas day alone.

From the AP and Consumerist: Enzyte is history.

On 21 September 2006, I reported on the US government’s investigation of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, the company that markets and sells Enzyte. The company’s advertisements featured a man named Smiling Bob, who lived a “better life” because of Enzyte. The advertisements included fake endorsements from medical doctors, and fake statistics from customer satisfaction surveys.

No one was satisfied

Enzyte was advertised as a natural male enhancement treatment. The Enzyte pills were little more than a placebo. The company made its money through credit card fraud, along with a steadfast refusal to process returns and cancellations from millions of customers.

It’s just the kind of business model that made the US Departments of Justice, Commerce and Health take notice.

Founder Steve Warshak, his mother, and others now face fines and jail time for their roles in the scam, as well as obstructing the investigation. This editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer hails the ruling, and pleads for Smiling Bob’s demise.

Over a 100 years ago, Americans had another name for fake medications like Enzyte: patent medicine. See Wikipedia, QuackMedicine.com and the US National Library of Medicine for more information on this topic.

Business Week has updated a popular article from 2005 on business blogging. The new version is well worth reading. It now covers social media, including social networks. and provides many examples of how these Internet services have become sources of competitive advantage for some companies.

In a few industries, blogs and social networking have become key success factors. Higher education is well on its way.

Here’s an interesting statistic: only 27 percent of US Internet users read blogs. If you’re reading my blog regularly, I guess you’re an early adopter!

From the New York Times, here’s a report about the booming gray market for iPhones in China. iPhones are manufactured in Taiwan, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apple doesn’t sell the iPhone in Taiwan or in Communist China because no Chinese telecom operator will meet Apple’s demands. So there’s not legal way to buy an iPhone in Taiwan or China.

No carrier? No support? No problem.

It’s relatively easy to unlock an iPhone and use it with on a GSM network. Third-party software is available to localize the screens and provide missing features. When Apple updates the iPhone’s firmware, these unlocks tend to break. This article from Business Week mentions that Prague is a major center for iPhone hacking.
But someone who is using an iPhone in China may not care that much about these new features. As more iPhones enter the gray market, more programmers join the effort to jailbreak the device.

This makes me wonder what might have happened if Apple sold unlocked GSM iPhones online and in its retail stores, and told AT&T, T-Mobile and every other GSM carrier in the world to just deal with it. The customer service problems might be significant, which explains why Apple has decided not to break the rules… yet.

I also wonder how many iPhones have been purchased in Honolulu and then shipped outside the United States.

Silicon Hutong predicted over a year ago that Apple would wait to introduce the iPhone in China. Looks like he was right!

See my earlier posts about the iPhone:

• 31 January 2008: Applications are coming for the iPhone
• 26 January 2008: iPhone helps AT&T add more wireless customers
• 13 January 2008: The story of the iPhone
• 20 November 2007: An iPhone for China?
• 14 November 2007: No iPhone for you, China

Earlier today, we noticed that YouTube was not available. An ISP in Pakistan, PieNet, single-handedly blocked global access to the popular video site for two hours, according to multiple reports on the Times of London, ZDnet, ReneSys, OpenDNS and Data Center Knowledge.

PieNet hijacked YouTube’s domain name by sending Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) instructions called advertisements to reroute all requests for YouTube.com to an IP address in Pakistan. ISPs use BGP to link the routers in their networks together, creating the global internetwork that we call the Internet. ISPs trust that the BGP advertisements they receive from other ISPs are correct.

Trust is cheap

Researchers have developed encrypted forms of BGP, but ISPs would rather not implement these more secure protocols because more powerful and expensive routers would be needed. While Cisco and other router manufacturers would welcome the additional sales revenue, ISPs would pass along their increased costs to businesses and consumers.

Many Internet protocols and services rely upon trust. Email is a good example. The core e-mail protocols do not check message content or the identities of senders and recipients. Email messages are sent across the Internet as alphanumeric text. Over the years, as a few users decided to exploit the open nature of email, we have added protocols and services to identify spam, check user identity and encrypt messages and passwords.

Pakistan goes offline

It is very rare for a major mistake like this to happen, because ISP managers and staff understand the value of reputation and trust. This redirect was probably not an accident or an error by PieNet staff – it was almost certainly an intentional hijacking designed to make a political statement. A bogus BGP advertisement is a very loud and rude way to make such a statement.

Richard Stiennon of ZDnet notes that PieNet probably brought all Internet traffic in Pakistan to a grinding halt, as Pakistan Telecom could not handle millions of requests for YouTube.

YouTube engineers detected the redirection quickly and asked for help from major ISPs. Their next step was to find the bad BGP instructions. This was a trivial exercise, as PieNet’s identifiers were all over the advertisement.

PCCW Telecom, the main Internet provider for Pakistan, removed Pakistan’s ISPs from the Internet until the new BGP advertisements propagated to ISPs across the world. Once YouTube’s route was restored, users could watch their videos again.

Internet users in Pakistan will have slower Internet connections for the next few days, and network engineers around the world will keep close tabs on Pakistani ISPs.