This is by way of being a response to the Web 2.0 blog. I have to agree with the view that people don’t usually want all-singing, all-dancing websites. They particularly don’t want to return to them.

I accept that this isn’t strictly true for novelty websites. There is always room for sites that you visit to go “Wow, what a fantastic effect!” and recommend to your friends. However, this is a very limited market. It’s hard to see where money can be made from these sites. They only have value to business when they are promoting a band or a movie. So, there is no one to pay for the development time. This means that these sites tend to exist only as student exercises.

Otherwise extreme use of the newer capacities of the web usually only exist to promote web design companies. Even more, they mainly exist to promote web design companies to other web design companies, which seems a bit pointless.

If there are problems with the Web from the end-user’s perspective, these are not usually along the lines of “If only there was more pointless moving around of icons and text and a few more flashing lights” Most problems are more like – This doesnt work as I expect. I have to log in to do anything. Do I really have to enable Active X to buy a mouse online and so on? Why does it take as long to buy a train ticket online as to go to the trainstation and buy one?

My main whine about the web is that sites are all starting to look the same. And this is not notably pretty. There used to be a much wider range of web aesthetics, from much more beautiful to much uglier. Now most of the web is just boring. The web has settled down to a common dull aesthetic. Maybe if some of the genius needed to pick up on a dozen new technologies went into a more experimental approach to the look of web pages, we’d all start to get excited about it again.

A new form of Trojan holds your files to ransom (according to http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6066636.html). Not having files of value >= 10p, this doesn’t exactly put me in a flap. But, as I am fair game for getting almost any malware, I could still find myself horribly inconvenienced.

According to zdnet, this is the third such attack in about a year. There are lots of details about the new Trojan attack on Sophos. (http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2006/04/ransom.html) Its characteristics include a seemingly modest $10.99 ransom demand, together with a pretty unreasonable demand to pay within 30 minutes, which must be unmeetable unless you live in a Western Union office. Oddly the messages don’t inpire much trust in the promise that paying up will halt the trojan, as the message provides a Yahoo email address for you to contact if the removal code doesn’t work.

The basic design flaw in all this from the criminal’s viewpoint must be the same problem faced by all extortionists – picking up the cash. Western Union may be international, but it is not anonymous. There can’t be a Western Union office in the developed world that isn’t covered by the currently ubiquitous cameras. A huge influx of $10.99 Western Union orders to one office would be its own trail anyway, unless, there is a computer wizard isomewhere so bored that they would bother to write and propagate a Trojan for $10.99. In which case, they could probaly get away with it but might be better advised to get a more profitable line of work.