While Internet companies elsewhere are desparate to market themselves well enough to drive traffic to their site, the Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation of Perrysburg, Ohio might be experiencing a case of tunnel-vision (pun intended). They do not want YouTube users accidentally coming to their site, apparently because it is too much for their hosting provider to handle.

They complained a few weeks back that the site was being downed by heavy traffic as users looking for YouTube landed on their site instead, presumably by typing the wrong domain name. This downtime cost them a great deal of money in lost customers, they said. How big was the traffic spike? They claim unique visitors went from 1,500 to over 2 million per month. UTube has been forced to move hosts 5 times to cope with the traffic, with bandwidth bills increasing by a factor of 100, they claim. They registered the domain way back in 1996, so they have every claim to it – what’s more, they also argue that the UTube name is strongly tied to their identity.

I understand their concern about the site being down, but is that really the problem? What would the increase in sales/conversion be if the site were able to stay up? It just makes me wonder if they realize that they are being seen by a much larger potential customer base now? In fact, I was just looking for a tube to buy the other day…

The IHT has a rather gruesome report on how some soldiers were prepared for managing risks in Iraq:

At one military course, an advanced trauma treatment program he had taken before deploying, he said the instructors gave each corpsman a live pig.

“The idea is to work with live tissue,” he said. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. And every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature.”

“My pig?” he said. “They shot him twice in the face with a 9 millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire.”

“I kept him alive for 15 hours,” Kirby said. “That was my pig.”

“That was my pig,” he said.

Over the years, people in information security have always debated whether it is better to hire someone who has cracked systems or someone who could, but never would. Some say it is the same as deciding whether to hire policemen who have prior criminal records, or hiring surgeons who have intentionally harmed their patients. This story, by way of harsh example, certainly touches a nerve in that debate.

Interesting conclusion by the Guardian regarding patents and risk:

Firms are now being set up, such as Nathan Myrhvold’s Intellectual Ventures, solely to acquire and exploit patents. In this brave new world, owning patents can be far more profitable than winning the lottery and less hazardous than robbing banks.

That certainly raises some information security questions about the consequences of intellectual property regulations today, let alone their original intent.