"We're in the early days of behavioral targeting but it's an idea whose time has come"

We'll be the first to admit that it's hard swimming against the tide all the time, especially when the tide is of tsunami proportions... We get flack from time to time from self-anointed pundits who think we are nuts to stick with our vision of Kerika as a peer-to-peer based desktop application, when the prevailing vision is all about advertising-supported Web services -- the so-called "Web 2.0" model.

And then a juicy story like this one comes along, from today's Wall Street Journal, which does a great job of explaining just how scary the brave new world of Web 2.0 is going to be like from a privacy perspective!. A couple of quotes:

[Microsoft] has begun combining personal data from the 263 million users of its free Hotmail email service -- the biggest in the world -- with information gained from monitoring their searches.

"We're in the early days of behavioral targeting but it's an idea whose time has come," says Simon Andrews, chief digital strategy officer for WPP Group's MindShare, a large buyer of ad time. "There is a lot of potential to know if people have been looking at specific sites."

Check out the article and let us know what you think.

The land of mist and moss

This has been an interesting winter so far, here in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Our weather is normally pretty mild: lots of rain, of course, which I like because it keeps everything nice and green except for the month of August.

The past month or so, however, haven't been all that wonderful: first we had a terrific snow storm a few weeks ago that stranded me about 5 miles away from while I lived, leaving me to trudge home on foot for an hour-and-half through a blizzard at night.

And now, a pretty scary wind storm. I don't know exactly what a "wind storm" is; until yesterday I hadn't even heard the term before, but I have lived through hurricanes and tropical cyclones before, and that's pretty much what it sounded like last night when the wind really picked up.

So, what's all this got to do with you, dear reader? Well, severe weather usually means large-scale power outages, of the kind that our ISP has difficultly coping with, so you might have seen some disruptions in service -- e.g. not being able to go online because our central rendezvous server is down and out. It has also made it somewhat hard for us to get our next version ready as quickly as we would have liked.

Still, we are hard at work on our next version, which will have a bunch of exciting new functions as well as some significant changes (improvements, we hope!) to existing functions. Stay tuned, as I start previewing the goodies over the next few days and weeks...

Contacting Us

If you need reach Kerika, please email info@kerika.com. We try to answer all emails within 24 hours; unfortunately this particular email address, which is the only one we post on the Web, gets a ton of spam from all the robots out there.

Kerika behind a firewall

Short-version: Kerika is supposed to let you connect to other users even if you are behind a firewall, but that isn't working right now: we have a bug that we want to hope in the next few weeks.

Long-version: normally your Kerika application would try to use ports 10421 and 10422 to connect to our rendezvous server, and thence to other Kerika users who are online. (First it would try port 10421, if that failed it would try port 10422).

If neither port is open, e.g. because you are behind a corporate firewall, your Kerika application is supposed to use port 80 -- which is almost always open since this is the port that your browser uses to access the Internet -- to connect to a relay server at our data center. The relay server is then supposed to then act as an intermediary between you and the storage server and other Kerika users who happen to be online.

But there's a bug. Right now the relay server settings, at the data center and on your computer, are also trying to use the same ports 10421 and 10422, instead of using port 80. Which means that if your firewall is already blocking these ports, the relay server won't work either!

The fix to this problem isn't very hard, but unfortunately now is not a good time for us to implement it because we are deep in the process of wrapping up our next version, which is going to have some very significant improvements and new features. We will try to make sure the fix goes into this version, but there is a lot of testing still left to do so we won't be able to roll out the fix for a few weeks at least.

Our sincere apologies for hassles created by this bug...