From: Rasheed Baqai (rasheed@usa.net)
Date: Sun Feb 04 2001 - 16:02:49 PST
I've been a user of Juno since '96 when they became the first provider to
give email access without having a dial-up account (when they provided
a free dial-up number to send and receive Internet email). I rarely use
it now, but I think the hype exceeds the reality in this case. Back then,
MCI was still offerring email-only services to residential customers for
about $5.00 per month (with the old-fashion letter/number address).
Juno has now developed into a free with ads Internet provider and a no-ads
with fee Internet provider.
Juno has an app that looks at the applications on your machine. It looks
at the OS and other things (and you can browse in one the log files to see
what information it has collected). Third-party sales of this data is
similar to "53% of users are running Win95 with 32MB or ram or less",
etc if anyone is even buying this data right now. Could it be used for
bad purposes, sure? Can you trust Juno? It is up to the end user.
I've had conversations in the past with Mr. Ardai. He is definitely in a
deep situation in trying to get Juno profitable, but Juno has been
up-front with its privacy policy from the beginning.
Juno has announced that it will try to make money using unused cycles of
computers for cracking difficult problems. Many of you have done this
with SETI-related and security-key challenges. A lot of people think
these programs are malicious and will look into other things in people's
computers. Well, they can be malicious, but they also can be simple
programs just like the existing ones are. Juno hopes to asks people
voluntarily at first for using this (mind you, this is mostly targeted to
the users of the free Internet service not really those who use just the
free email service). If there are not enough volunteers, you could see
Juno making it a requirement of the most heavy free users. Who will buy
these results? It is expects biotech companies mostly. I mean there are
already start-ups out there that have made entire computer networks of
companies able to do the exact thing. What people have been doing for
free with SETI and security-key may have a monetary value. In any case,
Juno knows that it won't last in the free Internet market with just
advertising revenue.
Finally, those who like their @juno.com address can access their email
like most other email services at a website. http://webmail.juno.com
without using the Juno client.
I don't know what the future for Juno is, but it is currently the
third or fourth largest active ISP after AOL,MSN,Earthlink. They made it
longer than most, and brought non-computer companies to advertising before
most sites could.
Rasheed
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 06 2001 - 04:11:14 PST