Well I have not verified all this data, but it sure does not sound good...

here is an article on MSNBC, claiming Richard Splain was involved in healthcare insurance scams & Wholesale RX scams:

Take a look at Nevada Health Care Network now.

The "for lease" sign in the window tells most of the story. The empty office behind it tells the rest.

"I could not locate the company. The phones were disconnected."

"After everything was closed down, we were still getting ripped off. Our account, our credit card, was being looted for the monthly fees.

There is also a KVBC news video on this page, and this article covers Wholesale RX:

News 3's Darcy Spears first exposed a local company called Wholesale RX that sells low cost prescriptions from other countries. Problem is, the drugs are not approved in the US, so they're illegal and could be dangerous. Since the investigation, the FDA has started to crack down on these companies.

And this site aims to connect the same person to Traffic Power & home buying scams.

PLEASE follow this guy Splain! HE IS A CROOK! He burned my wife and I in 2001 in a "we buy houses" scam. We got sued by the bank and had to file BK!! He also has ties to an Intenet Placement Company on Jones formerly called Traffic Power. I think called First Place. He needs prosecuted. I'd help!

The same name, Richard Splain, is also listed in a customer complaint email on Traffic Power Sucks:

I had even talked with Rich Splain one of the owners of TP who refused to help me get the service promised. I feel I was ripped off and deserve a refund like everyone else who was cheated by TP.

Wonder how many loose ends are still left untied? I doubt Richard tries suing MSNBC anytime soon, eh...

I know, I know, there might be multiple Richard Splain's, but this SEC info page lists him next to Matthew Marlon:

Xtreme Webworks has retained the Law Firm of Gordon & Silver, Las Vegas, Nevada to represent its interest in the pending litigation against former employees and defendants, Matthew Marlon and Richard Splain.

This document on Edgar Online also connects Richard Splain to Xtreme Webworks.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Not too long ago the Wall Street Journal also profiled the same Matthew Marlon & his street name:

Mr. Marlon, 61 years old, filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy-court protection in 1996. In 1997, Mr. Marlon was indicted on charges of conspiracy to manufacture a controlled substance. He later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, related to possession of a chemical used to make methamphetamine, and was sentenced to three years of probation, including six months of home confinement. The court record for his drug offense said he also had an alias, "Jimmy Ray Houts."

In case anyone is wondering why I care about this information, Traffic Power is a company that cold called me to promote a junky website that I am embarased to own. They later sent me a C&D claiming over a million dollars in damages, and then sent me a lawsuit. In spite of hiring a lawyer and personally talking to their lawyer I still have no idea of any specifics in why the lawsuit occured - other than them thinking they could push me around.

I spoke to one of their former employees last weekend, and need to talk to my lawyer about it first, but I may soon interview him. Stay tuned!

SF Gate has an article about Google proposing to offer free Wifi to SF. The interesting bits:

Sacca said that Google, which makes virtually all its money from online advertising, had yet to determine whether it would include ads in the service. But Google said it would make its Wi-Fi network available for a fee to companies that want to offer paid Internet services. Sacca said there were no plans to share any revenue with the city.

Of course there will be ads...they will promote Google out of the deal...and ads are all that drive their business model :)

SBC thinks the city is already fairly well covered:

SBC spokesman John Britton said his company encourages competition but believes that governments should seek greater investment from private companies to increase broadband service. He said San Francisco already was served by SBC and enjoyed more than 400 free Wi-Fi hotspots, more than any other city in the country.

Earthlink does not like the Google idea:

"We've looked into free service, and we haven't found a model where free works," said Berryman. "At some point free becomes less sustainable because there's no way to upgrade service and the networks when no one's paying for it."

No surprise Google's competitors think Google doing free Wi-Fi is both unnecissary and unsustainable. Of course it's competitors do not have the largest database of human intentions and the largest ad network in the world.

Some think San Francisco is a bad test city because of it's rough terrain, but that - along with it being a tech culture mecca - is probably a good reason to use it as a test city. If you can get it to work there it should be no problem to get it to work elsewhere.

Others also made bids on the project, but Google is getting the press. How many business models Google kills before they are done achieving their goal? How far will public officials let Google control the information streams when other companies worth a few hundred billion dollars may go under if Google does everything they want?

Whether or not you like Google, you have to admit that in many fields they raise the bar on the competition, but I don't think it is good for anyone if one company is too dominant in the web - and Google seems to be making ALL the right moves thusfar.

NFFC talks about how search engines lose relevancy when they care more about how the results got there than the quality of the results.

Well a while ago Danny Sullivan made a post about comment spammers being the dirty sleezy scumbags that they are.

When comment spam was new and limited most of the people who were doing it were somewhat intelligent and did not hit too many live blogs. Since then people have got dumb about how they do it, hitting even blogs ran by search engineers.

I guess I understand working your way around the system or doing what you have to do to compete (I manually added a few spam links to some sites when I was first learning the web & SEO and did not understand some of the broader implications of what I was doing) but eventually as you learn and as techniques lose their value the solution is to move on to doing other things.

Some people are still holding on to comment spam and it is annoying. Some of them are going so far as to register domains like drive.to or shop.at to where if you block the domains it prevents people from writing some common phrases.

And then you got Google caching random .xml documents you do not remember ever creating chuck full of spam. Of course the fine people at MovableType do not care about comment spam when you buy a license, upgrade the software, or pay for an install. No, that is your problem for chosing to use MovableType in the first place.

I would love to see MovableType write an open letter of apoligize to anyone who ever paid for a license to use their swiss holed software in which using requires a ton of operator intervention.

If you are selling thousands of licenses of your software and it has holes in it then you ought to take the time to discuss the issue with people to do a legitimate job to fix the problems. And you ought to apoligize to anyone who paid for the nightmare you put them though with MT. I mean some of this stuff has still been uncovered fairly recently, and your company long ago had VC funding.

How long does it take to plug the holes & make a useful software product?

Did I ever mention how much I hate cold calls?

So I picked up the phone on the first ring, and this girl was still talking on the other end to one of her friends.

I said "hello."

She said "is Robert there" (Robert is my roommates name)

I said "who is this"

She said "is Robert there"

I said "who is this"

She said "Mary Jane. Is Robert there?"

I said "who paid you to call me"

She said "oh, you are Robert"

I said "who paid you to call me"

She said "I might be able to tell you if you weren't so rude and would stop interupting me." And then she hung up. Perhaps she reads the archives and knows better.

A telemarketer inturupting me, and not even being ready to talk when she does, and she is talking about someone being rude and interupting. What a perspective. What irony. I laughed.

It is the exact reason why search and blogging are so great. Those who want to tune in do, and you waste minimal resources hunting down disinterested prospects.