Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft says there are over 1,000 applications you can run on Windows Vista with few, if any, issues. However, Windows apps number in the tens of thousands. Add to that the facts that x64 Vista versions don't support legacy 16-bit code, and that the Windows Resource Protection in Vista breaks some apps, and you've got a big issue. InformationWeek lists a host of workarounds in How To Manage Windows Vista Application Compatibility. Among the tips discussed are Vista's compatibility mode, its Program Compatibility Assistant wizard, and a little-known form of file and registry virtualization that's built into the OS. What problems have you encountered with incompatible apps, and are any issues you've encountered deal-breakers that could further roil the already muddied adoption picture for Vista?"

An anonymous reader writes "There's a new twist to the tale of Windows .ANI exploit, that's been in the news all week (including when a spam campaign used the teaser of nude Britney Spears pictures to lure people to malicious sites). InformationWeek reports the Windows .ANI bug at issue first surfaced — and was patched — two years ago, in early 2005. 'If they had simply looked for other references for the same piece of code when they originally dealt with it a few years ago, they would have found this and patched it in 2005,' says Craig Schmugar of McAfee. 'It would have saved a whole lot of people a lot of time, money and effort.' Microsoft claims this .ANI vulnerability is different from the old, but beyond that they're not talking."

An anonymous reader writes "There's a new twist to the tale of Windows .ANI exploit, that's been in the news all week (including when a spam campaign used the teaser of nude Britney Spears pictures to lure people to malicious sites). InformationWeek reports the Windows .ANI bug at issue first surfaced — and was patched — two years ago, in early 2005. 'If they had simply looked for other references for the same piece of code when they originally dealt with it a few years ago, they would have found this and patched it in 2005,' says Craig Schmugar of McAfee. 'It would have saved a whole lot of people a lot of time, money and effort.' Microsoft claims this .ANI vulnerability is different from the old, but beyond that they're not talking."

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek adds some interesting new details to the story of unprecedented grass-roots search for Jim Gray, the Turing Award-winning database guru who helped set up Microsoft Research's San Francisco lab. Gray disappeared Jan. 26 after sailing out of San Francisco Bay to scatter his mother's ashes at the Farallon Islands, 27 miles offshore. Once the Coast Guard had given up its massive search, Gray's friends rallied the tech community — including people like Google co-founder Sergey Brin — into action. 12,000 volunteers spent 3 days examining 1.6 million hi-res images of ocean gathered by a NASA pilot who flew a U2 low over the area where Gray was thought to have disappeared. But it was all for naught. As Sendmail creator Eric Allman notes, Gray was expert at 'stripping away mystery by making things simple. It's an irony to me that he should end in a mystery.'"

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek adds some interesting new details to the story of unprecedented grass-roots search for Jim Gray, the Turing Award-winning database guru who helped set up Microsoft Research's San Francisco lab. Gray disappeared Jan. 26 after sailing out of San Francisco Bay to scatter his mother's ashes at the Farallon Islands, 27 miles offshore. Once the Coast Guard had given up its massive search, Gray's friends rallied the tech community — including people like Google co-founder Sergey Brin — into action. 12,000 volunteers spent 3 days examining 1.6 million hi-res images of ocean gathered by a NASA pilot who flew a U2 low over the area where Gray was thought to have disappeared. But it was all for naught. As Sendmail creator Eric Allman notes, Gray was expert at 'stripping away mystery by making things simple. It's an irony to me that he should end in a mystery.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Mac expert John Welch, author of the widely read OS X versus Vista comparison, delves into Apple's Leopard Server OS. He and Information week have on offer a deep dive into what's known so far about OS X Server 10.5, which will be showcased at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Welch weighs in on Leopard's iCal, Wiki, file, Quicktime, and mail services, along with Xgrid 2, Open Directory 4, and 64-bit capabilities. What does it all add up to? His assessment: Apple probably isn't aiming at 'big' enterprises; just the same, Leopard Server is shaping up to be a great SMB (small and mid-sized business) product. Welch writes: 'For about a thousand bucks on existing hardware, or for the cost of an Xserve, you get a really solid server, able to support Web services, collaboration, groupware, IM, and file services. You can run it with its own directory service, or as part of an Active Directory implementation out of the box. It provides some features that due to pricing and/or setup requirements, have traditionally been reserved for big enterprises — in particular clustering of both email and calendaring servers.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Mac expert John Welch, author of the widely read OS X versus Vista comparison, delves into Apple's Leopard Server OS. He and Information week have on offer a deep dive into what's known so far about OS X Server 10.5, which will be showcased at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Welch weighs in on Leopard's iCal, Wiki, file, Quicktime, and mail services, along with Xgrid 2, Open Directory 4, and 64-bit capabilities. What does it all add up to? His assessment: Apple probably isn't aiming at 'big' enterprises; just the same, Leopard Server is shaping up to be a great SMB (small and mid-sized business) product. Welch writes: 'For about a thousand bucks on existing hardware, or for the cost of an Xserve, you get a really solid server, able to support Web services, collaboration, groupware, IM, and file services. You can run it with its own directory service, or as part of an Active Directory implementation out of the box. It provides some features that due to pricing and/or setup requirements, have traditionally been reserved for big enterprises — in particular clustering of both email and calendaring servers.'"

Weather Storm wrote in with a story about those who see no need for home net access. Surprisingly, it's not the cost that is a barrier to entry. Instead, most say they don't see the value of having a net connection at home. "A little under one-third of U.S. households have no Internet access and do not plan to get it, with most of the holdouts seeing little use for it in their lives, according to a new survey. Park Associates, a Dallas-based technology market research firm, said 29 percent of U.S. households, or 31 million homes, do not have Internet access and do not intend to subscribe to an Internet service over the next 12 months."

prostoalex writes "Consumer Electronics Association and Computer Technology Industry Association introduced a new certification for individuals and companies installing home networks and connecting consumer electronics devices to a central PC: 'The certification is geared to individuals who install, integrate and maintain "smart" homes, in which the PC is the hub controlling lighting, security systems, audio-visual and digital entertainment gear, including home media centers.' The home networking market is predicted to grow at 20% a year globally."

An anonymous reader writes "The Internet Archive is being sued by a Colorado woman for spidering her site. Suzanne Shell posted a notice on her site saying she wasn't allowing it to be crawled. When it was, she sued for civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act. A court ruling last month granted the Internet Archive's motion to dismiss the charges, except for the breach of contract claim. If Shell prevails on that count, sites like Google will have to get online publishers to 'opt in' before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search."

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek looks inside the data centers that power the game Second Life. Tidbits from the article: The software architecture is an extension of the virtual world metaphor of Second Life. At any time, it's possible to walk into one of Second Life's two data centers, pat one of the rack-mounted servers, and say that particular server is running virtual New York, or San Francisco, or ancient Rome, and imagine itty-bitty people and buildings inside the 1U rack-mounted servers. Linden Lab, which develops and maintains Second Life, runs 2,000 Intel- and AMD-based servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. And, contrary to widespread belief among Second Life users, Linden Lab has not decided whether to open-source the Second Life server software."

An anonymous reader writes "Mac advocate John C. Welch weighs in with his list of the top 20 Mac OS X products (except Welch manages to list 22). The collection of software tools ranges from the obvious, such as Boot Camp, to the obscure but perhaps more useful — little-known apps like Peter Borg's Lingon, for creating launchd configuration files. What's on your personal list of indispensable Mac productivity aids and programming tools? Also, do you think Welch gives too much air time to built-in OS X tools at the expense of third-party products such as NetworkLocation?"

An anonymous reader writes "Mac advocate John C. Welch weighs in with his list of the top 20 Mac OS X products (except Welch manages to list 22). The collection of software tools ranges from the obvious, such as Boot Camp, to the obscure but perhaps more useful — little-known apps like Peter Borg's Lingon, for creating launchd configuration files. What's on your personal list of indispensable Mac productivity aids and programming tools? Also, do you think Welch gives too much air time to built-in OS X tools at the expense of third-party products such as NetworkLocation?"

An anonymous reader writes "Another straw in the wind: following last week's news that the US Department of Transportation is putting a halt on upgrades to Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7, today comes word that the Federal Aviation Administration may ditch Vista and Office in favor of Google's new online business applications running on Linux-based hardware. (The FAA is part of the DOT.) The FAA's CIO David Bowen told InformationWeek he's taking a close look at the Premier Edition of Google Apps as he mulls replacements for the agency's Windows XP-based desktop computers. Bowen cited several reasons why he finds Google Apps attractive. 'From a security and management standpoint that would have some advantages,' he said."

Dotnaught writes "For the past five years, Xcerion has been working on an XML-based Internet operating system (XIOS) that runs inside a Web browser and promises radically reduced development time. To provide developers with an incentive to write for the platform, Xcerion's back-end system is designed to route revenue, either from subscription fees or from ads served to users of free programs, to application authors. Think of it as Google AdSense, except for programmers rather than publishers. Is it absurd to think this poses a threat to Google and Microsoft?"

An anonymous reader writes "According to a memo being reported on by Information week, the US Department of Transportation has issued a moratorium on upgrading Microsoft products. Concerns over costs and compatability issues has lead the federal agency to prevent upgrades from XP to Vista, as well as to stop users from moving to IE 7 and Office 2007. As the article says, 'In a memo to his staff, DOT chief information officer Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."'"

An anonymous reader writes "In a three-part Dr. Dobbs podcast, AI pioneer and MIT professor Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future developments in the field. In part 1, 'It's 2001. Where's HAL?' he looks at the unfulfilled promises of artificial intelligence. In part 2 and in part 3 he offers hope that real progress is in the offing. With this talk from Minsky, Congressional testimony on the digital future from Tim Berners-Lee, life-extension evangelization from Ray Kurzweil, and Stephen Hawking planning to go into space, it seems like we may be on the verge of another AI or future-science bubble."

An anonymous reader writes "In a three-part Dr. Dobbs podcast, AI pioneer and MIT professor Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future developments in the field. In part 1, 'It's 2001. Where's HAL?' he looks at the unfulfilled promises of artificial intelligence. In part 2 and in part 3 he offers hope that real progress is in the offing. With this talk from Minsky, Congressional testimony on the digital future from Tim Berners-Lee, life-extension evangelization from Ray Kurzweil, and Stephen Hawking planning to go into space, it seems like we may be on the verge of another AI or future-science bubble."

An anonymous reader writes "In a three-part Dr. Dobbs podcast, AI pioneer and MIT professor Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future developments in the field. In part 1, 'It's 2001. Where's HAL?' he looks at the unfulfilled promises of artificial intelligence. In part 2 and in part 3 he offers hope that real progress is in the offing. With this talk from Minsky, Congressional testimony on the digital future from Tim Berners-Lee, life-extension evangelization from Ray Kurzweil, and Stephen Hawking planning to go into space, it seems like we may be on the verge of another AI or future-science bubble."

An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"

An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-on to John Welch's widely read review arguing that Mac OS X is superior to Vista, Information Week is running the first in a weeklong series of roundtables where a programmer, networking consultant, and 3 IT managers have a serious technical debate on the pros and cons of Vista. What's been your experience with Vista? More importantly, do you think it will ever gain traction among corporate users, or is its glitzy Aero interface destined to make it mainly a consumer OS?"

An anonymous reader writes "In Googleplex East: Search And The City, IWeek has posted a visual tour of the search giant's NYC HQ, complete with the requisite massage room, candy machine, and funky cafeteria. (There are even — surprise — work areas.) A companion story argues that New York City has reemerged as a tech center, citing the access to the Big Apple's media as a powerful pull for Web 2.0 companies. It also argues that NY's business community is more important these days to startups than Silicon Valley's deep pool of talent. Do you buy this thesis? Isn't it really unimportant these days where you work, geographically?"

An anonymous reader writes "In Googleplex East: Search And The City, IWeek has posted a visual tour of the search giant's NYC HQ, complete with the requisite massage room, candy machine, and funky cafeteria. (There are even — surprise — work areas.) A companion story argues that New York City has reemerged as a tech center, citing the access to the Big Apple's media as a powerful pull for Web 2.0 companies. It also argues that NY's business community is more important these days to startups than Silicon Valley's deep pool of talent. Do you buy this thesis? Isn't it really unimportant these days where you work, geographically?"

An anonymous reader writes "In Googleplex East: Search And The City, IWeek has posted a visual tour of the search giant's NYC HQ, complete with the requisite massage room, candy machine, and funky cafeteria. (There are even — surprise — work areas.) A companion story argues that New York City has reemerged as a tech center, citing the access to the Big Apple's media as a powerful pull for Web 2.0 companies. It also argues that NY's business community is more important these days to startups than Silicon Valley's deep pool of talent. Do you buy this thesis? Isn't it really unimportant these days where you work, geographically?"

PetManimal writes "A comparison of first-week retail sales of Vista compared to first-week sales of XP back in 2001 found that Vista sales were 60% lower. Steve Ballmer has admitted that earlier sales forecasts were 'overly aggressive,' but at least there is some good news for Microsoft: early Office 2007 sales were very strong compared to the early sales of Office 2003, despite almost no advertising or marketing until the retail launch at the end of January."

An anonymous reader writes "When It Comes To Broadband, U.S. Plays Follow The Leader says a story in IWeek. Their thesis is that, while broadband access in the United States rose from 60 million users in March 2005 to 84 million in March 2006, the US is well behind countries like England and China. Indeed, what you may not realize is that the U.S. ranks a surprisingly poor 12th in worldwide broadband access, a situation which could threaten its ability to maintain its technological lead. The federal government is no help: the FCC has almost no data on the rate of hi-speed adoption, or of what the speed and quality of those services are. Broadband is more expensive here than in other nations, as well, almost 10 times as expensive by some estimates. The cost and poor quality of service aren't from population density, aren't from lack of interest, and are not from lack of technical know-how. So, what is holding us back?

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "When Jimmy Wales recently announced the Search Wikia project, an attempt to build an open-source search engine around the user-driven model that gave birth to Wikipedia, he said his goal was to create "the search engine that changes everything", as he underscored in a February 5 talk at New York University. I think it could, although not for the same main reasons that Wales has put forth -- I think that for a search engine to be truly meritocratic would be more of a revolution than for a search engine to be open-source, although both would be large steps forward. Indeed, if a search engine could be built that really returned results in order of average desirability to users, and resisted efforts by companies to "game" the system (even if everyone knew precisely how the ranking algorithm worked), it's hard to overstate how much that would change things both for businesses and consumers. The key question is whether such an algorithm could be created that wouldn't be vulnerable to non-merit-based manipulation. Regardless of what algorithms may be currently under consideration by thinkers within the Wikia company, I want to argue logically for some necessary properties that such an algorithm should have in order to be effective. Because if their search engine becomes popular, they will face such huge efforts from companies trying to manipulate the search results, that it will make Wikipedia vandalism look like a cakewalk." The rest of his essay follows.

This will be a trip into theory-land, so it may be frustrating to users who dislike talk about "vaporware" and want to see how something works in practice. I understand where you're coming from, but I submit it's valuable to raise these questions early. This is in any case not intended to supplant discussion about how things are things are currently progressing.

First, though, consider the benefits that such a search engine could bring, both to content consumers and content providers, if it really did return results sorted according to average community preferences. Suppose you wanted to find out if you had a knack for publishing recipes online and getting some AdSense revenue on the side. You take a recipe that you know, like apple pie, and check out the current results for "apple pie". There are some pretty straightforward recipes online, but you believe you can create a more complete and user-friendly one. So you write up your own recipe, complete with photographs of the process showing how ingredients should be chopped and what the crust mixture should look like, so that the steps are easier to follow. (Don't you hate it when a recipe says "cut into cubes" and you want to throttle the author and shout, "HOW BIG??" It drove me crazy until I found CookingForEngineers.com.) Anyway, you submit your recipe to the search engine to be included in the results for "apple pie", and if the sorting process is truly meritocratic, your recipe page rises to the top. Until, that is, someone decides to surpass you, and publishes an even more user-friendly recipe, perhaps with a link to a YouTube video of them showing how to make the pie, which they shot with a tripod video camera and a clip-on mike in their well-lit kitchen. In a world of perfect competition, content providers would be constantly leapfrogging each other with better and better content within each category (even a highly specific one like apple pie recipes), until further efforts would no longer pay for themselves with increased traffic revenue. (The more popular search terms, of course, would bring greater rewards for those listed at the top, and would be able to pay for greater efforts to improve the content within that category.) But this constant leapfrogging of better and better content requires efficient and speedy sorting of search results in order to work. It doesn't work if the search results can be gamed by someone willing to spend effort and money (not worth it for the author of a single apple pie recipe, but worth it for a big money-making recipe site), and it doesn't work if it's impossible for new entrants to get hits when the established players already dominate search results.

Efficient competition benefits consumers even more for results that are sorted by price (assuming that among comparable goods and services, the community promotes the cheapest-selling ones to the top of the search results, as "most desirable"). If you were a company selling dedicated Web hosting, for example, you would submit your site to the engine to be included in results for "dedicated hosting". If you could demonstrate to the community that your prices and services were superior to your competitors', and if the ranking algorithm really did rank sites according to the preferences of the average user, your site could quickly rise to the top, and you'd make a bundle on new sales -- until, of course, someone else had the same idea and knocked you out of the top spot by lowering their prices or improving their services. The more efficient the marketplace, the faster prices fall and service levels rise, until the prices just covered the cost of providing the service and compensating the business owner for their time. It would be a pure buyer's market.

It's important to precisely answer the question: Why would this system be better than a system like Google's search algorithm, which can be "gamed" by enterprising businesses and which doesn't always return the results first that the user would like the most? You might be tempted to answer that in an inefficient marketplace created by an inefficient search result sorting algorithm, a user sometimes ends up paying $79/month for hosting, instead of the $29/month that they might pay if the marketplace were perfectly efficient. But this by itself is not necessarily wasteful. The extra $50 that the user pays is the user's loss, but it's also the hosting company's gain. If we consider costs and benefits across all parties, the two cancel out. The world as a whole is not poorer because someone overpaid for hosting.

The real losses caused by an inefficient search algorithm, are the efforts spent by companies to game the search results (e.g. paying search engine optimization firms to try and get them to the top Google spot), and the reluctance of new players to enter that market if they don't have the resources to play those games. If two companies each spend $5,000 trying to knock each other off of the top spot for a search like "weddings", that's $5,000 worth of effort that gets burned up with no offsetting amount of goods and services added to the world. This is what economists call a deadweight loss, with no corresponding benefit to any party. The two wedding planners might as well have smashed their pastel cars into each other. Even if a single company spends the effort and money to move from position #50 to position #1, that gain to them is offset by the loss to the other 49 companies that each moved down by one position, so the net benefit across all parties is zero, and the effort that the company spent to raise their position would still be a deadweight loss.

On the other hand, if search engine results were sorted according to a true meritocracy, then companies that wanted to raise their rankings would have to spend effort improving their services instead. This is not a deadweight loss, since these efforts result in benefits or savings to the consumer.

I've been a member of several online entrepreneur communities, and I'd conservatively estimate that members spend less than 10% of the time talking about actually improving products and services, and more than 90% of the time talking about how to "game" the various systems that people use to find them, such as search engines and the media. I don't blame them, of course; they're just doing what's best for their company, in the inefficient marketplace that we live in. But I feel almost lethargic thinking of that 90% of effort that gets spent on activities that produce no new goods and services. What if the information marketplace really were efficient, and business owners spent nearly 100% of their efforts improving goods and services, so that every ounce of effort added new value to the world?

Think of how differently we'd approach the problem of creating a new Web site and driving traffic to it. A good programmer with a good idea could literally become an overnight success. If you had more modest goals, you could shoot a video of yourself preparing a recipe or teaching a magic trick, and just throw it out there and watch it bubble its way up the meritocracy to see if it was any good. You wouldn't have to spend any time networking or trying to rig the results, you just create good stuff and put it out there. No, despite whatever cheer-leading you may have heard, it doesn't quite work that way yet -- good online businessmen still talk about the importance of networking, advertising, and all the other components of gaming the system that don't relate to actually improving products and services. But there is no reason, in principle, why a perfectly meritocratic content-sorting engine couldn't be built. Would it revolutionize content on the Internet? And, could Search Wikia be the project to do it, or play a part in it?

Whatever search engine the Wikia company produced, it would probably have such a large following among the built-in open-source and Wikipedia fan base, that traffic wouldn't be a problem -- companies at the top of popular search results would definitely benefit. The question is whether the system can be designed so that it cannot be gamed. I agree with Jimmy Wales's stated intention to make the algorithm completely open, since this makes it easier for helpful third parties to find weaknesses and get them fixed, but of course it also makes it easier for attackers to find those weaknesses and exploit them. If you think Microsoft paying a blogger to edit Wikipedia is a problem, imagine what companies will do to try and manipulate the search results for a term like "mortgage". So what can be done?

The basic problem with any community that makes important decisions by "consensus" is that it can be manipulated by someone who creates multiple phantom accounts all under their control. Then if a decision is influenced by voting -- for example, the relative position of a given site in a list of search results -- then the attacker can have the phantom accounts all vote for one preferred site. You can look for large numbers of accounts created from the same IP address, but the attacker could use Tor and similar systems to appear to be coming from different IPs. You could attempt to verify the unique identity of each account holder, by phone for example, but this requires a lot of effort and would alienate privacy-conscious users. You could require a Turing test for each new account, but all this means is that an attacker couldn't use a script to create their 1,000 accounts -- an attacker could still create the accounts if they had enough time, or if they paid some kid in India to create the accounts. You could give users voting power in proportion to some kind of "karma" that they had built up over time by using the site, but this gives new users little influence and little incentive to participate; it also does nothing to stop influential users from "selling out" their votes (either because they became disillusioned, or because they signed up with that as their intent from the beginning!).

So, any algorithm designed to protect the integrity of the Search Wikia results would have to deal with this type of attack. In a recent article about Citizendium, a proposed Wikipedia alternative, I argued that you could deal with conventional wiki vandalism by having identity-verified experts sign off on the accuracy of an article at different stages. That's practical for a subject like biology, where you could have a group of experts whose collective knowledge covers the subject at the depth expected in an encyclopedia, but probably not for a topic like "dedicated hosting" where the task is to sift through tens of thousands of potential matches and find the best ones to list first. You need a new algorithm to harness the power of the community. I don't know how many possible solutions there are, but here is one way in which it could be done.

Suppose a user submits a requested change to the search results -- the addition of their new Site A, or the proposal that Site A should be ranked higher. This decision could be reviewed by a small subset of registered users, selected at random from the entire user population. If a majority of the users rate the new site highly enough as a relevant result for a particular term, then the site gets a high ranking. If not, then the site is given a low ranking, possibly with feedback being sent to the submitter as to why the site was not rated highly. The key is that the users who vote on the site have to be selected at random from among all users, instead of letting users self-select to vote on a particular decision.

The nice property of this system is that an attacker can't manipulate the voting simply by having a large number of accounts at their control -- they would have to control a significant proportion of accounts across the entire user population, in order to ensure that when the voters were selected randomly from the user population, the attacker controlled enough of those accounts to influence the outcome. (If an attacker ever really did spend the resources to reach that threshold point, and it became apparent that they were manipulating the votes, those votes could be challenged and overridden by a vote of users whose identities were known to the system. This would allow the verified-identity users to be used as an appeal of last resort to block abuse by a very dedicated adversary, while not requiring most users to verify their identity. This is basically what Jimmy Wales does when he steps in and arbitrates a Wikipedia dispute, acting as his own "user whose identity is known".)

This algorithm for an "automated meritocracy" (automeritocracy? still not very catchy at 7 syllables) could be extended to other types of user-built content sites as well. Musicians could submit songs to a peer review site, and the songs would be pushed out to a random subset of users interested in that genre, who would then vote on the songs. (If most users were too apathetic to vote, the site could tabulate the number of people who heard the song and then proceeded to buy or download it, and count those as "votes" in favor.) If the votes for the song are high enough, it gets pushed out to all users interested in that genre; if not, then the song doesn't make it past the first stage. If there are 100,000 users subscribed to a particular genre, but it only takes ratings from 100 users to determine whether or not a song is worth pushing out to everybody, that means that when "good" content is sent out to all 100,000 people but "bad" content only wastes the time of 100 users, the average user gets 1,000 pieces of "good" content for every 1 piece of "bad" content. New musicians wouldn't have to spend any time networking, promoting, recruiting friends to vote for them -- all of which have nothing to do with making the music better, and which fall into the category of deadweight losses described above.

An automeritocracy-like system could even be used as a spam filter for a large e-mail site. Suppose you want to send your newsletter to 100,000 Hotmail users (who really have signed up to receive it). Hotmail could allow your IP to send mail to 100,000 users the first time, and then if they receive too many spam complaints, block your future mailings as junk mail. But if that's their practice, there's nothing to stop you from moving to a new, unblocked IP and repeating the process from there. So instead, suppose that Hotmail stores your 100,000 received messages temporarily into users' "Junk Mail" folders, but selectively releases a randomly selected subset of 100 messages into users' inboxes. Suppose for arguments' sake that when a message is spam, 20% of users click the "This is spam" button, but if not, then only 1% of users click it. Out of the 100 users who see the message, if the number who click "This is spam" looks close to 1%, then since those 100 users were selected as a representative sample of the whole population, Hotmail concludes that the rest of the 100,000 messages are not spam, and moves them retroactively to users' inboxes. If the percentage of those 100 users who click "This is spam" is closer to 20%, then the rest of the 100,000 messages stay in Junk Mail. A spammer could only rig this system if they controlled a significant proportion of the 100,000 addresses on their list -- not impossible, but difficult, since you have to pass a Turing test to create each new Hotmail account.

The problem is, there's a huge difference between systems that implement this algorithm, and systems that implement something that looks superficially like this algorithm but actually isn't. Specifically, any site like HotOrNot, Digg, or Gather that lets users decide what to vote on, is vulnerable to the attack of using friends or phantom users to vote yourself up (or to vote someone else down). In a recent thread on Gather about a new contest that relied on peer ratings, many users lamented the fact that it was essentially rigged in favor of people with lots of friends who could give them a high score (or that ratings could be offset unfairly in the other direction by "revenge raters" giving you a 1 as payback for some low rating you gave them). I assume that the reason such sites were designed that way is that it just seemed natural that if your site is driven by user ratings, and if people can see a specific piece of content by visiting a URL, they should have the option on that page to vote on that content. But this unfortunately makes the system vulnerable to the phantom-users attack.

(Spam filters on sites like Hotmail also probably have the same problem. We don't know for sure what happens when the user clicks "This is spam" on a piece of mail, but it's likely that if a high enough percentage of users click "This is spam" for mail coming from a particular IP address, then future mails from that IP are blocked as spam. This means you could get your arch-rival Joe's newsletter blacklisted, by creating multiple accounts, signing them up for Joe's newsletter, and clicking "This is spam" when his newsletters come in. This is an example of the same basic flaw -- letting users choose what they want to vote on.)

So if the Wikia search site uses something like this "automeritocracy" algorithm to guard the integrity of its results, it's imperative not to use an algorithm vulnerable to the hordes-of-phantom-users attack. Some variation of selecting random voters from a large population of users would be one way to handle that.

Finally, there is a reason why it's important to pay attention to getting the algorithm right, rather than hoping that the best algorithm will just naturally "emerge" from the "marketplace of ideas" that results from different wiki-driven search sites competing with each other. The problem is that competition between such sites is itself highly inefficient -- a given user may take a long time to discover which site provides better search results on average, and in any case, it may be that Wiki-Search Site "B" has a better design but Wiki-Search Site "A" had first-mover advantage and got a larger number of registered users. When I wrote earlier about why I thought the Citizendium model was better than Wikipedia, several users pointed out that it may be a moot point, for two main reasons. First, most users will not switch to a better alternative if it never occurs to them. Second, for sites that are powered by a user community, it's very hard for a new competitor to gain ground, even with a superior design, if the success of your community depends on lots of people starting to use it all at once. You could write a better eBay or a better Match.com, but who would use it? Your target market will go to the others because that's where everybody else is. Citizendium is, I think, a special case, since they can fork articles that started life on Wikipedia, so Wikipedia doesn't have as huge of an advantage over them as they would if Citizendium had to start from scratch. But the general rule about imperfect competition still applies.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem: You can have Site A that works as a pure meritocracy, and Site B that works as an almost-meritocracy but can be gamed with some effort. But Site B may still win because the larger environment in which they compete with each other, is not itself a meritocracy. So we just have to cross our fingers and hope that Search Wikia gets it right, because if they don't, there's no guarantee that a better alternative will rise to take its place. But if they get it right, I can hardly wait to see what changes it would bring about.

An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Dobb's Michael Swaine breaks down the question of where operating systems are headed. Among his teasers: Is Vista the last version of desktop Windows? (Counterintuitively, he says no.); Did Linux miss its window on the desktop? (Maybe.) And, most interestingly, are OSes at this point no longer necessary? He calls out the Symbian smartphone OS as something to keep an eye on, and reassures us that Hollywood-style OSes are not in our short-term future. Where do you weigh in on the future of operating systems? In ten years will we all be running applications via the internet?"

An anonymous reader writes "There are 139,834 open-source projects under way on SourceForge. IWeek wonders which projects will make lasting contributions, and which will fizzle. Sure, Linux, Apache, and MySQL are winners, but what about OpenVista, FLOSSmole, and Hyperic HQ? What's your list of open-source winners and losers?"

An anonymous reader writes "Web privacy advocate Cory Doctorow is on about shrinkwrap licenses, in his latest essay. They've always been onerous. Now, Doctorow says the new EULA in Vista and even the MySpace user agreement could put users at risk of being sued. He closes with: 'By reading this article, you agree, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all [everything].'"

prostoalex writes "With municipal Wi-Fi taking off and startups distributing free wireless routers for those willing to share their Internet connections, Wi-Fi phones or hybrid phones with both cellular and Wi-Fi access, are attracting interest. Dr. Dobb's Journal runs a review of 6 wireless phone devices available on the market today. The cheapest ones start around $80, but lock you into T-Mobile branded hotspots. The more expensive ones, Sony Mylo in particular, offer support for 3rd party clients, such as Skype, GTalk and Yahoo! Messenger."

j2xs writes "In an InformationWeek article entitled 'Where's the Software to Catch Up to Multicore Computing?' the Chief Architect at IBM gives some fairly compelling reasons why your favorite software will soon be rendered deadly slow because of new hardware architectures. Software, she says, just doesn't understand how to do work in parallel to take advantage of 16, 64, 128 cores on new processors. Intel just stated in an SD Times article that 100% of its server processors will be multicore by end of 2007. We will never, ever return to single processor computers. Architect Catherine Crawford goes on to discuss some of the ways developers can harness the 'tiny supercomputers' we'll all have soon, and some of the applications we can apply this brute force to."

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "Google has removed a few user names and passwords posted inadvertently to a phishing blacklist it compiles and makes publicly available on the Web. This information was submitted to Google by Firefox users with the browser's internal antiphishing toolbar. This feature, developed in cooperation with Google, enables users to report potential phishing sites to Google's blacklist database. Google has reportedly implemented a new mechanism detecting login data in submitted URLs to prevent sensitive information from getting posted to the list." The article notes that news of this minor lapse may obscure the ongoing problem of sensitive data exposed on the Web and findable via Google and other search services.

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek follows up its widely read review where Mac OS X beat out Windows Vista in a head-to-head comparison, with a reader debate on which is really the superior operating system. From the article: 'Mac users love venting about Windows... Any company that calls their techs "geniuses" thrive in forums like this. They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes. Windows Vista all the way. If Windows sucks soooo much, how come more people are familiar with it than Mac OS X? Last time I checked, Windows wasn't just a business operating system. Tons upon tons of people use it and like it.'"

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek follows up its widely read review where Mac OS X beat out Windows Vista in a head-to-head comparison, with a reader debate on which is really the superior operating system. From the article: 'Mac users love venting about Windows... Any company that calls their techs "geniuses" thrive in forums like this. They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes. Windows Vista all the way. If Windows sucks soooo much, how come more people are familiar with it than Mac OS X? Last time I checked, Windows wasn't just a business operating system. Tons upon tons of people use it and like it.'"

ubermiester writes "InfoWorld reports that Windows Vista will be available for legal download as of January 30th — the same day it will be available in retail stores. MS-NBC Online notes that, 'a relatively low number of computer users are likely to get Vista by downloading it from the Internet, but the mere availability indicates that Microsoft is fiddling with distribution methods for the extremely profitable franchise at the core of its business.' It will be available via the MS Marketplace site in conjunction with a Circuit City offering. Additionally, users who decide to 'upgrade' to a more expensive version of the OS can simply activate the features they want by unlocking them via online activation."

Some of you are tired of the blizzard of coverage the iPhone is getting, so this roundup of iPhone stories is running off the main page. First off, EMIce points out what seems to be plenty of prior art (as well as a booming research scene) on the multi-touch interface that Steve Jobs demo'ed, boasting of having "filed for over 200 patents." FastCompany has a profile of NYU researcher Jefferson Han and his killer demo of a multi-touch interface at TED. Next, Toreo asesino writes in with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer's take on the iPhone; the Microsoft CEO doesn't sound very impressed. And finally, an anonymous reader notes CNet's article on why the iPhone, once it's in the hands of consumers, may be the most muggable item of consumer electronics ever.

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek has a review of 6 rootkit detectors.This issue became big last year when Sony released some music CDs which came with a rootkit that silently burrowed into PCs. This review looks at how you can block rootkits and protect your machine using F-Secure Backlight, IceSword, RKDetector, RootkitBuster, RootkitRevealer, and Rookit Unhooker."

Kelson writes "Internet Explorer 7 hit the 100 million download mark last week. Yet in the three months it's been available, Firefox's market share has continued to grow. InformationWeek reports that nearly all of IE7's growth has been upgrades from IE6. People don't seem to be switching back to IE in significant numbers, prompting analysts to wonder: has Microsoft finally met its match?"

rochlin writes "We know that Steve Jobs has said the iPhone won't accept third-party apps. The iPhone looks to be running on a Samsung provided ARM core processor. That means it's not running on an Intel (or PPC) core. That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like). Darwin, the BSD based operating system that underlies what Apple has previously been calling OS X, does not run on ARM processors. The Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement says the source would have to be made available if it is modified and sold (paraphrased; read it yourself). A Cingular rep has said the iPhone version of the OS source will not be made available. It will be closed, like the iPod OS and not like Darwin. So if it ain't Darwin, it ain't OS X (in any meaningful way). An InfoWorld article on an FBR Research report breaks down iPhone component providers and lists Samsung as the chip maker for the main application / video cpu. So, that leaves the question... What OS is this phone really running? Not Linux or the source would need to be open."

An anonymous reader writes "IBM set the record for most patents granted in a year for 2006. At the same time, IBM points out that small companies earn more patents per capita than larger enterprises and pushes for reform to address shortcomings in the process of patenting business methods: 'The prevalence of patent applications that are of low quality or poorly written have led to backlogs of historic proportions, and the granting of patents protecting ideas that are not new, are overly broad, or obvious.' And the company has been committing itself to a new patent policy: 'Key tenets of the policy are that patent quality is the responsibility of the applicant; that patent applications should be open to public examination and that patent ownership should be transparent; and that business methods without technical content should not be patentable.'"

An anonymous reader writes "With Macworld set to start Jan. 8, InformationWeek has a detailed comparison that pits Mac OS X against Vista. According to reviewer John Welch, OS X wins hands down. The important point: he doesn't say Vista is bad, just that technically speaking, OS X remains way ahead. Do you agree?"

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek picks its '5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007.' The list, which is based on the idea that these are areas which will move into the mainstream this year, includes RFID, graphics processing engines, server virtualization, Web services, and mobile security." What made your list?

gregleimbeck writes "Spam volume soared another 35% in November, an e-mail security vendor said Thursday, and the month saw spam tactics that reduced the efficiency of traditional anti-spam filters. 'There's been a huge increase in spam volume,' says David Mayer, a product manager at IronPort Systems, 'from 31 billion spams a day on average in October 2005 to 63 billion in October 2006. But in November, we saw two surges that averaged 85 billion messages a day, one from Nov. 13 to 22, the other from Nov. 26 to 28.'"

twitter writes "The Register and others are examining a New York Times effort to eliminate bias from technology reporting by not echoing paid opinions. (Other coverage here.) They target Microsoft specifically. InfoWorld has an insightful summary of the two sides of this old debate. Fake think tanks, dubious sponsored research, and Astroturf are not considered but should be. Companies using these tactics deserve to be held at arm's length, but that's hard to do when the company is also a monopoly able to make or break any 'expert.' It would be refreshing to see the New York Times discover the FSF, opensource.org, EFF, and other sources of computing expertise."

darkonc writes "InformationWeek has a story on how Microsoft is squeezing Windows 2000 users as Vista and Office 2007 are being released. While some new software is legitimately unable to run on Windows 2000, other software (like MS's anti-spyware product) will install and run flawlessly — but only if you remove an explicit check for Windows 2000 in the installer." The article notes that other vendors, for example Sun, have more liberal and flexible support policies for legacy products.

john82 writes "Earlier this month we had a report from Forrester, based on a random sampling of 2,000 credit card accounts, that purported to show that iTunes sales were crashing. Now comes another survey from Reston, VA-based ComScore which indicates the exact opposite. ComScore's report which is based on actual iTunes sales shows a 84% increase during the first nine months of this year compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile the author of the Forrester report, Josh Bernoff, noted in his blog yesterday that they shouldn't be pummeled just because everyone took what he wrote and ran with it."

prostoalex writes "Information Week magazine runs a brief report from Microsoft Research, showcasing some of the new technologies the company's research division is working on. Among them — a rootkit that eliminates other rootkits, a firewall that blocks the traffic exploiting published vulnerabilities, a system for catching lost e-mail, a honeypot targeted at discovering zero-day exploits, and some anti-phishing applications."

Ruvim writes "It has been mentioned in previous Slashdot discussions as possibility, and now it became a reality: Information Week reports that a spoofed server has been released that can be used to activate Microsoft's Vista Enterprise versions. It is being made available on several pirate Web sites and spoofs a Key Management Service server, used to activate a large number of copies of Windows Vista in enterprise environments." From the article: "Vista is the first version of Windows that Microsoft requires volume license customers to activate. Besides KMS, the Redmond, Wash. developer also offers Multiple Activation Key, which resembles the retail version's activation process. PCs activated using KMS must reactivate at least once every six months. The MelindaGates hack uses a VMware image of a KMS server to activate -- and keep activated -- a pirated edition of Windows Vista Business. 'Looks like Windows Vista Volume Activation 2.0 is a big bust,' wrote a user identified as 'clank' on the PirateBay Web site Friday. "

Dotnaught writes to tell us about an InformationWeek article reporting that, according to a Forrester Research report, consumers are fed up with ads. From the article: "In the past two years, the number of consumers using pop-up blockers and spam filters has more than doubled.. More than half of all American households now report using these ad blocking technologies to block unwanted pitches... Today, 15% of consumers acknowledge using their digital video recorders to skip ads, more than three times as many as in 2004." The study would have been more meaningful if it hadn't conflated spam blocking with ad blocking.