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Where Does Microsoft Want You to Go Today?
blenderking sent in this Wall Street Journal story about Microsoft's new "Smart Tags" - auto-linking to Microsoft websites in any web page you visit. "From the article: "In effect, Microsoft will be able, through the browser, to re-edit anybody's site, without the owner's knowledge or permission, in a way that tempts users to leave and go to a Microsoft-chosen site -- whether or not that site offers better information." My web site is about margarita recipes....what is Microsoft going to do...offer a visitor to my site a better recipe on their site?" Another reader sent in a CNET article on the same subject.
Where I come from, we have a law that forbids you take someones else work and change that without the permission of the copyright holder.
Taking this work (the HTML) and rewriting it to contain links not in the original document would possibly be classified as fraud (they can't really blame it on a buggy HTML parser, can they).
I'd love to take such a case to court! :-)
That is, if the stories indeed tell the truth...
Oh great, MORE opt-out lameness.
First we had favicon.ico. Yes, go ahead and grab bogus URLs blindly, rather than letting me advertise a proper location to a preferred icon somewhere.
Then we have this PROPFIND stuff foisted upon us by people running some version of Gnome. You can cram that PROPFIND up your ass, and the worst part is that a lot of times they're doing it on favicon.ico! WTF is up with that?
And now we get a meta-tag system to opt-out of this new system?
Try this for a change, lusers:
Create a technology that is enabled when the person writing the content sets a flag somewhere, rather than making it on UNTIL they set a flag!
Get a clue!
1. anyone (not just MS) can write smart tags. the user will have the option of using them, not using them, or only using the ones from the company they like. where is the evil there? 2. the smart tags are in word, excel, etc. mostly they do things like let you right click on a person's name and send them email. you might choose to install a smart tag that would automatically open up slashdot search. jeez, that is pretty evil. 3. The smart tags look nothing like links. how exactly are users supposed to be conned by a drop down list with a big i in the middle? i'm guessing a lot of you cool "free thinkers" just start typing as soon as you see m$ in the subject without bothering to check out the facts.
Ok, exactly how do I, as a web author, turn the damn thing off? What Meta-Tag to I have to put on my web pages to make sure that Microsoft doesn't alter the content?
My only alternative is to block IE6-and-above browsers. I don't wish to do that but, I will if I must.
You guys mock everyone for being MS lemmings, yet no one here seems to be actually reading or trying to interpret the article. 1. The feature will be off by default. The user has to CHOOSE to enable it. So it's not going to be that suddenly every website you go to has all these tiny squiggly lines. The user will decide that he WANTS to see them and go to the links that Microsoft provides. 2. The webmaster can insert ONE (1) meta tag and the code will not work on their page. In other words, if you as a webmaster, don't want that crap on your page, it's one meta tag away. How in the hell is this content control? 3. Some users may actually want this feature. ./ users always seem to have this assumption that everyone is as tech savvy and has the same set of standards as they do. If that was the case, we'd only have one restaraunt, one airline, and one carmaker - people like different things, and having a feature that is (A) off by default (B) able to be turned off by a webmaster and (C) there to help a user who wants it IS NOT ALL BAD.
Christ you guys amaze me with the conspiracy theory stuff sometimes.
If i stick the words "Full Windows 2000 Source Code" on my homepage.. will smarttags hook me up?
The 'unwashed masses', society as a whole, and corporations have essentially asked for this (and the other things Microsoft is shoving down our throat).
When we didn't get up and fight for the browser war and let Netscape die, we asked for browser issues like this. Some knew they were coming. Come on - who didn't see this sort of thing coming when the anti-trust issues related to Netscape were raised in the first place?
I administer a large number of web servers including one that hosts a bunch of WebCT courses. I got a message from WebCT the other day, "Netscape 6.x will not be supported by WebCT..." And this is distance-learning/educational software! If you can't use Netscape/Mozilla on a college campus, where can you use it effectively?!?!
The only thing we can do now, to win back the web a little (maybe), is a grass-roots campaign to support Mozilla. The only thing is, Mozilla may not actually be better than IE...
And I want to see what they would do with the word "DeCSS" on a site and what MPAA would do about that ;D
That's why it's absolutely essential that the de-facto browser(s) that most people use be Open Source. There will be none of this crap, and we can prove it.
Long live Mozilla and Konqueror!
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?Smart Quotes?
the "Intellamouse" (which is actually okay, but still, it's just a damned mouse...)
And now "Smart Tags", which may very well get them sued.
If Microsoft had invented "Smartmedia", it'd be 2 feet long, 3 feet wide, and weigh several hundred pounds.
- A.P.
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Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Note: I'm an IE6 tester, so I believe I'm reasonably qualified to comment without fear of spreading FUD.
That's funny, I would have assumed that as an IE6 tester you are incapable of commenting WITHOUT spreading FUD. :)
IMO, they are a pain, but easily disabled.
Isn't life short enough without having to disable painful features?
Take it to the extreme: if my car was delivered with a "self-destruct" button, but with a manual explaining how to disable it, I doubt I would even get in the car, much less buy it and drive it for years and trust it with my life. The company could say "but some of our users need a self-destruct feature!" But that's not the point is it?
If a feature is a pain and the software is not delivered with the "feature" disabled, that company does not have your best interests at heart. The repercussions of having a monopolist company blatantly not care about its users are very great indeed. I hope you put that in your test report :)
(end sarcasm. And I'd just like to say- holy shit!! Look what you can do when you win the browser war. Who wants to bet that the way they'll appease CNet and the like is by _selling_ 'smart link' access to common english words? Talk about seizing a choke hold on communication and mindspace. This is so far out of line it makes my head spin. It potentially plays merry hell with _my_ trademarks and IP.)
If they can do this, it's not all that far from correcting regular HTML tags that happen to point to DeCSS, and 'fixing' them to point to the MPAA's FAQ.
Far from committing a 'crime', Microsoft will be in the position of protecting millions of innocent net users from committing crimes! :P even if you WANT to, you won't be able to get to 'illegal' content. It's not such a big stretch.
Their stuff takes addresses like foo.com/bar/server-junk//double-slash-format.html and turns the // into a /, making a corrupted live web link out of the text, while continuing to show it as a double slash visibly.
It's a very small step to having IE automatically change all links on the browser side if it doesn't like them. In fact, there's a logical argument for identifying links that are also represented by Smart Links, and interceding, either going instead to the smart link or popping up an annoy box, which would look like this:
Beginning to get the picture, folks? _All_ they have to do is start popping up 'choices' to go to Smart Tags at every available opportunity, including 'extra choices' for existing addresses. This, I think, would not be deemed illegal. Then it's just a matter of a 'just use the smart tags' option to stop the annoyance, and they're home free, with the user having 'chosen' to not even honor existing HTML tags out there on the net. It is _trivial_ to jockey people into the position of 'choosing' to use Microsoft's idea of what links should point to, and at that point they have a lock on electronic commerce that is truly impressive.
I would be really, really surprised if they were too dumb to realise this. Few people consider them stupid. I think they're completely aware of the whole sequence of events I've outlined. It's the logical next expansion IF .NET works- because if .NET works, they still have to expand more. It's a shrewd move that shows great foresight. The fact that the implications are shocking does not, I think, worry them one bit.
2.Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page author. There is a META tag that does this.
Well, *this* is ass-backwards. So suddenly every HTML page in the world has changed, and to fix it we have to add a new meta tag?
Yeah. I can see the Microsoft apologists coming out of the woodwork. "It's a benefit!," and, "It's easily disabled with a simple Meta tag, a patch to your webserver, and a prayer to Saint Gates!"
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
It's better OFF by default so that it isn't always screwing up people's pages unless the user really wants it to.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
When you're trying to control the way your page looks, you may not want dotted purple underlined links.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I'm aware of that. I'm just saying that it should be opt-in, not opt-out. Now web-authors will have to go insert that meta-tag in all their old pages.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I thought that's what customer meant anyway?
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
You are assuming way too much clue on behalf of the user. I frequently get email sent from a form on my web page where the senders ask questions about completely different websites apparently thinking that my site is the same as these other sites they were on because they followed a link from those sites and ended up on mine. These people aren't going to know what the difference between a regular link and a squiggly purple link signifies. Unless they have been trained to know (and you should assume that most people won't be), how is the end user supposed to know that squiggly purple links have been added by the browser and aren't part of the site? This is something that only technically savvy people are likely to recognize (as pathetic as that sounds).
I desperately hope there is some way to disable this from an individual webpage or for an entire site. Even for the "clueful" end users who do know the significance of the special links, I don't want this anywhere near my site which has negative commentary on Microsoft as it could totally distort the meaning. I don't want my site to be a springboard for Microsoft propaganda, especially since that is exactly what I'm trying to counteract on my site.
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Oh come on, how obvious can they become?
They have an arguable browser monopoly, (or at least close to it) and are clearly bundling in their content services, which are pretty lukewarm, in order to boost it's views.
These are textbook monopoly practices here.
hawk
I think it's interesting. I'm reading an article and what to learn more about something-I just click on a smart link. I don't even have to visit my local library to learn more (Voyagers :)
:)
However, it sounds like the way it is being done is to sell a word to the highest bidder. I want to learn more about SCSI - instead of being taken to the SCSI FAQ, I get sent to Adaptec's product site. If I wanna learn about what a database is, I'm sure I won't be going to Oracle's site, but probably a MS SQL Server site. (And has been mentioned, I'll never click on a smart tag that promises info about goats!)
My other question is where is all of this stored? Am I going to be (unknowingly) constantly downloading new smart-tag definitions to my hard drive -> soda=www.coke.com,beer=www.guinness.com
and how much more time is it going to take for a web page to load?
Also, can I hack the database once it is on my machine, so I can send Linux to www.linux.com, not www.microsoft.com/windows
"I can't believe, by reading people's comments, how many of you don't understand how this works. NO, Microsoft isn't modifying your web page ON YOUR SERVER, geeze. They're filtering whatever you send out through their browser, on the client side, as it comes in. Now, to come back to the issue at hand... "
They're reproducing copy-righted content on your screen in a different format from the original. That seems like a copy-right violation.
Google has for a while had on their website javascript code that could be put into a button to do just that in Netscape browsers, and if you download the google toolbar extension for ie, highlting text and then doing a right-click brings up a "Google Search" option.
Excuse me, but aren't these the sorts of things that got MS in hot water with the DoJ? Never mind that MS is violating my copyright by including my content in their "new and improved" generated page. Didn't we already go through all this with the Deja linking fiasco?- --------------
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Excellent post, but you forgot to work in the words "exciting" and "great new".
Personally, any time in the last two years that I have heard those phrases I have checked my wallet and double-locked my door.
sPh
I'd assume that Office XP has everything scriptable, just like current versions of Office, but with possibly a slightly better authentication scheme (I haven't messed with it yet). Wouldn't be be fairly interesting if someone wrote a nice script to associate every word in the dictionary (assuming it's a script-accessible object) with http://goatse.cx? I mean, I doubt anyone would click on it, at least not more than once. But I can guarantee it'd be damn annoying to see every word have the SmartTag icon hanging there.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It would be even cooler if I could share my annotations with other people.
Of course MS does not seem to care much about the user here - rather it's trying to build another marketing "bring-in-the-eyeballs" tool.
P.S. Look up "web annotations" on Google - there is plenty of research along these lines.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
My big beef with this is that Micro$oft will be making money off my site, without me seeing a dime.
After all, surely no one thinks M$ won't be charging the people they insert links for out the nose. Or the people buying banner ads on the M$ search engine the article says they'll be inserting links for.
And if I write a term of service into the site explicitly forbidding use of this "feature", users can either not use it or not use the site - they don't have any right to use a site in contradiction of the terms of service.
I sure hope M$ makes a site where we can submit URLs to be excluded from this disservice. I'm not holding my breath though.
I'm asking, because on BugTrack I heard multiple times about for example Outlook or Word being vulnerable to script viruses even when scripting is turned off.
hany
LOL
Like the users will actually *use* this kind of a feature -- most of them don't even change the "home" page their browser goes to when it is opened.
IE is simply filtering out certain key words, and providing links to more information on those terms.
...Information provided *by* MS, *for* MS's benefit.
A rep from MS is quoted in the article (paraphrased by me) that the "Smart Link" feature would be used to link to Microsoft websites and other sites "blessed" by MS.
This means that MS is *adding* their own content to someone else's webpage, without their permission, and most probably without their knowledge.
While I agree that a context-sensitive keyword search could be a helpful addition to any web browser, I highly suspect any such "feature" that is controlled by an entity whose primary objective is to make money. Not just MS - but what if AOL decided to do something similar, but link to AOL/TW websites and services?
Leveraging their monopoly this way seems a BLATANT abuse of their position. It's wishful thinking that the DoJ will pick up on this and use it in their case, however.
Now, if the links themselves were controlled by a non-profit organization, or even an educational one, and the only information provided was definitions of terms (no advertizing - no plugging of "blessed" websites, etc...) - I don't think I would have a problem with it. In fact, I would welcome such a feature. But don't let it intrude on a webpage's look and feel - instead, make it a right-click option (highlight a word, right-click, and one of the options is "Look up definition", for example) so that people using text and words in artistic ways (like poetry) could retain their expression, in the way they envisioned it, while still allowing on-demand access to the new feature.
Perhaps even have the source of the definitions be user-configurable - for example, being able to choose to look up a definition from a Mirriam-Webster dictionary, then cross-reference it with the Oxford English definition of the same word...but it would have to have a *sane* default setting, because many users wouldn't change it, even if they could...
The more I think about this, the more it sounds like a feature that should be handled by a browser plug-in, rather than by the browser itself - make the feature "opt-in" rather than "opt-out".
Now I'm just rambling =)
Most of them will not know, or do not care if the sites are Microsoft-influenced. After all, they probably use almost only Microsoft-products already, and this will misguide them even more.
/. had here a couple days ago about a handful of sites getting 80+ percent of hits =)
Therein lies the problem with this.
Let's say that for speed, the "database" of words to "smart link" is stored on the client side, by the OS, in some specially encrypted, obscured DLL file (along with a couple "crucial" system components to make sure clued users don't simply remove it.
Let's say one of the links points to a page on MS's website.
Let's say MS does a drastic redesign of their website, and moves a lot of stuff around, including the page that one of these "smart links" links to.
So, Joe User is sitting in his trailer park home in Indiana (convenient example, it could just as well be a $50 a day apartment in the Bronx, or a fine $400,000 home in the suburbs of Chicago for all I care), browsing on his MSN dial-up connection. He comes across your website (by some strange sequence of events), which is all text, with no links whatsoever.
Joe User, however, sees a plethora of links -- "smart links" -- which he proceeds to click on. He gets errors. Joe User isn't happy. Joe User sees an email link on the main page of your site - and (in an astonishing show of insight for a non-clued user) emails you:
"I was on your page, and you have broken links. It makes me angry. Fix them!"
You look at his email and go "what?" - and after checking the validity of all the links in your code, are still perplexed - you email him back:
"Could you be a bit more specific about the links you say are broken? I've verified all the links on my pages as being valid - so I'm not sure what specific problems you've run into."
He doesn't understand - the links are right there in front of him, plain as day.
...You get the point. People are accustomed to the web working in a certain way. Webpages have links in them that go to other webnpages. If a ink is broken, email the site operator. They're not going to understand this new "smart link" thing. They're going to use it, but they're going to believe it comes from the page itself, not from their browser.
Remember that it is the lesser knowledgeable (in terms of internet) who use most of the web.
Actually, they use the *least* of the web, but produce the most *traffic* =) Check out the story
ok, let's say "aryan cracker" codes up a virus to add links to his hate/violence/porn filled site (www.racist.net) keyed on the words "white," "jewish," and "kumquat." now let's say he sends it out via email from a forged address: joe@site1.com. let's say a user at site2.fr and another at site3.com (located some place in the usa where www.racist.net is considered to violate some local standard or another).
now alice@site2.fr browses www.kumquats.com with xp-ie. the racist.net link has nazi literature on it, so violates french law. who does she sue? perhaps she never browses the site with another browser - perhaps her solicitor has gotten the same virus - the owner of www.kumquats.com will have to defend themselves.
this also applies to bob@site3.com browsing www.paint.com. the porn on www.racist.net violates local obscenity standards. who does he sue? how does he know, and must the operators of www.paint.com come and defend themselves for something they never did?
and if those sites - kumquat and paint - have to defend themselves, do they have recourse against microsoft?
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
You can get Google's own version from
o id (Qr=prompt('Enter word to find in Merriam-Webster Dictionary:',''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://www. m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?'+escape(Qr)+' '
http://www.google.com/options/buttons.html
And dictionary lookup:
javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){v
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rant
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If they use MS Office they'll probably think it's the spellchecker.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
While smart tags can be easily turned off, and might even be turned off by default, what would make anyone beileve that there isn't a one-liner VB or javascript or ActiveX which will turn it back on?
2. Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page author. There is a META tag that does this.
;-)
This is still lousy behavior. Why not REVERSE that behavior, requiring a META tag for "Smart tags" to be turned on? Otherwise this imposes (not that M$ has ever done that before
But Sanford insisted Smart Tags are safe. "It's not like people are downloading executables here," he said. "This is fairly benign stuff."
Uhuh. And HTML has never been used to exploit weaknesses in design.
Sit back... relax... this will only hurt for a second. I promise I'll call you. Of course I'll respect you in the morning. The check is in the mail. This is fairly benign stuff.
http://windows.scares.us
No where in anything but the SLashdot Hype does it say M$ will be altering your page. What they will do is introduce a new class of tags with some new purposes. Such as Stock Market Tags. They still require a click thru, and you can just NOT INCLUDE the tag if you don't want it. Granted Half these new tags point to M$ resources but how is this different from say ICQ or AIM or MSN and all the TAGS YOU CAN't CHANGE there ? I don't think you have to worry about M$ engineers or webspies rewriting your page in the dark :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
IANAL but I would venture a guess but that if you use one of M$'s tools that do generate these tags, somewhere in the EULA is a statement giving them permission to alter your content for the purpose of smart tags. I've seen the Beta XP but there was none of this silliness in it.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It always amazes me how little some people do care about freedom. There are a number of reasons for why we need a active monitoring of the market to ensure that it will stay competitive and open to all.
Consumers, in general, are not going to bother. "bothering" involves looking up information/spending your time on something they don't understand the purpose of. They would rather just sit and watch the N-th episode of the anorexic AllyMcBean
Consumer lock-ins Imagine you had bought all your electronic hardware from just one manufacturer. The TV, the Video, the DVD player, the radio, the Stereo .. Everything bought from Bill's Hardware. Everything works just fine together. It was relatively cheap compared to other options. But now, even if someone else manufactures a new DVD player with options that you would be ready to kill for, you can't reasonably buy it. It won't plug into your Bill's Hardware TV, nor the stereo, and not even that special powerplug you got as a bonus foe being such a nice custumer. You are locked-in
Monopoly, Economicaly speaking, a company is said to have monopoly position on a market if it can block/prevent active competition with either market position or financial power. It works like this: Let's say that some company is producing the perfect DVD player. Bill's Hardware starts selling it's DVD players way under manufacturing costs and even giving them away in some bundle-backs. When the new company goes under, the prises will of course rise again, and since there is no competition, Bill's Hardware can just blod-suck the marked dry.
brant-typing is the phenomenm when consumers connect one producers product with a product category. Examples could be McDonalds and hamburgers, Domino's and Pizzas etc etc ...
There was an interesting example of this here in france a while ago when people decided to protest against a certain dairy-product manufacturer by boycotting his products. Polls showed that about 60% of people were in favor of the boycott. But in reality sales of this producer's product's almost didn't decrease at all !! This is the power of brand-typing.2 C3AF4F2snlbxq'|dc
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echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb15CB32EF3AF9C0E5D727
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
From the article:
Tags feature, which is similar to a Smart Tag feature in the new Office XP, will be turned off by default in the final release, and that users will have to consciously choose to enable it by activating a setting buried in the browser's menus.
They are not altering anything without the users permission. But what we rather should worry about, is the 75% of the webusers who actually may want to use it for easier browsing. Most of them will not know, or do not care if the sites are Microsoft-influenced. After all, they probably use almost only Microsoft-products already, and this will misguide them even more.
Remember that it is the lesser knowledgeable (in terms of internet) who use most of the web.
"The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages." - Tao of Programming
Something for netscape perhaps, Opera should be able to plugin as well.
First the ???? all over the place.. now MS Content everywhere?
The hell w/ that.
Grell
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
So if you DON'T want them to use it, just stick in a tag.
In other words, if I don't want IE 6 adding smart links to any of my web pages, all I have to do is opt out on each and every?
Please pardon me if I'm still less than thrilled.
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how to invest, a novice's guide
Just noticed this the other day, press release here or http://www.pressroom.ups.com/pressreleases/0,1014, 514,00.html
Now, I don't know to what extent this can be used for customer control, but it is cool to be able to send email to someone saying a package has been shipped, with an easy link to the UPS tracking. As it is, I have to copy the tracking # from the email (if the sender bothered even to include it) and copy/paste it into the browser after opening up the UPS page and clicking on 'track'. Yet another example of Msft giving the 'path of least resistance' option.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Some people have mentioned the similarity to things that NBCi, and others have done...and failed because/in spite of.
I however think that the advertising contents make this more like the ISP's who offered discounted/free service by wrapping a frame of their ads arround a whole website. If I remember correctly they were sued out of existance. Only in stead of having a small company trying to carve out a spot for itself on the internet (none of the companies doing this were very large), we have a decided Monopoly (Thanks Judge Jackson) who have at least once used their Monopoly to force competition out of the market (Thanks again Judge, even if you are about to get overruled by W's crack econo-cide squad of litigators (if it isn't to much bother)) using it to advertise its other services to their captive audience.
That it is turned off by default only means it isn't finished yet, and won't be by general release, that's alright there are always service packs (lots of them), who knows maybe this will get 'fixed' in a 'critical security hot fix' if M$ happens to have a particularily hard time with revenue next year.....now that sounds like an emergency.
Okay, this is a pretty good example.
Hm. I'm trying to come up with a counter-example. Failing miserably.
Damn, I hate that. :)
Okay, from the article, it seems this is pretty much just another "See a word, click it, get information" thing (like that NBCi plugin). They're not actually changing your site. And the tags appear differently from normal links, with "squiggly purple lines" that indicate a rollover target, then creates (on rollover) a button that will, if then clicked, take you somewhere else.
It sounds to me like it would be pretty easy for the end user to distinguish between links that I've put there, and links that the browser generated to sites that MS thinks I might be interested in.
Could you write a disclaimer that says "don't do this?" You could try. But would that block the end-user's fair-use rights to the page? How would that be different from someone saying that you couldn't feed their page through a translator? Both systems would be an end-user activity that adds value, in the user's mind, to the information already present in the website. If they want to be able to click on every occurrence of the word "grits," then, well, that's up to them.
My big beef with this would be if the links looked like my own, or if they replaced my own links with links that the system thought were "better." It doesn't sound like this does that. The only other thing that I'd be annoyed with, from a user level, would be if I couldn't turn the damned feature off. Sounds like you can do that, too. Which, naturally, I'd do right off the bat, if it was shipped in default "on" state.
This was exactly what I was planning to say, but with 300-odd responses already, I'm not surprised someone beat me to it :-).
They are going to say that because the squiggly lines are not links, they are not modifying anything. The HTML source is unchanged; they are not tampering with anyone's copyright.
I don't know if I buy that one. I for one wouldn't like to see my site mutilated like this. Of course the proper response from MS is "use the Meta tag, then". I will. But that doesn't lessen the slimy nature of this.
Let's be fair, though: Some lazy page writers might see this as a godsend and if there was a meta tag to ENABLE it, it might actually get used. Depends on the quality of the links more than anything.
D
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I hope there will indeed be (as announced in the WSJ article) a meta tag to disable this new "innovation".
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Let's just hope that the "feature" will indeed be off by default. We're still looking at a beta version here.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Just because they're not actively developing any more versions of Netscape, it does not mean that the Netscape browser will disappear overnight. Duh.
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Delphis
Delphis
Now that sounds better. Put the control in the hands of the users, instead of Microsoft or any other company with possibly confused interests. The problem is, the 'default install' of IE is BOUND to contain Microsofts 'sample links' .. so it'd be right back to brainwashing the masses. Sure, you and I would know about how to modify our own lists or grab lists from good places like /. .. but the effect would be largely similar if we were just disabling the features and using the web just like we have done for the last 5 years.
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Delphis
Delphis
What do you think adding links does to a page? Hmmm?
.. or some such crap, the words 'office' and 'windows' would be turned into links for Microsoft, even though you were only writing some boring page about your work environment and that's your right as the creator of the page - to decide for yourself when to include links or not. It's that right that's being usurped by Microsoft.
IT'S CHANGING THE CONTENT AS PERCEIVED BY THE END USER.
It's obvious that Microsoft would use any and all words that correspond to Microsoft products to get people to come to their site.
If you had the text. 'The windows in our office were a bit dirty this morning'
In many ways it's more insidious than someone coming in and hacking your webserver to change your pages, as at least you can tell when that's happened.
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Delphis
Delphis
Microsoft will probably commit suicide within the next few years.
We can but hope.
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Delphis
Delphis
what you want a link to every fucking word ? !
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Delphis
Delphis
Smart tags can be easily turned off by the end user. There is a BUTTON ON THE TOOLBAR to do this. <<<<
the average user doesn't know how to, or is deathly afraid of configuring anythign on there computer. reality, ppl will leave it there (if it aint broke dont fix it) and ms will benifit. if i'm not mistaken this is the same reason they are in an anti trust suite. packaging technology together.
Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page author. There is a META tag that does this.
<<<
see above
Smart tags look nothing like ordinary links. They are purple dotted lines uder the word. When you mouse-over them, an (i) info symbol appears. You CANNOT mistake smart tags for ordinary links<<<
cool they draw the person to the link, which will lead them to a ms sponsered site.
how does MS select there content anyways. is it goign to be encarta, or birtanica, is it too much to ask to have the user select his own content provider.
The default smart tags look for any reference to any company in MoneyCentral, and a few US universities. You click on them, and you get info. <<<<
suppose I want to link to daytec online, or yahoo, or well see above.
Smart tags look nothing like ordinary links. They are purple dotted lines uder the word. When you mouse-over them, an (i) info symbol appears. You CANNOT mistake smart tags for ordinary links. <<< we addressed this before, they are nice cool looking clicky thinkgs that direct you to ms selected sites. I believe it's called packaging one technology with another.
IMO, they are a pain, but easily disabled. <<<
see below. all MS testers think they are god chosen
Note: I'm an IE6 tester, so I believe I'm reasonably qualified to comment without fear of spreading FUD.
You know Microsoft's gone over the line when even the Wall Street Journal says the feature is "something new and dangerous."
But smart tags are a competitive advantage that IE will have that other browsers won't. You keep going on with this stupid opinion that smart tags are a reason why people would leave Windows for a different OS. Care to actually explain this one?
Cheers,
Say what? That's not backwards, that's the whole freaking point. Smart tags will be big because users often want more information on a particular topic. Information that isn't provided by or linked to by the web page's author. The authors who are too sloppy/lazy to provide such context would also usually be too lazy to do that "turn on via metatags" thing you're talking about. Smart tags are a way of still being able to get good info despite their lazy asses.
Cheers,
Nah, you're actually right about the problem of context. The smart tag wouldn't be able to distinguish the word "sexy" and whether it meant it in an erotic way or just in the more modern "hot topic" way. But by the same token, it's not really a problem because you're already going to know the context yourself.
The context problem isn't really one that confuses users, the problem is more of popping up unnecessary smart tags, which could be an annoyance. For example, I activated ESPN's smart tag for baseball on a sample document I was creating. (I was just testing a bunch of different ones out.) I got a smart tag underline below the word "long," so I mouse over it and see that ESPN's offering to take me to a page with a profile of the A's Terrence Long on it. So, it's a new technology and they need to work some kinks out. Number one should be making it case-sensitive, which would've prevented that situation. These things are definitely cool, though. I'd love SoccerNet or someone to come out with the same thing for soccer players, where whenever I'm emailing my friends about the subject, which is a lot, I'd get the smart tag under anyone's name I saw or wrote about, and instantly get their profiles. Sure I could do it manually in a browser, but there's no reason to waste the extra time when it's this easy with smart tags. I don't need to hunt for the link and create an anchor tag, I don't need to rely on my friends to insert the links. Just click on it, and bang, I'm there with the info I wanted.
The hypocritical whining about Microsoft definitely is lame, though, especially when people around here are telling us that they know what's best for other users. This technology is great, and if they don't want to use it, fine. They can get left behind while I'm getting things done with it. But go do your own thing and quit crying about it already, eh?
Cheers,
I thought we were talking about reality here, not your made up chicken little fantasies. Smart tags are already available now, so please tell us how Microsoft has done anything unethical with them.
And ya know, if I decided to come out with my own Cryptonomicon-changing smart tags, I could, as could anybody else. But why would a user choose to activate this?
Cheers,
Dude, settle down already. Please tell me that your post was a joke/troll. Office XP (including Word and Excel) already have these smart tags, and the smart tags have been pretty much universally praised, from cNet saying it was one of their favorite features, to ZDnet says, "will most likely become a key capability of all word processors--right up there with squiggly underlines for misspelled words and right-click spell check. [...] Trust us, this feature alone is enough to upgrade to Office XP." Hell, cNet and ZDnet aren't even all that gung-ho about upgrading to Office XP in the first place, but they still love this feature. And they're right, it's going to be like the wheelmouse where you get annoyed whenever you have to use computers without them.
Cheers,
Funny, when I look at you through my eyes, I see a complete idiot. It's so funny to see the reaction from the Linux zealots here. I have to remember to save this story for when other companies are implementing the same thing. And why will they? Because it's an awesome feature. (Oh yeah, I forgot that you've never seen it, but hey, by all means keep talking like you have.) Everyone will be able to look back and laugh at how shortsighted and simpleminded you guys were. Of course, everybody knew that anyway, which explains the complete lack of innovation in the open source world. *grunt* Fire bad! *grunt* New features evil!
Cheers,
Huh? Smart tags don't just link to Microsoft sites. Most of them have been created by third parties, not Microsoft, and you can make them yourself.
I'm telling ya, this article will one day stand as a monument to the complete idiocy of most Slashdotters.
Cheers,
But then you're forcing users to depend on some lazy-ass web developer. Smart tags are great for doing research, but it looks like like you're trying to take away this power that Microsoft and other third parties are giving Windows users. Why limit myself to the web site author's links when I can use my own? When there's a word on the web site that you've never seen, do you email the webmaster and ask him which dictionary you may use to look up the word?
Cheers,
In the first half of the first sentence of your post, you sounded pretty much like a reasonable person. So I'm curious, what is your problem with Smart Tags? I'm asking you because I'd really like to hear a legitimate complaint instead of all this other bullshit that's being tossed around about this article.
Cheers,
Yeah, and websites can instantly lose 86% of their visitors. Boy, you're one smart cookie!
Cheers,
A useful feature that will be used to promote one company.
No, since other companies can come out with their own. The user just checks the ones that he wants to use at any particular time. It's actually a cool technology that other companies have applied to web sites before. It's especially great for something like financial data. Let's say I like CBS marketwatch, but hate their stock details. Well, I just create a smart tag which grabs stock data from Yahoo instead. Of course, now some dipshit at Slashdot will accuse me of "re-editing" someone's site. Get a clue.
The amount of hypocrisy from people here is pretty astounding, though. (I'm not including you — you were reasonable about it, it just seems like you misunderstood it). Whatever happened to the mantra here that the web is for the user, not the web designer? That designers should quit trying to control layout and style, but should instead leave it up to the user? Well, so much for that, because it looks like everybody here now thinks that the user should be forced to accept the designer's every last whim.
What's next, will there be an uprising here to get Mozilla to stop letting users use an alternate stylesheet? Someone should get right on that, otherwise those evil users could distort the heavenly vision of the web designer!
Ahh, it's so fun to watch so many people's so-called principles twist and turn and bend past the point of snapping whenever Microsoft is involved. Old Slashdot message: "We're sick of Microsoft telling users that M$ knows best." New Slashdot message: "M$ can't give people this capability (or give them Unix-compatible sockets), because their users don't know what's best for themselves. We'll decide for ourselves what is best for those dumb users!" Truly comical...
Cheers,
If you don't include anything like a link to "some other site", and when MS displays it, they alter the page to include links to "those other sites", haven't they - by definition - created a derivative work of your copyrighted web page? Couldn't you (as the copyright holder for said page) give them the cluestick application they so desperately need at that point?
Well, MS isn't distributing that derivative work, though. The user's computer is creating it, showing it to that computer's users, and not sending it off to anyone else.
A good idea at first, but keep in mind that as some idiots start writing sites that check the user-agent and go out of their way to exclude non-MSIE users, then eventually non-MSIE users will start telling their browsers to spoof as MSIE 6. So you'll eventually be redirecting Opera users. Why do you think MSIE is alleged to have 80% of the userbase?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
My first guess would be SmartTags' usefulness, from a suit's point of view, within corporate intranets. A company could add a SmartTags extension to all of the workstations on its intranet, so that, for example, whenever the phrase "health insurance" appeared on a Web page or an MS Word document, the user could follow the squiggly purple link to the health-insurance page on the company's benefits site. This would make the suits feel like have some control over their company's internal Web sites, even when they aren't personally signing off on the content of every page.
Any other ideas?
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send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Fundamental difference. Netscape's links are buttons in the browser toolbars and such. They don't intrude on the content. Microsoft's tags aren't buttons in their toolbars, they're presented as markup in my content.
My take: search engines don't modify my content, (Not)Smart Tags do. Indexing my Web site is fine, as long as you index what I wrote without modifying it. Going in and adding what the user sees as marking in my copyrighted content that I didn't put there is altering my work, which is not legal unless you've negotiated with me and gotten permission.
Now if it's under the user's control, ie. the user and not the software is specifying which words to mark up and where to point the resulting links, I'll call that fair use just like annotating a textbook. If it's done out-of-band, ie. the user marks a word and tells the software to mark it up for them, that's fair use. But when the editorial control over what gets marked up and where the links point to does not rest with the person viewing my site and is not at their direct request, then that's a third party distributing an altered version of my work without permission.
If Microsoft controls the operating system market and the browser market then they ultimately control how people look at information. By controlling how people look at information they can influence the message that an individual receives. For example, they could put in lots of links to good press about Microsoft anytime I browse an anti-microsoft article. Anytime I bring up slashdot, the word Linux might end up pointing to Microsoft's shared source philosophy page. They can, to some extent, control information and can therfor control thought.
You as an individual make a choice to not use these technologies, but if large portions of the general population are using them, then that means Microsoft has an increased degree of influence over their thinking. You are not an island and you'll have to deal with the influence of this technology when you meet these people on the street and when they cast their votes. Just think of the potential for smart tags on:
-Political campaign sites - Visit the gore site and see links to pages that are against gore's positions
-Corporate homepages - wonder what sorts of tags might show up on sun's page through a microsoft browser
-Anti-Microsoft sites
Be afraid... Be very afraid...
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Incorrect on a couple of levels. First, many webpages are explicitly copyrighted. Secondly, copyright includes the idea of derivitive products, which your on-screen website rendering most assuredly is. If what you were saying were true, you'd be able to take screenshots of sites and then sell them on your own site as yours. You can't do that; those screenshots will be copyrighted by the web site owner.
So while many renderings of the final website exist, I most assuredly do claim a copyright on the final product.
And yes, it's about redistribution. Millions of people will see the "Microsoft" version of the page. In every way that matters, Microsoft is re-distributing the page. That it happens to perform the computations locally on every system cannot be allowed to be an escape hatch, or all protections, logical and otherwise, completely break down. ("[Large cable-modem ISP] does not censor sites... it's just that every time someone requests a competitor's site, we make sure the cable modem rejects the IP address." That's censorship.)
It's almost exactly like running a scam where you bilk people out of $10 at a time, and manage to aquire a couple million that way. You will not be charged under the $10 law, you'll be hit under the full fraud law. It's a general principle, both legal and common sense: Doing lots of little things can't allow you to escape from the consequences of the totality just because each thing was little. Election fraud, bodily injury, hell, even the cigarette companies only kill one cirgarette at a time. This isn't exactly an out-of-the blue kind of thing.
I then took some time to explain about the XP software subscription model and the whole Microsoft .NET strategy. She was amazed! "No, that can't be right... they wouldn't be allowed to do that!" HA! Not only allowed... but already halfway towards implementing it!
With Microsoft sending out tons of free copies of Office XP to every Journalist in America and filling their head with lies -- it will only be a matter of time before every secretary in America wants a copy of Windows XP, and Office XP. Shit! They actually believe that it is inherently a better product!
We're doomed.
> Isn't Mozilla already instable enough? (Not a
:)
> flamebait, just an attempt to point out a
> practical problem. If there are bugs in the
> existing featureset, adding newer features
> before fixing essential ones seems unwise.)
Very true! hehe.
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Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I agree. I did a little more reading after my post and I discovered a few things that are very important to remember when flaming Microsoft:
:).
1. It will be an opt-in system (default: disabled)
2. Web authors can include a meta tag to disable it (although I'd prefer if it were the other way)
If it pans out like the document reads, it could be a useful tool. I believe, however, that it offers Microsoft too much control over the Internet "experience" that a user has. I don't think my words have any meaning, so we will see how it pans out
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Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
> If you place your cursor on the underlined
> word, an icon appears, and if you click on the
> icon, a small window opens to display links to
> sites offering more information. For instance,
> in the new browser, a Washington Post Web
> article on Japanese baseball players was
> littered with eight Microsoft-generated links
> that the Post editors never placed on their
> site.
I'd like something like this. I think it actually gets the web closer to what it was originally envisioned as - a way of linking information together. This feature would allow you to get related information that is (1) current, (2) relevent, and (3) not necessarily a reflection of the author's opinions. It sounds great... until...
> In the beta version I tested, most of these
> links weren't functional yet, but Microsoft
> officials confirm that they will send users to
> Microsoft Web properties or to other properties
> blessed by Microsoft. One of the links did
> work: It launched Microsoft's mediocre search
> engine, which is packed with plugs for other
> Microsoft services.
This leaves the taste of sour berries in my mouth. A useful feature that will be used to promote one company. I think it would be awesome if the browser cross-referenced the words with a directory project like dmoz. However, Microsoft is obviously trying their darndest to monopolize and control all sources of information on the Internet.
Maybe the mozilla developers can implement something like this into their project. I think it is a really neat idea and it would be a shame to see a good idea closed up, patented, and restricted from fair and public use.
But hey... that's the world we live in. right?
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Computer Science: solving today's problems tomorrow.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
This sounds like a great idea. As a user, getting additional info from about what you are reading about is a good idea. And for all the web editors complaining about changes to their "carefully chosen links", screw tehm. What gives them the right to say they can control where I go when MS cannot. To the people complaining about users not recognizing the difference, well it is a trade off that I'm willing to live with, and at least MS tried to differentiate links.
I can only hope Mozilla et al pick this up with the added ability to select my own content sources, as opposed to MS specific sources. I generally avoid MSN sites 'cause they annoy the crap outta me, and this would be the only reason I would turn this off.
Anm
Hmmm...
Security-implications, anyone? I've only browsed the light documentation, but there's a risk here that viruses will have a nice little hook for gleaning information from every document you open in a SmartTags-aware program.
Ah... how foolish of me to worry, we all know Microsoft is on top of that whole security thing. I'm sure they've thought of everything...
Belief is the currency of delusion.
As I recall, didn't someone who created a site-modifier (to change the language of a site) face a lawsuit under DMCA? I could be wrong, but I seem to recall a time site modification sites were getting in trouble.
This is possibly one of the most amazingly blatant examples of Microsoft misusing its technology I have seen - and that is saying a great deal. If this doesn't affect the monopoly case it bloody well should - though under the Shrub administration I have my doubts.
As for this helping Microsoft, this is one Microsoft user (albeit rather involuntary) who won't touch XP with a ten foot pole. Now if I can only talk my wife into using Linux at home . . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?UR L=/code/sample.asp?url=/MSDN-FILES/027/001/652/msd ncompositedoc.xml
Go download the SmartTag SDK and write your own DLL, and then you too can make people go whereever and whenever you wish.
Instead of bitching like a little girl all the time, why don't you get with the program?
[Saint Stephen]
I agree fully. Imagine a mass-mailing from, oh say big Telcom A, and big Telcom B manages to have a lacky stand at every mailbox and slap on one of their stickers. And that's just for advertisments. I have couple of Poems on my Homepage. I don't want anyone to alter the appearance (even purple squigglies), because they look the way I wan't them to look. The publisher/creator of content (whether it is traditional or digital) should have control over their content, however the end-user will always be able to make changes (I've underline passages in a book). The difference is that M$ in essence can look over you shoulder and alter the content (yes, it is an alteration). Whether they use it initially or not doesn't matter. The fact that they control the entire environment makes it harder for average end-users ... everything requires an extra step (switch OS, download another browser, disable a feature that was accidentally turned on). I'll stick with my other OS and make plugs for it as often as I can!
This looks something like a concept I've been working on for a little over a year. I call it " openreference ".
It's basically just "object-oriented" hypertext.
In the browser the interface could look something like the Windows SendTo menu. (The equivalent of the Unix Pipe.)
I've written up some of my ideas in a proposal . Right now I'm trying to learn perl so I can parse and import IDB data, FIPS Codes, and SEC filings.If anyone has ideas or is interested in helping out, send me an email.
-Tim LangemanI don't know why so many people complain about M$, and how "shocked" people are when M$ announces this kind of thing. If you're running any M$ OS at home, then by choice, you are accepting this.
I run Linux at home and I am lucky to be able to run Linux at work too. I have chosen not to fall in Microsoft's grip.
If you're gonna complain about M$, then do something about it. Convince people not to buy M$ products any more. Don't buy Microsoft products yourself. Or, by all means, switch to an alternate OS. No one is forcing you to use M$.
This is the same thing, only it's being produced by microsoft. An outside company is adding content to a webpage without the permission of the designer and you know what? It's fine. If you don't want to see additional content that wasn't originally designed with the page, then either get another browser or disable the feature within explorer 6. I'm very sorry that you might lose some business, but this is a feature for the consumers and to tell them that they may not use it is just as bad as if Microsoft told then that they must... there are options besides Internet Explorer, if you don't like IE, then get another browser... don't tell other people, however, what browser they should use or what features they wish to have in their own browser.
If I want to change a font size for a webpage, I can with my browser. If I want to disable images, I can with my browser. If I want to set up a filter to block ads, or rewrite tables, I can do so using a proxy and my browser. My browser has the power to display webpages however I want, please don't tell me that I shouldn't have the ability to do so. It's fair use, deal with it.
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--
RumorsDaily
Reading the following from C-Net's article:
"The Guernsey Research analysts also warned of the security risk of downloading non-Microsoft, third-party code into an application or Internet Explorer 6."
...
Karnal
You can do some of this with MS's tags. I'm not sure what the behavious is when there are multiple tags for the same word, i think it just adds them to all to one menu, however you could write (or use someonelses) list by writing a simple XML doc in notepad and putting it into a particular directory on the server.
There are also facilities for auto updates so the list could get better over time
-- "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
Having looked at the Smart Tag SDK I can say that since content providers (either the specific site you are viewing or a dictionary or something) can write thier own tags to do just about anything they want, there is no need to write this technology off as flawed.
OK, so the sample tags arn't massivly good and have a microsoft bent to them, but they are only samples.
On a more technical note, you can write these tags either as COM objects, allowing complex database lookups for example, or using a simple XML schema to create website links, which is the part that people seem to be getting worked up about.
The microsoft stock price example is written as XML and works very well. There is no reason why the mozilla developers can't support that schema themselves.
I have been very impressed by MS's smart tags through out office and i think they could be very exciting and powerful both in an internet setting and in an internal setting. I'm sure that anyone can could think of a 100 good uses for these, especially since they can be used in word etc as well:
match filmstars names and link to biographies
match company names/product names and link to the correct site
match rare words and link to a dictionary
match customer names and allow the user to access thier account info
match currency values and provide exchange info
etc. etc.
-- "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
...and can be used for good or evil -
:CueJack system.
.net is supposed to be an open standard, right? And MS will have all of your information...
/. or any pro-open source sites - less is more in this case, ok?
Or: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction...
How long will it be before this is used against them as some creative virus writer (not the ususal script kiddie), who is further offended by being directed to MS approved content, uses the no doubt present security holes in XP to write a cute little stealth virus that changes all those 'smart tag' registry settings and/or code? The potential is unlimited.
It would have to propogate without any other change to the operation of the target machine using Outlookwhatever, or even as an activeX control using one of the authentic MS security certificates that should be in the wild by now (although may be specifically decertified in this new XP release.) People will click on anything, especially when all these new squiggly links appear unbidden in their web pages. A truly elegant version of this would install itself through a 'smart tag'.
The modified version might squiggle-underline appropriate keywords with links to content or sites with objective or even anti-MS information - yes, even goatse.cx or pr0n, but that would be over the top and pop up on their radar screen way too quickly. The goal here would be to have every second or third link or so be changed so it could stay relatively invisible. It might be much like RTmark's
With the quality of MS tech support, even if the end user could talk to them, MS would insist that it's not happening. Based on MS's ususal fixes for problems of this nature, the said code would have to reside somewhere where it could reinstall itself after the user reloaded the OS (burning up another of their five authorized installs) or it would have to be so pervasive that it existed on many frequently visited sites and reloaded itself easily - web-bugs, steganography or maybe some version of the Ken Thompson CC hack?
After all,
Just don't link to
This sounds like a job for the fine back orifice team at CDC.
Disclaimer: IANAC (I am not a coder.) This is total speculation and I don't know if any of this is actually possible. Smarter folks than me may know. It just seems a likely next step.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
Create 100% pure graphic sites. No smart tags.
What about Lynx you are going to say, well create a 'real' text version (.txt not
Between you and me this is not innovation anymore, it's actually walking back in time, thank you M$.
I remember an uproar when Deja.com did something similar with usenet postings. Turned random words into links to their paying vendors?? Remember that?? Seems like the same kind of thing to me.
I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. Then deja was even in possession of the data they were "modifying". Now, M$ isn't even in possession of it.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
Slashdot already has lists of relevant links for articles - you really didn't mean to say that you preferred Slashdot build IE specific features into the site, did you?
As for shipping with it off - that's true BUT meaningless. If the default startup page is MSN with a bunch of "click here to enable SmartLinks" propaganda, most people will turn it on. I think any argument that some potentially dangerous feature will be shipped "off" by default is a weak one since there are so many ways to get people either to turn it on or have third parties turn it on before it reaches consumers.
I agree with you on the copyright aspect, once a page hits the browser (or goes through a remote filter of my choosing) I can do what I like with it.
----> Kendall
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hoops!
o uble_helix.gif], daß diese Signatur dreizeilig ist.
How nifty!
Hopefully nobody has filed that for soft-patenting, since my prior art still is in the phase of proto typing...
--
Obacht! [http://www.gisser.de] In obigem Strukturentwurf könnte durchaus ein fluidisches Flipflop stecken.
Beachten Sie zumindest [http://www.gisser.de/the_double_helix_sits/the_d
Note! This signature has 3 lines. If it comes in with more, please hit the attachment attached herein.
I wish, Id too -- hmmm, +PLUS+ this nice creamy link to Shelley :-)
I can imagine the chaos that ensues if their techology is anything like a primative crawler: a word gets searched, you get porn or something totally unrelated :)
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
If the feature is or can be switched off why the fuzz? Ever noticed AOL pitching towards AOL in Netscape? ... or ...
Or the logitech "Web wheel" or
*Every* company does this, why should MS be different?
Funny if you could edit the links though so you end up as Sun's site if you click Microsoft.
This Microsoft bashing is getting *really* boring btw. Please stop.
I really don't think it matters much whether the publisher or the reader is required to opt-in, although I expect if Smarttags were such a wonderful enhancment Microsoft wouldn't have much difficulty getting authors to opt-in ;-)
The reason I think that either author or user opt-in is sufficient is that either preserves the principle of content neutrality.
To date, browsers are format-sensitive, not content sensitive. They don't care what I am talking about, just how. Smarttags are a departure from this. As an author, they give Microsoft a mechanism by which they can alter the character of my work for most readers. Imagine I put the text of the Bible on the net; I may have my bible text linked to commercial sites. Imagine I put my employee handbook on my intranet -- I may have the handbook linked to job listings by competitors.
Smartags requiring opt-out spell the end of content neutrality.
As long as the default state remains content neutral, I have no problem with this technology. Ideally, the users, authors, or both could even choose the smarttag provider the way they can choose search engines. Opt-in only automates processes that are within the powers of authors and readers to do manually. The information delivery system will as a matter of course treat all content equally, except by an act of commision by the author or the reader.
An opt-out scenario means that we accept that we must bear an added burden to maintain the integrity of our own expressions. It doesn't matter how tiny that burden is, we give up the absolute right to control our own works. Note that Microsoft on the other hand retains the right to control the integrity of its works by default, and does not share the burdens its competitors have in maintaining this right.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
what i want to know is what microsoft might do next - if they feel that they can link words on other peoples website, what would they think was wrong with changing peoples link to AI generated "better" content, thus "representing another step in personalizing the Web" (to microsofts liking) as they think of it.
As long as we're talking slippery slopes -- what if Microsoft decided to incorporate this "feature" into applications in other areas they control, such as MS Office?
How'd you like to send a quote to a customer and have it linked to Microsoft's competive products?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I agree that this kind of technology has its legitimate uses.
However, I disagree with your assertion that this will not give Microsoft editorial control over other people's pages. Navigation is a critical part of web content. A browser company adding its own links to a web page is like a printer adding his own footnotes to a book.
The critical issue is who does this -- the reader or the browser producer. If a user opts-in to have Microsoft's (or perhaps some other third party) links added, then it's a fair use by the user.
If the user has to opt out, then Microsoft is insinuating itself into the content of other people's web pages.
Finally, on an offtopic note -- if this "feature" makes it into the mainstream IE, anybody interested in starting a pool as to how long before it gets cracked and we start seeing goatsex smarttags inserted into Slashdot?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is an interesting article at http://www.procompetition.org/headlines/WhitePaper 5_15.pdf that tries to paint a broader picture of Microsoft's strategy with regards to WindowsXP, Passport, MSN, HotMail, .Net, etc. Now, the organization that produced the paper is decidedly anti-MS, so you have to take it with a grain of salt. Its best to note what is supported by other material (quotes, press releases, documentation,etc), and view opinions presented with a critical eye. However, it is an very eye-opening article, and should be a must read for all those that think that MS is somehow neutered compared to 4 years ago.
I just tried to click on the link and it didn't work. It will work if you go to http://www.procompetition.org and follow the link to the top story.
It's not a bad idea in principle. Go to a site, see links to pages that deal with the concepts on the site. Browser-side control of how a site displays isn't anything new, and I think it's a bit disingenuous for /.ians to decry its ability to "re-edit anybody's site."
However...
The whole concept of just linking to MS sites is just ludicrous. I don't know of any one company that can provide good info on a wide range of topics. The right way to do this -- of course -- would be to offer a spec for creating your own list of word-link associtations, or even for pulling these from the net. Then the user could configure which list to use -- for instance, choosing between Websters or the Oxford English as your dictionary. But of course that's not what MS is doing. Instead, they assume that they can tell you everything you need to know about, well, everything.
No thanks. I'm not going to let any single source spoon-feed me information, let alone a company that's already demonstrated an amazing disinterest in serving my needs.
It really depends on the level that it is implemented. Is it done at socketlevel or is it done at application level ?!?
It can be implemented in a BAD way!
nosig today
Looking at this (Dutch version) I predict that ST(tm) will provide more information chaos then previously.
I think that with this technique it will be even harder to direct all information flows in an orderly fashion. I think it is bad...
nosig today
Oh, yeah. they want everyone to use this technology. But if you had 1000 Web companies using your smart tags, could you justify NOT adding in a MS-specific tag whenever you found one that seemed on-topic? Could you look your investors in the face if you failed to a take advantage of this? If someone's got an airline-related smart tag, why not add in an expedia link? If someone has a smart-link around an email address, why not add in a hotmail link?
Like I say, we'll see....
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
You're missing the point. In your scenario, A puts up a SmartTag. B puts up a resource for that SmartTag. C (Microsoft, presumably) puts "support" for that SmartTag into their next update. Now, all of those "links" that used to point to provider B now point to provider C. Microsoft is the only one that has this level of control because they're the only one that can update the OS.
Enjoy!
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
Any program can update smart tags.
We'll see.... I expect Microsoft to be as willing to relinquish that control as they were to export the Windows/Explorer API so that other browsers could be integrated into Windows.
--
Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
Googlebar changes the appearance of a web site by highlighting the words that you searched for. It is a really useful feature when trying to find relevant information in large documents. The only difference is that the Microsoft technology helps both them and the consumer. Someone may want to get more information that Microsoft offers. Maybe they don't.
Oh, now that I am at it, any web translation services like Go.Web also do this. They are fullfilling a need.
I am not thinking this is problem, as long as there is an opt-out or never-opt-in for the feature.
By taking a position of superiority you show how nearsighted you are. Thus Spake ADRA
Bye!
As a protest we should use some IE specific javascript to change sites to use white text on a purple background.
Add this to the header:
<script src="ie.js"></script>
Then put this in ie.js:
if (document.all) {
document.write("<style>")
document.write("body {background: purple; color: white}")
document.write("a {color: white}")
document.write("</style>")
}
Much more effective than a meta tag...
I can't believe, by reading people's comments, how many of you don't understand how this works. NO, Microsoft isn't modifying your web page ON YOUR SERVER, geeze. They're filtering whatever you send out through their browser, on the client side, as it comes in. Now, to come back to the issue at hand...
If I write a text, a copyrighted text that is, there is no way at all that the browser could legitimately modify this text by presenting it to the user. What is scary is that MS's lawyers probably thought of that, and my bet is that they're going to argue that the links are not part of the content, that they are not the text, and therefore more links can be inserted with no legal implications. But we all agree that links are part of the content, that they express as much as the text itself. I think Microsoft is prepared to challenge that if the need arises.
And that's not good.
Oh, and by the way, the possibility that you can insert a tag in your page to prevent IE from doing that is not making this feature any more or any less legal. If the copyright argument holds, a copyright notice suffices, I don't need to put a tag to prevent every possible copyright-infringing browser feature.
Maybe he gets paid by the post?
War is necrophilia.
The WSJ article says that the default would be "off" so that users would have to turn the feature on.
Look, I hate MS as much as the next person. I've worked for a standards consortium that MS would just as soon see go away forever. I've encountered some truly horrible MS crap that shouldn't have a place in this world (cough, FrontPage). I don't agree with their predatory business practices at all.
But this feature, as much as it galls me to say it, isn't actually evil. It's about the user's ability to customize their interaction with the information the web presents. And whether that customization takes the form of a portal, or a search engine, or an agent, it's all about users wanting the information they deem is relevant to them. So if someone wants to turn on a feature that adds more links that clearly don't look like standard URLs, then I have to say I don't see that as a problem, as long as the feature is optional, and the default is off. And it would be nice to see a disclaimer shown when the user turns it on that alerts them to what the feature is actually going to do and warns them that the "special" links are chosen by MS and not the creators of the websites. Actually it'd be nice to see that disclaimer in the link popup box every time as well.
We need to realize that this is the way the web is going- savvy users are finding ways to cut through the dreck and find what they need. And if they are stupid enough to think that MS-selected links are going to offer then quality browsing... well, I say let them.
"Ah, but: nothing in that case is being copied in a form which the user can access. A web page is being published across the web and the user actually has the result in a form that they can save to disk and access at will."
The smart tags are still evaluated client-side, I think. At any rate, it's nothing the user wouldn't otherwise have.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
"For a game genie to have those effects on a game, you would have to go to the store, buy a game genie, place it in your console, then place the cartridge onto the console, not exactly something that could happen without the end user knowing about it."
To be fair, attribution is one of the exclusive rights protected by copyright. This could infringe that, except that HTML does not really specify presentation - even CSS won't change how a blind user hears a page. So, an author cannot expect that her page will appear exactly as she expects to the audience. Does Junkbuster violate the right of attribution?
Galoob was decided for two reasons: 1. There was no infringement because there was no copy created in a fixed form, and thus no derivative work. 2. Users of GG were fair users - their purposes (not Galoob's) were non-commercial, not significant in alteration, and not distributed. This applies to smart tags (or Junkbuster) instead.
Besides, MS isn't forcing you to use this (it can be turned off). They are forcing you to use IE6, in that they have a monopoly, about which see DOJ v. MS.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Could MS be sued for copyright breach on the grounds that the displayed page is now a derived work?
Sure. The plaintiff would lose, tho. See Nintendo v. Galoob. Galoob made a product that altered the reactions, graphics, and gameplay of Nintendo's copyrighted stuff. Nintendo sued for copyright infringement, and lost. The product? Game Genie.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
It has reached the point where it's not easy to find the legitimate issues amongst the MS-bashing.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
That's right, I sent email to a couple of Post columnists, and the editor,containing links to the article, and the quote mentioning the Post. I wonder what they think about it?
Best Slashdot Co
So, smart tags look nothing like regular links? Maybe not yet, but it's just a matter of time before the smart tags coding will be able to pick up on and mimic the colour of existing links. Mark my words.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
yup, embrace & enchance
Years ago, wasn't it Ticketmaster that sued MS for having a link on their Sidewalk site which went directly to Ticketmaster's order page?
Something along the lines of that link bypassing Ticketmaster's info, and making the order page look like it was part of the Sidewalk site...
If I remember correctly, MS had to remove the link- implications that if a site doesn't want you to link to them, you have no inherent right to do so...
So now I make a website and mention tickets for a concert. The new IE underlines that link, trying to be helpful (rolling eyes), and gives my word a link to Ticketmasters site.
Am I in trouble?
Does this give weight to your argument? Haven't they already lost the 'links are not content' argument?
Doesn't the DeCSS case also negate that?
Links ARE content, in both those precedents. Thus, MS is mucking with the content the author intended.
However, while lame, if the authors can include a metatag to turn off this linking, then maybe not so bad. But I DO hate opt-out rather than opt-in.
KM
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
http://www.activewin.com/articles/2001/xpie6.shtml
Crashes Konqueror consistently. Hmmm, ActiveWin. Way to go with your HTML coding guys...
Can you supply a link to the actual image file.
If I want this functionality, then I will download it myself. However that isn't the issue. The issue is with linking to unapproved material (material I have not approved) from a website that I have created.
Surely a better option is to give the power to the website creator - using cunning things known as hyperlinks! :) Maybe even "HyperHyperLinks", where the webpage author ca do the following in the HTML header:
[!--
[multilink name="linux"]
[mlitem href="http://www.linux.com/"]Linux.com
[mlitem href="http://www.linuxworld.com/"]Linux World
[/multilink]
--]
That would take the power from Microsoft and give it to the web site author. From the above example, for all instances of the word Linux in the webpage, the browser will show that there are "multilinks" in some way (purple underline?!), and then show you the web site authors intended links. You could even have a site-wide hyperlinks.xml file, like the site wide stylesheet.css file that you can have...
I think it's interesting. I'm reading an article and what to learn more about something-I just click on a smart link. I don't even have to visit my local library to learn more (Voyagers :)
Here's a quick plug for Mac OS X and its concept of system services. You can use a service like InstantLinks to select any word/phrase and do a web search on it. You can do this not just from your browser, but from any Cocoa app. It doesn't alter the appearance of the text in the document and can be configured to use the search site you want, not taking you to some MS-approved site that IE would. Just as significant is the ability to extend the services to other information. Have a street address you want to get a map of? Select it with InstantLinks and just get a map!
OK, end of plug. I don't know why I plug free software (beer free, with the potential of being speech free) when it can only result in me having to do more support. I'd have put a link to InstantLinks, but perhaps by making people have to find it themselves will reenforce how useful a service it is. :-) Oh, and you might want to wait a bit, since an update is scheduled for release tomorrow.
Do you work for M$?
You need to read the article.
These tags don't modify the web page, they are additions to what the browser presents to the user. What the columnist was pointing out was how micr~1.oft added links throughout every article he viewed on his paper's website, that weren't orignally placed there by the site editors. Most of the links were non-functional, but one took him to a lame micr~.oft site. Only M$ will have control over where these links lead, and will sell that link-space to others.
My favorite line in the article
ONE MICROSOFT OFFICIAL says the feature will spare users from "under-linked" sites.
And as Walter Mossberg points out, that changes the editorial content so carefully designed by the website's owners. It gives M$ the power to add or alter any link it feels like, and the end users may never know they are being re-directed to M$ approved content.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
It's true...my dad uses BeOS, which uses very distinct yellow tabs in the corner of its windows instead of long bars that go all the way across. One of those banner ads disguised as a MS-style window *still confused* him and he would have clicked it if I wasn't there. This goes to prove that most people don't know or care about what OS they're using because they simply aren't educated enough in the way of computers like most of us are.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Most of the commercial websites are already so bloated with graphics that no-one would notice if you just change all text to images. And webdesigners would be happy, they could finally create their pages with Photoshop or Freehand.
- Raynet --> .
I have an even better business idea... if you use it, send me a cheque after the IPO.
Its kinda simple.... give away free radios and television sets?
How do you make money?? Well this is where it gets interesting. Instead of playing the radio stations adverts, I have software that automatically filters them out, and plays my adverts instead.
Ditto for the TV!
I get to sell adverts, and not have to pay for the generation of the content, or the 'bandwidth'.
The enduser does not know any better, because they would have seen ads anyway! What my software can do is study your listening/viewing patterns and only play adverts that I think you would like...
btw. The feature can be disabled by buying a #1 screwdriver, removing the screws at the back, soldering three wires together, and leaving the case off the radio/tv!
This is a licence to print money!
Scary stuff huh?? do you still think these SmartTags are so smart??
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
Sounds like the same issue--copyright infringement (suggesting that site X sponsors/is associated with Microsoft), etc.
-Omar
Hell, no, but that's beside the point. We're not the customer. OEM computer manufacturers and Microsoft's marketing products are the customers, Windows users are the product.
Umm, while we're at it - didn't we rake Dejanews over the coals for this last year?
When I put up a web page about modems, I don't want every instance of the word modem to go to a specific modem manufacturer chosen my MSFT.
Which brings me to the privacy implications.
What do you want to bet that it doesn't go to a ;o dem&GUID=[your GUID]">Microsoft-operated tracking site</A>
<A HREF="http://www.usrobotics.com">modem%lt;/A>
manufacturer's site, but it actually goes to a
<A HREF="http://msid.msn.com/tracker.cgi?smart_tag=m
before redirecting you to the advertised site?
(And what do you want to bet that when you mouseover to see where the smart tag goes, you don't see the actual MSFT tracker, but just the words "Smart Tag! Find out about 'Modem'" in the status bar?)
This is a *client side* implementation of smart tags, with a default set of smart tags provided by Microsoft. Read the article.
But this isn't about redistribution, it's about locally altering the appearance of a web page, as I might do by changing the default fonts, disabling Javascript, or running Junkbuster.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
It would be no more binding than are the phony EULAs found in most commercial software.
There's no question that Microsoft is adding this "feature" to benefit themselves rather than their customers. Still, it's conceptually the same as me looking at your website through a Junkbuster proxy, or changing the text and background colors to some weird combination. Even if you are the copyright holder on a work, you do not get to exert absolute control over how it is viewed or used. Isn't this why we're opposed to the DMCA, because it unreasonably limits what users can do with their own machines?
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
oh great.. just what I was waiting for. I'm looking at a pornwebsite, and get all these silly links on sex ed, breastcancer and venereal diseases.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Blake's seven is an old BBC SF series, and IMO one of the all time best.. very dystopian. I can really recommend it, even if the special effects are a bit dated. (what do you expect from a late 70s/begin 80s show :)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
be a bastard and check it server-side. javascript can be turned off...Too bad for opera users posing as IE though..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
...and my public utilities analogy was meant to point out that unless you're some sort of fanatic, this sort of change may be possible but it really isn't feasible. Just like it's possible to spend all day breathing through scuba gear if you're really that worried about pollution, but unless you're nuts it really isn't feasible.
Nah, you're insulting people again. It isn't that people don't know that Windows sucks, it's that they either [a] don't care, or [b] know, but aren't able to change their position at this point. There's actually a category [c], of people who know and *are* able to do something about it, but that 2% of users has already switched to Linux, and we're talking about the other 98% here.
What you're acknoledging here is that de facto standards are more important than de jure ones. On paper, drugs are (or were, until recently) illegal in the Netherlands, and yet in practice they were mostly tolerated, so the de facto standard prevailed. On paper (specifically, the constitution), you can reside in the US for five years and then become a US citizen; in practice, the INS raises so many hoops for people to jump through that people can live here for decades without gaining their citizenship. On paper, you can run any operating system on your computer that you like, but in practice you have to run Windows if you want to be able to work with anyone else. Like I say, it isn't worth it to make yourself a pariah.
Yeah, now that you mention it, I really like BeOS. It should be the best operating system for media type work, which would be useful to me as a web developer. And yet I've got it installed on my laptop at work, and it isn't able to use my network card, so there goes any kind of web work. It can't run the software that my colleagues need me to keep an eye on, so that cripples them & me. And because every other BeOS user out there is hitting problems like this, the user base is dwindling, the developers are abandoning it for bigger names like Windows, Mac, and Linux, and the company behind it seems to be dying. All this in spite of the fact that, on paper, this is the best OS that I have been able to find. Once again, a de facto standard ("anything but BeOS") is trumping a de jure one ("go ahead & use BeOS").
It is *not* the fact that people are lemmings. Stop saying that, stop thinking that. It's that, given a choice between putting up with Windows' familiar quirks and taking on an entirely new & alien system, most people simply can't be bothered with the alternatives. It's a big deal to the Slashdot crowd. It isn't a big deal to anyone else. If you're still hell bent on your car analogy, you might as well compare it to a gas engine against a diesel or electric one: from the average user's point of view, the gas/windows one seems to perform better (despite some flaws) while the other one is harder to find fuel for and is overall just a pain in the ass for regular commuting.
Well, there you go. Everyone has their reasons. Yours happens to be games. For other people, it might be Office. Whatever. Despite your passion, you yourself are doing what these "lemmings" of yours do: putting up with whatever flaws you see in Windows because it happens to provide something you want that no other operating system currently provides. If you *really* want to convince people that it's possible to totally abandon Windows -- and I would accept that it is possible, if your work & leisure roles allow you to get away with it -- then you can't speak out of both sides of your mouth like this. Practice what you preach, or cut people some slack.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
You're carefully avoiding my point. It doesn't matter if it's one game or a million of them; if there is something that you want to use & it's only available on Windows, then you are no different than the people you criticize.
Note that it has nothing to do with it being "too hard" or anything else. You seem to be not at all intimidated by the difficulties of using Linux on a day to day basis, and yet still you're booting into That Other OS. Clearly, there is an issue preventing even your full fledged adoption of Linux, and at least in this case, it ain't the difficulty of using it. So I repeat: everyone has their reasons...
My advice to you is simple. Put up, or shut up.
:)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
We're just going in circles at this point, but I still stand by my argument, citing the "walks like a duck, talks like a duck" principle. You say that you're somehow better than people who are doing the exact same thing you're doing; I say that simply being aware of what's going on without making any changes to your behavior doesn't make you different, and being condescending about it actually makes you (or me, or anyone) worse.
It's like saying "well, I'm not a vegetarian, but a lot of my friends are and I like veggie food, so I might as well be one." Well, no. You either are or you aren't, and such a person isn't. Or saying (uh oh, here comes Godwin to ruin the fun... :) "I'm not actually a Nazi, I just work at the camp because the money is good" doesn't make such a person better than the people that work there for, well, whatever other reasons.
Sorry.
Sure. And I also consider the fact that, because you paid for that Windows license, it really doesn't matter whether you use it constantly or 1% of the time. They got their money from you, end of story. Granted, short of building a system from raw components, it is a pain in the ass to get a PC without paying for that license along with it, but it would be a different matter if that license had never been used. That's not the case here. You are using it, however infrequently. You paid the money and are now using the product, just like millions of others.So again, put up or shut up. If you're gonna be a vegetarian, stop sneaking the McBurgers. If you're gonna be a Linux purist, stop playing the damn Windows video games. You can't just say you want to be one, you have to actually follow through with your convictions here.
Well again we're just going in circles here (not that that isn't fun sometimes), but once again you make & then refute your point. You say that people can switch at any time, and this is plainly true. But then you say people don't "for whatever reason", as if people's reasons were just some trivial thing to be swept under the carpet. This clearly isn't the case. A lot of people clearly have reasons to stick with Windows that are much more important to them than the reasons to switch.In your case, your reason is a game, which you don't play often but still you play often enough to dual boot. Whatever, same difference. In my case, the reason is that I have NT software that I have to be able to run at work from time to time, and it's not worth spending 15 minutes round trip from a running *nix login to a running NT login & back. In my parents' case, it's that they've just started to get the hang of using Windows and are not about to try again with some much more arcane system just because their son thinks it's cool -- especially when that would mean having to switch away from AOL. At my company, it's because we write software that emulates Windows software for test purposes, so we have to be able to both experiment with the originals & deploy our simulations on Windows for others. Etc.
Clearly, everyone has some reason or another, and almost all of them are stronger than mere ideology or variety. Ignorance really doesn't come into play -- some are aware of the alternatives, some aren't, but mere ignorance usually isn't the barrier. Even if everyone were informed about the glories of *nix, the vast majority wouldn't switch to it -- certainly not overnight, anyway.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
That one line both summarizes & refutes your point. Yeah, it would be nice if we could live in a purely Windows free world. I like the idea of putting "I don't do Windows" on my resume. But we don't live in a Windows free world, and most of us, including you it seems, don't have the flexibility to put that quip on our resumes.
Your car analogy only works on the assumption that if all cars can work the same way & drive on the same roads, then any car can be used in place of any other car. But you know well that software doesn't work that way. It has nothing to do with being a lemming, so stop making pointless insults about average folks.
Walk into any place that sells computers, and damn near all of them are going to have Windows installed. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to switch to something else, especially when leaving Windows on there means being able to run the same applications and documents that most other people are using. Being a pariah isn't that rewarding to most people, so advocating it is an uphill battle.
Rather than comparing operating systems to cars, it's better to compare them to something like public utilities. It's something that is always there in the background and, aside from a certain geeky demographic, people generally don't spend much time thinking about it. If the utility or the OS company makes a change we don't like, there isn't much that can be done about it. Sure, you could switch your computer to Linux and you could put solar panels on your roof & a windmill in the backyard, but really these sorts of measures aren't feasible for the majority.
I'd love to turn my building into a gleaming solar powered home of the future, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way: I would have to figure out where to get equipment and how to set it up, and I'd probably have to get used to spending my spare time on maintaining it unless I can pay someone else to do so (not likely, I think). Further, I live in a condo, so I'd have to convince eight other families that it's a good idea, and get them all to switch with me. Maybe we'd all be happier afterwards, but I can't see persuading that many people to change, when just sending out a check to the electric company every month is so much easier in the short term.
Same deal here. Skipping from present hell to a future utopia would be nice, but it's much more complicated than just telling people to abandon the present. Most of us can't simply do that, and advocating such things really isn't as constructive as you seem to think it is.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Care to share with us what that META tag might be?
<meta name="smart-tag-compliance" content="doubleplusungood">
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
The day I will never use a PC again:
y0uv3 b33n h4x0r3d by b1ll g4t3z0r
--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
1) The WSJ article states that sites can include a meta tag that will prevent this "feature". This is intrusive, pig-headed, and backwards. It should be the other way around.
2) The googlizer (look for it, AC wrote it) is far better. It works with any selectable text and will almost surely provide better data.
Imagine all the llamas who will make almost every word point to http://goatse.cx
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
One might argue that this doesn't modify the web page, but I think it clearly does:
A web page is not just the text and other content that appears on it, it is the whole presentation of that content. When I create a page that is purposely not littered with hyperlinks or any other element that distracts from the text, I've done more that just write the text, I've made a design decision for how my work will look. This feature changes that.
Imagine that someday M$ adds another feature that draws squiggly lines around regonizable areas of graphics. That hideous looking eye shadow on the picture of the Mona Lisa you're looking at now links to a page on M$'s website that says: "eye n. an organ used for sight which is owned by Microsoft. (eg. all you eye are belong to us.)" Modifying the visual presentation of text is not so much different.
Now, one could argue that webpage designers never had control of the presentation of their pages anyway. Well, even if browsers have alwyas done a poor job of rendering the tags that web designers put in, to my knowledge, they have never inserted tags of their own into our pages. (Yes, I know it doesn't literally insert tags into the HTML...well, I assume it doesn't...but the effect is exactly the same as if it did). There's a big difference between a program that sucks and a program that intentionally makes significant changes to the appearance and purpose of a copyrighted work.
This isn't a copyright question, but isn't this a little like a company going into their competitors' stores (or non-competitors, depending on what website you're at) and pasting their own posters all over the walls? Or, especially in the case of a page that was purposely designed to appear a certain way, like spray painting M$ propoganda all over the walls and merchandise?
And how about M$'s benevolent grant of an opt-out scheme? If this feature DOES modify copyrighted works, I don't think this would make it legal. Copyright is not an "opt-out" law. Since when is a copyright owner required to make a pilgrimage to Redmond and beg the good graces of Emperor Willy to prevent M$ from modifying their copyrighted material?
If this feature makes it into a public release, I intend to add a graphic to my pages that looks like one of their links that opens a window explaining my view of what M$ is doing. I'm sure glad I use templates for most of my web pages, so I could "opt-out" for all my pages by updating only one or two files.
Hmm...maybe M$'s strategy is to force their compatitors to spend so much time adding opt-out tags to all their web pages that they go broke.
The fact that this feature even got written, in my opinion, shows how arrogant and unconcerned about legal issues M$ has become. They may not be evil, but their actions are identical to the actions of someone who is.
"What happens when an irrefutable argument meets an immovable opinion?"
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
If you read the article, it doesn't mention that microsoft will be able to change your content - all it will do is put links under keywords. Not exactly something platable, but nowhere near as bad as 'reedit' suggests -I had horrible visions of my pages all reading:
"glen is a nuffnuff,
sincerely,
bill"
In all these cases, the actual web pages are never touched; they are simply annotated on the client side. I don't recall there being any law against a user agent modifying an HTML page when it is displayed. I'm sure if corporations had their way, they wouldn't allow me to use my own stylesheet to view their pages (an option in both IE and Netscape); but I still can, because HTML was never intended to strictly control how content is displayed. If a user agent wants to intersperse every page with links to it's producer's web, well, why not? It may be annoying, but there's nothing illegal or even immoral about it.
--
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
It doesn't really matter that these "unwanted" (by the web page author) links look different. "Smart Tags" are still links placed on your website, thus associated with you. So, if the links are broken or link to site the user doesn't want to go to, you'll get the e-mail complaining.
It's like when a Windows crash occurs while browsing the web using Netscape. The user blames Netscape, but Windows has the bug. (I'm not saying all crashes while using Netscape are Windows, bugs, but all crashes while using Netscape are perceived to be Netscape's.)
Where will the word Linux link me to?
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
Here's my quote of the day provided by fortune:
You can fool all the people all of the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.
-- Joseph E. Levine
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
for writing their damn web sites to the MSIE specs. I can't tell you now many sites don't work on Konquerer or Netscape (which I normally use on my desktop) and I have to go to MSIE in order to make the components work.
So they bought into the MS vision of how their web sites should look, and now MS has weaseled their way into a position to steal their users.
Maybe more of them will write to the standards now.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
What would happen if every webmaster who could set their page up to have a BIG warning show if if the host type string sent by the client indicated the client supported this? Something along the lines of:
www.eFax.com are spammers
1999
Netscape user reads on site:
This site must be viewed using IE4+
2001
IE user reads on site:
This site must be viewed using Netscape4+ or IE4-5
---
That's not a bug, that's a security feature!
I mean, if Microsoft cannot modify your personal page to protect you against 3133t h4x0r, DMCA-violating university professors and cancerous communist open-source software, who is going to? Hmmm?
Thank you, Mr Gates! A clear case of benevolent consumer protection, that's what it is!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
I know Microsoft is evil and is just doing this to bolster traffic to their networks and wouldn't THINK of doing anything that benefitted people, but apparently just by coincidence I think they've hit on the best feature the web can ever offer.
The example above is really corporate child's play. They basically have a list of keywords in a DLL (or maybe they're smart and get a new one from MSN every day), and when they find those keywords, they tell you more about the subject in question. Now, the reason I say it's CORPORATE child's play is because I'm sure companies can buy this access, or will be able to in the future. Which does nothing at all to gaurantee that it'll be useful.
But consider if you could simply highlight arbitrary text on a page, and ask for more information about it. Now consider that maybe this feature is written into your favorite open source browser, and instead of the MS site, it hits a user-chosen search site instead. Myself, I might hook it up so that it goes to Google's "I'm feeling lucky" link for any section of arbitrary text. Or at least I would if search engines produced decent results more often :)
But seriously. This is the neatest thing ever. Wasn't there something like this in Ender's Game? Some book I was reading when I read that, anyway. The library was all electronic and arbitrary text could be cross-referenced in the entire rest of the library.
What's not to love?
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Usually, I hate the /. anti-microsoft bias, as it is often socialist banter. However, this is rediculous. How on earth, does Microsoft think this will float muster. They would never put this feature in say MS Word or Excel. Imagine reading some Acrobat PDF tech manual, and the thing inserting advertisment links into the documentation. How f-ing confusing would that be?
No way this feature ends up in the release version. They couldn't possibly attempt it. Its ludicrous. In fact, this is the worst marketing crap I've ever heard from any compnay anywhere. This is worse than the CD club that sends you the CD, and if you don't want it you have to send it back. Microsoft is bucking for some serious trouble here. Balmer just poured fuel on the fire.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Ok, Smart Tags are obviously beyond evil. I'm curious if they are even legal. If I had a trademarked site, which had advertisments for Burger King, and Microsoft put up links to McDonalds wouldn't that be bullshit. I mean they would be using my trademarked logos etc to endorse their product.
I think there are some serious legal issues here. Here are other examples:
American Heart Association site mentions the word asprin, and Microsoft puts links to Bayer, suggesting that The AHA endorses Bayer. That is definitly illegal.
There will be a flood of legal cases if this thing ever flys.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Internet explorer creates a derivative work whenever a person uses its save as feature and gets it to save in "Web page complete" mode. It adds meta tags to the effect that the generator of the html file is Internet Explorer, and does nasty things to the formatting of the html, which is just as much the information portrayed by the html code as the content is. This is an infringement of my copyright rights pure and simple. The only problem that I am not sure of concerns the fact that microsoft only provide a facility in a piece of software, to perform these copyright infringements, and do not actually perform the infringements themselves. Does this mean that the end user is the liable infringer or is microsoft the infringer. This is similar to the issues that are raised by users of photocopy machines. In that case the end user is responsible for the infringing copies of a work. How is it that copyright rights not infringed by copies of your information in caches and search engines?
So how hard woud it be to write an Apache module that creates automatic meta tags? And, simply include a few examples switched on at default:
- meta tag to indicate being served by apache version whatever
- meta tag to include company copyright notice
- meta tag to disable Microsoft Smart Tags
Well, not really, but it was damn funny.
I wish I had moderation points right now, I'd mod that up.
That seems to be MS' reasoning when they talk about themselves, it's like they're all crazy and delusional. Of course, the truth is that they are just lying out their asses all the time...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
What if I were to use style sheets or whatever to make my own purple squiggly underlines on my webpage, just like M$ did. And what if those links opened popup windows, just like M$ did. And what if the layout, formatting, fonts, etc. were identical to M$'s. And what if, instead of actual M$ content, it was my content, with the word Microshaft instead of Microsoft.
Clearly a parody, and I could use it to say whatever I wanted, with the appearance of it being Microsoft speak. I could say anything -- Bill Gates wets his bed, Microsoft will give you $20 if you format your hard drive, Linux is a better OS, whatever.
My point is, this can be "abused" by anyone. So, I say bring it on -- I look forward to appearing to speak on behalf of Microsoft. C'mon, it'll be fun!
Support a few technologists in Washington.
The problem here is that you are making the assumption that the average user *can* distinguish between a regular hyperlink and a smart tag. I think you are being overly optimistic about the savvy of the average user - I am certain I will receive countless emails from users who clicked on a smart tag on my website and when it was broken, contacted me not microsoft.
The majority of users cannot tell you what browser they are using, don't know what an OS is, or what one they are using - and if asked probably get the two confused. They sure as hell won't recognize that there are more than one type of hyperlink on a document.
I will also assume that smart tags are turned on by default - the average user will not know how to turn them off, why they should, or what the "smart tags" button refers to. The fact that I can turn them off via a META tag is almost acceptable - I will be including this in *all* webpages I design for myself, and recommending it as mandatory to all my clients as well. However, I should not have to include a tag to turn them *off*, I should have to include a tag to turn them *on*.
The mere fact that Microsoft can, by virtue of their dictatorshi^H^H^H, er Monopol^H^H^H, I mean innovation foist this *feature* on the majority of web users regardless of what the content generators on a website want is or should be completely illegal. I look forward to the lawsuits I hope will arise - although since the US has such a pathetic Justice system at the moment ("The best judges money can buy") I don't expect anything will come from it. Microsoft has the money and they will no doubt win any court case they get involved in.
Sadly, since MS dominates the browser market, I cannot consider including code to ban IE from my website without eliminating 98% of my traffic.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
You CANNOT mistake smart tags for ordinary links.
Have you ever done user support/helpdesk stuff? Never underestimate the power of stupid people. I still get calls from users telling me that Windows is giving them an error box saying "Warning, your internet connection is not optimized".
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
It clearly says a meta tag will allow sites to specify that they don't want this 'feature' to be active when viewing the site. People - stop being in a rush to post the first comment and first READ the ENTIRE (very short here by the way) article.
Whether your tool is a pencil or a web browser, you are allowed to make the change. Lynx renders your page, but it leaves the images out! Outrage! I'm modifying your page when I view it with Lynx! Are you mad? Of course not.
What's the difference between that, then, and me using IE to modify your page with other links? I am, like I said, allowed to draw moustaches on your page, and spindle and mutilate it as I see fit.
Why am I defending MS? Because the alternative most of you are advocating is too horrible to contemplate! You want there to be some limitation on how end users are allowed to render HTML! To hell with that shit! Can you even begin to imagine such regulation? Do you want to have to develop your open-source browser under government supervision?
You might wish Microsoft dead and buried, but let me offer you a piece of advice: don't put your head between them and the gun when you pull the trigger, Slick.
Office XP Developer Center -- Smart Tags
Office XP Developer Center -- Smart Tags (Russian)
'Smart Tags uitdaging voor ontwikkelaars'
All About Smart Tags
XML Cover Pages -- Microsoft Announces Smart Tag Software Development Kit with XML Support
CNET -- Smart Tags and Clever Features
CNET -- Smart Tag SDK (for Office XP)
How to Download YouTube Videos
This explains everything!
Stop with the FUD!
At the very least, M$ should provide an option for site which don't want smart tags - eg:
[meta name="smart-tag" content="no"]
Then we can turn it off on our sites.
If they had any balls they'd make FrontPage
insert this code by default.
There's precedent for this sort of thing: Deja's "X-NoArchive: yes" in Usenet and the robots meta tags in web pages. In both these cases if you leave out the tag you posting/page is processed.
Has anyone else noticed that the new ms office logo has a swastika in the middle? Now we have solid proof that they are an evil empire!
(Meant as an observation and a stupid joke, don't be angered ok?)
This guy is clearly trying to fight /. FUD with relevant information. For your information, Mister Smarty Pants, we're here to masturbate our egos and made "sly" comments about Microsoft without reading anything that may give us information about the topic at hand. Also, I notice you haven't replaced the "S" in Microsoft with a dollar sign. You may want to proofread your posts before you make them.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
It's the same thing. Microsoft is competing with AOL/Time Warner, and their bid to grow their walled garden over the OS. It's absorb or be absorbed at this point, and who would you really rather have in control of the consumer personal computing market?
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
It's easy enough to check which browser is being used to enter the site. If a significant portion of the web started refusing to allow MS Browsers to enter the site, I bet MS would change its tune in a hurry. Most of their strategy involves seeing just how far they can push people before people push back. If enough people bitch about something, they claim they didn't mean to do that and take it out.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Please stop this shit ! Wake me up ! Help ! Help ! ;-|
Wanna take a guess which words in the phrase "I hereby deny Microsoft the right to add any links using their smart-tag technology" are going to be linked, right-away, to Microsofts website about how great "smart-tag technology" is?
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
They shut down on April 2, 2001.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I do not know what your site looks like or what it does that IE cannot handle, but shouldn't a successful site contain pages that all browsers can display? As rabid a supporter of Mozilla and other OSS solutions as I am, I only use what works across the board (read: server-side programming).
Let's admit it. In our wildest dreams, the world embraces & uses open-source software and standards. If advocacy of OSS can make that dream a reality, we will advocate. So I fail to see how shutting out even IE users advocates anything we strive for.
In fact, we had a project proposed recently that involved some pages with kids content. I was charged with creating a way to insert a bumper page between these pages on our site and every link to external sites. Annoying! But that's how serious some people, namely editors, are about links off of their own content.
So, some sod with IE6 with Smart Tags drops in for a visit to our site and suddenly he sees links that our editors and producers have no intention or desire for in the first place. Original content we took the time and resources to produce now has links away from our site and our work.
This is copyright infringement. The site browsing experience we have carefully if not painfully constructed is no more. For anyone including a Microsoft official to describe pages as "under-linked" is patently myopic. Who is anyone to say what a page should or should not link to except for the people producing the page containing the links?
Say your favorite TV show is CSI and it's all new tonight. Would you hand over the remote to someone else who wants to flip around during that show? Probably not. So why would you allow someone to create links in your web pages where they do not exist?
Now they've even come up with a device that will help them to control the population.
----------------------------
-----------------------
Moderator's essentials
Exactly who is legally responcible when the browser directs someone to some legally questionable site? The first person the lawyers will call is the author of the web page not Microsoft
You know, i just have a really REALLY hard time getting excited about XP, infact, it may drive me off of Microsoft all together, and that would be sad, they have all the good games :(
no signature required
but it's only a matter of time before MS starts "correcting" misspellings like micro$oft, microsloth, windoze, etc =)
Can't wait to see what smart tags do to SlashDot.
I don't know about other companies, but I know at mine, general policy is to turn that off (Netscape's What's Related thingie, to use your elegant technical term). Why? Because to work, it sends every URL I or someone else visits to the server handling the What's Related thingie. At home, I could not care less who knows I visit slashdot.org (note the correct use of that expression, one of my inherited pet peeves), but I can understand why companies might have a problem with this. I can also forsee (unless I misunderstood the implementation) typing in some obscure tla and having some part of XP intrepreting it as something completely different, providing yet another opportunity for me to fight with a Microsoft product over who knows what I meant to type more.
Deja News was doing this a year ago.
m l
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/07/18/2122249.sht
I'm just surprized it took Micro$oft so long to come up with this idea...
I wonder... does Deja/Google hold a patent on this??
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
The article mentioned Republican links within Democrat pages, Chevy links in Ford pages, etc. Well, imagine Microsoft's links on words like "Linux", "Free Software", "competition", "fair trade practice", "free thought"...
It occurs to me now that right now they are probably looking for a way to license free thought... Ha ha, only serious...
There already is something like this in Mozilla, as well as IE and Netscape 4. It's called What's Related. It's a tab in My Sidebar in Mozilla and displays in the Explorer Bar in IE. The technology is provided by Alexa.
There are 2 differences between Related and Smart Tags for users and victims (i.e., site owners and developers).
- The links are carted out of the Side Bar and seamlessly integrated into the content of the web page without the author's permission. The M$ links could destroy the artistic integrity of a site. I think Smart Tags would be tantamount to copyright infringement, because it is intentional and specific alteration of a website (not merely non-standards rendering) without permission. Sounds like INNOVATION in cracking. Now you can deface a website without touching the server. Couldn't you put a Smart Tags DLL in a trojan horse and put your own links in every page the user sees? Then change the links whenever you want by having the trojan horse download a new DLL.
- Essentially, millions of site owners would unwittingly become affiliates of Microsoft in a one-way business relationship. There should be an opt-in policy, and site owners should expect to be paid for offering Microsoft the privilege (not a right) of placing its links on your site. Microsoft has no right to impose on others' online property. It is a shame that even non-profit organizations and personal sites would be subjected to profiteering run amuck. Microsoft must compensate other organizations for advertising its goods (or "bads"
:-) and services just like every other company has to do!
I do understand that 1) the source code is not changed and 2) the links look different from standard hyperlinks. As far as the common user's perception is concerned, these two facts are irrelevant.Office 97 / 2000
Clippy: "It looks like you're writing a letter! Would you like some help with this?"
Office XP
Smart Tag: "It looks like you're writing a letter!
www.msn.com/word/letters/, www.MSWordCentral.com, www.IntelliWord.com"
IE 6
Smart Tag: "It looks like you're on an unapproved, non-Microsoft web site! Now redirecting to MSN..."
ok, by your wording 90% of people never change thier default settings. If this is off by default then what would be the point of putting it in in the first place, if only 10% would use it? If a person is annoyed by it they can find a way to turn it off. I think having it on by default is a better choice, give people who don't know any better more information, and if they really don't like it give the option to turn them off.\ =\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
There is a met tag the can be inserted by the page author to disbale to feature for that page\ =\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
But it doesn't screw up people's pages. they show up the same way hyperlinks do, except with a dotted purple line\ =\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
Free, and with no monthly fees ever! MS eye glasses project MS generated adverts^H^H^H^H^H^H news and information links directly onto your world. Just imagine MS interpreting everything you see for you! Wow! Kinda like terminator vision, just as evil, not as smart.
I can see it telling me these helpful things, "That cute girl is belong to Bill Gates, hands off, he's going to petrify her." "That is the new MS VW available exclusively at HighestBidder." "You need to buy and eat that fat and surgar food substitute."
This will be much closer to the way the world should be.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Why is there such a backlash against this feature? It's potentially useful and it's off by default. Granted, Microsoft should be using a META tag to turn this thing on, not turn it off, but otherwise, what's the big deal?
Wow, that's one of the worst pieces of FUD I've seen posted on Slashdot so far! The SmartTags are just something that allows Content Provider A to neatly package something for syndication. So, for example, Content Provider A gives stock quotes. The SmartTags feature just makes it easy for Web Site Operator B, if he's running IIS/ASP or whatever, to easily insert a stock quote from A's site. That's all.
The comment you posted makes it sound like Microsoft is going to be taking over everybody's website. Using the SmartTags requires an actual effort on the part of the webmaster; Microsoft (or any other content provider -- anyone can make Smart Tags easily) will not suddenly have editorial control over every website in the world.
You guys need to chill out. Everything that Microsoft does is not necessarily automatically evil.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
by tcc (teeceecee@nospam.hotmail.com) on 7:57 Thursday 07 June 2001 EST ok they can continue on with their world domination strategy, fine with me, as long as it means one day they will control my mother in law, if that's not in the plan... I have the feeling I am being screwed somewhere. The difference is that the combined purchasing power of the consumer has given Microsoft all this power. You (not you specifically, but you as a society) gave this power to them. I sure as heck don't have control over my mother in law, so I sure can't give it away! Now, if I did, I probably would ... burn in hell for finishing that sentence.
Before i get modded as a troll, let me state that I do not like this company for its software, practices, expansionist visions, or monopolistic power. I don't like/use IE, and the only MS products I use are mediaplayer6.4 and win2k (when not using Linux). Smart Tags are a direct attempt by MS to take over the web and further establish total control.
However, I see merit in smart tags; they make the web even more cross-referenced/indexed and further promote XML's ability to do these things. An open source variation of this that uses an open database that doesn't collect user info could do wonders, so long as it is controlled by an honest non-corporate organization. Think of integration with everything2.org, a dictionary, a thesaurus, an encyclopedia, a biographical dictionary, an atlas.... that would be cool.
The only forseeable problems with this kind of technology are
- A corporation/organization's power to manipulate the masses (my solution is use an open database containing the collective opinions of what is good cross-reference material, and have several of these databases competing with each other).
- The power taken away from the site's creator. The site may be making a profound statement
...and a viewer could click on a Smart Tag only to be directed to a site offering the opposite statement. For example, a site about the holocost could be linked to a neo-nazi site about preparing to create the next holocost. (Although sometimes conflicting views can be nice. Search engines aren't biased in this regard; a search for holocost would not favor one of these over the other.)
Anticypher states in his comment above, "Walter Mossberg points out that changes the editorial content so carefully designed by the website's owners. It gives M$ the power to add or alter any link it feels like, and the end users may never know they are being re-directed to M$ approved content."Hopefully, words highlighted by Smart Tags will continue to be unique in appearance; according to the linked WSJ article, "On a PC with Windows XP, when you open any Web page, squiggly purple lines instantly appear under certain types of words." I think this would be better with a toggle key or button (so they won't show up unless you're looking for them) - that helps in the editorial bit too.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Yay for freaking out for no reason!
... and you only turn it on if you WANT the help!
Here's how the Internet Explorer Smart Tags work: On a PC with Windows XP, when you open any Web page, squiggly purple lines instantly appear under certain types of words. In the version I tested, these browser-generated underlines appear beneath the names of companies, sports teams and colleges. But other types of terms could be highlighted in future versions.
OH NO! IF I'M CURIOUS ABOUT WHAT SOMETHING IS OR WHO SOMEONE IS, IT WILL OFFER ME A HELPFUL LINK TO INFORMATION! GOD FORBID!
In addition, Microsoft says, it will provide a free bit of programming code, called a "meta tag," that site owners could use to bar any Smart Tags from appearing on their sites.
So if you DON'T want them to use it, just stick in a tag. Sounds fair, right? Okay, now read THIS:
Microsoft says the Internet Explorer Smart Tags feature, which is similar to a Smart Tag feature in the new Office XP, will be turned off by default in the final release, and that users will have to consciously choose to enable it by activating a setting buried in the browser's menus.
MS is adding a USEFUL feature which is VOLUNTARY to the user and which can be DISABLED by the creator, and you're bashing them?
... and people wonder why everyone calls Slashdot biased.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
By having MS introducing this novel feature into the browser/OS whatever AND (remember the AND) the system is extensible by 3rd parties without paying MS royalties it would be a worldwide accesible feature in no time at all....
It is then up to all the others to play catchup (Opera, Netscape(?), Mozilla, whatever program) to embed similar features....and you would be able to link to places without knowing the destination in advance (and that IS an advantage - just see WikiWikiWebs...)
I could easily see this smarttag feature extended with some fancy collaborative editing features or other usable features.....
It should of course be customizable by the user wether he wants it or not.
Smart tags look nothing like ordinary links. .... You CANNOT mistake smart tags for ordinary links.
I can just hear the end user complaints now. "How come sometimes links look like this, and sometimes they look like that? Shouldn't links always look the same?"
--
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
In other words, if the "nice disclaimer" is in the form of a properly formed meta tag instructing Internet Exploder not to provide these "smart links", it will be disabled. Still, it sounds like a bad feature to me. Also, who would be surprised if there were a "bug" that prevented the meta tag from being read and conveniently went unfixed? I don't think I'll be using this new OS anyway, between this kind of garbage and the over the top, intrusive license controls. I also don't think I will derive enough value from their other software to justify the costs associated with the subscription model they will surely be moving to. If I can't use their application software, Windows will certainly have no place on my drive.
.sig: file not found
or it's "hidden" win2k version
:( )
.oO0Oo.
\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
for instance when you press the search button in IE5.01 it goes to the site
ie.search.msn.com
and asks for a language specific page
so add a line [with the correct IP] to hosts
192.168.1.1 ie.search.msn.com
and pop a virtual host in your apache httpd.conf for ie.search.msn.com
This way you can then quickly customize the search tab for the whole network.
Smart tags will use their own URL so you can happily roll your own. I doubt I'll ever war3z^H^H^H^H^H buy XP (depends on games
but that would be my solution
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
You don't have to use Micro$oft's products.
Thank God the Government isn't trying to tell us all what to use -- they actually have enforcement.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
As soon as I get a few more things working under Linux though, M$ goes in the trash (at home anyway).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
As annoying as it is, it's nothing new or generally disapproved. Even mozilla has it.
Kimmo
--
--
Binaries may die but source code lives forever
I think this would be seen in a completely different light than a Game Genie. For a game genie to have those effects on a game, you would have to go to the store, buy a game genie, place it in your console, then place the cartridge onto the console, not exactly something that could happen without the end user knowing about it. However, with this, most users will have no idea that what they are seeing on the page isn't the original content intended by the authors of the page. It seems to me that the reason nintendo lost the game genie suit was because it was the customers actively going out and buying something to change the properties of the game, and not game genie sneaking into every house and installing a game genie without anyone's knowledge.
Want some indy electronic (and other) music?
This sig intentionally left blank.
i'm guessing the md5sum would have to be public-key signed so MS couldn't just change that sum at the bottom of the page.
and if they set the browser to run jscript before they insert their links then it'd be futile.
unless you implemented it with frames, and a second, hidden frame held the md5sum for the first page and waited until a few seconds after the first page's onload() so that MS postprocessing would be finished, and then md5sum'd the resulting frame and compare ti to the good md5sum.
feels like another evolutionary game.
-f
-f
www.blackant.net
omg, when I waved my mouse over the link I expected the url to show up as something like http://www.microsoft.com/press/linuxsuxks or something...
You touch on some interesting points here. But i do, of course, still have some objections.
First off, my car analogy was more (as i stated in another response to one of the replies) along the lines of being a force for change. M$ will continue to pull what they've been pulling for over a decade simply because they have the assurance that no one is going anywhere, so to speak. 99% of Microsoft's power lies in the content of almost every response I've seen to my post so far. That is to say, everyone seems to have this blind acceptance that microsoft is, was, and always will be a monopoly. And so they stick to the status quo (i.e. Windows) because they don't know any better or, at least, they are too blind to see the vicious cycle. If you buy into the idea that M$ is the standard and therefore go out and buy M$ products, then you have just made M$ the standard. And as microsoft actually veers from the standard (read: Kerberos, Java, etc.) people feel they have no choice but to follow because...well...(throw up your hands)....Microsoft is the standard, and all your friends are using it (some old saying about jumping of a bridge comes to mind here). Where Ford comes into play here is that i believe that people can break this cycle.
The idea is not to simply trash Microsoft and run for the hills with a linux box in hand, but to simply say to people, "Hey! There are other operating systems out there. Maybe one fits you better, have you tried any of them?" And, at that point, i think a lot of people will find that they have been missing out. Don't fall into the trap of buying this monopolistic bullshit spewing from the corporate mouth of Microsoft just because it's been coming out for over a decade. Change can occur, and it can occur rapidly. But people have to stop thinking that they have to use Windows just because the majority of others do.
Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to switch to something else
I have to say i have always found comments like this to be rather disturbing. Once again, it goes back to the seemingly ingrained belief that windows is, was, and always will be. The first thing that strikes me as ironic is that we live in a society that makes millions of dollars via training courses and online tutorials on how to do things in windows. "Learn to use your computer" they tell us, or "5 simple steps to being a windows master." and so on. This, to me, is not indicitave of an OS that is as intuitive as Microsoft would have us believe. Hell, MacOS is probably the easiest to use. So the question remains, if people just choose the path of least resistance....why isn't Apple doing nearly as well as Microsoft??? Moreover, why is it that, if a person chooses an OS that is not the easiest to use, it winds up being Windows and not, say, Solaris? If the answer to that question is simply because "Windows is the standard" - then my previous point about the self fulfilling prophecy has just been made - and, i will maintain that most people are still lemmings.
BTW - the only reason i have windows installed on my system is because of Counter-Strike and Flash. I just got done with a 5 hour gaming session and haven't booted into linux yet.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Would you consider it a "competative advantage" if a company published copies of Cryptonomicon and replaced all of Neal Stevenson's references at the back of the novel with ones of their own choosing?
What you call good business, i call unethical.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Not games. A game.
And, basically, what this infers is that i have no problem using linux at all for anything else. Actually, i could use wine for CS and do away with windows alltogether, but i'm just too lazy right now to work on it. UT? I play that in Linux. MythII? Linux. Office apps? Linux. IRC? Linux. ICQ? Linux. Browsing the web? Linux.
"But linux is too hard!!!" they say. "It's not for the average user." And then they go on to bitch about another way in which our great friends in Redmond are trying to fuck them.
My advice to those people is simple. Put up, or shut up.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
You're carefully avoiding my point. It doesn't matter if it's one game or a million of them; if there is something that you want to use & it's only available on Windows, then you are no different than the people you criticize.
And, in all honesty, i think you've missed my point. I am different from the people I criticize, inasmuch as Windows is not my primary operating system. In fact, if windows were to disappear from the universe tomorrow, i wouldn't be running around like a chicken with my head cut off because i just lost all use of my computer. Can you honestly say that, (by inverse logic) that joe windows users, who is no different from me, would take no issue with the fact that he now has absolutely no OS on his system (and, if he does, he most likely has no idea how to use it)? You ask me to put up. I say that i already have. I mean, certainly you have to consider the fact that i earn a living using a non-M$ OS and, also, spend 99% of my free time using a non-M$ OS putting up.
But, the digression is there. Most people, including yourself, have been making the argument that windows is the standard and that it is damn near impossible to switch to linux in a successful manner. The examples i have been giving all along pretty much prove that that is not the case at all. People can switch to other operating systems easily and quickly. They simply don't, for whatever reason. But the argument that you can't be as productive or as entertained on an OS other than windows is an opinion bred by the one thing i've been arguing against for a long, long time: ignorance, and the unquestioning acceptance of anything microsoft tells them.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
i think the point i was trying to make with my Ford analogy was more along the lines of how to be a force for change.
There is an old saying that it is folly to continue to do the same thing and expect different results. And, in that light, I would assert that it is folly to continue to buy and use Microsoft products the way we (the public) have always done and expect M$ to stop screwing us all of the sudden.
One could write and essay on the general laziness and idiocy of the (american) public in this respect. But alas, i have been screwing with Actionscript and playing counter-strike for the past 10 hours and i'm exausted.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Let's kick this story back 5 years ago and i'll give you a little something to mull over in that gray matter of yours. This whole thing reminds me of why i stopped using winders in the first place (as i type this from W2k :(
Microsoft is selling a product. That product is called WindowsXX and you have to live with the fact that if you buy said product, then there may be facets of it that you don't like (i.e. "smart tags" and all the other crap that's become bundled in with it). So here's an alternative...
USE A DIFFERENT OS! I stopped using windows because i couldn't put up with a crappy OS and bundled software that i couldn't get rid of any longer. I advise people, in this situation, to either put up or shut up....USE A DIFFERENT OS! USE A DIFFERENT BROWSER! DO SOMETHING OTHER THAN BITCH!
Let's put it this way. If 99% of the world bought Ford products, and Ford made changes to the product that no one liked, and yet, people went on buying Fords do you think Ford would give a flying fuck what people said and (gasp) change their cars.
Nope. and MS doesn't give a flying fuck either because "smart tags" or no, people are going to go on buying Winders like the lemmings they are.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I expect this will be just one more obnoxious automatic feature I'd spend 30 minutes trying to find how to disable
In IE 5.5, you can disable most unwanted "features" by choosing Tools | Options... and clicking the Advanced tab. You'll find checkboxes for lots of features that are on by default, and many that are off by default. This new feature will be off by default anyway.
Will I retire or break 10K?
navigation is a critical part of web content - critical enough that browser companies should not tweak with it. they should let web site owners decide what type of navigation they want to put in their pages.
Not necessarily. For instance, many sites disable browsers' contextual menus to keep users from making fair use of images or to keep users from opening new windows, locking them in a frame jail. Users should have the final choice whether to allow these new links, not browser makers or webmasters.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If proper hyperlinking of article text hadn't become the forgotten point of the Internet,
It hasn't. You just haven't been looking at the right web sites. Everything2.com is linked profusely. Try it; you might like it.
(See what I've written on E2)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Smart Tags do not "edit" or "re-edit" a site. People who are alarmed that Microsoft is going to start adding and removing content from their site are barking up the wrong tree. The article linked above did not do a good job explaining Smart Tags at all.
Here's a technical outline of what smart tags are: A Smart Tag has two parts, a recognizer and an action item. The recognizer spots words or phrases in a document (like the sports teams mentioned in the article). The action item add action (like browsing to a web page) to those words. Though it does add some XML to the document, it doesn't change the HTML. Smart Tagged words don't look like regual HTML links. Instead they have a small squiggly purple underline. Also, they can be turned off at the browser. You can turn all smart tags off, or just turn off the ones you don't like. I know, because I've been developing with smart tags in Office XP for three months now.
Personally, I think smart tags are very useful in some contexts. If I'm doing stock research, for example, I'd love a smart tag that recognizes when I type in a publicly traded company's name. I must admit I'm not sure they belong in every web page I view. I don't want to be directed to a mediocre search page every time I read a web page.
If you're really interested in Smart Tags you should check out the Smart Tag SDK or the Smart Tags FAQ.
_____________
I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.
_____________
I'll bet / with my Net / I can get / those things yet.
--Dr. Seuss
What if I release my web site under a "non-free" license's that does not premit modifation by any party for any reason?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Further evidence, if we needed it, that most posters don't RTFAs.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
...even if Microsoft itself has to provide them.
If I make and sell a smart TV set that blocks my competitors' commercials and replaces them on the fly with my own (yes, it's a non-trivial task, chill!) those competitors will probably take about a nanosecond to file suit for unfair competition, because, quite frankly, it is.
So, how is this any different? Yes, I know, I don't have to use WinXX -- I don't, as a matter of fact, since I have an all-Apple household and have never *needed* any Microsoft products -- but we're still talking about subverting third-party site content at the browser level, making changes to a site that the developer never intended, and generally polluting the user's experience. Given Microsoft's penchant for no-prisoners strategic marketing, how can this be a good thing?
73 de N5VB (ex-KD5BIV) AR SK
I found all these words with squiggly underlines on my website. And there I was trying to figure out why most of my words were spelt wrong! It turns out they were just hyperlinks after all.
Microsoft is pretty much free to do what it wants, especially if it comes to hijacking people's attention in order to get more and more people to like all things Microsoft or Microsoft-benefiting. Look, if ABC can implant a huge spooky-looking Oldsmobile billboard in the infield of Turn 4 of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway ("positioned," curiously enough, to be a serious safety hazard) during their coverage of the Indy 500, think what Microsoft can do if they smarten the browser they've all but forced you to use to the point where they can tailor your whole "Web experience." MS has MILLIONS of people buying and using their products uncritically and without as much as a thought to alternatives. Never in the hostory of the world has any one entity, governmental or corporate, had such an inroad into the actions and decisions of such a large group of people.
Even I, arguably the staunchest of MS supporters on /., think this is bad juju.
Perhaps if this were a standard with a publicly maintained content list, I'd be cool with this. But as it stands, it's not quite right, and technically, under the constitution, it's prior restraint (since the content is altered before it is seen by the client).
In MS's defense, my mouth is watering at the potential for this on a corporate Intranet, which is where I thought the technology was originally intended to go, with Office XP's new Intranet features. But on the Internet, it's just not right.
I'll keep using IE and all, but I think I'll avoid any of these Smart Tags on the Internet.
Well, I went to the Office XP launch and I can tell you that smart tags aren't evil at all. It's a kind of regular expression that applies to "all" content. If I'm in Word, I might have a smart tag that recognizes addresses. A little icon pops up that says "I can do stuff with this!" - and then I have choices of actions that apply to addresses, like looking them up in Outlook or mapping them in MapQuest or something.
Could I use them to redirect IE to different pages based on keywords? Sure, of course. But I don't think that's necessarily the focus - it's much more general than that.
And that's a bad thing? remember, this is all client side.
just thing, a single click to goatse every time you see a reference to XP...
<FL:smarttaglist xmlns:FL="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:smarttags:list ">e </FL:moreinfour l>m s">
<FL:name>
slashBot</FL:name>
<FL:lcid>
1033</FL:lcid>
<FL:description>
A list of MS related terms and suitable SlashBot comments on them.</FL:description>
<FL:moreinfourl>
http://msdn.microsoft.com/offic
<FL:smarttag type="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:smarttags#msdnter
<FL:caption>
SlashBot Links</FL:caption>
<FL:terms>
<FL:termlist>
microsoft, innovate, office, windows, 95, NT, XP</FL:termlist>
</FL:terms>
<FL:actions>
<FL:action id="ODCWebSite">
<FL:caption>
&SlashDot Web site</FL:caption>
<FL:url>
http://slashdot.org</FL:url>
</FL:action>
<FL:action id="SlashdotWebSite">
<FL:caption>
Red Hat &Web site</FL:caption>
<FL:url>
http://www.redhat.com</FL:url>
</FL:action>
<FL:action id="Goatse WebSite">
<FL:caption>
Goatse &Office Web site</FL:caption>
<FL:url>
http://goatse.cx</FL:url>
</FL:action>
</FL:actions>
</FL:smarttag>
</FL:smarttaglist>
TomV
Control the Desktop OS - check
Control the browsing platform - cHeck
Control lobyists and juges - check
Control databases and information - check
Control what people WANT - In progress...
ok they can continue on with their world domination strategy, fine with me, as long as it means one day they will control my mother in law, if that's not in the plan... I have the feeling I am being screwed somewhere....I just can't point it...
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
anyone got the 411 on this supposed meta tag? i tried searching on google and microsoft.com, no luck. funny, every page on microsoft.com that has the words disable and smart tags is turning up a 404 now.
cat
People don't realise this, but Microsoft is a wonderfull company. For example:
- Their products are designed to give the consumer the freedom to work in a wide range of enviroments - Windows95, Windows98, WindowsME, WindowsNT, Windows2000, WindowsXP
- The quality of their software is excelent - DOS is very stable
- Their prices are highly afordable - Windows 3.1 prices are at an all time low
In this specific case, i think putting in IE the ability to transform any work in an HTML page into a link to a Microsoft site is a way of empowering the User by allowing him/her to for example click in the name of a brand and be sent to a Microsoft endorsed site full with articles to buy and "super special promotions" and "unbiased consumer information".To everybody out there i say:
Please think twice before bashing Microsoft again!!!
Two things, supposedly the feature can be disabled by sites, but do you really believe the browser will honor the command to turn the feature off? Maybe the first version, but upgrades and updates will likely "enhance" that feature and mean that it will be enabled regardless of what the site wants, because "users want the feature". Not that I'm paranoid. In any event, what if one of the licenses for text/web/documents were extended. They could still allow for open use of the content on other servers, but no modification of the data displayed to end users from specific servers. In other words, I could allow the content to be copied, modified, redisplayed by others, but I do not allow modifications to the content to be displayed to end users served directly from my server. Combine with the license rules in the web server that does not allow Internet Explorer XP access to the site since it violates this license. Does anyone think there would be any value in something like this? I know from a commercial standpoint I would not want my customers leaving my site for a competitor's site just because Microsoft liked the competitor and linked one of the words in my document to their site.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Kewl
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Words in HTML pages are linked as in the M$ scheme, but I control where each link goes. Think of it as bookmarks on steroids. Furthermore, I'd want to be able to easily import published sets of "link targets" from sources I prefer. Pr0n fans could import from www.sexmeup.com, and prudes could import from www.noickystuff.org.
I could imagine a hierarchical system of link targets. First, see if I personally have specified a target for the word "foo." If not, check my imported lists, in a priority order I control. I would want these link targets to be visually different from normal links...maybe by color?
Oh, and one more thing...let me right-click on any word to look it up in the dictionary or thesaurus site of my choice.
Take a lesson from the evil empire: embrace and extend.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
> I then suggest (understand : "Vehemently
n al.dtd">
/>
/>
- Ve riSign-Citigroup-CompuServe-Digital
a ck -Turner-Money Book
B lu emoon-Modern-1
e r Brothers
e r Music
c h- Teldec-Warner/Chappell
/>
...
> sustain") that the webmasters who'd want to be
> smart-tagged should put a Meta Tag in their pages.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitio
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Foo</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../bar.css"
<meta name="DontAllowSmartTagsFrom" content="Microsoft"
<meta name="DontAllowAutoLinksFrom" content="AOL-Time-Warner-Hughes Electronics-3Com-Eastman Kodak-General
Motors-VarsityBooks-Hewlett-Packard-PurchasePro
City-AOL Europe-ICQ-The
Knot-MapQuest-Spinner-DrKoop-Netscape-iAmaze-Qu
Club-HomeStyle Books-Crafter's Choice-One Spirit-International-Little,
Brown and Company (and UK)-Bulfinch Press-Back Bay Books-The
Mysterious Press-Oxmoor House-Leisure Arts-Sunset Books-TW Kids-HBO
(USA, Asia, en Español, Ole, Poland, Brasil, Hungary)-Cinemax-Comedy
Central-CNN-Court TV-Road Runner-Time Warner Communications
(telephone)-New York City Cable Group-New York 1 News-Time
Warner-Kablevision-Hanna Barbera Cartoons-Telepictures-Witt-Thomas
Productions-Castle Rock Entertainment-Time (Asia, Atlantic, Canada,
Latin America, South Pacific, Money, For Kids)-Fortune-Life-Sports
Illustrated-Inside Stuff-Money (Your Company, Your Future)-People (Australian, Español, Teen)-Entertainment Weekly-The
Ticket-In Style-Southern Living-Progressive Farmer-Southern
Accents-Cooking Light-The Parent Group(Parenting, Baby Talk, Baby on
the Way)-This Old House-Sunset-The Health Publishing
Group-Hippocrates-Coastal Living-Weight Watchers-Real
Simple-Asiaweek-President (Japanese business monthly)-Dancyu-Wallpaper
(UK)-eCompany Now-Field & Stream-Freeze-Golf Magazine-Outdoor
Life-Popular Science-Salt Water Sportsman-Ski-Skiing Magazine-Skiing
Trade News-SNAP-Snowboard Life-Ride BMX-Today's Homeowner-TransWorld
Skateboarding-TransWorld Snowboarding-Verge-Yachting
Magazine-Warp-American Express Publishing Corporation (Travel &
Leisure, Food & Wine, Your Company, Departures, SkyGuide)-DC
Comics-Vertigo-Paradox-Milestone-Mad Magazine-Time Warner Music-The
Atlantic Group-Atlantic Classics-Atlantic Jazz-Atlantic
Nashville-Atlantic Theater-Big
Beat-Blackground-Breaking-Curb-Igloo-Lava-Mesa/
43-Rhino Records-Elektra Entertainment
Group-Elektra-EastWest-Asylum-Elektra/Sire-Warn
Records-Warner Brothers-Warner Nashville-Warner Alliance-Warner
Resound-Warner Sunset-Reprise-Reprise Nashville-American
Recordings-Giant-Maverick-Revolution-Qwest-Warn
International-WEA Telegram-East West ZTT-Coalition-CGD East
West-China-Continential-DRO East
West-Erato-Fazer-Finlandia-Magneoton-MCM-Nonesu
Music-WEA Inc.-Ivy Hill Corporation-Warner Special Products-Joint
Ventures-Columbia House-Music Sound Exchange-Music Choice and Music
Choice Europe-Viva-Channel V-Heartland Music-Road Runner-Warner
Publisher Services-Time Distribution Services-American Family
Publishers-Pathfinder-Africana.com-Warner Brothers Recreation
Enterprises-Turner Entertainment-TBS Superstation-TNT-Turner
South-Cartoon Network(Europe, Latin America, Asia/Pacific)-Turner
Classic Movies-Turner Original Productions-Philips Arena-Turner
Learning-Turner Adventure Learning-Turner Home Satellite-Turner
Network Sales-New Line Cinema-Fine Line Features-Atlanta
Braves-Atlanta Hawks-Atlanta Thrashers-Turner Sports-World
Championship Wrestling-Good Will Games"
<meta
--
mrBlond
CowboyNeal for president!
"Hit any user to continue."
Yes, it's nice that Microsoft allows you to configure it now, but what happens if in IE6.5 or IE7 or whatever they decide to...
1. Remove the button that lets the user turn smart-links on/off? Microsoft says: "User feedback has shown that 89% of all users love smart tags, so now they'll be available for every page, all the time!"
2. Change the browser to ignore the META tag. Microsoft says: "Website authors love the extra content that Microsoft provides for them, for free!"
3. When Microsoft directs all smart tags to Microsoft-approved sites, with Microsoft approved content. Microsoft says: "YOU don't want to think anything bad about Microsoft, now do you? Please go read your pro-Microsoft propoganda for today!"
4. When Microsoft changes smart tags to look like ordinary links. Microsoft says: "99% of users don't care whether a link directs them to a Microsoft or non-Microsoft site. Pretty soon, who will be able to tell the difference anyway? And just look at all of the amazing content and services you get for one low, low price (monthly, of course). Look at all the VALUE we're giving you, for free! Who cares what the links look like?"
5. You say "these smart tags are a pain. I want them to disable them." Microsoft says: "What? YOU DON'T AGREE WITH MICROSOFT? YOU ARE THE PAIN! TERMINATOR DROIDS - HOME IN ON THIS PERSON'S IP ADDRESS AND DISABLE THEM!"
It's traditional embrace and extend - but this time they're aiming for people's thoughts. Doesn't that bother you just a little?
----
Free yourself. Everything else will follow.
Hopefully somebody will come out with a script that will add the meta tag to disable DumbTags. Something tells me this would be a very popular app, and will go thru many versions since MS will want to make sure we only want to disable DumbTags version 1.05 and not 1.051.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Yes, that is all I need is more shit to make the webpage I am loading bigger, my browser bigger, and Microshoft's prescence in my life bigger. Sign me up -- quick!
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
OK, so basically what is going on, is It's illegal for us to crack our way into www.microsoft.com and add our own links there, but it's perfectly OK for Microsoft to add links to our web pages? Sorry, but I don't think that's fair. If they can make any sort of edit at all to anyone else's pages, via any methods, which includes the addition of previously absent links ("beneficial" or not), then whoever has a web site altered in this fashion should be automatically granted the right to edit Microsoft's web pages. It's only fair.
Don't get me wrong - this "opt-out" will be far more effective for M$ than an "opt-in" strategy - who would voluntarily allow a browser to add links to their site in ways that they couldn't control?
And if noone would do it voluntarily, it kind of begs the question . . .
Not a huge crisis:
To turn off Smart Tags
On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect Options....
Click the Smart Tags tab.
Clear the Show Smart Tag Actions buttons check box.
Click OK.
There, all done. You can turn off the red-alert now.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
Sorry guys - the information is this article is ABSOLUTELY BULLSHIT. Excuse the language but theres just no other way of expressing the pure digust I have for the moron who posted this.
Before you post s*hit like this, make an effort to check it out. Just because CNET can post inaccurate and moronic stories doesnt mean that slashdot should to.
Smarttags do NOT change the data in the HTML document - rather they provide additional information to what is already supplied in the document. For example, if I hover over a link to http://www.microsoft.com - I will be presented with a tiny little, unobstusive window detailing some info about the company such as their homepage and stock symbol.
Jesus christ slashdot - why dont you actually ask somebody who beta tests Internet Explorer 6 / Windows XP before making these WILD accusations? Probably because it would be ALOT harder to spread your FUD then.
Gam
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
According to the article, Microsoft could change owners webpages without the owners knowing. Seriously, if I run a standard apache webserver, I see no way in hell m$ just browsing over there with IE and changing links and text all over my site. Can someone please give me a technical explanation what I missed? Or is this just another m$ bashing post to get users to let of some steam? Anyway, please enlighten me as to what one would have to run in order for m$ to change my site. I'm really looking forward to it!
/Smuffe
I can see it now. Assuming that this page modification will only occur in IE and not in Mozilla/Opera, write a little JavaScript that redirects IE viewers to a pigged-page, where words are intentionally misspelled to thwart pattern-matching linking.
"Population 1,656"
A number of sites have been throwing hissy fits about other sites linking to them. Will M$ be held accountable, should it link to a site that wants to charge per link, or would the site hold the content creator of the "modified" page accountable?
IANAL... But I play one on
people that defend MS, on any level, are the worst dort of deluded dopes... they just don't see that the emperor has NO clothes.
It's making MS look bad, Link to it! :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Yes! Anyone who's interested in working on a free/open source WikiBrowser (WardsWiki) WikiBrowser (Meatball) go read and contribute at those links, or contact me. It could be done as a sidebar in browsers that do that, and as a separate app for different OSes. (there's no project yet)
Life,
John
ourpla.net is your planet
Instead of complaing I think that the mozilla/GPLExplorer/whatever folks should add this feature (turned off by default) to their browser and show Microsoft how to do it right.
It could actually be the thing that got mozilla out of the cave and into usage...
--
TC - My Photos..
On this page you can find some links. If you create a bookmark on the link Google Search (a little javascript> you simply have to select words in the Web-page you are viewing, and then activate this bookmark. - Then you will get a page with lots of related sites without the Microsoft filter.
I'm using this for year now and it does not change the site I am viewing, and I can do it without M$ Software.
I don't need to be told what the input window and the 'send' button are. MSN Messenger, however, assumes that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground and won't let me turn the damn feature off. It's a sign of stupidity to assume that someone whom you've never met is stupid. It's also a good way to get bit on the ass in the long run.
Americans might be dumbed down, but telling us we're stupid just pisses us off.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
I've never seriously considered actually blocking IE from my sites...until now. Probably time to go find that javascript and install it. Enough is quite enough.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
BTW here is how the article looks in the Dialectizer:
Whar Does Microsof' Want Yo' t'Git Today?
Posted by michael on Thursday June 07, @07:49AM fum th' subliminal-message-har depp. blennerkin' sent in this hyar Wall Street Journal sto'y about Microsof''s noo "Smart Tags" - auty-linkin' t'Microsof' websites in enny web page yo' visit. "Fum th' article: "In effeck, Microsof' will be able, through th' browser, t're-edit ennybody's site, wifout th' owny's smarts o' permisshun, in a way thet tempps users t'leave an' hoof it to a Microsof'-chosen site -- whether o' not thet site offers better info'mashun." Mah web site is about margarita recipes....whut is Microsof' a-gonna does...offer a visito' t'mah site a better recipe on their site?" T'other reader sent in a CNET article on th' same subjeck.
If anything, I think it will result in a flooding of MS support channels from people complaining that their browser is "broken" because all the words have squiggly lines under them.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I know you were mostly joking, AC... but for those who really hate the feature, that is the obvious way to break it.
If you don't want MS filling your page with smart links, spoof a bunch of them right on your page, all going to useless and/or really gross sites. If enough people do that, people will start to avoid following those damned things at all.
Besides, while it was the way people once thought HTML would someday be used, nobody but us geeks ever follow contextual web links anyway. Regular users go to the sites they know, and only find other sites through Yahoo, "links" pages, or their favorite commercial portal. Most of them only revisit the same 5 pages 90% of the time, and seldom "browse" in the mid-90's sense of the word.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"Yes, people should go into this with eyes open for what they're working with, but I don't think there's any nefarious plot," he said.
Of course. Microsoft would NEVER do that... I laughed out loud when I read that part.
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"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
Cross off Netscape.... Yesterday's /. post.
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"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
I wonder if the links appear if you save the page.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Ah, but: nothing in that case is being copied in a form which the user can access. A web page is being published across the web and the user actually has the result in a form that they can save to disk and access at will.
I think a good lawyer could give it a go.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Some peole have suggested that since it is just a question of display there is no more grounds to attack than if you don't like the fonts the browser uses but I think that it could be argued that the meaning of an HTML-work is changed when the links are changed and that this takes it into the realm of a derived work.
For example, if I put up a page giving company x's products a negative review and your browser links 'company x' to their advertising then the meaning of my page has at least been confused (why am I advertising a product I'm saying I don't like?) and at worse totaly reversed, depending on the context.
Personally, I think I'll just block IE6 or whatever version has this with a redirect to www.opera.com.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
From the article:
--
Is it okay to cry "Movie!" in a crowded firehouse? --Steve Martin
... Netscape,
... Mozilla,
... Opera,
ALL, one would presume, that run under Windows XP. Even if MS makes XP hostile towards other browsers (do they dare, after the IE fiasco?), there's always, well, the Penguin.
Akardam Out
I wonder how long it will take a cracker to make a malformed SmartTag code with a dummy name to gain access to anyone's system who uses it? Sounds like a good way to insert a Trojan.
> Smart tags can be easily turned off by the end
> user. There is a BUTTON ON THE TOOLBAR to do
> this.
Helps, although it'd be better if they were off
by default. 90% of people never change their
defaults; most have no clue how to, even if there
is a button on the toolbar. If nobody tells
them to push the button on the toolbar, they
won't.
> Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page
> author. There is a META tag that does this.
Better; the fact that page authors can prevent
Microsoft from modifying their pages is a good
thing.
> Smart tags look nothing like ordinary links.
> They are purple dotted lines uder the word.
> When you mouse-over them, an (i) info symbol
> appears. You CANNOT mistake smart tags for
> ordinary links.
You've never worked a help desk, have you?
Chris Mattern
I'm waiting for the day where the browser's parser automatically filter's out a competetor's website links and subs in their own. Wouldn't be too hard to do, and you might never notice it...
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Or a thong, or any sort of tight fitting and / or revealing clothing. I really don't, and that raises the issue of pr0n. We ALLLLL know its out their, I'm sure we have all stumbled across it (intentionally or not) while surfing the web. So if Microsoft is going ahead with their nefarious smart tags what will this do to the porn industry. Will Microsoft be selling its own premium (or substandard) porn, and then discreetly pull your browsing to one of their sites, while your standard 8 million pop-ups pop up.
I'm not really worried, but it could happen.
Paranoia is when you think they are going to do something to you; fear is when you KNOW they are.
Geoffrey Cameron Peart
McMaster Software Engineering
Geoffrey Cameron Peart
McMaster Software Engineering
Monkies? I like Monkies
From the article:
It sounds to me that it's more like their explorer bars, except that it's more closely linked to the content of the page. What's the problem? You can turn it off, and you can add ones that you do want... dmoz...google...whatever.
-BB
Totally agree. Anyone can write their own SmartTags, so what's to stop you getting the ones you want from your favourite search engine/ shop/ whatever and using them. I just hope that you can use 3rd party ones AND turn off the MS ones...
-BB
Newbie finds GPL word on the web... Smart Tag leads to Virus information.
... Smart tag leads to Cancer information.
... Smart tag lead to Ms fight against DOJ.
Newbie frin a weird word Linux on web
Newbie find innovation on the web
...
We are getting there slowly - Soon IE will hopefully know where I can buy that product cheaper that I was just about to buy - go there, fill-in my cached credit card details and make me happy.
Even better - it can analyze my behaviour patterns - suggest products I never thought about. Arrange credit lines automatically since my credit worthness can be verified objectively.
And in case I forget to renew my microsoft subscriptions it will look after that too.
Actually, I don't have to update all the thousands of pages contained by all my web sites.
I then suggest (understand : "Vehemently sustain") that the webmasters who'd want to be smart-tagged should put a Meta Tag in their pages.
They have to be explicitely authorized, not the contrary or nothing will prevent them (or anybody else) in the future to play such a game (with such a reduced press-coverage) before whining it's the user-that-had-not-put-a-Meta-Tag's fault.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This is blatant copy of the post #43 , which made me laugh and was not moderated funny.
On the serious part: I don't like the idea because, without context, a word can mean very different things. Look at censoring software: I used the words "sexy gal" on my personal webpage somewhere and, at a bank where I worked, the censoring software blocked it because it was "pr0n"...The page blocked was showing old pictures of my family.
This feature will have the same effects: I use "sexy gal" and it could link to http://www.lolitagirls.com or so....Not my idea, when the context doesn't indicate porgnography at all.
But then, probably I'm wrong?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Some days ago I saw the first commercials on TV here in Europe (on german TV) for Office XP. Yup... I didn't know it shipped yet by the way, so it could be pre-order or so. Of course I said, oh, crap! Liars! But then I guess that there are more secretaries (or managers) watching TV swallowing those lies, than halfway informed geeks. I don't remember the slogans, but "making things easier" was definately one of them.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias" (1818)
Still a pain, but at least they're recognizing some Web sites might not want this "feature". The best part is that with modern template-generated Web sites, you only need to add the META tag in one place to de-Smart Tag your entire site.
At what point will Micro$soft actually give me a reason to buy XP. It use to be games but consoles are now faster, cheaper and hackable. The office2k cover's 90% of what I need and that last 10% is covered by specialized tools.
I find myself using *nix more and more for my work and day to day task's. BillBorg are you going to give me a reason to buy your product?
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
If there isn't an option to turn this off (cause you know, this being M$, that it will be on by default) I will be switching myself and the rest of my office to Opera so fast it will make Gate's head spin. Not that he will care or anything.....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Maybe this will finally convince the courts that people should not be legally responsible for policing the content of sites they link to, now that web site owners are not the only ones who can create links on their web sites.
include $sig;
1;
Actually this has already sort of happened
I can remember back in '98 I was playing with Beta 1 of "Windows NT Workstation 5" back before it became Windows "Profesional" (Though what "professional" would willingly use windows I don't know.)
In any event I was going about configuring it, and since it only had IE 3, I decided to go and install Netscape Communicator since I prefer it. So I faithfully typed "http://www.netscape.com" into IE and low and behold IE displayed an HTTP error I'd never seen before which was something to the effect of
which translated is: Needless to say, I thought this was just a little bit offensive, and probably stupid considering the DoJ was right in the middle of the antitrust investigation.I managed finally to get Netscape (by installing it from a cd distributed by my school) on the machine, and surprisingly "NT5b1" allowed it to run. I guess the IE division of Microsoft has more of a "sense of humor" than the OS department.
BTW The beta sucked...
credo quia absurdum
With any luck, there will be a way, via the Document Object Model, to detect this and turn it off, like I did with ThirdVoice.
And I can't wait for Microsoft to cease-and-desist me when I try.
Ed R.Zahurak
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
We are a chemistry group (not computers)so although they are smart people their not necessarily good coputer people so if they find these things annoying then how does the general population feel about these "features"
Most of the computers run Office 97 because although the more upto date office programs (2000 etc) might be better they also have so many "features" that it pisses everyone off enough that they want 97 reinstalled.
I think M$ tend to add these features until people are convinced that they really do want them....Your minds are under our controle
Stupid tags if quality of links from their search engine is an appropriate example of the standard of linking we'll get.
If proper hyperlinking of article text hadn't become the forgotten point of the Internet, perhaps M$ wouldn't feel that this service would add value to surfing...
As much as I dislike this whole Smart Tags idea, I don't think it's a copyright issue. When I request a web page, the server delivers the data to my browser. I have the right to instruct the browser to modify it for my own personal use. For example, I can make the font larger or I can override the designer's choice of text and background colors with my own. Similarly, if I'm enough of a crackhead, I can run Microsoft LinkMuncher on my own personal copy of the page in order to ensure that it is not "underlinked" or "overusable." As long as I don't redistribute it, it's probably no more of a copyright violation than changing the background color.
Still, even if it's not a copyright violation, the only good thing about this feature is that it'll default to off.
This guy actually wrote in to the New York Times "I keep getting an alert that says: 'Warning: Your Internet connection is not optimized. Download Internet Boost 2001 now!' I don't know what causes this message, but how I can keep it from appearing?" What do you suppose he will make of XP's squiggly purple lines?
Boy I'm glad everyone says the browser war is over. Clearly, the better company won.
In other news: Al Sharpton's "Peckish Strike"
I run a web server that offers the dial-up software for the university where I work. No big deal. Recently, anytime you go to the site a pop-up advertisement comes up. Http is being filtered and and site on the "second level" is redirected from the main server after this pop-up occurs. Even my lowly server for my master's project does this. Argggh. With a bit of hacking I bet you can make perl eradicate the Microsoft nuisance.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
- Smart tags can be easily turned off by the end user. There is a BUTTON ON THE TOOLBAR to do this.
- Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page author. There is a META tag that does this.
- The default smart tags look for any reference to any company in MoneyCentral, and a few US universities. You click on them, and you get info.
- Smart tags look nothing like ordinary links. They are purple dotted lines uder the word. When you mouse-over them, an (i) info symbol appears. You CANNOT mistake smart tags for ordinary links.
- IMO, they are a pain, but easily disabled.
Nothing to see here. Move along.No, there isn't Netscape anymore
Ni!
whoever owns the client, owns the content. J
It's just a BloJJ
...what Microsoft would do with these pages.
I'd always be much happier if their package software shipped with all that garbage turned off and they sent along a 4 pager indicating what they are, where to find more info and how to toggle them.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My web site is about margarita recipes....what is Microsoft going to do...offer a visitor to my site a better recipe on their site?
You never know, it may contain sodium pentathol. Just drink up, smile and don't worry about a thing, ol' Bill will look after your best interests.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's different becuase gnome was not altering the presentation of the KDE website to insert gnome-approved links.
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A person of moderate zeal
These can be turned off by meta tags or on the browser end. No biggie. Get off of it already.
Set free the landsharks and let the lawsuits fly.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Sounds like a massive commercialization of the (apparently now-defunct) Thirdvoice software that raised such a ruckus a couple years ago. Perhaps Thirdvoice has some patents on the idea which Microsoft is infringing.
Uh oh! If I'm anti-patent and anti-Microsoft, which of my principles do I set aside today?
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
The link was the username...my bad!
My other sig is extremely clever...
That
would
be
rediculous
!
-Spackler
And if i write a nice disclaimer somewhere on my site which explicitly disallows this, are they still allowed to "change my site"?
Oh, i am sure MS has a horde of lawyers...
J.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I.
Are some people still using MIcrosoft?
Bill Gates does not want you to be a customer, he wants you to be an inferior.
Bush's education improvements were
Its depressing...But what happened to the real standards body? www.w3c.org?
Thats why my site was made: www.penguinfriendly.org
This is a battle for Freedom. I was the choice to be mine, not some large corporations.
StarTux
This is not a case of MS inventing some new, crazy way to controll the minds of the world. This is just a case of thier so called "innovation" (read: taking someones idea and pretending it was theirs). flyswat was doing this exact same thing years ago. Its not that scary, it is more annoying than anything else. I guess some people like it though.
Its not changing the page or anything like that, it just adds its own links to conent from it's own database. Thats it. If you don't like it, don't use it.
This article is completely blowing it out of proportion. As if hate groups could make you see their content. How? You would have to knowingly install their add-ins.
This article is is just FUD. Its anti-MS FUD, so many of you out there may forgive the author. But FUD is FUD, and this article does not even attempt to look at the issue even handedly.
--
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
... to add 'smart tags' to words in my site. I dare them.
javascript alert: You have been found browsing unofficial media while under the influence of anti-social neuronal activity.
Fatal OE exception caught in room101.vxd:
Your brave new world may be corrupt or inoperable. Please reinstall from your original windows84 media.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
If Microsoft continues in this direction and IE begins placing links into a web site that originally didn't have those links, I imagine that consumers could be swayed by other browsers who advertise "View web pages as they were meant to be viewed--take charge of your online experience!" Honestly, if this does make it to the released version, I think MS is opening itself up to a whole slew of litigation. If a web site can be copyrighted, then altering it without the authors consent could be considered illegal, couldn't it?!
And that's my $0.32 (adjusted for inflation).
I'm not expendible, I'm not stupid, and I'm not going! --Avon, Blake's Seven
Several years ago I picked up a button at a sci-fi conn that said "I was expendible, I was stupid, I went. -- Tasha Yar". LOL, never knew it was a reference to something else until now.
----------
Technoli
It seems like this is a copyright infringement.
It seems as though you're right - the makers of the web site retain their exclusive rights, and they don't usually give them up. This includes the right to make derivative works. There's an implied license in deploying a web site - that it will be copied into memory and displayed in a browser.
Of course, what if this is just Microsoft's method of "display?" And then, what about proxies like Proxomitron, that can alter a page to remove unwanted Javascript? It all gets so weird...
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
As if www advertising wasn't a big enough mess already, take this hypothetical example:
Say, like millions of relatively obscure people, I put up a website talking about things that matter to me, in the hope that people of broadly similar viewpoint see it and derive some vague benefit. (Posting here is motivated by the same general priniple.)
Hypothecate next, that in order to offset some of the cost of the site, I negotiate formal contractual arrangements for banner ads with spiffy-biffy video cards and a company that makes funny colored hats.
Please note that advertising sales is not my motivation in creating the site in the first place: I'm doing that because I have something to say. Also, I feel good about promoting spiffy-biffy because they're inexpensive and rugged and do a really good job rendering KDE and Gnome, and I like my unusually colored hat.
We're not talking tycoon city here. The site gets a small number of hits, and the revenue stream from it's advertisers is proportionate, but it is serious business nevertheless. It produces steady revenue for me, and is mutually beneficial for my site readers and the advertisers involved.
There must be millions of websites like that all over the world. In fact, there are.
Now, if I'm interpreting the meaning of this "innovation" correctly, along comes m$, and they engineer links to appear on my site to the competitors of spiffy-biffy, whose products only work with windoze, and the hat company. They do this without my permission and I never get paid a damn thing, but m$ sure does.
Something is real wrong with this picture.
give me a
If I create a web page, and "snag" content dynamically from another site (without permission), I'm violating copyright. By them modifying my page, they're effectively using my content to display their own page with my content.
I don't see the difference, personally.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Shouldn't they make a meta-tag that ENABLES this feature instead? MS should get explicit permission to do this to someone's website through an opt-in tag, rather than an opt-out tag that I have to spend time and money inserting into every single one of my pages.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Assembler can be used for constructing nasty viruses, therefore, we must, at all costs, stop the scourge of assembler!
-
I don't think it's a problem. You don't need to click a word that has a smart tag - only if you want to. That's what Microsoft has been good at all the time: do what the users ask for.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
This is the homepage for Smart Tagsi cl es/oQuickSmartTags.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2002/art
I read the whole description of them, it just sounds like a way to get stuff done in office, it doesn't mention the Web on the entire page.
What Microsoft is going after is complete control of Joe User. They don't really care about the clever minority that knows about the problems with Microsoft and will find alternatives; we are NOT an important segment of the market. Frankly, it surprised me that the Smart Tags are default OFF.
Reality is indistinguishable from any sufficiently advanced fantasy.
Snore more MS bashing.
Why not just block the browsers/OS from viewing your sites. That would eliminate them maninpulating your content.
I think the NBCi software only let you click on certain words. That is, you couldn't click on any word.
Read the article, troll. The feature comes from Office XP and can be turned off. And no-one necessarily 'wants' smart-tags, but tons of people are buying every new iteration of Windows, so M$ doesn't have a great way of knowing what people want. Probably because many computer manufacturers package Windows on every new machine so that end-users don't have to think about which operating system they should use. If they did, I would bet that M$ wouldn't retain it's monopolistic market share on OS's.
OK - so lets say you go to one of the many Porno Sites - Will MS Link you bak to there Peep WINDOW?
The code required for this would be awkward, tho.
Maybe put all your pages on backgrounds with the exact shade of purple used by SmartTags?
imagine meta tags on slashdot....
uggh
And neither can you in smart tags.
--
Two witches watch two watches.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
You've developed a reputation as the evil empire. Are you so strapped for cash that you can't hire someone to get you out of this mire? How hard can it be? One would think you like being universally loathed. It has nothing to do with what your browser does or doesn't do. It has to do with how you treat your user community. How people see you. I would have to say the consumate failure of Microsoft is in public relations. Microsoft is it's own worst enemy. Microsoft will probably commit suicide within the next few years.
I always thought defacing web sites was illegal?
a default Windows install may, for example, automatically contain some sort of MS web portal
What I meant to say here was "some sort of MS web portal built into the desktop". It doesn't quite sound the same without that part :) So there where you currently have "my computer", "recycle bin" etc on your desktop, there will be links straight to MS content providers, e.g. "news", "stock quotes" .. possibly not even links, but the content itself - a web page portal effect.
Microsoft says the Internet Explorer Smart Tags feature, which is similar to a Smart Tag feature in the new Office XP, will be turned off by default in the final release, and that users will have to consciously choose to enable it by activating a setting buried in the browser's menus. it's disabled by default, which means it doesn't do shit
In the grand tradition of Microsoft bloatware, this seems like an interesting feature that, down the road, might actually be useful. Of course, going down that road could well involve some heavy duty reconfiguring of the Microsoft code (imagine a plugin which would let you hook, say, a dictionary or encyclopedia in as the object of these links, rather than M$ sites..)
Problem is, their going about it bass-ackward. Rather than implementing this as a feature which users (including not just those browsing from XP, but also those serving to XP) can enable if they want it, they are forcing the entire world to march to their beat.
I shouldn't have to include a metatag in my site to keep M$ from getting jiggy with my source. (It's a little like being presumed guilty until proven innocent...). Instead, I should have to include a metatag to allow Microsnot to have their way with my site.
The world does not revolve around Microsoft, no matter how hard they sit on it and spin...
But the general idea is clear. Every time I stop seeing me with my own eyes, and look at myself through MS eyes, I see myself like a fat cow, only waiting to be milked away of her last drop of... money.
I have only one thing to say, and it's that if we (hackers, other computer companies, government, general public) let them get away with it, well, we will deserve to pay MS along till end of time. The strategy is clearly written, nobody is fooled, and alternative ways can be developed. If they are not, it's a proof that MS is a de-facto-standard-creating-machine, and all the rest, only a loud bickering lot of noise.
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
If I was in court trying to explain to normal folks what smart tags were, I'd explain it like this:
Imagine you have your own "mon and pop" store. You buy things from others and place them on the stand to sell to your customers. Obviously you have to sell a little more expensive since you're a small business.
Well, how will you feel if Microsoft came into your store, without your permission, and on top of EVERY item you sell, puts their own tags offering a better offer (which includes Microsoft's price, phone number, URL, etc)???
Well, that's EXACTLY what Smart Tags do in real life on other people's sites.
With this, Microsoft alone could drive out of business 95% of all competing small businesses (and maybe many of the medium-size and large ones too).
I don't know about you, but I see this as an invasion to the original web designer's work. It's like showing "stuff" the original website designer did not intend to show. It's almost just as going to the Louvre and spray-painting the Mona Lisa with the words Microsost.
Microsoft says the Internet Explorer Smart Tags feature, which is similar to a Smart Tag feature in the new Office XP, will be turned off by default in the final release, and that users will have to consciously choose to enable it by activating a setting buried in the browser's menus. In addition, Microsoft says, it will provide a free bit of programming code, called a "meta tag," that site owners could use to bar any Smart Tags from appearing on their sites.
So, it's a feature that other, now defunct, companies have offered before (NBCi: "See a word, click it, get information") and that it turned off by default.
What's the problem, exactly? Oh, right, it's Microsoft.
They say they always draw purple lines. But what's to keep them from including backdoors to just change links? They could even include a back door to change everyone's settings remotely, by having IE check M$'s site on startup.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
What if i sent my resume in .doc format to a company? They will open it and find a whole bunch of links to microsoft, thats just a wonderful feeling....
Given that they'll probably implement the feature whether we like it or not, let's instead think of some ways to make this concept more palatable. It seems that it will be turned "off" by default, so that's a good thing. I think it would probably be much better if you could choose what source to obtain your "smart links" from. That way, there could be competitive databases that provide a more fair distribution of links. This should, of course, be chosen within the same dialog box as the switch that turns the feature on in the first place. Any other ideas?
GreyPoopon
--
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
War was beginning.
CEO: What happen ? ....
Webmaster: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Sysadmin: We get signal.
CEO: What !
Sysadmin: Main screen turn on.
CEO: It's You !!
Gates: How are you gentlemen !!
Gates: All your link are belong to us.
Gates: You are on the way to destruction.
CEO: What you say !!
Gates: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Gates: HA HA HA HA
CEO: Take off every 'zig' !!
CEO: You know what you doing.
CEO: Move 'zig'.
CEO: For great justice.
Note: Presumably 'zig' is a code name for Windows XP.
--
Security and monopolistic activities aside, how many people actually want these features? How many people will actually use them? 90 percent of the features in Excel and Word go unused as it is and the last thing I want is stuff popping up whenever I type someone's name. I think this will make using computers more complex and confusing for everyone. As soon as you start integrating stuff and having things happen automatically and forcing users to choose what websites to visit people get upset. For those Linux developers out there developing software for Linux on the desktop keep things simple, integration minimal and don't make any assumptions on what the user wants and do it automatically.
Everyone keeps asking if a web page author can write a disclaimer forbidding MS smart linking. RTFA, people! From the article:
Clearly there's a (META NAME="Smart Tags" CONTENT="Block"> , or some such, that Smart Tags will scan for first. (WSJ refers to this as "programming code," but whatever.) This of course is analogous to spammers using an "opt-out" model, assuming you're OK w/ being violated unless you say otherwise. It should be "opt-in" instead, more like (META NAME="Smart Tags" CONTENT="Allow" > , not touching your page unless that's there. But who ever expected MS to be respectful of authors or anybody for that matter?
Fight for your right to read books!
Hey,
brave hackers,
It is enjoyable to see the arguments against this new "innovation". But really, what did you guys expect from Microsoft? To play nice? to take care of you? Yah right. I am myself a little short of time and please don't waste it with childish comments like: "uh-oh now Microsoft have really done it... last straw... bloody murder.. etc". After you finish your fine arguments, please go back to _hacking_for_your_favourite_OS_ and have faith! For God's sake!
From the "This sounds vaguely familiar dept..."
Taken from a Wallstreet Journal article: "In response to my questions, Jonestown officials stressed that the purple Kool-Aid may still undergo modifications to make it more palatable. But they defended it as a useful tool.
DocWatson
MessEdUp
#/var/www/v
Uh, screwing with HTML != including pet software. What do you not understand? How are they _not_ different?
echo 'Header append X-HD-DVD "0x09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0"' >>
This is, obviously, just another plea by M$, saying "Don't use our software anymore.. Go get a Linux CD!". Seriously, they just keep pushing it further and further.. and some linux distros get more and more user-friendly. It's just a matter of time before MS software is "communistic" (or if they're already at that point, perhaps even further :), and Linux is easy to use for the average Joe. When that day hits, maybe people will see the light. Let's hope. That could almost destroy a monopoly.
This bit of info was brought to you by the letter Q. Thanks, Q.
I found this URI with a Google search:
h at snew/whatsnewpublicpreview.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/essentials/w
It suggests using this meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="MSThemeCompatible" Content="Yes">
to ENABLE Smart Tags on IE 6 beta. So maybe the actual meta tag to disable it would be either no meta tag or:
<meta http-equiv="MSThemeCompatible" Content="no">
I don't have IE 6 beta to test it, though.
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
The solution is to change the color of a link in your page to the same color as the text, and then surround all the text with a hyperlink back to your page.
Problem solved.
Now we just have to solve all the problems that this will cause 8*)
I've already implemented a simple solution that puts a dead halt to MS shenanigans on my website. If IE (any version) is identified as a browser the user is redirected to an 'error' page which states that IE is incapable of displaying the page properly and hey, would they like to download a free copy of Opera today? Same goes for AOL-identified browsers.
Is it illegal? Heck no, IE *isn't* capable of displaying the pages properly - because I've blocked its ability to do so. The reason is true, I just omitted explaining the cause.
It *is* my web site, after all. And damn, it's funny how many people will download Opera on the spot and install it when you set things up like that.
Hey, if MS can be sleazy then why can't I do the same as a bit of payback?
:-)
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Simple answer to all the "problems" with this. /. or some user will release such an add-on really quick). If no one else writes it then I will, and i really expect to see a generic news site add-on where you download the [damn, i forgot the extension, that standardized file format that all the big news sites store their headlines in. the thing that the slashboxes use to make the little headline indices] of your favorite news site and the add-on generates smart tags for you based on keywords in the file.
People who dont want to see links to MS sites wont turn the option on. People who want to keep their site "clean" will opt-out (and then people who really want to see the tags will process out that meta tag). You guys DID all read the article right? It will be OFF by default. And other companies can make their own smart-tag add-ons. I look forward to being able to get contextual links to recent slashdot stories (as i am sure that
Other good uses will be links to NASDAQ quotes, word definitions, and maps. This is all off the top of my head, i am sure that other people will think up much better uses for the software.
And to all you copyright fanatics: once i download your page i can do any damn thing i want to it as long as i dont redistribute it. that includes letting software do stuff to it as well. if i feel like viewing your web site passed through www.pornolize.com then thats my perogative. ditto for running Atomica or QuickClick or anything else like that.
Not to say that I particularly like what MS is doing. But isn't this similar to what Netscape (and almost every other ap) does? The latest version of Adobe Acrobat has links to their corporate website. Mac OS X has a section on the Apple menu for purchasing Mac OS X software.
"It appears as though you favor goat felching MPEGS... you can find much better examples at our premium site, Yew's With Straws."
Ah the wonders of technology. =)
-"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." - Arthur Dent
nothing new here, flycast did that 2 years ago...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
"Maybe the mozilla developers can implement something like this into their project."
Isn't Mozilla already instable enough? (Not a flamebait, just an attempt to point out a practical problem. If there are bugs in the existing featureset, adding newer features before fixing essential ones seems unwise.)
I'm the stranger...posting to
It sounds great on paper for the Internet to be more integrated with an OS desktop - anything that lets you get your data more quickly is a good thing, although the fact that MS will only use their tech for sites that pay them is troublesome.
My real concern, however, is the security of Smart Tags. M$ says they just download static data, and I believe them - but I still worry about the limited power these tags will have. For example, will these tags be able to take control of your browser like conventional HTML? If so, it would be easy for them to send you to a site with, say, a Java applet or ActiveX control that really could breach system security. For that matter, could these tags "redirect" your word processor?
My other concern is that even if the smart tags are little more than text files, with no ability to directly control a computer, clueless users may be fooled by data presented by a tag. It a tag advised them, for example, to buy a certain product or visit a certain website, they might do it thinking it was some sort of "official" advice from Microsoft, and therefor good. In other words, I worry about the same sort of mentality that makes users open email attachments without thinking even though they're told again and again and again not to do that, because the attachment either seems to be from someone they know, or a picture of a hot tennis player.
I guess what I'm saying is that integrating the internet is all well and good, but I don't trust people who might try to pull pranks with smart tags, and I don't trust the average user. I've seem my high school lan go down too many times because of user cluelessness with email viruses that only work because an MS email client has such control of the OS.
I'm the stranger...posting to
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;
sed 's/In Soviet Russia/In NSA America/g' < yakov-smirnoff-jokes.txt
Sounds kinda like what some TV networks have done/are doing with stuff like baseball games and the 2000 New Year's Eve thing: editing over billboards and other posted advertising shown on screen (even on live TV) and replacing them with fake billboards for their own network and other advertisers. I don't remember how much of an uproar there was when that happened; I wonder how much this will get.
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;
sed 's/In Soviet Russia/In NSA America/g' < yakov-smirnoff-jokes.txt
i dont think that will work. i think it would just encourage users to avoid your site and go to m$oft sponsored non-nasty sites.
---
"i was saying gnu-rd"
Just prevent IE users from visiting your site until after they've read your anti-IE popup message. (Get a script to do this for you at http://www.angelfire.com/ms/AntiIE/IEjava.html)Thi s doesn't prevent their use of your site, it's just a gentle reminder that they're being led around by the nose thanks to M$.
Individual people aren't stupid, but the masses are. Microsoft is counting on the masses to remain uneducated about their practices and continue to be spoon-fed the latest feature that Micro$oft has decided is the standard. If we can educated the individuals to the alternatives, perhaps they'll join us.
Think back, didn't you use Windoze before you realized you didn't have to?
what's next a mandatory dongle connected to your brain and zaps you when you browse a non Micro$soft website? this is getting downright scary
-OR_BraveHeart "there's nothing certain in life except death and taxes"
you actually had to click on the what's related button to use it...it didn't just appear in front of you on the website....also as i recall what's related didn't work too well or maybe Netscape just lacked the know-how in which to sell advertising to companies through it as Microsoft is bound to do
-OR_BraveHeart "there's nothing certain in life except death and taxes"
In my mind, bundling IE with the OS was at least somewhat legitimate, since it enhanced the functionality of the computer system as a whole. It was leveraging its OS monopoly into the browser market, but both really fell under the same category of software for a computer system. This action, however, is clearly a flagrant abuse of monopoly power. They are controlling the content the viewer sees, not just the mechanism that's used to view and use the content. This far-reaching power can be abused infinitely for propaganda or other reasons, as many have described above. I sincerely hope that in a court of law or at least public opinion, this distinction can be recognized. What if the paper suppliers for newspapers refused to sell to ones of a certain political persuasion? What if the manufacturer of radios remotely reprogrammed yours to block stations that considered undesirable? Microsoft's Smart Tags are the tip of the iceberg, and their crossing of the line between viewers to content is a slippery slope justifying propaganda and censorship on a near unlimited scale. Your computer and its software is a tool. In this case, it should be a tool to view and interact with web pages. As long as it stays ONLY a tool, everything stays fine. I believe that governmental forcing of a division between viewing mechanism and content providers is totally legitimate. Monopolies have to stop somewhere, and essential freedoms must be preserved. Fortunately, this delineation is a very clear one (unlike in the IE bundling debate) so there is some hope for sane heads to prevail.
-Brendan
couldn't you instert some javascript to prevent ie identified browsers from displaying your page? or maybe to display a 'browser not supported' notice? i think ill do that if possible. fucking MS.
blenderking sent in this Wall Street Journal story about
_ _
Microsoft's new "Smart Tags" - auto linking to Microsoft
websites in any web page you visit.
...This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, please contact the program vendor for resolution.
____________________________________
______________________________________
Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither did I...
not to defend microsoft, but rather to set the record straight... the WSJ article that is referenced uses some fairly misleading terms, in saying that a webpage is "edited" or "changed"...basically, IE is simply filtering out certain key words, and providing links to more information on those terms. While it is true that this feature may seem invasive, keep in mind that there are no changes made to the actual web page...the browser simply allows you to further complement the material through other sites. And besides, if it sucks, you can always turn it off... _________________________________________________
It seems like this is a copyright infringement. Microsoft is taking something they do not own, and exploiting it for commercial processes.
Also, newspaper editors and such take great care to make sure that what they print is accurate. If an accurate story suddenly has links to inaccurate information, who is at fault?
The problem with this is simple - I have a web page that's devoted to my poetry and writings. It's a link-poor site - as you might imagine, I didn't write this stuff with a bunch of hyperlinks in mind. The poems are presented as plain text, just as they would be in a book. It's a violation of my artistic intent for a browser to highlight a bunch of "keywords", thus distracting the reader from the flow of the text, and to have these "keywords" link to things that I had no intention to have linked.
...
This is an attempt by Microsoft to use other people's words and pages as advertising revenue for themselves. It'll be interesting to see what happens when someone finds a way to hack it
http://www.net-link.net/~termite
I can do it. In fact it's pretty far along.
Plus, on the server side you can do more than on the client, e.g. summarization of articles based on the company tagged.
You could easily create a xml-rpc server that would integrate with smart tags to allow you to bookmark, or keep track of your favorite whatever.
Plus, unlike smart tags you could add coreference resolution and actually know that Microsoft, MSFT, The Evil Empire and M$ were the same company.
Check it out.
send money here
In Office XP, Word and Excel can load smart tag DLLs (SDK here).These DLLs implement two COM classes: ISmartTagRecognizer and ISmartTagAction. The recognizer scans text for patterns specified by the developer. For example, I wrote one that recognizes FedEx package tracking numbers. You can write a recognizer to recognize anything you can code, using pattern matching, database lookup, or whatever kind of heuristic you like.
When your smart tag recognizer recognizes something, it calls the CommitSmartTag method. All that does is stamp some XML into the source document, indicating the schema name for the smart tag type you just recognized. When you save the document, the XML gets saved with it.
Actions specify which XML schemas they're interested in. If a recognizer tags something with schemas-smarttagworld-com/zip#zip, then any action that wants to offer actions for that data type (like "look up this zip code", "find FedEx boxes in this zip code", etc) can do so. That means that anyone can write an action that overloads the smart tag types that MS supports in Office.
So, what about IE? Remember the XML? You can tag pages yourself by including the XML in the page (see this article and and actions, without any whiff of Office XP nearby. He missed some key points, though:
- Smart tags are marked by a dotted purple line (example). When you hover over the link, you get a little icon that expands into a pulldown. There's no automatic linking or redirection, period.
- There's no content substitution. You can write smart tags whose actions change content in a Word or Excel document, but the actions have to be triggered by the user. So, don't worry about MS making a tag that does s/Linux/Windows/.
- Anyone who can figure out VB or VC++ (and probably C#, but who cares) can write smart tags. UPS, OAG, and a bunch of other companies are already doing so (partial list). Everyone's invited to the party.
- Users have to turn on smart tags. They're off by default so that MS doesn't get inundated with millions of calls asking what that little purple line is for.
- There's a META tag that turns off the recognizer/action combo in IE6, so you can add that tag to your pages so that no smart tags will be active therein. Perfect for paranoid penguins.
HTH.DeCSS ;)
If 2600 can be sued for linking, so can Microsoft.
-- Azaroth
What's next, "Opt-out"?
This phase subdivides down into four distinct phases itself:
Phase 1: SmartTags. Off by default.
Phase 2: SmartTags. Not off by default.
Phase 3: Required usage
Phase 4: Usage tied to micropayments with no way to disable.
By Phase three, every keyword on every website, will be for sale. In order to stop it, there won't be meta tags, there will be server dll's only.
By phase four, you will be required to pay to use general websites.
In the process they will eliminate dynamic duo, Linux and Apache. How? in order to stop smart tags in IE, you will need to run a dll - eg, you'll have to have a MS server. Site owners will flock to iis boxes in mass quantity. Good bye apache server farms - good bye the majority of commercial linux boxes on the web.
This is Microsoft's Final Solution for Linux and Open source.
How many people know how to program a dll? How many people are running on ms servers? There is no meta tag - if there is, it won't last past version 1. There will be no way to disable the feature from your website.