There's a problem with this
by
Tim+Ward
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Now that Google will find anything you want so easily, isn't there a danger that people will stop putting links to useful and interesting sites on their pages?
I don't need to tell people, via a link, about some wonderful site I've found if they can find it for themselves quicker and easier using Google. So I might not bother to maintain my collections of useful links, and Google will lose its information source. A victim of its own success.
What happens then?
Re:There's a problem with this
by
Cheesy+Fool
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Why would it be quicker to load up google, do a search then click on the link (assuming its the correct one) as opposed to already being on your website and just clicking the link you've provided or just being provided with a link to a website?
--
Hail to the king, baby!
Where's the magic?
by
guerby
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In the age of DMCA, SSSCA, and angelic companies
running after all those evil pirates in order to protect their beloved authors that deserve their protection, how comes
no one has yet sued the biggest copyright
infringer of all times... the Google cache?
I'm pretty sure it's similar to the "use windows because it's on my machine when I buy it".
"I'll use this search engine because that's what appears when I install AOL, @home, sypmatico, etc."
That, and most people can't be bothered remembering more than two web addresses. www.hotmail.com (being replaced by simply using MSN messanger) and www.my-favourite-porn-site.com.
-- "Peace, Love and Apathy"
I would go on worrying if i were you
by
limbop
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Google works on the recursive principle that an important document is one linked to by a lot of important documents. search for "child pornography" and (i'm generalizing here) you're likely to find two kinds of sites: sites offering child pornography and sites opposing it. those will probably create two seperate cliques (if you look at the web as a graph) or clusters. It will be quite easy to offer them as two seperate lists both satisfying the search query. i believe northern light (http://www.northernlight.com/) does exactly this.
Now how about a similar principle for people? A suspicious person is one who communicates with suspicious people. If you have access to Email messages sent on the internet this is quite easy to achieve. Filter the messages to those mentioning "child pornography" and now do the same analysis as google does. voila! you are left with lists of child pornographers and of internet vigilantes. easy. automatic. you can start worrying again.
btw, if you are looking for an interesting technical description of the best search engine around, the original google article (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/brin98anatomy.html) by Brin and Page does the job a lot better than Doctrow's.
A puff piece with poor logic
by
XDG
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The article boils down more or less to the following:
1. "Old" search technologies (Altavista, Yahoo) failed because they used approaches that found words but not content (Altavista) or relied on non-scalable human editorial judgement (Yahoo).
2. Google works (and is cool) because it uses available information about the number of links to determine (a) valuable content and (b) smart judges of other valuable content
3. The government efforts at creating the Panopticon will fail because they'll be stuck using "old" keyword approaches that can't pick out real content.
This argument is flawed in two key ways:
1. The author confuses the nature of the "search". Web searching is about finding *content* and the challenge is differentiating "good" content from "bad" content. Governmental "security" searching is more akin to traffic analysis and the goal is identifying dangerous *individuals* based on the content and pattern of their traffic. The challenge there is differentiating "good" (safe) speakers from "bad" (dangerous) speakers.
2. The author assumes (based apparently simply on opinion and what is popularly reported in the press) that the government will blindly apply "alta-vista style" techniques. His lack of fear of the Panopticon is based on an assumption of incompetence in the application of surveillance methods. Given the motivation and resources (both of which the government now has in spades), there is no reason to believe that more sophisticated and effective techniques will not be developed and pursued. Assuming Echelon has really been in operation, it's hard to imagine that, in the closed halls of the NSA, researchers aren't well aware of the limitations of keyword search and are far along applying cryptanalytical techniques to the real problem identified above.
It would seem that the author is trying to take advantage of hype and concern about government surveillance not to make a serious comment about it or whether one should truly be concerned, but rather to get an audience for his opinion that Google is really cool, which most of already knew anyway.
-XDG
Re:A puff piece with poor logic
by
sam_handelman
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
the challenge is differentiating "good" content from "bad" content.... The challenge there is differentiating "good" (safe) speakers from "bad" (dangerous) speakers.
I agree with all else you say - including that the government has the resources to come up with new approaches to the problem - but I don't think that this challenge is really different from distinguishing between good and bad content. In so far as the government is trying to do what it shouldn't even remotely be doing, using this technology to identify subvsersives, you are right. However, in so far as carnivore might *actually* be used to intercept a criminal communique, I think that the challenge is very similar to what is faced by google.
Suppose that Inoccuous260@hotmail.com only ever sends one message, from some terminal in a public library, and it is the delivery schedule for a nuclear weapon. The best, most morally (if not legally) defensible use of Carnivore would be to intercept this message and hand it over to the Feds. If the Feds can do this, even once, Carnivore will be with us forever, however else it may be abused, b/c you will never rally the public will to end use of such a tool. The problem of identifying that message, and I don't want to brainstorm ideas here, but I'm sure we could come up with several, is very similar to the problem of picking out a biographical sketch of Allen Turing among all the sci-fi and hoopla, which Google can do using characterisation by links, and which the government would be hard-pressed to do without that human resource.
So, the author raises a fair point about the limitations on the "legitimate", let us say intended, use of carnivore. However, the unintended/illegitimate use, simple identification of dissidents, could indeed be carried out by a clever 10 year old, and is plenty worrisome even if Carnivore never does what it was supposedly intended to do.
-- The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Wrong panopticon
by
dallen
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Doctorow's point, I believe, is that we have a luxury of choices for searching information, but those who want to wiretap us do not have the luxury of infinite time and infinitely improved ways to find the information they want.
If they could only track us via the public internet, I would probably agree.
I would say we don't know what sort of technology they ultimately have for searching our data; until we knew that, we should not assume anything such as he has, that they're not able to keep up with the flood of data.
Remember that they're not only recording elements of email, phone, and other communications; but they are also tracking who is sending and receiving it; and those who are under "wiretap" are nearly perfectly trackable as long as they can associate an identity to an IP to a person. That is the Panopticon, the prison with ideal survailance; mapping a person to their communication and selectively watching those who bear suspicion.
Google: Big improvement, but not perfect
by
livingdots
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I like Google; it weeds out most of the spam -- unlike AltaVista. It isn't perfect, though. I once searched for prostate milking, after reading this. The search results were quite interesting: It brought up hundreds of, apparently fake, headlines ("Located here! Prostate Milking") and domain names ("childhood-disease.accurate-health.com/prostate-m ilking.html"); it in fact still does, even though a month has passed since. Many of the links don't work, but some redirect you to other sites (this one amazingly owned by Novartis, a supposedly "respectable" biotechnology company). Question: How do they do this?
alleged fragility of books
by
AdamBa
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe 500 was an exaggeration (given that the printing press was about that old)...but there are certainly 300 year-old books that are fine (not having been vacuum-sealed) and 100 year-old books are not even that unusual.
The article (or that part of it) reminds me of the people who claimed that newspapers were going to fall apart and they all needed to be microfilmed and stored that way...now the newspapers that were dumped are in such great shape that The Sharper Image is selling them for $30 a pop, and the microfilms are deteroriating, that is the ones that were made legible to begin with.
Copying bytes may be easy but every time I switch computers I have to worry about moving stuff and where is it stored, then there is 20-year-old stuff on 5 1/4" floppies...meanwhile my books from childhood are all doing great. Even the cheap-o dot-matrix printouts from my BBS days in 1983 are perfectly preserved, which is more than I can say for any data I had from back then.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that Google will find anything you want so easily, isn't there a danger that people will stop putting links to useful and interesting sites on their pages?
I don't need to tell people, via a link, about some wonderful site I've found if they can find it for themselves quicker and easier using Google. So I might not bother to maintain my collections of useful links, and Google will lose its information source. A victim of its own success.
What happens then?
In the age of DMCA, SSSCA, and angelic companies running after all those evil pirates in order to protect their beloved authors that deserve their protection, how comes no one has yet sued the biggest copyright infringer of all times ... the Google cache?
So where's the magic?
--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>
I'm pretty sure it's similar to the "use windows because it's on my machine when I buy it".
"I'll use this search engine because that's what appears when I install AOL, @home, sypmatico, etc."
That, and most people can't be bothered remembering more than two web addresses. www.hotmail.com (being replaced by simply using MSN messanger) and www.my-favourite-porn-site.com.
"Peace, Love and Apathy"
Google works on the recursive principle that an important document is one linked to by a lot of important documents. search for "child pornography" and (i'm generalizing here) you're likely to find two kinds of sites: sites offering child pornography and sites opposing it. those will probably create two seperate cliques (if you look at the web as a graph) or clusters. It will be quite easy to offer them as two seperate lists both satisfying the search query. i believe northern light (http://www.northernlight.com/) does exactly this.
Now how about a similar principle for people? A suspicious person is one who communicates with suspicious people. If you have access to Email messages sent on the internet this is quite easy to achieve. Filter the messages to those mentioning "child pornography" and now do the same analysis as google does. voila! you are left with lists of child pornographers and of internet vigilantes. easy. automatic. you can start worrying again.
btw, if you are looking for an interesting technical description of the best search engine around, the original google article (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/brin98anatomy.html) by Brin and Page does the job a lot better than Doctrow's.
The article boils down more or less to the following:
1. "Old" search technologies (Altavista, Yahoo) failed because they used approaches that found words but not content (Altavista) or relied on non-scalable human editorial judgement (Yahoo).
2. Google works (and is cool) because it uses available information about the number of links to determine (a) valuable content and (b) smart judges of other valuable content
3. The government efforts at creating the Panopticon will fail because they'll be stuck using "old" keyword approaches that can't pick out real content.
This argument is flawed in two key ways:
1. The author confuses the nature of the "search". Web searching is about finding *content* and the challenge is differentiating "good" content from "bad" content. Governmental "security" searching is more akin to traffic analysis and the goal is identifying dangerous *individuals* based on the content and pattern of their traffic. The challenge there is differentiating "good" (safe) speakers from "bad" (dangerous) speakers.
2. The author assumes (based apparently simply on opinion and what is popularly reported in the press) that the government will blindly apply "alta-vista style" techniques. His lack of fear of the Panopticon is based on an assumption of incompetence in the application of surveillance methods. Given the motivation and resources (both of which the government now has in spades), there is no reason to believe that more sophisticated and effective techniques will not be developed and pursued. Assuming Echelon has really been in operation, it's hard to imagine that, in the closed halls of the NSA, researchers aren't well aware of the limitations of keyword search and are far along applying cryptanalytical techniques to the real problem identified above.
It would seem that the author is trying to take advantage of hype and concern about government surveillance not to make a serious comment about it or whether one should truly be concerned, but rather to get an audience for his opinion that Google is really cool, which most of already knew anyway.
-XDG
Doctorow's point, I believe, is that we have a luxury of choices for searching information, but those who want to wiretap us do not have the luxury of infinite time and infinitely improved ways to find the information they want.
If they could only track us via the public internet, I would probably agree.
I would say we don't know what sort of technology they ultimately have for searching our data; until we knew that, we should not assume anything such as he has, that they're not able to keep up with the flood of data.
Remember that they're not only recording elements of email, phone, and other communications; but they are also tracking who is sending and receiving it; and those who are under "wiretap" are nearly perfectly trackable as long as they can associate an identity to an IP to a person. That is the Panopticon, the prison with ideal survailance; mapping a person to their communication and selectively watching those who bear suspicion.
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
I like Google; it weeds out most of the spam -- unlike AltaVista. It isn't perfect, though. I once searched for prostate milking, after reading this. The search results were quite interesting: It brought up hundreds of, apparently fake, headlines ("Located here! Prostate Milking") and domain names ("childhood-disease.accurate-health.com/prostate-m ilking.html"); it in fact still does, even though a month has passed since. Many of the links don't work, but some redirect you to other sites (this one amazingly owned by Novartis, a supposedly "respectable" biotechnology company). Question: How do they do this?
The article (or that part of it) reminds me of the people who claimed that newspapers were going to fall apart and they all needed to be microfilmed and stored that way...now the newspapers that were dumped are in such great shape that The Sharper Image is selling them for $30 a pop, and the microfilms are deteroriating, that is the ones that were made legible to begin with.
Copying bytes may be easy but every time I switch computers I have to worry about moving stuff and where is it stored, then there is 20-year-old stuff on 5 1/4" floppies...meanwhile my books from childhood are all doing great. Even the cheap-o dot-matrix printouts from my BBS days in 1983 are perfectly preserved, which is more than I can say for any data I had from back then.
- adam