Slashback: Zip, Language, Opportunism

Slashback tonight brings you updates and corrections from recent and ongoing stories, including (this time around) non-silver silver paste, the return of the Orkut, Mike Rowe and his not-so-epic battle with Microsoft (one last time, I hope), the future of Zip for Microsoft Windows, and more. Read on below for the details.

Funny name, well-executed idea. YourMother writes "After almost 4 days of being offline, the social network Orkut is back online. The Orkut development team has been working nonstop since bringing it down on Sunday afternoon and quite a few new security features have been implemented to protect users information. Within the first 48 hours it was up, it gained almost 100,000 users, growing many times faster than other social networks like Friendster or Tribe. Did Google hit the social network bulls-eye?"

glinden points to a story with some more information about those security holes. "From the article, 'Sources close to Google suggest widespread XSS (cross-site scripting) hacks forced the closure of the service. It isn't clear how much personal data or communication was disclosed.'"

Playmate. Playmate, playmate playmate. An anonymous reader writes "A week after an appeals court ruling revived a Playboy Enterprises Inc. trademark infringement lawsuit against Netscape Communications Inc., the companies have reached a settlement in the case (See a ZDNet report) The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed. This puts an end to a closely watched case in the search engine advertising field. Several other lawsuits over misuse of trademarks in search engine ads are still in place. Google e.g. is embroiled in a lawsuit with Luis Vuitton regarding keyword-based ads in France and asked for a California court's ruling to back its trademark policy for AdWords after facing the threat of a lawsuit from American Blind & Wallpaper Factory Inc."

You have to admire such brave nomenclature. Michiel Frackers writes "Thanks for the link to my site, I got 3 gigabyte of traffic in a few hours! If I would have known, I would have written something in English. I have added an update about the Strangeberry product and its relation to Tivo at the URL you linked to.

I also included a link to my private blog (as www.frackers.com is more about my work in media & technology). Hopefully this clarifies some things for your readers, I did not intend to make this some kind of quest or game at all: it's just that I promised Arthur and his colleagues not to disclose what they are exactly doing, as you will understand."

And Anonymous joe writes with this link to an intriguing bit of Strangeberry speculation at the Register.

Nokia to port Python to Mobiles, not Perl An anonymous reader writes "Nokia was mistaken. In fact, El Reg reports that Python, not Perl, is the preferred language for scripting on its smartphone platforms. The availability of a Python implementation for mobile phones is part of a broader plan, including a JVM-based BASIC interpreter."

However, the Register article linked says that Perl is being considered, it's just that Python is being looked at as the primary language.

I wouldn't trust their pearls, either. Blade Leader writes "OCZ has issued a recall of OCZ Ultra 2 thermal paste after the Overclockers.com article on their lack of silver content. They blame the lack on their supplier, and claim they will be pursuing legal action."

A piece of history (or at least a piece of somethin' ...) Artemis writes "Searching along E-Bay and MikeRoweSoft.com I noticed that Mike Rowe has decided to sell the Microsoft Cease-and-Desist Letters and WIPO book he received on E-Bay. He is selling the WIPO book with the 25-page letter received from Microsoft's lawyers on January 14/2004.This inch-thick book contains copies of web pages, registrations, trade marks, other WIPO cases, emails between me and Microsoft's lawyers and much more. There are 27 annexes filled with information. This package also comes with the 25-page complaint transmittal coversheet that was sent with the inch-thick book."

What's wrong with gunzip, tar? whitefox writes "CNet News is reporting that PKWare & WinZip have settled their differences and will maintain Zip file compatibility for the foreseeable future with each supporting the other's security extensions. In addition, PKWare will include its SecureZip in the code it licenses to other software makers. This is good news in deed for users and developers alike!"

Comments

GOOLGE IS DYING

[Anonymous Coward]

Everytime I search for electronics reviews or hardware reviews I get pages full of those stupid spam sites. What happened???

So who seeds Orkut

[Space cowboy]

There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation about a meeting-place where membership is by invitation (can't you tell I'm not one of the exalted :-)

It would be interesting to see what the demographic of the initial seed population was - and to see whether that influenced the community over time... As any fule know, the initial conditions can have a profound impact on any time-dependent phenomena :-)

Simon

Re:So who seeds Orkut

[Junta]

In most any circumstance, anyone with an association in good standing with an employer has an almost infinite advantage over anyone else, even if on paper they are much much much less apparently qualified. I know, this just agrees with your point, and I too have been pissed off by this phenomenon, but I have to admit, there is sound reasoning behind it.

The major problem with hiring people is that it is typically a long term investment with a good deal of commitment on the part of the employer. For obvious reasons, there is an extreme benefit in determining the qualifications of a candidate before hiring. Despite all best efforts in interviews and resumes, it really isn't possible to gauge a candidate very accurately except to weed out the most incompetent. Even if someone isn't up to par, they can fake it in an interview long enough to look better than another candidate that just can't deliver a good sales pitch at interview time. Social networking provides the applicant credibility, and provides the employer better accountability ('Jim recommended him, so Jim has ultimate responsibility').

Of course, further benefits include lower startup time for a new employee and, over time, increased morale and teamwork, the foundation of which was already partially built off of company time before even the first day. Someone coming into work with a few familiar faces will tend to hit the ground running better, being less timid about getting starting advice and knowing a comfortable person to ask about things as they start running. Even without asking questions, the closer contact allows the existing employ to detect problems long before they would have been seen with a stranger.

So yes, to those without the networks, it is really unfair, and it is unfair when you build a really nice social network only to have it shattered by a site shutdown (both have been my situation), but it does increase candidate review reliability overall and increase net productivity.

All that said, I think this should go out the window in the sales/marketing world. The best evaluation is the pitch they throw for themselves in a short term. If a guy can sell you on taking him for a job over other candidates, I can't imagine a better qualification for that line of work...

thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with gunzip, tar?

Have you ever tried to extract a single file from a gzip'ed tar archive? It's not possible without unpacking everything and throwing away the bits that you don't want.

Nokia to port Python to Mobiles, not Perl

Yay! This makes *much* more sense. Python rocks and is perfectly suited for portable devices on small devices, hence the successful PalmOS port.

Orkut - Funny name, well-executed idea.

Urm.. it's been a very badly executed idea if they've had to shut it down already because of hacking. Then there are the disgruntled reports from users that think it's completely pointless. It's only popular because Google is - they could have sneezed and everybody would have noticed.

two copies

[SHEENmaster]

He received them in duplicate, and he's only auctioning one copy. That said, I'd auction 'em both; the price is at $3,751.00 with more than seven days remaining!

Re:Is a "copy" the same as a "duplicate original"?

[AndroidCat]

I wouldn't count on a signature. That's the original Jan 14th agreement MS sent him--one copy for him, one for them perhaps? He didn't sign it, and then MS offered to throw in an Xbox, the trip, MSCE course, etc. (I wonder if the text of the agreement he did sign has or will be made public?)

If the bidding doubles a couple times, he'll be making more than the $10,000 he wanted in the first place. Hmm, maybe in 30 years, he'll buy them?

Re:Zip

[DumbWhiteGuy777]

XP's zipping isn't good. Download 7-zip instead. Totally free, no fancy crap, and works great for all kinds of archives. You'll thank me later.

Damn that silver... or lack of it

[Supp0rtLinux]

I ran out and bought a full box of silver-less paste at CompUSA (and yes, I got the CompUSA) label on it. My attorney is filing a "false advertisement" suit against them on Monday. I figure if everyone else can get "sue happy" then so can I. Maybe I'll get to retire early.

Re:Stupid Guy Asks...

[MooseGuy529]

Cross-site scripting is when you create a form on your web page which targets a page on another site. An example of cross-site scripting used appropriately is when you insert a Google search box on your page. The search form sends the query to Google, not your site, so it's cross-site.

The problem comes when people create deceptive forms that get the user to do bad things, or create forms that blatently allow the user to do something they shouldn't.

Someone can easily post links and more information and make some karma off of this post...

Netflix, DRM, and Paranoia

[IntelliTubbie]

As the Register article suggests, preventing piracy with DRM would be one of the concerns if Netflix were to launch an online video-on-demand service. But let's think about this for a minute. People can already rent the physical DVDs and rip them to a digital format. Is making the files available for direct download any more dangerous?

In fact, it's less dangerous, if anything. If you rip a generic DVD and share it on Kazaa, etc., it's completely untraceable back to you -- anyone could have ripped that DVD. However, an online video-on-demand service could embed some sort of unique watermark in the file to identify the customer, so that they could be held responsible for any illegal copying (as with the recent Oscar screener fiasco).

In their fear of online piracy, the MPAA/RIAA/etc. have forgotten that

1. Real-world piracy is just as much of a problem, probably more so.
2. Customers are willing to pay for the increased convenience and instant gratification (see iTunes Music Store), which more than offsets the increased risk.
3. Most customers don't want to be criminals, so giving them a legal option (see again iTMS) is both a good idea and profitable.

Cheers,
IT

Re:Google and cross-site scripting

[angio]

I think you're pretty off-base with respect to Google's awareness of the byte costs of various approaches. First of all, Google is trying to optimize the user's perception of speed - and downloading a separate CSS doc would require a second TCP connection, etc., etc., which could negatively impact both the user experience and the load on Google's servers. I wager that their common case is one search per user.

Second, have you actually _looked_ at the returned HTML from a Google search? It does use CSS within the returned page (see the style section), and it's very compact CSS and HTML.

The rest of their site has some "potential inefficiences" that could be corrected, but keep in mind that probably more than 99% of Google's traffic is search traffic. Amdahl's law - optimize the part that slows you down the most, not the little corner cases. Google's search results pages are very efficient.

Oh, and re the orkut thread, it was seeded with Orkut's friends and coworkers at Google, pretty much. The social network is pretty obvious in the way it grows out from there - stanford, google, bay area, computer science, geek schools, other schools, general population.

Re:Google and cross-site scripting

[DunbarTheInept]

they ignore the content-type header, favouring the file extension instead.

Now, wait a minute. Do they actually IGNORE the header, or do they merely have it take less precedence than the extension? Those aren't the same thing. (In other words, in cases where the file extension isn't helpful, do they drop back to the content-type?) If so, that's not google's fault. They're tring to archive the web as it is actually used in practice, by people who are on average, ignorant of the standards. There are a lot of files out there where the content-type is going to be some generic term that only tells you, "yup, it's a binary file alright", or worse, are actually downright wrong. Given that these mistakes are everywhere out there, it might be that google decided they would get a more accurate database if they let the file extensions take precedent, as wrong as that may be from a conceptual standpoint (and very unfair, too - if my file ends in .doc that doesn't have to mean it's a Word document, and google shouldn't archive it that way.)

But anyway, the choice to let extension take precedence might be their only option. If most of the internet sites out there are doing it the wrong way, google has to aquiese and go along with that in order to have a more accurate database.

Re:Google and cross-site scripting

[YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT]

The social network is pretty obvious in the way it grows out from there - stanford, google, bay area, computer science, geek schools, other schools, general population.

Wake me up when the girls arrive.

-- YLFI

Re: "Email me!"

[some guy I know]

You know, I just thought of a neat new way to harvest email addresses ...

I would join

[ZINGYWINGY]

I would join Orkut if the text in the jpg on their home page had the grammatically correct sentence "Whom do you know?"

But alas.