I saw his comments earlier today, and it struck me that it won't make a bean of difference (in a social networking context) unless everyone changes their name. If you are still "connected" with a distinct (and essentially fingerprintable) social network of people then you are always identifiable - your old name can simply be correlated with your new one based on who all of your "friends" are and other indelible information (education, location, background, likes, dislikes, etc) - assuming you are not starting a new life in a new country and never speaking to anyone from your past ever again.
The only way it may be able to work is if everyone changed their names - and even then I think there would still be enough unchangeables to be able to positively correlate old and new identity information unless, again, you are starting a new life in a new country and have no connections to the past.
People who get heavily involved in social networks do not have a clue what the implications for them in the long term are - not even a smidgen of a clue. Facebook know you for life (because they know *you* - and all of *your* connections, not just a username connected to other usernames). Even when facebook fades away as the fad that it is and something else takes over as the hip trendy thing to do, facebook still know who you are, and can still use that to make money long after Zuckerberg has started shaving.
Hasn't he already said that a remake of it in 3d is on his list? He is trying to generate a 3d bandwagon after-all, so dredging up some of his past ballbaggery movies and milking more money from them would seem like a two birds one stone situation.
the Retina display's pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels.
Ditto the monitor I am using - ditto my 5 year old LCD mobile phone held at a normal working distance. I guess apple don't want to just say "it is high res.", they need to cover it with a lot of marketing PR "gloss" - gloss tech people can see through, but that the starbucks crowd can't.
No worries. I have no idea why MS removed it. Some comments online indicated that MS found that 95% of people don't use it so they decided to simply eliminate it for a "consistent user experience". However, I am hopeful that the hack link posted above may bring it back - I find it extremely frustrating to not be bale to move files like that. Most of the time I have them all aligned, but if I am sorting through a large folder of files, and creating burn/move/listen/finish piles then the new default in W7 is basically impossible, you have to create subfolders to move files into, a needless complication.
If you would read the link provided you would find that it is all disabled in explorer. The only place it is not disabled in W7 is on the desktop. Jees, are you trolling or don't you have W7?
P.S. it is not "align to grid", in XP that is unticked and yet if you try to drag files around you can't move them away from their siblings, only rearrange the stack. Untick "auto-arrange" and magically I can drag files wherever I like, creating whatever distributions I want, even having them virtually all on-top of each other if I so care.
sticks and wrong end. I want to be able to drag my files around in any way I want in explorer (for example creating a great big messy pile of them on the bottom right of the explorer window, and another big messy pile of file icons on the bottom left).
I was just doing a quick browse to find some moaning threads about it to show you when I discovered this:
an apparent hack to fix it which I didn't find last week despite half a day of googling the problem (and only finding exasperated people who said it was apparently hard wired). I shall promptly try this on Monday to see if it allows me the ability to drag files about again.
It would seem to me that the manual aimed at the xp -> 7 movers should spend most of its time covering all of the inexplicable little changes that have been made. There aren't many new things, just lots of changed (or entirely removed) things.
As I decided to change my work PC over to 7 last week I can testify. I had superficially played with vista and 7 up until now, but it is a different thing when your main machine moves completely. For example, in W7 MS have inexplicably removed the ability for auto arrange on files to be turned off in explorer - they now always "spring" to the grid - an annoying change. While day to day I didn't use this, it was used in xp now and then in sorting out a large folder full of files, as it is much more intuitive to spatially sort. Gone from W7, and no hack to get it back.
The picture viewer is also crap now, slow, with a initially loaded blurred preview, then 1/2 a second later the real preview loads. Also when you zoom in it doesn't interpolate as it did in xp, just pixellates.
I am in the game and I have never heard of any of this. Improbable to begin with, but made doubly so by the fact that each pixel is individually evaporated on something like the XEL-1 - so the 10x10 cm is meaningless - each pixel is the maximum active area that anything can migrate out to the edges of.
Smells like total BS to me (tipped off by the "they're not telling you" conspiracy theory line). There are loads more holes in what you said, but I am not wasting time on it.
Nice idea in theory, but the practicalities make it next to impossible. Maintenance, costs, complexity etc. If you fly it up there then you need to keep it in working order, potentially for years - and that would mean costs in flying up spare-parts, engineers, undertaking safety inspections - essentially it would require setting up the first spaceship yard - costs NASA no doubt don't want to be liable for. The alternative is to fly it up and then simply agree not to service it, but at that point its usefulness would be virtually zero, as it couldn't even be sued as an emergency escape as they can't put people inside something that isn't being serviced. Then when the space station is decommissioned (whenever that is) they will be unable to bring it back down to earth so it will be burnt up upon re-entry with the station - a bit of a waste.
He is entitled to his opinion on what the status of the broadcast market is in the UK (and it mostly seems to be an attack that fits in with the "great pay-wall of Murdoch" that they are planning - "nobody nowhere should provide free content" is the mantra). However what is totally unacceptable is use of phraseology such as:
state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision
while it doesn't surprise me that someone coming from the same family as fox news would make such a absolutely false statement - it does make him look particularly stupid. Any idea that the BBC is state-sponsored (a phrase that conjures up images of despots ordering what the daily headlines will be) is both false and misrepresenting reality - staples of the murdoch methodology. This would be the same BBC that in its capacity as a news reporter examines and holds the government to account on behalf of the people every day. Zircon, David Kelly, and many more.
We can only be thankful we don't live in murdochs world where they control all. The only "News" that the public would be allowed to "consume" would consist of right-wing bile and trash shalebraties and their sordid tales.
I don't know if it is just my perception, but it feels like MS is back to their old ways with a lot of their activities these days - particularly with regard to anything web facing.
After what felt like a few years of roughly being fair with things, we seem to have had a spate of underhand moves recently. Off the top of my head I can list installing firefox extensions through windows updates without asking (spooking a lot of people including myself - "1 new extension installed what? I didn't install anything"), upgrades to IE8 presenting the user with a complex series of choices - one that implies you should opt in to their accelerator program or IE8 won't install, and the other offering you an express set of installation options or else click through a large number of preference screens - while failing to mention that express settings set IE8 as the default browser.
And now (if true), engaging in DNS hijacking to drive visitors to their search site. Can they just not accept user preference at all?
I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim.
They can cite them, i.e. "we have previously found [REF]", without infringing anything, so I think you have gotten mixed up there. What they cannot necessary do without infringing is reproduce data/figures without gaining copyright exemption. It can be handled two ways, both involve citing the earlier work along with the reproduction to be absolutely sure that you are nobody thinks you are plagiarising yourself, and if you want to be proper about it then you can get a copyright exemption (which happens all the time for review articles). It will almost always be granted, but it is just a bit of a hassle to get sometimes. These points don't negate any discussion about the moral or ethical repercussions of being forced to sign over copyright - that is different - but practically there are no great repercussions.
I have had to sign away copyright on work I have done, and it does feel wrong. But on the other hand the journals are relatively relaxed about the situation, and you don't see legalise copyright warnings being posted to anyone. If journals annoy authors then said authors don't publish in those journals so they have to be careful. If academic establishments stopped paying subscriptions to journals then it might also be different - as at that point all of the copyrighted works the publishers hold become a rather more active asset to exploit since they may not be making any money from subscriptions (in some open access models for example).
but at least this one is well intentioned and could save a life.
Not if phone manufacturers are dissuaded from adding this feature because they would either have to pay Apple royalties or risk being sued by them. In that case the fact that it has been patented may actually cost lives.
If Apple came out and guaranteed royalty free licensing for all then it would be a positive move for society.
Times are getting tough - FB need to start to find ways of actually making money, and pretty sharpish as well. The "2.0" days of wandering along to a VC like an extra from Beavis and Butt-head and saying "uh, yeah, kewl, man - we, like, need some more cash - yeah, 2.0, social, yeah" aren't going to wash any more.
Ad revenue is about to drop off a cliff (if it hasn't already), and loss making enterprises like FB - who's only revenue stream, other than VC funding rounds, was ad revenue - are going to have to start "monetizing" (what a lovely word for strip mining everything in sight) otherwise they will be in trouble.
Never forget Beacon. Their silent implementation of that privacy nightmare gives a brief view of their true intents - and that was done in the days when people were throwing money at them and they were being valued as being bigger than GM. Now the economic hardships are starting to bite I am not at all surprised they have attempted this.
I don't really see what Sputnik has to do with much - scientific, quasi political, enterprises have always required large-scale collaboration. The Apollo program was the same. Those activities were all government sponsored and government defined, not day-to-day inquisitive experimental science. CERN's goals are defined and executed by scientists, not by politicians (they just fund them, the same way they fund all public science).
There is truth in the message that large collaborations are becoming more common, and individual scientific achievements less (there are very few individual author papers in experimental science these days), but that is due to the nature of experimental science. The ability to execute world-revolutionary science in a small lab is becoming much much harder. The minutiae of nature is where most work is done, and minutiae now quite often requires large, expensive and extremely complex experiments. Measuring the mass of an electron can be done on a table with an oil drop experiment. Measuring the products of GeV collisions of hadrons requires CERN.
Not entirely sure why the summary touches on one being overshadowed by the other.
On the contrary, the two works are complimentary, and it is thus no coincidence that they have been released at the same time. Hubble shows an old cold planet on the edge of a solar system, while Keck shows some very young hot infra-red emitting planets close to their star. The two discoveries help elucidate the workings of other solar systems - and each is just as valuable as the other.
Facebook made it impossible for you to delete your account - until there was a public outcry.
"developers" of "applications" can see a great deal of your private data - this has not been fixed - there has not been a public outcry yet.
If it was private data and how much I choose to let others on the web see then that would be one thing. The issue I see with facebook is that they themselves seem to want to exploit your data at every single stage. Things like the inability to delete your account and "opt-out" services should be the anathema of any business that cares about privacy - instead they nefariously implemented them without consent and defended them until there was outcry. It took a feature piece in the New York Times before they decided to let people delete their accounts. What are they trying to hide?
In ten years time either all of the "facebook" stuff will be seen as a fad, and joked about as a fad - forgotten and irrelevant. Or it will still be "big" and they will know and capitalise on every single aspect of every single person's private data.
Personally I suspect it will be the former scenario - the "2.0", "social-networking" stuff is just a buzz - a hyper money fuelled fad. The whole thing is an attempt to generate a self-fulfilling prophecy. Facebook worth fifteen billion dollars? Give me a break. The entire bubble has been fuelled on speculative hot air - "if I say it is valuable and the next big thing, then it is". As the stock market has so ably proven over the last few weeks - fads and self-fulfilling prophecies never last.
There was an analogy that was doing the rounds on the "privacy-less age" that we are supposed to be living in. It drew comparisons between the nineteenth century reluctance people had to put money into banks and today's reluctance to protect your private details. We now deposit most of our assets with banks and think nothing of it, the analogy being that in the future the same will be with our private information. Of course like most analogies it is fundamentally flawed to compare the two things - but I couldn't help but smile when, over the last month, I see people questioning to withdraw their money from banks that are on their knees.
This is a useful tool, as well as being a bit of fun.
In addition to all the standard "wii gives no results!" posts, what I noticed, and what was nice to see when searching for a few things, was the absolute lack of blog/link spam everywhere. Searching for a couple of terms that I still search for now yielded 300 odd results - but 300 *relevant result*. Searching for the same thing with the 2008 engine gives me tens of thousands - but 90% of them are just pollution results. The 2001 engine actually kicked up a few "new" results for things that, while still technically available on the 2008 engine, are on page 152 of it - and so hence essentially lost and I have never seen them before.
It links in to what I have argued previously - fork search engines. A bleeding edge "just spidered" version for those who want to chase up-to-the-minute things - and a "stable" time-lag version that would defeat the point of spam (if a blog/link spamming campaign has to wait for a couple of years to get their search results in to the stable engine results then they are less likely to bother).
if the current version of the browser I'm using (the earlier Firefox) solves my problems, then why do I need to upgrade?
Because the version you are using will no longer be supported (and hence not very secure) in 4 months or so. Given that one of the main aims of internet interface software is security then I can't see how it will solve your problems for much longer.
There would be rightful criticism if this was an enforced upgrade, but it is not. Calling it a "nag" screen is also misleading, once or twice in the next few months is hardly every 10 minutes - information box would be more appropriate. It is not at all unimaginable that FF2 installed on family/friend machines who "just want to use the interweb" wouldn't know anything about FF3 - telling them about an upgrade that will (shortly) be required to maintain good security seems like a proper thing to do - indeed I am sure there would be criticism here if Mozilla didn't do this.
My comments weren't necessarily specific to this attack, but rather a more general point that the www is not up to handling what it is increasingly being used for. The web has continued to be employed to do more and more complex things. It started out with simple hosting of html files and hyperlinking between them to create a web - that evolved to include scripting frontends and database backends, and that is now evolving yet further in the current iteration to include entire execution of programs and complex tasks in the so-called "cloud" - all via www. It is a house of cards - and with each "complexity iteration" it is opening itself up to more flaws and holes (by definition - the more complex the task, the more flaws there will be).
When does the point come when people start saying "hang on a minute - this just isn't up to it"?
It seems with each passing year that the web is becoming more "broken".
Perhaps the problem is too many groups are attempting to use it as if it is a fail-safe system - banks, corporations, financial institutions, governments. It was never designed to be fail-safe. Frankly if they had treated it more like a the "wild west web" and less like a "cheaper and easier platform for advertising/cost-cutting" then we wouldn't be in this mess.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw his comments earlier today, and it struck me that it won't make a bean of difference (in a social networking context) unless everyone changes their name. If you are still "connected" with a distinct (and essentially fingerprintable) social network of people then you are always identifiable - your old name can simply be correlated with your new one based on who all of your "friends" are and other indelible information (education, location, background, likes, dislikes, etc) - assuming you are not starting a new life in a new country and never speaking to anyone from your past ever again.
The only way it may be able to work is if everyone changed their names - and even then I think there would still be enough unchangeables to be able to positively correlate old and new identity information unless, again, you are starting a new life in a new country and have no connections to the past.
People who get heavily involved in social networks do not have a clue what the implications for them in the long term are - not even a smidgen of a clue. Facebook know you for life (because they know *you* - and all of *your* connections, not just a username connected to other usernames). Even when facebook fades away as the fad that it is and something else takes over as the hip trendy thing to do, facebook still know who you are, and can still use that to make money long after Zuckerberg has started shaving.
Reached on his cellphone, Mr. Papermaster declined to comment.
a nice unspoken joke put in there by the journo.
Hasn't he already said that a remake of it in 3d is on his list? He is trying to generate a 3d bandwagon after-all, so dredging up some of his past ballbaggery movies and milking more money from them would seem like a two birds one stone situation.
the Retina display's pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels.
Ditto the monitor I am using - ditto my 5 year old LCD mobile phone held at a normal working distance. I guess apple don't want to just say "it is high res.", they need to cover it with a lot of marketing PR "gloss" - gloss tech people can see through, but that the starbucks crowd can't.
Not in any work environment, though as a consumer device this will likely pique the interest of the SOHO community rather than any large scale stuff.
I would judge in the world of work more is being printed now than ten years ago, not less.
No worries. I have no idea why MS removed it. Some comments online indicated that MS found that 95% of people don't use it so they decided to simply eliminate it for a "consistent user experience". However, I am hopeful that the hack link posted above may bring it back - I find it extremely frustrating to not be bale to move files like that. Most of the time I have them all aligned, but if I am sorting through a large folder of files, and creating burn/move/listen/finish piles then the new default in W7 is basically impossible, you have to create subfolders to move files into, a needless complication.
If you would read the link provided you would find that it is all disabled in explorer. The only place it is not disabled in W7 is on the desktop. Jees, are you trolling or don't you have W7?
P.S. it is not "align to grid", in XP that is unticked and yet if you try to drag files around you can't move them away from their siblings, only rearrange the stack. Untick "auto-arrange" and magically I can drag files wherever I like, creating whatever distributions I want, even having them virtually all on-top of each other if I so care.
sticks and wrong end. I want to be able to drag my files around in any way I want in explorer (for example creating a great big messy pile of them on the bottom right of the explorer window, and another big messy pile of file icons on the bottom left).
I was just doing a quick browse to find some moaning threads about it to show you when I discovered this:
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/disable-full-row-select-explorer-windows-7/
an apparent hack to fix it which I didn't find last week despite half a day of googling the problem (and only finding exasperated people who said it was apparently hard wired). I shall promptly try this on Monday to see if it allows me the ability to drag files about again.
It would seem to me that the manual aimed at the xp -> 7 movers should spend most of its time covering all of the inexplicable little changes that have been made. There aren't many new things, just lots of changed (or entirely removed) things.
As I decided to change my work PC over to 7 last week I can testify. I had superficially played with vista and 7 up until now, but it is a different thing when your main machine moves completely. For example, in W7 MS have inexplicably removed the ability for auto arrange on files to be turned off in explorer - they now always "spring" to the grid - an annoying change. While day to day I didn't use this, it was used in xp now and then in sorting out a large folder full of files, as it is much more intuitive to spatially sort. Gone from W7, and no hack to get it back.
The picture viewer is also crap now, slow, with a initially loaded blurred preview, then 1/2 a second later the real preview loads. Also when you zoom in it doesn't interpolate as it did in xp, just pixellates.
Source for any of this? Papers?
I am in the game and I have never heard of any of this. Improbable to begin with, but made doubly so by the fact that each pixel is individually evaporated on something like the XEL-1 - so the 10x10 cm is meaningless - each pixel is the maximum active area that anything can migrate out to the edges of.
Smells like total BS to me (tipped off by the "they're not telling you" conspiracy theory line). There are loads more holes in what you said, but I am not wasting time on it.
It's too bad they won't live. But then again, what does.
Nice idea in theory, but the practicalities make it next to impossible. Maintenance, costs, complexity etc. If you fly it up there then you need to keep it in working order, potentially for years - and that would mean costs in flying up spare-parts, engineers, undertaking safety inspections - essentially it would require setting up the first spaceship yard - costs NASA no doubt don't want to be liable for. The alternative is to fly it up and then simply agree not to service it, but at that point its usefulness would be virtually zero, as it couldn't even be sued as an emergency escape as they can't put people inside something that isn't being serviced. Then when the space station is decommissioned (whenever that is) they will be unable to bring it back down to earth so it will be burnt up upon re-entry with the station - a bit of a waste.
state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision
while it doesn't surprise me that someone coming from the same family as fox news would make such a absolutely false statement - it does make him look particularly stupid. Any idea that the BBC is state-sponsored (a phrase that conjures up images of despots ordering what the daily headlines will be) is both false and misrepresenting reality - staples of the murdoch methodology. This would be the same BBC that in its capacity as a news reporter examines and holds the government to account on behalf of the people every day. Zircon, David Kelly, and many more.
We can only be thankful we don't live in murdochs world where they control all. The only "News" that the public would be allowed to "consume" would consist of right-wing bile and trash shalebraties and their sordid tales.
I don't know if it is just my perception, but it feels like MS is back to their old ways with a lot of their activities these days - particularly with regard to anything web facing.
After what felt like a few years of roughly being fair with things, we seem to have had a spate of underhand moves recently. Off the top of my head I can list installing firefox extensions through windows updates without asking (spooking a lot of people including myself - "1 new extension installed what? I didn't install anything"), upgrades to IE8 presenting the user with a complex series of choices - one that implies you should opt in to their accelerator program or IE8 won't install, and the other offering you an express set of installation options or else click through a large number of preference screens - while failing to mention that express settings set IE8 as the default browser.
And now (if true), engaging in DNS hijacking to drive visitors to their search site. Can they just not accept user preference at all?
I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim.
They can cite them, i.e. "we have previously found [REF]", without infringing anything, so I think you have gotten mixed up there. What they cannot necessary do without infringing is reproduce data/figures without gaining copyright exemption. It can be handled two ways, both involve citing the earlier work along with the reproduction to be absolutely sure that you are nobody thinks you are plagiarising yourself, and if you want to be proper about it then you can get a copyright exemption (which happens all the time for review articles). It will almost always be granted, but it is just a bit of a hassle to get sometimes. These points don't negate any discussion about the moral or ethical repercussions of being forced to sign over copyright - that is different - but practically there are no great repercussions.
I have had to sign away copyright on work I have done, and it does feel wrong. But on the other hand the journals are relatively relaxed about the situation, and you don't see legalise copyright warnings being posted to anyone. If journals annoy authors then said authors don't publish in those journals so they have to be careful. If academic establishments stopped paying subscriptions to journals then it might also be different - as at that point all of the copyrighted works the publishers hold become a rather more active asset to exploit since they may not be making any money from subscriptions (in some open access models for example).
but at least this one is well intentioned and could save a life.
Not if phone manufacturers are dissuaded from adding this feature because they would either have to pay Apple royalties or risk being sued by them. In that case the fact that it has been patented may actually cost lives.
If Apple came out and guaranteed royalty free licensing for all then it would be a positive move for society.
Times are getting tough - FB need to start to find ways of actually making money, and pretty sharpish as well. The "2.0" days of wandering along to a VC like an extra from Beavis and Butt-head and saying "uh, yeah, kewl, man - we, like, need some more cash - yeah, 2.0, social, yeah" aren't going to wash any more.
Ad revenue is about to drop off a cliff (if it hasn't already), and loss making enterprises like FB - who's only revenue stream, other than VC funding rounds, was ad revenue - are going to have to start "monetizing" (what a lovely word for strip mining everything in sight) otherwise they will be in trouble.
Never forget Beacon. Their silent implementation of that privacy nightmare gives a brief view of their true intents - and that was done in the days when people were throwing money at them and they were being valued as being bigger than GM. Now the economic hardships are starting to bite I am not at all surprised they have attempted this.
I don't really see what Sputnik has to do with much - scientific, quasi political, enterprises have always required large-scale collaboration. The Apollo program was the same. Those activities were all government sponsored and government defined, not day-to-day inquisitive experimental science. CERN's goals are defined and executed by scientists, not by politicians (they just fund them, the same way they fund all public science).
There is truth in the message that large collaborations are becoming more common, and individual scientific achievements less (there are very few individual author papers in experimental science these days), but that is due to the nature of experimental science. The ability to execute world-revolutionary science in a small lab is becoming much much harder. The minutiae of nature is where most work is done, and minutiae now quite often requires large, expensive and extremely complex experiments. Measuring the mass of an electron can be done on a table with an oil drop experiment. Measuring the products of GeV collisions of hadrons requires CERN.
Not entirely sure why the summary touches on one being overshadowed by the other.
On the contrary, the two works are complimentary, and it is thus no coincidence that they have been released at the same time. Hubble shows an old cold planet on the edge of a solar system, while Keck shows some very young hot infra-red emitting planets close to their star. The two discoveries help elucidate the workings of other solar systems - and each is just as valuable as the other.
Facebook implemented without asking anyone anything - until there was a public outcry.
Facebook made it impossible for you to delete your account - until there was a public outcry.
"developers" of "applications" can see a great deal of your private data - this has not been fixed - there has not been a public outcry yet.
If it was private data and how much I choose to let others on the web see then that would be one thing. The issue I see with facebook is that they themselves seem to want to exploit your data at every single stage. Things like the inability to delete your account and "opt-out" services should be the anathema of any business that cares about privacy - instead they nefariously implemented them without consent and defended them until there was outcry. It took a feature piece in the New York Times before they decided to let people delete their accounts. What are they trying to hide?
All of this can go two ways.
In ten years time either all of the "facebook" stuff will be seen as a fad, and joked about as a fad - forgotten and irrelevant. Or it will still be "big" and they will know and capitalise on every single aspect of every single person's private data.
Personally I suspect it will be the former scenario - the "2.0", "social-networking" stuff is just a buzz - a hyper money fuelled fad. The whole thing is an attempt to generate a self-fulfilling prophecy. Facebook worth fifteen billion dollars? Give me a break. The entire bubble has been fuelled on speculative hot air - "if I say it is valuable and the next big thing, then it is". As the stock market has so ably proven over the last few weeks - fads and self-fulfilling prophecies never last.
There was an analogy that was doing the rounds on the "privacy-less age" that we are supposed to be living in. It drew comparisons between the nineteenth century reluctance people had to put money into banks and today's reluctance to protect your private details. We now deposit most of our assets with banks and think nothing of it, the analogy being that in the future the same will be with our private information. Of course like most analogies it is fundamentally flawed to compare the two things - but I couldn't help but smile when, over the last month, I see people questioning to withdraw their money from banks that are on their knees.
This is a useful tool, as well as being a bit of fun.
In addition to all the standard "wii gives no results!" posts, what I noticed, and what was nice to see when searching for a few things, was the absolute lack of blog/link spam everywhere. Searching for a couple of terms that I still search for now yielded 300 odd results - but 300 *relevant result*. Searching for the same thing with the 2008 engine gives me tens of thousands - but 90% of them are just pollution results. The 2001 engine actually kicked up a few "new" results for things that, while still technically available on the 2008 engine, are on page 152 of it - and so hence essentially lost and I have never seen them before.
It links in to what I have argued previously - fork search engines. A bleeding edge "just spidered" version for those who want to chase up-to-the-minute things - and a "stable" time-lag version that would defeat the point of spam (if a blog/link spamming campaign has to wait for a couple of years to get their search results in to the stable engine results then they are less likely to bother).
if the current version of the browser I'm using (the earlier Firefox) solves my problems, then why do I need to upgrade?
Because the version you are using will no longer be supported (and hence not very secure) in 4 months or so. Given that one of the main aims of internet interface software is security then I can't see how it will solve your problems for much longer.
There would be rightful criticism if this was an enforced upgrade, but it is not. Calling it a "nag" screen is also misleading, once or twice in the next few months is hardly every 10 minutes - information box would be more appropriate. It is not at all unimaginable that FF2 installed on family/friend machines who "just want to use the interweb" wouldn't know anything about FF3 - telling them about an upgrade that will (shortly) be required to maintain good security seems like a proper thing to do - indeed I am sure there would be criticism here if Mozilla didn't do this.
My comments weren't necessarily specific to this attack, but rather a more general point that the www is not up to handling what it is increasingly being used for. The web has continued to be employed to do more and more complex things. It started out with simple hosting of html files and hyperlinking between them to create a web - that evolved to include scripting frontends and database backends, and that is now evolving yet further in the current iteration to include entire execution of programs and complex tasks in the so-called "cloud" - all via www. It is a house of cards - and with each "complexity iteration" it is opening itself up to more flaws and holes (by definition - the more complex the task, the more flaws there will be).
When does the point come when people start saying "hang on a minute - this just isn't up to it"?
It seems with each passing year that the web is becoming more "broken".
Perhaps the problem is too many groups are attempting to use it as if it is a fail-safe system - banks, corporations, financial institutions, governments. It was never designed to be fail-safe. Frankly if they had treated it more like a the "wild west web" and less like a "cheaper and easier platform for advertising/cost-cutting" then we wouldn't be in this mess.
Answers on a postcard as to how to fix it.