This is potentially a very useful service but not all URLs we visit are from Google searches, some we still type in others as links from pages. However could we soon expect a Firefox add in that will filter all http requests through Google ? So then our new overlords will indeed know everything about our web-habits ?
I never ceased to be amazed at the sheer number of "Global Warming's a Myth / Good for Us" stories in American Newspapers and on American websites. That's nice, but Der Spiegel which printed TFA is German!
It's widely reported that Wall Street Journal are also claiming an exclusive:
In what appear to be early-stage discussions, executives at Microsoft and Yahoo are taking a fresh look at a merger of the two companies or some kind of match-up that would pair their companies' respective strengths, say people familiar with the situation. Maybe things really are changing in the Ozzie era - msft mightn't want to swallow & assimilate - maybe they do want a partnership ?
Fact is anyway for starters the Yahoo brand is a strong valuable asset, I don't see it been squashed. Also Yahoo is probably the second most successful internet company out there, msft is pretty poor to date given its opportunities, they'd be dumb to just take over & dictate.
The chief anti spam engineer of Google is Matt Cutts he says:
As a reminder, supplemental results aren't something to be afraid of; I've got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example...
That statement still holds. It's perfectly normal for a website to have pages in our main web index and our supplemental index
MySolitaire.com, another online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site's vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business $250,000...
Okay, so the VP of SEM for this site mentions that they tried buying links; maybe those links started to count for less. I decided to check into mysolitaire.com and see if I could find any other links that might have started counting for less. I did find a spam report where someone forwarded an email that appeared to be from mysolitaire.com...
I checked out http://www.mysolitaire.com/resources/ and by my count saw 329 different categories offered for link exchanging: And the fix:
The approach I'd recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).
Oooops I didn't know that my "marketing consultant" was doing SEO spamming. Ooops I just paid him by accident to do "stuff".
Good that Google doesn't let that defense wash. Could you imagine what a better place the world would be if we could have a similar rule for email spam ? I cheer Google on for their anti spam efforts.
What is this Culture Czar position? It feels like more spin in an age of way-too-much-spin Positive marketing works, people like Coke because of the brand which causes similar brain changes to drugs. A cheap way to make someone happy is nice corporate art, similarly internal company branding works. Google employees get a buzz from working in the company with the most valuable brand in the world. Having kooky titles like Culture Czar & Google-y reinforces the buzz about the place.
Google produces innovation based on incentive... It's great that they want the incentives to be more than just cash People actually only need so much money, the article clearly talks about the reward of a stimulating environment that is more campus like than other employers:
'Happiness Survey?' This smells of new-age rebranding. Aren't they talking about 'workplace satisfaction? Maybe, maybe not. Workplace satisfaction points towards the colour of the walls, the taste of the food... the focus "sounds" narrow. Work is where we spend about say 50% of our quality time so it is a major part of our lives. Google with its ski trips, for example, is acknowledging the blur between work & personal life. Thus with a hapiness survey they take a wider interest/responsibility than with a workplace satisfaction survey.
Personally whilst I find this blurring interesting it's also a little disturbing- many of the people I know who work at Google have an incredible personal loyalty to the firm, they socialise together, ski trips, voluntary charity events... somewhat cultlike.
A strong argument often raised against open voting is that disinterested people would have their votes purchased. Given that in most jurisdictions turnout rarely goes over 60% there's a lot of scope for purchase. This would then lead to the richest 1% having say 80% influence (which may not be a bad thing).
So Google has gone out & captured some seo/ad spammers ? I reckon Matt Cutts , their chief anti spam dude is preparing the "interview room". Google will extract their secrets & end up a cycle or 2 ahead in the SEO War.
Of course doing this will take some of the value out of their acquisition, an option mentioned in the article is selling off Performics, that would be shirking their responsibility. Much better to make it a honest, neutral but quality service. That might win the SEO War.
We do pay for Google. We accept marketeers ad's, effectively giving them write permissions to our brains ! Yes we here might think we're smart & that ads don't effect us but smart people spend billions per quarter on Google ads right now.
Thus as refund we ought have the offending ads extracted back out from our minds. Possibly this could be achieved by reverse advertising (say associating the company with cow-poo or George Bush). Else we'll need some neuro scanning & possible brain cell zapping.
"Peer-to-peer file-sharing consumes a disproportionate amount of resources, both in bandwidth and human technical support." "Left unchecked, P2P applications can consume all available network bandwidth," The bandwidth is an ok reason.
It also initiated "John Doe" lawsuits against users of computers on Ohio University's network. The university estimates staff members have spent nearly 120 hours dealing with the prelitigation letters from the RIAA. That's not a good reason.
How are we to know which is the "real" reason?
Fine nobody is truly neutral, partisans will always be involved, problem is that their involvment in gbw43.com suggests that Smartech may have crossed the line & become crooked. Until the gbw43.com issue is resolved this is an interesting open issue. Even if the gbw43.com is resolved finding Smartech folk in the criminal wrong this doesn't mean that Ohio had its books cooked but... often you see the smoke first & you gotta step up your vigilance at that point, maybe it's just a flash in the pan but maybe not- this will need to be investigated further.
WASHINGTON--A White House task force led by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras on Monday urged Congress to enact a variety of new laws designed to punish identity fraud, even though it is already illegal.
Many of the recommendations differ little from policies that Congress has already been exploring. The plan, for example, calls for limiting the reliance on Social Security numbers by federal agencies and for establishing a nationwide standard dictating how private companies should safeguard the personal data they hold and when they must notify the public about security breaches.
The Law has been abstracted and complicated to such a degree that the above-average (slashdotters are certainly capable) is not qualified or considered capable of writing one. Society is getting increasingly specialised & thus complex - this is a good thing as generally we have more than say the average person of a 100 years back. Specialisation is what floated the Industrial Revolution & thus gave individuals more freedom (removed us from the Land shackle). When the concept of a Western liberal democracy was founded specialistion wasn't as rife. Perhaps a sample of 10 different professionals would have been able to describe all knowledge. Now even 100 would be hard pressed.
Unfortunately we have to stick to our own areas of ability & interest regards law writing, even the average slashdotter wouldn't have much to add to say a change in law surrounding fire codes of new skyscrapers. We've to rely on others to oversee & complain on these issues.
Why you shouldn't force notifications to customers
-Zero day exploits: crooks will rush to do zero day exploits as an official confirmation will prove they've got good data (so more sophisticated gangs will buy it from them, most fraud happens in the first 24 hours) -Honeytrap: When identity theft occurs law enforcement agencies may wish to honeytrap the thieves by letting them use the say credit card details & thus tracking them. -White Noise Defense: smart companies ought have "white noise" dud systems, easily hacked containing white noise data with honeytrap triggers (eg a valid credit card number but one that belongs to say FBI) in it ! - and so on.
But they should be forced to notifiy law enforcement agencies.
TFA reports
For now, Google plans to use the software internally, as a tool for its employees, the spokesman said, declining to speculate whether Google might later try to market the technology or integrate it into one of its commercial products.
Should Google decide to market or integrate the technology into its products, the move would be seen as another in a string of recent steps taking Google into the sphere of collaborative work tools. They're only then saying maybe for regular users!
Yes Google excels at it's core advertising business which comes from search. Most of the great acquisitions since then haven't added to the bottom line. That said the hosted Google Apps package may come good. Otherwise Google is a one trick pony which peculiarly spends most of its R&D budget outside of its core revenue market !
I pity the RIM staff now. I work in an client that has had two "bad headlines" incidents. Understandably they are now highly risk averse - up to 12 sign offs required for minor changes ; Documentation to code ratio is >> 20:1 ; 5 chiefs to 1 Indian on many projects...
The public is ignorant as to what causes IT problems - even if RIM upgrade their QA process to "better than normal" no one will forgive them if lightning strikes twice. Thus RIM are likely to bring in extraordinarily restrictive processes. If I was a creative developer or solutions architect in RIM I'd be looking for a new job.
For many products the "developer studio" software is quite expensive, indeed these days with "zero foot print" web clients no user software is needed. Now then there is an attempt to monetize based on number of users of system, server flops, i/o etc but sometimes this can be blurry/hard to determine. Overall for a large installation it ends up being blended pricing in a bespoke negotiated contract.
The installation & software writing is often do by consultants/systems integrators - I work for one of the largets of these - we won't benefit from the product & also it suits the software companies to have us guys out there pushing their products. Thus software companies will give us free server & developer licenses. We'll use these for internal proof of concepts, training, evaluation before we even get near actual project work. So as a marketing effort it is quite valid to give us these licenses for free. But:
What if we use the software/package for our own internal business processes ? or Sometimes a very, very large software vendor (guess who) gets pretty pissed if we are recommending a competitor... even if the competitor's offering is more limited, specialized & regarded as the best available. So the very large software vendor instead of throwing chairs at us threatens to revoke all our developer licenses wordwide unless we ditch the competitor.:-(
Like any area of business software is quite murky.
How many millions(?) of hours of copyrighted material are there ? 24 Frames per second , potentially varying resolution, varying compression algorithms... ok they'll make some form of hash first pass but still with tens of thousands(?) of videos uploaded daily this is one major processing problem, hard to believe that computers can do it cheaper than humans ?
Smarter just to let the terrorists have their DVDs legally. You can easily track the distribution for intelligence gathering purposes. Furthermore even if you fail tracking the distribution say you do a covert house search & find such DVDs: at least, at operational level, this points you out to be on right track. Also post doing a house raid if at least you find some "terrorist paraphenalia" you can allay community fears that the bust was random/purely motivated by racial profiling.
Consider that ads subsidize most media: newspapers would be many X price without them, compare price of DVD boxsets to broadcast TV ? Even Slashdot is subsidized by ads. Thus as consumers we ought aim to make these ads more relevant as:
1) We'd get to read better/more useful ads
2) Our media companies could provide us cheaper/better content from extra revenue
So long as it is fed with rich data, our new overlord Google will start inferring things about us & personalize advertising more. E.g. knowing that we really like classical music say by search history thus offering specific cheap CDs. Possibly our phone will get an SMS as we pass a shop which has a particular CD that we're interested in in stock. Possibly knowing that we don't make purchases online Mon-Fri 9-5 unless it is lunch might aid pricing...
Also more people are using broadband even for say TV rather than accepting media broadcast so personalised ads are becoming more feasible/relevant. However we'll have to buy into this & co-operate more explicitly than in the past, the contract will need to be made clear but there is potential large benefits for all. Users need to start thinking about these changes now.
A focus of the article is on the over response to the "superhacker" - this is the same knee jerk issue in regular crime. Glorify the criminal - make them all out to be Moriarty calibre - dancing magicians who laugh at us mortals - wheedle about inadequate laws.... rather neat solutions to abrogate your basic security responsibilities ? Fact is that most cybercrime is carried out by fairly basic means but there's an industry of ass covering in pretending otherwise.
This is one case that could be a candidate for punitive damages... no not enough to bankrupt the RIAA but enough to put some serious manners on them. As TFA says
We are lawyers in New York City. We practice law at Vandenberg & Feliu, LLP. Through the Electronic Frontier Foundation we have undertaken to represent people in our area who have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)... We established this blog to collect and share information about this reign of terror Maybe the terror will end;-)
Say we accept our overlords as benign. Well a "useful" feature is clearly personalised search/news based on search history or email contents etc. This has been in beta in Google for some time. However what if in a workplace with a colleague looking over my shoulder I search for some innocuous term & it starts offering pornsites (which it knows being a single slashdottian I like) ? Problem is we all have secrets, closed areas... if we use Google as our primary www interface & it works well then it's like we've written a diary - worse it has intelligent statistical mining in it that offers insights !
It could be the case that Google "knows" us nearly as well as our best friends but doesn't have the tact to keep its mouth shut at certain times !
Slashdot Mirror
This is potentially a very useful service but not all URLs we visit are from Google searches, some we still type in others as links from pages. However could we soon expect a Firefox add in that will filter all http requests through Google ? So then our new overlords will indeed know everything about our web-habits ?
Fact is anyway for starters the Yahoo brand is a strong valuable asset, I don't see it been squashed. Also Yahoo is probably the second most successful internet company out there, msft is pretty poor to date given its opportunities, they'd be dumb to just take over & dictate.
Oooops I didn't know that my "marketing consultant" was doing SEO spamming. Ooops I just paid him by accident to do "stuff".
Good that Google doesn't let that defense wash. Could you imagine what a better place the world would be if we could have a similar rule for email spam ? I cheer Google on for their anti spam efforts.
'workplace satisfaction? Maybe, maybe not. Workplace satisfaction points towards the colour of the walls, the taste of the food... the focus "sounds" narrow. Work is where we spend about say 50% of our quality time so it is a major part of our lives. Google with its ski trips, for example, is acknowledging the blur between work & personal life. Thus with a hapiness survey they take a wider interest/responsibility than with a workplace satisfaction survey.
Personally whilst I find this blurring interesting it's also a little disturbing- many of the people I know who work at Google have an incredible personal loyalty to the firm, they socialise together, ski trips, voluntary charity events... somewhat cultlike.
A strong argument often raised against open voting is that disinterested people would have their votes purchased. Given that in most jurisdictions turnout rarely goes over 60% there's a lot of scope for purchase. This would then lead to the richest 1% having say 80% influence (which may not be a bad thing).
So Google has gone out & captured some seo/ad spammers ? I reckon Matt Cutts , their chief anti spam dude is preparing the "interview room". Google will extract their secrets & end up a cycle or 2 ahead in the SEO War.
Of course doing this will take some of the value out of their acquisition, an option mentioned in the article is selling off Performics, that would be shirking their responsibility. Much better to make it a honest, neutral but quality service. That might win the SEO War.
We do pay for Google. We accept marketeers ad's, effectively giving them write permissions to our brains ! Yes we here might think we're smart & that ads don't effect us but smart people spend billions per quarter on Google ads right now.
Thus as refund we ought have the offending ads extracted back out from our minds. Possibly this could be achieved by reverse advertising (say associating the company with cow-poo or George Bush). Else we'll need some neuro scanning & possible brain cell zapping.
I want my refund now !
They can read it & re-engineer it as paid for product !
Fine nobody is truly neutral, partisans will always be involved, problem is that their involvment in gbw43.com suggests that Smartech may have crossed the line & become crooked. Until the gbw43.com issue is resolved this is an interesting open issue. Even if the gbw43.com is resolved finding Smartech folk in the criminal wrong this doesn't mean that Ohio had its books cooked but... often you see the smoke first & you gotta step up your vigilance at that point, maybe it's just a flash in the pan but maybe not- this will need to be investigated further.
WASHINGTON--A White House task force led by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras on Monday urged Congress to enact a variety of new laws designed to punish identity fraud, even though it is already illegal.
Many of the recommendations differ little from policies that Congress has already been exploring. The plan, for example, calls for limiting the reliance on Social Security numbers by federal agencies and for establishing a nationwide standard dictating how private companies should safeguard the personal data they hold and when they must notify the public about security breaches.
Why you shouldn't force notifications to customers
-Zero day exploits: crooks will rush to do zero day exploits as an official confirmation will prove they've got good data (so more sophisticated gangs will buy it from them, most fraud happens in the first 24 hours)
-Honeytrap: When identity theft occurs law enforcement agencies may wish to honeytrap the thieves by letting them use the say credit card details & thus tracking them.
-White Noise Defense: smart companies ought have "white noise" dud systems, easily hacked containing white noise data with honeytrap triggers (eg a valid credit card number but one that belongs to say FBI) in it !
- and so on.
But they should be forced to notifiy law enforcement agencies.
Yes Google excels at it's core advertising business which comes from search. Most of the great acquisitions since then haven't added to the bottom line. That said the hosted Google Apps package may come good. Otherwise Google is a one trick pony which peculiarly spends most of its R&D budget outside of its core revenue market !
I pity the RIM staff now. I work in an client that has had two "bad headlines" incidents. Understandably they are now highly risk averse - up to 12 sign offs required for minor changes ; Documentation to code ratio is >> 20:1 ; 5 chiefs to 1 Indian on many projects ...
The public is ignorant as to what causes IT problems - even if RIM upgrade their QA process to "better than normal" no one will forgive them if lightning strikes twice. Thus RIM are likely to bring in extraordinarily restrictive processes. If I was a creative developer or solutions architect in RIM I'd be looking for a new job.
For many products the "developer studio" software is quite expensive, indeed these days with "zero foot print" web clients no user software is needed. Now then there is an attempt to monetize based on number of users of system, server flops, i/o etc but sometimes this can be blurry/hard to determine. Overall for a large installation it ends up being blended pricing in a bespoke negotiated contract.
:-(
The installation & software writing is often do by consultants/systems integrators - I work for one of the largets of these - we won't benefit from the product & also it suits the software companies to have us guys out there pushing their products. Thus software companies will give us free server & developer licenses. We'll use these for internal proof of concepts, training, evaluation before we even get near actual project work. So as a marketing effort it is quite valid to give us these licenses for free. But:
What if we use the software/package for our own internal business processes ?
or
Sometimes a very, very large software vendor (guess who) gets pretty pissed if we are recommending a competitor... even if the competitor's offering is more limited, specialized & regarded as the best available. So the very large software vendor instead of throwing chairs at us threatens to revoke all our developer licenses wordwide unless we ditch the competitor.
Like any area of business software is quite murky.
How many millions(?) of hours of copyrighted material are there ? 24 Frames per second , potentially varying resolution, varying compression algorithms... ok they'll make some form of hash first pass but still with tens of thousands(?) of videos uploaded daily this is one major processing problem, hard to believe that computers can do it cheaper than humans ?
Smarter just to let the terrorists have their DVDs legally. You can easily track the distribution for intelligence gathering purposes. Furthermore even if you fail tracking the distribution say you do a covert house search & find such DVDs: at least, at operational level, this points you out to be on right track. Also post doing a house raid if at least you find some "terrorist paraphenalia" you can allay community fears that the bust was random/purely motivated by racial profiling.
Consider that ads subsidize most media: newspapers would be many X price without them, compare price of DVD boxsets to broadcast TV ? Even Slashdot is subsidized by ads. Thus as consumers we ought aim to make these ads more relevant as:
1) We'd get to read better/more useful ads
2) Our media companies could provide us cheaper/better content from extra revenue
So long as it is fed with rich data, our new overlord Google will start inferring things about us & personalize advertising more. E.g. knowing that we really like classical music say by search history thus offering specific cheap CDs. Possibly our phone will get an SMS as we pass a shop which has a particular CD that we're interested in in stock. Possibly knowing that we don't make purchases online Mon-Fri 9-5 unless it is lunch might aid pricing...
Also more people are using broadband even for say TV rather than accepting media broadcast so personalised ads are becoming more feasible/relevant. However we'll have to buy into this & co-operate more explicitly than in the past, the contract will need to be made clear but there is potential large benefits for all. Users need to start thinking about these changes now.
A focus of the article is on the over response to the "superhacker" - this is the same knee jerk issue in regular crime. Glorify the criminal - make them all out to be Moriarty calibre - dancing magicians who laugh at us mortals - wheedle about inadequate laws .... rather neat solutions to abrogate your basic security responsibilities ? Fact is that most cybercrime is carried out by fairly basic means but there's an industry of ass covering in pretending otherwise.
Say we accept our overlords as benign. Well a "useful" feature is clearly personalised search/news based on search history or email contents etc. This has been in beta in Google for some time. However what if in a workplace with a colleague looking over my shoulder I search for some innocuous term & it starts offering pornsites (which it knows being a single slashdottian I like) ? Problem is we all have secrets, closed areas ... if we use Google as our primary www interface & it works well then it's like we've written a diary - worse it has intelligent statistical mining in it that offers insights !
It could be the case that Google "knows" us nearly as well as our best friends but doesn't have the tact to keep its mouth shut at certain times !