forsv: potpourri of thoughts

Google 2084

Robot racing gets under way

It's the ultimate robot reality show: 43 contestants battling for a spot in a government-sponsored desert race intended to speed development of unmanned military combat vehicles.

The reward? A $2 million cash prize.

The autonomous robotic vehicles began competing Wednesday in the first of a series of qualifying rounds at the California Speedway. Half will advance to the October 8 starting line of the so-called Grand Challenge.

The grueling, weeklong semifinals are designed to test the vehicles' ability to cover a roughly 2-mile stretch of the track without a human driver or remote control.

Participants ranging from souped-up SUVs to military behemoths will be graded on how well they can self-drive on rough road, make sharp turns and avoid obstacles -- hay bales, trash cans, wrecked cars -- while relying on GPS navigation and sensors, radar, lasers and cameras that feed information to computers.

Google offers free Wi-Fi for San Francisco

Google Inc. wants to connect all of San Francisco to the Internet with a free wireless service, creating a springboard for the online search engine leader to leap into the telecommunications industry.

Google spokesman Nate Tyler said Saturday that the company doesn’t have any plans to offer a Wi-Fi service outside the San Francisco Bay area.

“Unwiring San Francisco is a way for Google to support our local Bay Area community,” Tyler said. “It is also an opportunity to make San Francisco a test-ground for new location-based applications and services that enable people to find relevant information exactly when and where they need it.”

Google has been quietly experimenting with Wi-Fi service in a few connection spots around the Bay Area and New York during the past few months. In another sign of its interest in Internet access, Google recently bought an undisclosed stake in a Maryland startup, the Current Communications Group, which is trying to provide high-speed connections through power lines.

Building its own wireless Internet network connection also would help Google save money by reducing the fees that it pays to the telecommunications middlemen that provide a bridge between the company’s data centers and Internet service providers whenever Web surfers make a search request.

Any free Internet access service would threaten to siphon revenue from subscription Internet service providers like SBC Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. that have invested heavily in high-speed connections that depend on phone lines and cable modems.

A Google Wi-Fi service also could divert traffic from many popular Web sites, including Yahoo, MSN and AOL, if it’s set up to automatically make Google’s home page the first stopping point.

Keystrokes Reveal Passwords to Researchers

BERKELEY, Calif. - If spyware and key-logging software weren't a big enough threat to privacy, researchers have figured out a way to eavesdrop on your computer simply by listening to the clicks and clacks of the keyboard.

Those seemingly random noises, when processed by a computer, were translated with up to 96 percent accuracy, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It's a form of acoustical spying that should raise red flags among computer security and privacy experts," said Doug Tygar, a Berkeley computer science professor and the study's principal investigator.

Researchers used several 10-minute audio recordings of people typing away at their keyboards. They fed the recordings into a computer that used an algorithm to detect subtle differences in the sound as each letter is struck.

Contiune reading.

Ask Jeeves decides to axe Jeeves

Search site Ask Jeeves is getting rid of the iconic valet that has been its companion since its earliest days.

Citing "user confusion" over what the butler character represents the search site has said that Jeeves will soon be phased out.

However, Ask's research revealed that Jeeves was getting in the way of people realising that the search site had changed and that it can handle many more types of queries than just straightforward questions.

"As a result," said the Ask statement, "the character may be phased out as the prominent icon of the brand, although no timeline or details have been determined."

In line with a series of changes made to the Ask site last year, Jeeves got a makeover which saw him get slimmer and more tanned.

In its statement Ask said that no decision had yet been made on the new brand name it will adopt to show how the search site had evolved.

Bill Gates meets Napolean Dynamite.

Bill Gates meets Napolean Dynamite. Microsoft has a history of doing little spoofs at their developer events (a couple years ago Gates and Ballmer did a send up of the GTI commercial and then there was The Matrix). While this one is a shaky camera capture (hopefully someone uploads the original), it's still pretty amusing and fun to watch Gates poke fun at himself. Of course, the unintended comedy videos involving Gates are often funnier.

eyesoflaura.org

Laura is a security guard at a large, unnamed facility, and she has some time on her hands. She writes about palindromes, time travel, and her dog Helen. She offers pithy observations on the various people she sees every day, like "The Sexy Lady" and "The Inspector." She records herself walking on tile floors, drinking glasses of water, and reciting the alphabet in a breathy voice. With plenty of pictures and a controllable webcam, she seems to be exploring ideas of surveillance and identity. But just who is Laura? In her first entry, she says that she's waiting for something to happen in her life. Does it? We don't know the answer -- or even if her world is real -- but we're strangely drawn to the view through Laura's eyes.

BloginSpace

"I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords"

- in what looks like a thinly-veiled attempt at viral marketing, a company claims to be giving bloggers the opportunity to send a piece of their lives into space to potentially connect with extraterrestrials.

Let's just hope that future generations will not have to endure this kind of thing, next time a blogger decides to quit ranting on about themselves.

Google Moon

Google Moon - Google Maps gets the Lunar treatment, in honor of the first manned moon landing. No directions, though, so you won't be able to plot the best route from Tycho Crater to Mare Imbrium. (Fun Hint! - try the maximum zoom level)

Photoshop 911

Photoshop 911 is the reader response division of Photoshop Tips & Tricks. These blog will answer all your questions and give you plenty of new tricks and hints.

CIA war game simulates major Internet attack

The CIA is conducting a cyber-war game this week geared to simulate a major Internet attack by enemy computer hackers, an intelligence official said Thursday.

Dubbed "Silent Horizon," the three-day unclassified exercise is based on a scenario set five years in the future and involves participants from government and the private sector.

"These are people who could likely be affected or enlisted in a real situation," the intelligence official said.

"Its goal is to help the United States recognize indicators of a large-scale cyber attack."

Continue reading ...

GoogleBlue

Google thinks your internet connection is too slow. They want to make it faster.

YaGoohoo!gle

The ultimate search engine: YaGoohoo!gle.

Coworkers Judged by iTunes Playlists

Office workers who share music via Apple Computer's iTunes software track their coworkers' comings and goings and form opinions about them based on their playlists.

The opinions are not always what the sharer intended, a new study finds.

The sharing phenomenon can nonetheless create a community of sorts among coworkers who otherwise barely know each other.

The study, of an unnamed mid-sized U.S. company, was funded in part by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

"People sharing music in our study were aware of the comings and goings of others in the office because they noticed the appearance and disappearance of others’ music on the network," said Amy Voida, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech who led the research. "They imagined what other people might think about their music collections, and they were aware of the musical holes left when someone left the company."

Continue reading ...

Google intros Q&A service

Google Inc. began delivering factual answers for some queries at the top of its results page, to save users from having to navigate over to other sites and look for the information.

For example, if a user enters the query "Portugal population," Google returns the answer -- 10.5 million -- along with a link to the Web page where the information came from, which in this case is the population page of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Factbook.

Continue reading...

Driving directions on your cellphone... from...

Who else? but Google

You can use Google SMS to get detailed driving directions, including total number of steps, estimated distance and travel time. Just send your start and end address to 46645 ('GOOGL' on most phones), and we'll return step-by-step directions.

ID theft is inescapable

March 2005 might make history as the apex of identity theft disclosures. Privacy invasion outfit ChoicePoint, payroll handler PayMaxx, Bank of America, Lexis Nexis, several universities, and a large shoe retailer called DSW all lost control of sensitive data concerning millions of people.

Credit card and other banking details, names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth have fallen into the hands of potential identity thieves. The news could not be worse.

In March 2005 alone:California State University at Chico notified 59,000 students, faculty, and staff that their details had been kept on a computer compromised by remote intruders. The haul included names, addresses and Social Security numbers.

Read

Global Voices, Atanu Dey and BBC-NPR program "The World"

Global bloggers report (5:45)
Many websites have a section called a "blog" or web log. The log is a way for people to participate in online discussions. While these blogs are becoming more well-known in western countries, there are plenty of active bloggers all over the world. The World's technology reporter Clark Boyd has the story.

Related Links:
Global Voices Site
Ethan Zuckerman's Blog
Rebecca MacKinnon's Blog
Hossein Derakhshan's Blog
Atanu Dey's Blog
Ory Okolloh's Blog

Euromail: What Germans can teach us about e-mail.

North America and Europe are two continents divided by a common technology: e-mail. Techno-optimists assure us that e-mail—along with the Internet and satellite TV—make the world smaller. That may be true in a technical sense. I can send a message from my home in Miami to a German friend in Berlin and it will arrive almost instantly. But somewhere over the Atlantic, the messages get garbled. In fact, two distinct forms of e-mail have emerged: Euromail and Amerimail.

Amerimail is informal and chatty. It's likely to begin with a breezy "Hi" and end with a "Bye." The chances of Amerimail containing a smiley face or an "xoxo" are disturbingly high. We Americans are reluctant to dive into the meat of an e-mail; we feel compelled to first inform hapless recipients about our vacation on the Cape which was really excellent except the jellyfish were biting and the kids caught this nasty bug so we had to skip the whale watching trip but about that investors' meeting in New York. ... Amerimail is a bundle of contradictions: rambling and yet direct; deferential, yet arrogant. In other words, Amerimail is America.

Euromail is stiff and cold, often beginning with a formal "Dear Mr. X" and ending with a brusque "Sincerely." You won't find any mention of kids or the weather or jellyfish in Euromail. It's all business. It's also slow. Your correspondent might take days, even weeks, to answer a message. Euromail is also less confrontational in tone, rarely filled with the overt nastiness that characterizes American e-mail disagreements. In other words, Euromail is exactly like the Europeans themselves. (I am, of course, generalizing. German e-mail style is not exactly the same as Italian or Greek, but they have more in common with each other than they do with American mail.)

Continure reading...

Your body as data

2 GB of data per second, piggybacking on your skin's electrical field. You == organic lan for small electronic devices. And it's a little more secure than bluetooth.

COOL Javascript Trickery

COOL Javascript Trickery. Useful? Sure seems like it could be, though I can't think how. Fun? YES!

Don’t you know you’re gonna to shock the monkey

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows users to create scripts that alter the display of existing web pages. Like removing ads from google pages. I learned about the google script from boingboing. Oh, here's a script to remove the ads from there. Greasemonkey has a lot of uses, but has adblocking gone too far?

Anything Is Possible

How many times did you want to be a DJ?
Now you can podcast.

How many times did you want to be a movie maker?
Now you can Vimeo.

How many times did you want to be a rock star?
Now you can garageband.

How many times did you want to write music for TV shows?
Now you can Freeplay.

How many times did you want to be a journalist?
Now you can blog.

Anything is possible in this world we are living in.

It's an incredible time with the barriers to entry coming down for so many things.  The revolution of the ants is upon us.

Enjoy it.

(via Musings of a VC in NYC)

Cebit 2005: First day round-up

Cebit 2005, one of the world's most important technology fairs, has opened its doors in Hanover, Germany.

The fair showcases many of the consumer electronics and technology products that will be released to the market in the coming months.

Perhaps you might find this interesting...day by day account...

The Incremental Web

Rich Skrenta writes about the difference between the Reference Web and the Incremental Web:

Google searches the reference Internet. Users come to google with a specific query, and search a vast corpus of largely static information. This is a very valuable and lucrative service to provide: it's the Yellow Pages.

Blogs may look like regular HTML pages, but the key difference is that they're organized chronologically. New posts appear at the top, so with a single browser reload you can say "Just show me what's new."

This seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain. Rather than using HTML, the delivery protocol for web pages, there is a desire for a new, feed-centric protocol: RSS. To search chronologically-ordered content, a relevance-based search that destroys the chronology such as Google is inappropriate. Instead you want Feedster, PubSub or Technorati. Feed content may be better to read in a different sort of client, such as Newsgator, rather than a web browser.

And finally, there is a different advertising opportunity. Rather than the sort of business ads you see in the Yellow Pages, instead the ad opportunity is more about reaching a particular demographic or subscriber group. The kind of ads that are in magazines. How do you keyword target a breakfast cereal advertisement to fitness-conscious 21-25 year olds? You can't. You need to find something those people are reading, and put your ad there.

There are 4-8 million active blogs now. At this size, you can still "know" the top bloggers, and find new posts worth reading by clicking around. But when the blogosphere grows 100X or 1000X, the current discovery model will break down. You'll need algorithmic techniques like Topix.net or a Findory to channel the most relevant material from the constant flood of new content.

Rich is on the right track, but there are a few additional points which need thinking:
- We need to think beyond just text to multimedia for mass-market content creation and management. [Think Flickr.]
- In emerging markets like India, the mobile and not the computer will be at the heart of the Incremental Web.
- The interface has to go beyond the search box to more natural navigational interfaces. [Think Speech.]
- The published content is being amplified/tagged by the mass market --this also needs to be taken into account. [Think Del.icio.us.]
- A user's "subscriptions" will be the filter through which the user will want to see the Incremental Web. [Think RSS+OPML.]

(via Emergic)

Google Goodies

Gmail Journal:
Here’s how to turn your Gmail account into a multi-category journal.

Google Help:
Cheat Sheet

Google Toolbar 3 beta:
Google Toolbar 3 beta. Google writes:

- SpellCheck: Whenever users type into a web form (including web-based email, discussion forums, and intranet web applications), SpellCheck instantly reviews and suggests corrections. The AutoFix option enables users to automatically check and correct all the text they're entering with one
click.
- AutoLink: Whenever users see a U.S. address on a web page, one click on AutoLink automatically links the address to an online map. For example, if users are reading a review of a new restaurant, clicking on AutoLink will turn its address into a link to a map, complete with directions. AutoLink also links package tracking numbers to pages displaying that package's delivery status and other useful information, such as Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) and Publication ISBN numbers.
- WordTranslator: This feature translates words from English web pages into one of 8 other languages. Hover the cursor over a word and Google Toolbar's WordTranslator feature displays the word in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, or Korean.

International verison coming soon.

Google goes VoIP?

The Times has caught up on the rumour that Google is planning a Voice over Internet Protocol service:

The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer.

The technology that will enable Google to move in on the market has been around for some time. Software by the London-based company, Skype, has been downloaded nearly 54 million times around the world but no large telecommunication firms have properly exploited it.

BT, which connects seven out of ten British households, has developed its own internet-telephone service. However, the telephone giant, which has the most to lose if the new technology takes off, has been reluctant to promote it heavily.

But Google is "playing it cool", says VNUnet:

The rumours were fuelled when the company posted a job ad last week seeking a 'strategic negotiator' with experience in the "selection and negotiation of dark fibre contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of the development of a global backbone network".

The notoriously secretive Googlists said "we are not aware of any moves to enter this arena", but that doesn't necessarily mean that there's not behind-the-scenes movement.

And nothing on the Googleblog, unsurprisingly.

Twist in the Google browser saga

There have been long-standing rumours of a Google web browser, but the latest twist in the story is that the lead developer on Firefox, Ben Goodger, is now being paid by Google.

As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above - with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases.

I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general.

Add this to the "evidence" so far: (A Mozilla developer day at the Googleplex; the domain name gbrowser.com and the hiring of former IE builders.

Something's going on: is it Google simply protecting Mozilla from competitors, or is it a more complex situation?

safe computing

Let's start off the New Year by getting our systems free of the accumulated junk that various malware programs have left on them. And it is nice that the fruit of the acquisition of Giant Software by Microsoft (I know, it sounds like a redundant joke) is finally in evidence: last week, Microsoft released its first beta of its very own spyware removal tool.

I have following on my computer and am hoping am secure.

- Spyware Doctor from PCTOOLS (best so far)
- Ad-Aware SE Personal from Lavasoft
- SpyBot
- SpywareBlaster from Java Cool Software
and now Microsoft's AntiSpyware.

Blingo

Blingo is a new search engine with a twist: you can win a prize every time you search (if you're an adult US citizen, that is). Current prizes include a $250 Amazon gift certificate, an iPod, or a one-year subscription to Netflix.