S previously mentioned, the American government seeks to invade the privacy of Internet citizens worldwide. The purpose of the subpoenas in question seems genuine, but effectivity is futile. Moreover, this boggles the mind as it serves as a precedent to privacy invasion. The only search engines to have opposed this was Google and they are facing the court nowadays, due to their resistance to violate trust with their customers.

Google was fighting a subpoena from the US Department of Justice as part of its defence of an anti child-pornography act subsequently deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The probe had originally asked for a month’s worth of search queries in anonymized form, and the URL of every website that robots from MSN Search, Yahoo!, AOL and Google trawled.

The word through the grapawine is that Google’s stance has weakened and some limited data may find its way ‘outside’.

O anyone who is interested: I have put together a page that enables content spam to be reported to several search engines in tandem. The purpose of this little ‘utility’ is to centralise various pages of interest, which motivates spam reports that reach more than just a single company. The ‘meat’ of the report can be conveniently copied and pasted from one frame to another. Report spammy sites that violate ethics.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

This afternoon, I came across a statement that was simply too difficult to ignore.

According to IT services provider, Unisys, open source software is set to have a similar impact on the marketplace as the internet did in the 1990s.

Coming from a senior giant like Unisys, such prediction cannot be immediately dismissed.

Related item: The Death of Commercial Software

EDUCTION in the number of PC sales is expected for the year to come. As well as an economical study on the matter, one can find the the corresponding evidence in the media.

What does that all mean in terms of people’s software upgrade cycle, as opposed to the hardware cycle? Since the crushing majority of all computers are being sold with Windows pre-installed, this should be good news. Rather than hopping onto a new hardware beast, people could choose operating systems which are less resource-greedy. Ubuntu comes to mind as modest although KDE-based distributions like SuSE (even with some serious ‘eye candy’) should do.

Sales of PCs worldwide will grow at a slower pace in 2006 than in 2005, partly because the replacement cycle for desktop PCs has hit a peak, market researcher Gartner said last week.

[...]

Gartner also warned that worldwide PC shipment growth could fall below the current forecast of 10.7 percent if Microsoft doesn’t set a precise release date for its new Vista operating system and if end users shy away from adopting newly-introduced Intel technologies.

It has been claimed that only half of today’s computers can cope with Windows Vista. No new machines = No Vista, which is encouraging news for the Open Source community.

It is worth mentioning that several countries around the world, government divisions includes, have begun a migration to Linux. Open Source has been making the big headlines recently.

I occasionally re-think my arrangement of automated backups. Recent reading about somebody else’s backup method inspired me to take better care of backups (yet again). I used to have 40 GB mirrors in 3 separate sites, which seemed beyond sufficient. Nevertheless, last Tuesday I bought a 300GB external hard-drive. Unwrapped, connected to SuSE and voila! New drive appears on Desktop. Linux has become easier than ever before. Almost frustratingly easy as there is no challenge and rarely a need to install any software.

The only downside of this device is the noise level, which is resulted from rotation at 7200 RPM inside relatively small housing. This can become loud and persistent during overnight baskups. Since the noise bothers me, I suppose could rely on earplugs. The internal hard-drive on the actual box probably has greater noise levels than the new external unit. Usually, however, it is idle or asleep, so only noise from the fan is a true factor.

I never lethargically back up my hard-drives, but nightime appears to be a must for backups, owing to (to put negatively — due to) duration. Matters used to be worse if defragging hard-drives, back in the days when I had a Windows laptop in my apartment. It required some overnight maintenance jobs and fortunately no such issues exist with Linux. Backups, on the contrary, become larger and larger (thus taking longer to complete).

All in all, I have 300 vacant gigabytes to fill. But where will I ever find that much pr0n? I kid, I kid. [smile /]

Bloggers should probably take a quick glance at the following item:

AUSTIN, Texas–Laina Dawes and Elaine Liner are pretty sure they were fired for blogging. It’s not 100 percent certain, of course, because no one ever told them so officially, but the evidence seems solid.

Addendum: New Met blogging rules spark anger (BBC)

IREFOX keeps eating Internet Explorer. Not literally so, but this Web site is solid proof of the growth of Mozilla Firefox. Below are browser statistics which have been accumulated for over a year and embody nearly 100 gigabytes of traffic.

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