“How did a newspaper reveal so much about me…?”

PYING provides information. Information is power. The simple implication is that spying grants an organisation extra power. Especially, it gives an organisation advantages over its competitors. For this very particular reason, search engines put an end to privacy over time. As a matter of fact, the Internet in general has exposed most of us at a certain level. Controversially enough, Google can finally analyse the behaviour of rival search engines as they possess statistics of many Web sites.

Search engines and information management authorities are not alone in this. What I see more and more of are signup requirements for reading on-line newspapers (the New York Times is a notable example). I am not speaking of paid subscriptions, but rather about identification. It is no longer a secret that sales of in-print newspapers decrease, if not slowly diminish. As previously said, one must evolve and this includes publishers. More and more people simply find greater convenience in reading news on their personal workstation. So how can publishers keep up and protect their revenue? Can spying provide a solution?

Newspapers and publishers might not like the use of network bandwidth, which even when accompanied by advertisement, does not give them the same touch with the readers. Moreover, newspapers become more susceptible to plagiarism (which is a simple copy & paste), frequently due to millions of bloggers, some of whom are immoral. I occasionally find a heavily-cited article in blogs and it is ranked higher than its origin, which stems in mainstream media. Needless to say, such articles are copied verbatim, in full, and neglect to link to the source. No wonder the media is afraid of blogs.

All in all, newspaper head towards targetted content and they attain to get full information about their readers. This way, content (e.g. articles), as well as commercials, can be tailored to individuals. By localising items and customising them to a person’s taste, the relevance and thus value rises. This all comes at the expense of the individual’s privacy, of course. It all depends on the ability to make assumptions and generalisations in the process of ‘profiling’ an individual reader. Since the reader enters personal details at the start, too much is known. The browser cookie sooner or later contains full personal information about the reader, as well as all the article s/he has read. Similar issues and can in fact be ascribed to Google’s cookie.

I thought that the following story would be of interest. A little hack in the new service allowed it to be spammed rather quickly.

A technology glitch temporarily turned Google’s new personal listings service, Google Base, into a vast, virtual red-light district earlier this week.

Some bystanders speculate that Google Base is intended to take the place of eBay and Craigslist (as previously mentioned). I heard another analysis that said Wikipedia is under threat too. The rate of Google’s expansion is by all means phenomenal.

am not entirely sure how long Google Print (renamed Book Search) has actually been up for. I have just carried out a standard Google search and was suddenly advised to use Google Print to search among books. This was apparently an arbitrary promotion of their new shiny service.

Below are my first impressions and impulsive observations (primarily complaints):

• The top inch of two of each page in each book initially gets displayed as a scan (-)
• The search pages incorporate the option to purchase the book (+)
• Users are encouraged to open an account with Google Print. I am not too fond of this. Registration opens the door to dependencies, much like the signup with Google Sitemaps, which is a pre-requisite to taking advantage of Google Analytics (-)
• The interface is light-weight, clean and navigation is intuitive (+)

All in all, Google Print does not appear as bad as I anticipated. I said a few things against it and a few things in favour. Nonetheless, having so many books scanned and available for viewing per subscription raises a brow or two. It somehow gives Google ownership over the books and will discourage crowds from going to the public libraries. On-line music sales had similar impact on record stores.

POV-Ray – The Kitchen by Jaime Vives Piqueres

recently wrote about Microsoft’s attempt to gently push away any technology that is not theirs. Among my list laid OpenGL and DirectX, which is a Microsoft ‘tool’ for putting an end to interoperable 3-D rendering (frequently gaming) in favour of proprietary. The added value is zilch. It is merely required to re-inforce the shackles of a monopoly.

I kindly advise that you sign the petition to stop this from happening. At present, OpenGL support is discouraged in Windows Vista, which looks grim for a world where interoperability prevails.

In the current implementation (as of 2005-09-22) of the OpenGL graphics library in Windows Vista – a soon to be released new version of the Microsoft Windows operating system, OpenGL is not a stand alone library. Instead it functions as a wrapper around DirectX, and is frozen to the vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4.

This means that OpenGL applications in Windows Vista will, most likely, suffer from severe performance loss, that, when an OpenGL driver is loaded, the Windows operating system will have odd behaviours and that future versions of OpenGL will not affect the Windows Vista platform. This would result in less developers actively supporting OpenGL, and as a result, less applications written which are easy to port to another platform or easy to maintain.

Windows 98 screenshot from the 6-year-old Compaq Presario (click to enlarge)

HIS blog post is not concerned with giving away a laptop, but rather about my recent decision to give up laptops altogether. In this item I have collected some notes on my reasons for neglecting the world of mobile computers that are simply over-sized and are thus not contributory quite so often.

For increased productivity (e.g. dual-head, fast Ethernet), I find desktop machines to be an absolute necessity. I have learned this over time and I recently gave up the laptop which I had lugged for 6 years. It used to serve me fairly well while travelling, yet travel is the exception, which does correspond with daily requirements.

There are endless issues with laptops: hardware upgrades, components that become difficult to replace or even find (e.g. built-in speakers). These are just a few among the more prominent factors. One cannot ignore inflexibility with regards to hardware probing and peculiar vendor-specific drivers. I am not necessarily referring to Linux to Windows (or vice versa) migrations, but also to ‘intra-O/S’ migrations where drivers may be missing and so-called QuickRestore CD’s (factory defaults) can never resolve recurring incompatibilities.

I ultimately decided to stick to a PDA, preferably with folding keyboard. Along with desktop wordstation/s it works flawlessly unless one travels all the time. I have become accustomed to this over time. Synchronisation of memos with the desktop gives me the convenience I have probably sought all along.

A week back I became familiar with the World Community Grid. Described in their own words,

World Community Grid’s mission is to create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.

Our work has developed the technical infrastructure that serves as the grid’s foundation for scientific research. Our success depends upon individuals collectively contributing their unused computer time to change the world for the better.

I am hoping for my medical imaging research to become part of a localised research grid. Fortunately, this may actually happen sooner than I had anticipated. Yesterday I handed over C/C++ code to become a Web service.

I also have particular intersting in the way grid computing can assist the Web. My recent initiative called Iuron, once resumed, might rely on available, idle computer resources.

VER wondered how quickly and trivially you could produce plain-text banners for a given word, name, or slogan? Using fixed-sized characters and common cross-platform fontsets, you can use an on-line tool to produce banners of choice. This obviates the need for manual and laborious composition or ‘off-the-shelf’ ASCII graphics (my long-standing favourite source). Below is some example output from the tool:

The real issue is trying to fit the characters properly given fonts that are not the same as specified in the original site. This tool might be valuable, on occasions at least, for E-mail that is plain-text or even for UseNet/newsgroups.

Other Internet-based tools:

• Cyborg Name Generator
• Polaroid Images
• Name Popularity