… is back online. We took it offline after the old version (running on PostNuke) was hacked by person or persons unknown, and used the downtime to ponder feedback from users and rethink the concept. Our general conclusion is that the big need is for a site that is intelligible to non-technical users, non-doctrinaire and pragmatic. Most people don’t have strong views about computers or software — they just want them to work, be reliable and not cost too much. Some of them now realise that there may be alternatives to Microsoft that might work for them and need to know more. We will do our best to help them understand what’s possible and what might be involved in making the switch. Now all we need is an extra 6 hours in a day…
Monthly Archives: December 2005
The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
The Alexa story
John Battelle, author of an excellent book on search, has a hyperbolic post on his Blog. It begins like this…
Every so often an idea comes along that has the potential to change the game. When it does, you find yourself saying – “Sheesh, of course that was going to happen. Why didn’t I predict it?” Well, I didn’t predict this happening, but here it is, happening anyway.
In short, Alexa, an Amazon-owned search company started by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle (and the spider that fuels the Internet Archive), is going to offer its index up to anyone who wants it. Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index – about 100 terabytes of data. It’s best known for its toolbar-based traffic and site stats, which are much debated and, regardless, much used across the web.
OK, step back, and think about that. Anyone can use Alexa’s index, to build anything. But wait, there’s more. Much more…
It’s all done with web services. And it might indeed be significant because it could enable small but ingenious players to get into the search market.
Why DRM on music CDs always leads to spyware
Ed Felten is my idea of a great academic: he’s both a clever thinker and a brilliant explainer. As an example of what he can do, see this terrific account of how attempts to put DRM on music discs leads inexorably to the mess from which Sony BMG is now trying to extricate itself. Sample:
If the music is encoded on the disc in a format that any software program can read, the only way to stop programs from reading it is to install software on the user’s computer, and to have that software actively interfere with attempts to read the disc, for example by corrupting the data stream coming from the disc. We call this “active protection”.
For example, suppose the user wants to use iTunes to read the disc. But the DRM vendor wants to stop the user from doing this, because iTunes can be used to make copies of the disc. The active protection software will detect this and will interfere to ensure that iTunes gets a garbled copy of the music.
Here’s the key issue: Active protection only works if the DRM software is running on the user’s computer. But the user doesn’t want the software on his computer. The software provides no value to him at all. Its only effects are to stop him from doing things he wants to do (such as listening to the music with iTunes), and to expose him to possible security attacks if the software is buggy.
So if you’re designing a CD DRM system based on active protection, you face two main technical problems:
1. You have to get your software installed, even though the user doesn’t want it.
2. Once your software is installed, you have to keep it from being uninstalled, even though the user wants it gone.
This is just an excerpt. Read the full post for pleasure and enlightenment. Ed’s conclusion is: “Having set off down the road of CD copy protection, the music industry shouldn’t be surprised to have arrived at spyware. Because that’s where the road leads.”
Yes, siree.
Google Ad(non)sense
I’m still trying to reverse engineer the AdSense algorithm. At the moment (23:26, Monday December 12, 2005), all four ads placed by Google on this page are for fire or burglar alarms. Yet nothing even remotely connected to these has appeared on the Blog. Hmmmm… Could it possibly be that when it can’t find any relevent ads, it just, well, picks ones at random? Surely not.
Rat 1, Yale students nil
Lovely New Yorker piece by Louis Menand, reviewing Philip Tetlock’s book on pundits…
Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that, over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rat was told these frequencies. The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students, who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with almost fifty-per-cent error.
Osama: the facts
From The New Yorker…
Assuming that bin Laden is still alive, he is now forty-eight years old. He developed his vision for his global jihad organization, Al Qaeda, over the course of more than three decades, and his formative experiences have included participation in combat during the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the nineteen-eighties; prolonged exile from Saudi Arabia; the survival of at least two assassination attempts; at least four marriages, which produced at least a dozen children; and, lately, the trials of being the world’s most wanted fugitive.
No wonder he looks knackered in those home movies of his. I had always assumed he was about 108. First it was policemen who were younger than me; then it was High Court judges; now it’s the World’s Number One Baddie.
The BBC is going to put its programme catalogue online
Yep. It says so, here.
The e-book phenomenon
The Times asked me to write a piece about the e-book phenomenon, so I did. Sample:
Two factors will limit the size of the e-book market. One is that reading substantial amounts of text on a screen is a masochistic, headache- inducing experience that makes one appreciate the merits of paper: high resolution and low power consumption; great portability and infinite flexibility. And it will still function after you’ve poured a cup of coffee over it.
The other reason e-books won’t become dominant is that they usually embody tiresome “digital rights management” (copy-protection) systems. Publishers love DRM because it gives them control. Consumers hate it because it takes away time-honoured freedoms. If you buy a printed book, for example, you can resell it, lend it to a friend or donate it to the school jumble sale. But the licensing and DRM provisions on many e-books remove these freedoms. The e-book does not “belong” to you: all you have is a licence to use it in ways that have been approved by the publisher…
At the end of the piece I am described as “a commentator on the internet”, which is a bit grand. All references to the Observer have mysteriously disappeared!
SNARFing your email
Er, according to MIT’s Technology Review, Microsoft Research has released a program which prioritises the contents of your inbox depending on how close you are to the sender. The (free) download is called SNARF, for Social Network and Relationship Finder. It runs alongside Microsoft Outlook (2002 and newer versions), poring through e-mail histories and following chains of communications to ferret out the unread messages it deems most important.
SNARF measures a sender’s importance based on two key factors: the number and frequency of messages sent and received. The program then sorts unread e-mails into three fields: messages where the user is listed in the To or CC fields, group e-mails, and all messages received in the last week. SNARF lists messages by senders, rather than subject lines, and puts a user’s most important correspondents on top.
“We’re just counting e-mails,” one member of the development team said. “Some people might call it a brain-dead algorithm, but the messages you send someone is a pretty good proxy for how well you know people,” he says. “It can be very detailed.”