Wow! iPod eBooks Creator…
This utility/PHP script loads a large text file and splits it into notes for use on iPod. It is easy to read your book in plain text format on your iPod via Notes functionality. All notes will be automatically linked, so you can move from one to another with absolute ease. It’s as simple as turning pages of the book…
Very nice New Yorker piece by Stacy Schiff about Wikipedia. And an interesting comment on it by David Robinson, who was a guest blogger on Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker.
James Cridland’s in Berlin and has seen the future.
The television has DS:F on it, which until recently has been showing a motor-sport type show, and is now showing what QuizCall would look like if it was also a porn channel. A leggy blonde in yellow hotpants is asking questions to a caller – they could win 200 euros – and has just peeled off her top to display a fearsome set of headlights. She’s now stroking her hotpants suggestively. This is the German equivalent of ITV1, at 10.50pm, folks. This is what might happen at home. Please write to the Daily Mail now…
Big developments at Ndiyo — Hubster – a new Ndiyo model. It’s interesting how useful USB can be.
Well, well. After all that guff about how muslims are more loyal to their religion than to their country, how about this from the Pew Research Center…
Among non-Muslim nations, the United States is the outlier in terms of religious self-identification. The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes poll finds American adults are closely split between those who see themselves as Christians first (42%) and those who see themselves as Americans first (48%); an additional 7% say they see themselves as both equally. By contrast, only a third of German Christians (33%), and fewer than a quarter of British, French and Spanish Christians self-identify primarily with their religion. In this regard, the views of Americans closely parallel those of French Muslims, 46% of whom think of themselves first in terms of their religion rather than their nationality…
Well, not quite — yet. But you can see where they’re headed.
Now you can offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free*, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization’s website, too. It’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain…
Google is making a particular pitch at educational institutions. For example:
Get your campus talking
Sharing information and ideas is vital to learning. So imagine how valuable it would be if your entire campus community shared a set of powerful, easy-to-use and integrated communication and collaboration services. With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free.* You can select any combination of our available services (see below), and customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems — and it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain…
Lovely, thoughtful piece by Andrew Brown on how much we divulge to Google & Co. Best thing written so far IMHO on the AOL search-data release fiasco.
In March this year, a man with a passion for Portuguese football, living in a city in Florida, was drinking heavily because his wife was having an affair. He typed his troubles into the search window of his computer. “My wife doesnt love animore,” he told the machine. He searched for “Stop your divorce” and “I want revenge to my wife” before turning to self-examination with “alchool withdrawl”, “alchool withdrawl sintoms” (at 10 in the morning) and “disfunctional erection”. On April 1 he was looking for a local medium who could “predict my futur”.
But what could a psychic guess about him compared with what the world now knows? This story is one of hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands, revealed this month when AOL published the details of 23m searches made by 650,000 of its customers during a three-month period earlier in the year. The searches were actually carried out by Google – from which AOL buys in its search functions…
From The Register…
Australia’s identity card system was routinely searched for personal reasons by government agency employees, some of whom have been sacked.
Police are now investigating allegations of identity fraud resulting from the security breaches.
There were 790 security breaches at government agency Centrepoint involving 600 staff. Staff were found to have inappropriately accessed databases containing citizens’ information. The databases are part of a massive federal Government smart card project which will link medical, welfare, tax and other personal data on Australia’s 17m citizens.
In total, 19 Centrepoint employees have been sacked and 92 others have resigned. Police are conducting investigations into five employees, they said.
The man charged with protecting citizens’ privacy in relation to the project said that the government must do more to prevent this kind of security breach when so much vital information is gathered in one place.
“The Centrelink revelations are deeply disturbing,” Professor Allan Fels told Australian ABC radio. “I take some comfort from the fact that the government has caught them and punished them, but there is still a huge weight now on the Government to provide full, proper legal and technical protection of privacy with the access card.”
The police have confirmed that investigations are ongoing after five referrals were made to it from Centrepoint. At least one of the cases is believed to involve allegations of the establishment of fake identities to be used to receive payments.
The investigation took two years and involved the use of sophisticated spying equipment. Union officials said staff had repeatedly been warned about the inappropriate accessing of records…
I expect the UK Home Office will issue a statement saying that it couldn’t happen here because it will be in charge of the proposed system. No wonder satirists are having a thin time at the moment. It’s hard to keep up with reality.
Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.
From Good Morning Silicon Valley…
Poor Google — you and I should have such problems. The search sovereign has amassed so much cash that it is in danger of possible reclassification and regulation as an investment firm. In its most recent quarterly financials, Google listed assets totaling $14.4 billion, including $4 billion in cash and $5.8 billion in marketable securities. Under guidelines set by the Investment Company Act of 1940, companies with more than 40 percent of their assets in securities are to be regulated as a mutual fund. Google clearly falls into that category at the moment, so it asked the Securities and Exchange Commission late last month for an exemption. “Google states that it is not in the business of investing, reinvesting, or trading in securities,” the company told the SEC, adding it has no plans to invest “for short-term speculative purposes.” The SEC hasn’t yet responded to the request, but most Wall Street types I spoke with feel approval is likely. “They will probably get the SEC exemption — but if they didn’t, its fascinating to think of what the boys could do with that $10 billion in cash (and securities),” said Barry Ritholtz, chief market strategist for Ritholtz Research. “I strongly doubt we will see a big buyback or a special dividend from them. And there’s only so many jumbo jets anyone really needs. So that makes a major acquisition the next option. Hell, they could buy Tivo, XMSR, half of Amazon.com — and still have a few billion dollars left.”
Hmmm… The Economist has an oddly unsatisfactory article on the dim future of newspapers. “Newspapers”, it concludes, “are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded”. The associated Editorial is more succinct:
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.