Daily Archives: December 15, 2006

Blogging ‘set to peak next year’

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From BBC NEWS

The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.

The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.

Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.

Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.

He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on…

The ‘Rule of Law’: Attorney-General’s statement translated

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The Attorney-General’s Statement reads:

“It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.”

TRANSLATION: The rule of law is of course very important, except when it’s inconvenient for the government. In the past few years we have found it increasingly inconvenient btw.

“No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.”

TRANSLATION: All those reports about Labour MPs being up in arms because of threatened job-losses in their constituencies if the arms deal with Saudi Arabia doesn’t go through are just media speculation. And even if they are true we paid absolutely no attention to them. What do you think we are — politicians???

“The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.”

TRANSLATION: The Saud regime may be the most despotic, corrupt, tyrannical and bigoted in the Middle East (now that the Taliban have been temporarily deposed), but we need to have those bastards inside our tent because they loathe and fear Al-Qaeda even more than we do. Also we need to keep them on-side as we try to slither out of Iraq.

Sometimes, one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. Yesterday, a Labour Prime Minister was interviewed by detectives investigating a corruption scandal engulfing his administration — and it was judged a triumph by his staff that he wasn’t cautioned. This meant he was ‘just’ a witness, and not a suspect in the inquiry. And at the same time, his government’s chief law officer halts an inquiry that was on the brink of revealing illegal payments of perhaps £1 billion to a posse of Saudi princelings and their hangers-on because they were (as the BBC’s Security correspondent intimated this morning) livid at the prospect of having their ‘privacy’ invaded.

Combatting reputation-faking on eBay

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Interesting article on Technology Review

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Carnegie Mellon University researchers are relying on an old adage to develop anti-fraud software for Internet auction sites: It is not what you know, it is who you know.

At sites like eBay, users warn each other if they have a bad experience with a seller by rating their transactions. But the CMU researchers said savvy fraudsters get around that by conducting transactions with friends or even themselves, using alternate user names to give themselves high satisfaction ratings — so unsuspecting customers will still try to buy from them.

The CMU software looks for patterns of users who have repeated dealings with one another, and alerts other users that there is a higher probability of having a fraudulent transaction with them.”

There’s a lot of commonsense solutions out there, like being more careful about how you screen the sellers,” said Duen Horng ”Polo” Chau, the research associate who developed the software with computer science professor Christos Faloutsos and two other students. ”But because I’m an engineering student, I wanted to come up with a systematic approach” to identify those likely to commit fraud.

The researchers analyzed about 1 million transactions involving 66,000 eBay users to develop graphs — known in statistical circles as bipartite cores — that identify users interacting with unusual frequency. They plan to publish a paper on their findings early next year and, perhaps, market their software to eBay or otherwise make it available to people who shop online.Catherine England, an eBay spokeswoman, said the company was not aware of the research and would not comment on it. But England said protecting the company’s more than 200 million users from fraud was a top priority.

More detail here. Christos Faloutsos’s web site is here.

Sonsini — latest

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Well, well… The NYT reports today that…

Hewlett-Packard’s board has ended a crucial advisory relationship with Larry W. Sonsini, the powerful Silicon Valley lawyer, according to a person with close connections to the board.

The move is the latest repercussion from the company’s spying on directors and journalists, which has led to the criminal prosecution of its former chairwoman and a senior company lawyer by California authorities, several federal investigations, $14.5 million in civil fines as well as considerable embarrassment for a company that prided itself on ethical behavior.

After the year’s end, Mr. Sonsini and the firm he helped build, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, will no longer serve as outside counsel to the board. The law firm will still do legal work for Hewlett-Packard. A company spokesman said yesterday that “Wilson Sonsini will continue to have a relationship with H. P.”

Mr. Sonsini and his firm were not involved in the spying, which began after Patricia C. Dunn, the H. P. chairwoman, directed company lawyers and investigators to find the source of board leaks. But he was caught up in the events, and was criticized for failing to prevent the incident from damaging the H.P.

H.P.’s search for another lawyer to serve as outside counsel is expected to set off a scramble among Silicon Valley firms. “It’s not a big revenue item for a law firm, but being able to say to other clients that ‘I give advice to H.P.,’ is a prestige thing,” said a lawyer who did not want to be identified because he has done work for the company.

A spokeswoman for the Sonsini firm, Courtney Dorman, said, “There is a lot of ongoing work with H. P.” The firm handled the transactional work for H. P.’s recent $4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury Interactive, a business software company.

Mr. Sonsini, who serves as chairman of the firm he joined in 1966, had no comment. Ms. Dorman also said that the firm’s chief executive, John V. Roos, had no comment.