Eclectic Views

    
The relevant beanz are as followz:

"New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age" by Matt Richtel
in yesterday's NY Times:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/technology/12social.html
  

    
Thanks!
  

    
>social networking sites like Boomertown, Boomj, Eons, Multiply,
Rezoom, 

Do any of these stand out as far as numbers of subscribers?
  

    
I haven't seen any figures on subscribers like those for MySpace and
Facebook. The companies may not want to publish them if they're not
impressive.
  

    

   Boo Hoo

"SCO files for Chapter 11"
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070914-sco-files-for-chapter-11.html
  

    

They bet the store and lost it. I'm also crying crocodile tears.
  

    

   Watch Your Mouth

Today's paper describes a San Jose startup founded by two brothers who
"spent several years doing intelligence work for the Israeli military",
Ariel and Ruben Maislos. Their company, Pudding Media, aims to be a sort of
cross between Skype and Google; it's "an Internet phone service ...
supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their
calls." In lieu of toll charges you let these guys listen to what you're
saying, and their voice-recognition software delivers related display ads to
your computer screen. To subscribe you must give them data on your "sex, age
range, native language and ZIP code". The company hopes soon to "e-mail the
ads" to the party at the other end of the call (where they will get the
address is unclear) or show the ads on their cell phone. CEO Ariel Maislos
observes "we saw that when people are speaking on the phone, typically they
were doing something else." Like driving, which doesn't require any
attention. He said scanning the spoken word "was not substantially different
from what Google does with e-mail." Also that "young people... are less
concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are." (And who wants to
protect young people anyway?)

So if you find your screen cluttered with ads for condoms and escort
services, you might want to moderate your speech. Unless of course that's
what you're interested in. My idea is to get a bunch of Navajos who say
they're speaking Basque and see what happens.

Most interesting to me (and a little chilling) was the result of tests where
they found the advertising or other introduced "content had a tendency to
determine conversations". Per the CEO, "The conversation was actually
changing based on what was on the screen. Our ability to influence the
conversation was remarkable." If George Orwell had only known about this.
  

    

   Watch Your Hands, Too

Close on the heels of the company that listens to your phone calls for what
you're talking about comes a new initiative from Microsoft, who "is taking
solid aim at a business that is arguably outside its core competence:
advertising. And it is deliberately facing off against a specialist,
Google." MS bought an advertising firm named aQuantive last month for $6
billion. aQuantive owns the successor agency to the much-beloved (not)
Avenue A and Razorfish firms, and its head is now working with the Giant of
Redmond to cut off Google's air supply. How? With "conversion attribution".
This concept means to replace the old model of click-through, where if you
go to Wally's World Wide Widgets via a link from Google, Google gets all the
credit. Microsoft means to "track all of the online places where consumers
see ads"; more fully, "Microsoft will be able to provide advertisers with a
log of all the places on the Internet where people see ads before going to
the advertisers' Web sites, ... based on individual computers' electronic
signatures." This appears to say that Microsoft will have the potential to
record all the sites an individual's computer has visited on the Web. Wow.


   The Supremes Take A Patent Case

The US Supreme Court has lately become more active in the area of patent
law, a field they used to shun, overturning rulings by the appeals court and
limiting the extent of patent protection where they felt it had become
excessive. They may be about to do so again. LG Electronics sued Quanta
Computer for incorporating Intel chips in its PCs (hardly a new practice).
Intel has a license to incorporate patented LG technology in its chips, but
LG says Quanta needs a license to use those chips in its computers. The
article is very brief, but it says the implications of the case "could have
far-reaching ramifications". Or perhaps not. Chances are the court will
reverse the Federal Circuit which held for LG, and everybody can exhale; but
if they don't, after about three minutes every IP contract negotiator on the
planet will add a clause which grants the right-to-use to all downstream
purchasers, effectively overriding the default rule. Of course there will be
cases filed up to the statute of limitations for existing licenses, but that
seems like a one-time thing.
  

    
An interesting use of public/private encryption keys to authenticate e-mail:

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/7027451.stm
  

    
   Quote Of The Day

"We are running 79 countries from Istanbul"

 - Jean-Philippe Courtois, President of Microsoft International

Quoted by invest.gov.tr
  

    
Obviously a reference to their operations in those countries.  The more
sinister interpretation would be scary, if it weren't so laughable.
  

    

   Cloud College

A meeting last December between CEOs Eric Schmidt of Google and Samuel
Palmisano of IBM has led to a $30 million (over two years) joint venture
research initiative. Both companies are creating data centers with about
1600 processors running "an open-source version of Google's data center
software" for use by (initially) students from six universities: Carnegie
Mellon, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, the U of Maryland, and the U of
Washington. Both companies are said to be motivated by concern that "most of
the innovation in cloud computing has been led by corporations, but ... a
shortage of skills and talent [among students] could limit future growth".
Cloud computing in this article refers to the use of remote processing
facilities linked to the user over the Internet.
  

    
There's an interesting paragraph in a news article on the winners of the
Nobel Prize in economics:

"One recent subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on
the value of software patents. He determined that software was a market
where innovations tended to be sequential, in that they were built closely
on the work of predecessors, and innovators could take many different paths
to the same goal. In such markets, he said, patents might serve as a wall
that inhibited innovation rather than stimulating progress."
  

    
   IPv4 Reaching End Of Line, Says Vint Cerf

From  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/7068140.stm

The ~4 billion addresses provided by version 4 of the IP numbering scheme
may be effectively exhausted within the next 3 or 4 years, according to
Vinton Cerf. Version 6, which provides rather more ("340 trillion trillion
trillion separate addresses"), is described as standardized ten years ago
but not implemented by ISPs. The two versions are said to be incompatible,
so ISPs would need to offer both until v4 fades away; presently China,
Japan, Korea, and the EU have taken the lead in rolling out v6.
  

    
I guess soon the U.S. will be alone in the world using IPv4.
Along with feet, pounds, gallons, and two kinds of tons.
  

    

   Microsoft Judicial Oversight Extended

Federal judge Susan Kollar-Kotelly approved a motion by plaintiffs to
continue the court's oversight of antitrust defendant Microsoft through the
end of January, pending another motion to extend it until 2012. It had been
set to expire next month, five years from its start in 2002. States argued
that without continued supervision, "competition in the personal computer
marketplace would be harmed".


   Hold The Cookies

In advance of a two-day FTC symposium on privacy (quel coincidence),
Internet marketers are proposing their own do-not-track lists similar to
telephone do-not-call lists. AOL is expected to announce its own, to be
operational by the end of the year, though part of the signup process will
include letting them try to talk you out of it, so you can receive ads
targeted to your interests such as Netflix movies and Amazon products based
on your past purchases and searches. The article notes that Internet ad
spending has doubled since 2004 and is expected to reach $20 billion this
year.
  

    
This just caught my eye, from BBC News:

"An internet social networking site, in the style of Facebook and MySpace,
has been launched aimed at people over 50."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/uk_news/england/kent/7070667.stm

I wonder if there is anything comparable in the US.
  

    
Facebook is growing hugely in that demographic.  Also, the existing 
services that target over-50 folks, from seniornet to aarp's site, are 
all at least thinking/talking about adding some social networking 
functionality to their sites.
  

    

   Social Standards

An article today at  www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/technology/02google.html
describes an initiative to promote "a common set of standards for software
developers to write programs for social networks". Called "OpenSocial", it
is said to be a competitor to FaceBook's standards and includes Google,
MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, and other sites among its supporters.
Opinion seems to vary on whether FaceBook has been asked to join, depending
on who you ask.


   Opting Out Of Web Bugs

Now apparently called by the more flattering term of "web beacons",
SourceForge defines them as "a string of code that provides a method for
delivering a graphic image [including a 'single pixel graphic image'] on a
web page or in an email message for the purpose of transferring data, or
determining how many times a specific web page has been viewed". Anyway, if
you find a single pixel hard to see or otherwise harbor some animosity
toward the concept of being spied on, you might want to visit
  http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
<70> was TOO inarticulate.  Its point was that so many influencial 
social networking sites working toward a programming standard is a 
huge development, HUGE!
  

    

   Open Source Comes To Cellphones (Maybe Someday)

 "Cellphone Straitjacket Is Inspiring a Rebellion"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12cell.html?ref=business

"At the heart of the tension between the different camps is whether the
wireless network should be open, much like the Internet is today, or remain
under the watchful control of companies like AT&T and Verizon Wireless, a
joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone. Carriers, who paid
billions of dollars to build their networks, are unwilling to open them."
  

    

   So Much For Secrets

Adi Shamir, the "S" in RSA public-key cryptography, has published an
interesting research note (on a subject which others have also explored). It
suggests that even a minor flaw in a processor chip, such as the Pentium
floating-point bug, could defeat encryption in all machines with that model
of chip. To oversimplify, public-key cryptography relies on a pair of linked
encryption keys, one of which is published and the other kept secret; so I
can for example send you a message encrypted with your public key which can
only be decoded by you with your private key. *But* if your computer has a
known processor flaw, I can send a "poisoned" message that enables me to
determine your private key, or as Mr. Shamir puts it, security could be
"trivially broken with a single chosen message". Since the designs of
microprocessors are closely guarded trade secrets, there is no way of
knowing if these flaws exist, but he observes that "the increasing
complexity of modern microprocessor chips is almost certain to lead to
undetected errors".

  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/technology/17code.html
  

    

   Peace In Our Time

Well no; but maybe the potential for an armistice in the digital rights
management war, in the news today from France. ISPs, movie and music
copyright holders, and the government there have drafted a three-way
agreement on handling illegal downloads of copyrighted material. "An
independent authority supervised by a judge will be set up and put in charge
of deciding when to issue electronic warning messages to Internet users"
found to be executing unlawful downloads; "if users ignore those messages,
their [ISP] accounts could be suspended." But in return, the proposal
"creates obligations for film and music companies to make their works
available online more quickly, and to remove barriers like those that make
music tracks unreadable on certain platforms [are you listening, Mr. Jobs?]"
Not everyone in France likes the deal; the consumer group UFC Que Choisir
called it "very tough, potentially destructive of freedom, antieconomic, and
against digital history." Whatever that means.
  

    

   Energy From The Googleplex

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/technology/28google.html

Google says it plans to develop inexpensive (cheaper than coal-based)
renewable energy sources, and not just for use in its server farms; they
want to churn out a gigawatt, "enough to power the city of San Francisco -
more cheaply than coal-generated electricity...[within] years, not decades."

Some investors wonder if the company is straying from its area of expertise:
one analyst observes, "I've written off Google's competition as a threat to
Google's long-term market share gains. But I haven't written off Google's
own ability to stretch too far and try to do too much. Ultimately, that is
the biggest risk in the Google story."