Google fade out

Posted by bordalix Wed, 23 Nov 2005 14:59:00 GMT

What if Google will do most everything wrong, and is competitors don't? A tale from Jack Shafer (Slater's editor) called The Great Google Wipeout give us an interesting view of what could be a possible future.

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Free culture

Posted by bordalix Wed, 23 Nov 2005 14:59:00 GMT

A very interesting presentation from Lawrence Lessig at OSCON 2002. A true call for arms in the fight against control and copyright, a must read. 32 minutes plus download time (8MB).

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Tuesday in the afternoon

Posted by bordalix Tue, 22 Nov 2005 14:57:00 GMT

Yesterday I spent all night catching up my feeds. Due to personal reasons, I spent the last three days offline, and when I finally get to my bloglines account I had thousands of new posts to read. So I decided to do something about it (besides reading them), clean up my blogroll and add some new feeds I'm interested in. As a result, I have now more 6 blogs to read daily (ouch!).

Another good decision was to delete Google's AdSense from the blog. This blog exists for more then a year now, and I've earned less than 5 USD from it, so, bye bye AdSense. Essentially, I'm giving free publicity to Google, and they don't need it, right?

So, into the juice of those thousands feeds:
  • Talking about Google, if you want to include Google maps on your website, you should take a look at Phoogle, which allows you to do that with 5 (yes, five!) lines of php.

  • If you're a heavy user of Wikipedia, maybe you can find LuMriX useful. It's a Ajax powered Google Suggest look-a-like service for Wikipedia. Can make your Wikipedia searches faster.

  • Microsoft is trying to standardize Office 12 documents, in what they called the Microsoft Open Office XML. It's a good move, but it would be much better if they would follow the Open Document standard. Yes, I'm being naive now...

  • Amazon is preparing to launch two new great services, branded Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade. In the first one, you will be able to buy pages from a book, instead of buying the entire book, which can be useful in some cases (I don't see much utility in this, but maybe someone will). But the second service is a major breakthrough: when you buy a book from Amazon (70% of my books) you will be able to buy a search service for that specific book!! So, it's the best of the two worlds, I can read my book while getting a tan in the beach, and if I want to find something in it really quickly, I have Amazon Upgrade.

  • And the funny link is about the launching of the new iPod Invisa

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Microsoft SSE

Posted by bordalix Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:56:00 GMT

Microsoft announced SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions), which can be seen as a two way item sharing (think bidirectional RSS). The extensions described in the Simple Sharing Extensions enable feed readers and publishers to generate and process incoming item changes in a manner that enables consistency to be achieved. For example, two or more will be able to co-edit a post, which can be a huge revolution in the blogsphere. If you are a technical person, you should take a look at the specification page, after all, Microsoft launched it under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Are the winds of change blowing from Richmond?

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Lists

Posted by bordalix Mon, 21 Nov 2005 14:55:00 GMT

The end of the year is coming, so are lists of anything. In a couple of weeks, TV channels, magazines and newspapers will start to deliver lists of people, inventions, events, etc. So, let me try to do it now, be the first one to annoy you with this:

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The $100 laptop

Posted by bordalix Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:54:00 GMT

Thank you Nicolas and your team for this achievement, the $100 laptop. Watch the video where UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nicholas Negroponte Unveil the $100 Laptop Prototype at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, and some photos on the MIT website.

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Sony DRM breaks copyright?

Posted by bordalix Wed, 16 Nov 2005 14:52:00 GMT

This can be Sony's worst nightmare: first, Sony decided to distribute a rootkit in there music CDs, to be installed in your PC (without your knowledge), in order to hide is DRM software; second, Mark Russinovich discovered the existence of this rootkit, and make it public, which make people start to scream at Sony; third, someone took advantage of the rootkit and wrote a trojan codenamed Stinx-E, able to hide from Windows, so impossible to be detected and cleaned; fourth, Sony decided to provide an uninstaller to allow people to erase the rootkit, but this uninstaller raised new security holes; and finally, it seems Sony used some LGPL code, without delivering the source, so breaking copyright:
It turns out that the rootkit contains pieces of code that are identical to LAME, an open source mp3-encoder, and thereby breach the license.

This software is licensed under the so called Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). According to this license Sony must comply with a couple of demands. Amongst others, they have to indicate in a copyright notice that they make use of the software. The company must also deliver the source code to the open-source libraries or otherwise make these available. And finally, they must deliver or otherwise make available the in between form between source code and executable code, the so called object files, with which others can make comparable software.

Sony complied with non of these demands, but delivered just an executable program. A computer expert, whose name is known by the redaction, discovered that the CD "Get Right With The Man" by "Van Zant" contains strings from the library version.c of Lame. This can be concluded from the string: "http://www.mp3dev.org/", "0.90", "LAME3.95", "3.95", "3.95 ".

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Ridiculous

Posted by bordalix Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:51:00 GMT

So, after all the fuss around this issue, Sony decided to allow people to download an uninstaler for is DRM software. All you have to do is fill a form, download the software and run it. Know that you know that, don't do it. People from Freedom to Tinker found out that if you install Sony uninstaller in your PC, you are opening a huge security hole. Malicious users can execute code in your PC, all you have to do is visit one of there websites. Where (and when) is this going to end?

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Web 2.0 definition

Posted by bordalix Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:50:00 GMT

There are a lot of different definitions for what is Web 2.0. Wikipedia as one, Tim O'Reilly another, and there is even a cumulative definition. Maybe Web 2.0 is about this: peer-to-peer services, where your peers helps you getting what you need, and in return you help your peers by participating. And this can be used for viewing television and videos over the internet, with Tioti (Tape If Of The Internet), for writing and reading stories, with Glypho, or for finding interesting stories with Digg. What I really now is that, like Mark Evans, I'm drowning in Web 2.0 apps.

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Media central

Posted by bordalix Mon, 14 Nov 2005 14:49:00 GMT

Via pfig, Media Central (inspired by Front Row and CenterStage).

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