Author: john

A favorite (favourite?) thing to do

Try this out: start iTunes and go to the music store… scroll to the bottom and select another country. Take a look at the top 10 (or 100) from other lands. For the most part, the songs are popular for a reason.
This truly is globalization in a good way…

…well, there is the whole Apple and record labels thing.

Stand against popups

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17spy.html

People are throwing away their computers, rather than spend the time to disinfect them (a chore I’m all too familiar with). One person remarked that “she no longer clicks on pop-ups.” What?!? I didn’t know that anyone was still clicking on popups!

The time has come for browsers to eliminate the pop up as a browsing option; kill spyware through the technology which enables it. Web applications which rely on this “feature” should all be reprogrammed.

Popups are costing the world too much money and time–we sunk a bunch of cash into the Y2K change, this one should be easy.

“The things you Google for define you”

This CNet article talks about the potential personal tracking ability of Google corporation. An interesting contrast is found when the depth of their info gathering abilities (from e-mail to everything you search) is compared to the public trust in the company. This isn’t the first comparison between Google and Microsoft, but it is perhaps more clearly laid out than most.

There’s something about surfing the net that seems so personal and innocuous that my guess is many do not think twice about the types of searches they do. Google does not (to my knowledge) explicitly state their log-retention policy–meaning that Google (or someone who was able to get their data) might be able to match personal to web data, perhaps with questionable results.

Perhaps this post is just being paranoid, but the article’s point that the public’s trust in Google may possibly be misplace is well taken.

PS: thanks Google for the free e-mail space, blog, picture software, search software, …