Posts filed under 'Internet'
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September 8th, 2008, 10:58am
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Wired’s Threat Level has a story up about how researchers have created a facebook application that’s capable of delivering Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using nothing more than a facebook application and its users. The application, Photo of the Day, is installed by users who want a daily photograph. When users load up the page/photo of the day, the application sends a server to a third-party server (the one being attacked) and requests a large file from it, usually a high resolution image. This high resolution image is silently downloaded to the user’s computer, and not displayed. The effect of this is that by simply using the application, users are draining bandwidth from some targetted server. If enough users are using the application in this way, the server could get overloaded with requests, and rendered inaccessible to the people who are actually trying to visit it. Read More »
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August 15th, 2008, 10:14am
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Rasmussen Reports just released some interesting results from a recent telephone survey in the United States. Nearly half of Americans “believe the government should require all radio and television stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary, but they draw the line at imposing that same requirement on the Internet.” By “drawing the line”, they mean that 57% do not believe the government should force balance of commentary on individual Internet sites - but 31% still do. That’s still uncomfortably high for me.
You need to be a premium member to get access to the demographic cross-tabs, but I would assume that age is the primary dividing line here: I can’t imagine too many Net Geners who grew up “bathed in bits” would support the balance initiative, but I could just as easily understand how people who don’t use the Internet (or don’t use it too often), which is a much older demographic, could be drawn into supporting it.
Such people would come from a broadcast media mindset, where certain individuals could consolidate control of dominant media assets, and thus control the political messaging that the vast majority of people are exposed to (think: the one newspaper town). Read More »
July 31st, 2008, 06:04pm
After reading Ian’s post last week about how in the new age of connectivity the lines between what is work related and what is personal are not only blurred, I was reminded of an article along the same subject line. The article discusses several court cases in the US involving young people charged with driving while under the influence of alcohol. In these cases, prosecutors have accessed the defendants’ Facebook and Myspace pages and made sentencing agreements and recommendations based on the perceived behavior of the defendants in the photos posted on the sites.
In one case, a defendant was sentenced to two years in prison rather than probation because between her DUI arrest and conviction, pictures were posted to her Myspace page showing her to be holding a glass of wine and joking about drinking. Distasteful, but not illegal. According to the prosecutor this photo evidence showed a sufficient lack of remorse on the part of the defendant and therefore warranted a harsher sentence. Read More »
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July 28th, 2008, 11:36pm
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If you’ve been able to get through the high traffic loads on cuil.com (pronounced “cool”, meaning “knowledge” in Gaelic) today, you’ve been one of the first to use the world’s newest search engine that is (in its own words) poised to dethrone the undisputed king of search.
Self-proclaimed to have indexed three times more pages than Google and 10 times more pages than Microsoft, Cuil is the brainchild of Tom Costello, Anna Patterson and Russell Power, formerly of IBM and Google. With some pretty direct attacks on other unnamed search engines that “rely on superficial popularity metrics,” Cuil’s philosophy is “to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.”
While I was unable to complete many searches effectively today due to overwhelming traffic to the site, Cuil appears to have great potential and I am intrigued by the service’s promise to “guide [me] towards answers to the questions [I'm] not even sure how to ask.”
Another advertised feature that is sure to attract attention is cuil’s privacy policy that can be summed up in short by their tagline “your search history is your business, not ours.” (It should be interesting to see how long this lasts.) Read More »
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July 28th, 2008, 09:50am
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There is a great debate raging all over the blogosphere, and more traditional media for that matter, in regards to the effect the Internet is having on the “wiring” of our brains, and more specifically our collective reading skills. We’ve recently written about it here, here, here, and here, Nicholas Carr had a great piece published in the Atlantic Monthly called “Is Google Making us Stupid“, Clay Shirky has an excellent response on the Britannica Blog entitled “Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr“, and a variety of other well thought out replies to Carr’s article can be found here.
Personally, I find that the quality of the debate itself runs somewhat counter to the thesis that Google, Digg, blogs, and other social media tools are making us stupider (or stoopider, if you prefer) - it’s pretty hard to read everything that I’ve linked to above and not come out feeling a little smarter for the time invested. However, such articles are by no means representative of what most people typically spend time reading online, so I certainly see value in the debate continuing to evolve - which is where this recent NY TImes piece comes in.
Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes (and I really like the first couple as thought starters in terms of how brains are being wired differently, in a way that could be construed as both good and bad): Read More »
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July 26th, 2008, 03:38pm
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Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj just shared this discovery over at the Google Blog. The numbers are staggering: in ‘96, the Internet contained ~26 million pages, then the count hit a billion in the year 2000. Just eight years later, that number has balooned to 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs. This number leaves out pages that are automatically generated, or are very similar to other pages — if these results were left in, the total count could effectively be undefined. All of this information is continuously indexed:
Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.
I’m starting to think that this internets thing just might catch on.
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June 20th, 2008, 03:43pm
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How Does America’s PASTime Fare in the World of Wikinomics?
Hello Wikinomics blog readers! I’m a new summer student with the Wikinomics team. I have decided to do things a little differently and profile a different business each week and grade them through the Wikinomics Report Card™. I will try to focus mainly on older businesses and organizations and analyze how they are utilizing the wikinomics principles such as being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
Background: Major League Baseball (MLB) was originally founded in 1876 and the current structure of the American League and National League has existed since 1903. Baseball is a game ingrained in American culture, and is frequently referred to as America’s pastime. Although attendance has grown steadily since the league’s inception (ignoring strikes and lockouts), the game is slowly fading away from the public consciousness.
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June 20th, 2008, 11:14am
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As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.Dilbert.com. The site is having a couple of issues right now, but the new tool that enables group mash ups is particularly interesting as you get to fill out all three boxes… anyone care to join me?
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June 17th, 2008, 05:31am
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Here’s an interesting little story from TorrentFreak - when Mr. Suitcase published an album last year, he started receiving payments from Stim (the Swedish Performing Rights Society), which is funded via a tax on all recordable media in Sweden. This is often referred to as the “Pirate Tax”, as it is designed to compensate artists for having their creative output “stolen” in various ways. To quote Mr. Suitcase on how he responded:
“First, I got a bit put off by receiving the money because to me, that kind of arbitrary hand-out of alms is a ridiculous system. Then I thought, why not see it as an opportunity and earmark the money for something creative. And since the money came from piracy, I had to use it for more piracy, right?”
So he created a new album, fully funded by the tax, by using other people’s music and putting it through some old effects boxes he acquired. In turn, the end result is what some might call a pirated mash-up album, fully funded by an anti piracy tax. I’m sure not everyone would agree with his approach, but one (or at least I) have to love the mindset he took to get there:
“To me, ‘Frauds’ is a statement. There’s so much negativity in the debate. ‘File sharing means artists can’t…’, ‘File sharing means nobody will ever…’ I think it’s the opposite, I think the beautiful aspect of the digital era is that anything recorded can be remixed, tweaked and modified.”
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June 12th, 2008, 05:00pm
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There seems to be a growing popular perception that the Internet is ruining our attention spans. I disagree.
Have you ever found yourself on a plane with nothing to read but some horrible in-flight magazine? Do you actually finish the articles, or are you a skimmer? I’m a skimmer, but I don’t think that’s because I have a poor attention span.
Choosing not to finish reading something you have no interest in isn’t a sign of an attention deficit, it’s a sign of good time management.
In his article, “Is Google making us stupid?”, Nick Carr discusses a study of Internet research sites: “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.” From the study itself: “users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts.”
Hmm… So it’s a problem that researchers, who are searching through massive databases to find articles on a specific subject, are choosing to rule-out the relevance of certain articles based merely on their abstract? What are the abstracts for again? Oh, right!
Steven Johnson makes a convincing argument in his book, Everything Bad is Good for You, that our attention spans are increasing. As I pointed out in my post yesterday, YouTube videos from US presidential candidates tend to be more popular if they are longer.
The Internet has a lot of amazing content. But unfortunately, it has even more that wouldn’t make it into that in-flight magazine. It is part of human nature to skim and discard multiple pieces of content until we find something worth focusing our attention on. Today’s technology just allows us to do this on a much wider scale.
That’s a good thing.
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June 12th, 2008, 01:48pm
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Those of us who make predictions about the future can often run into a particularly frustrating problem – being right, but being right too early. This is something I’ve been through a few times, particularly with the Naked Corporation – I thought, and continue to think, that it’s a great book about the future of the enterprise and transparency, but when it was published in 2003 it never really gained the traction I hoped for. Fast forward to 2007 – while I was particularly happy about how well Wikinomics was (and continues to be) received, when I saw this cover of Wired Magazine that came out around the same time… let’s just say I couldn’t help but wonder how the Naked Corporation would have fared if the timing worked out better.
Such issues of timing and prediction underlie Paul Krugman’s excellent Op-Ed piece in the NY Times called “Bits, Bands, and Books”. He opens by quickly recapping the technology bubble of the late 1990s, the inevitable collapse, and then jumps to the recent oil and food shocks that have reminded us we still live in a “material world.” But it’s what he says next that is most important:
So much, then, for the digital revolution? Not so fast. The predictions of ’90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected — but the future they envisioned is still on the march.
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June 11th, 2008, 05:55pm
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It is no secret that Obama has blown his opponents out of the water on YouTube.
- Seven of the videos on Obama’s official YouTube page have drawn more than a million views, with his speech on race pushing the 5 million mark. Not one Clinton video has made it to a million, and McCain’s most viewed clip has drawn less than half that.
- The cumulative viewership of all the YouTube videos Obama has posted in the last three weeks is almost 2 million, while neither Clinton nor McCain has broken 400 thousand.
Is this because Obama just coincidentally happens to appeal to those young and wired voters who use a lot of YouTube? Partially, no doubt.But Obama is also using YouTube more effectively. Specifically, he is posting longer and more insightful videos.
Consider, for YouTube videos posted by the candidates over the last three weeks:
- The average length was 7 minutes.
- Three of the four most-viewed Obama videos are over 20 minutes, and the fourth is 13 minutes long.
- The only two Clinton videos that were longer than 20 minutes (all the others were less than four minutes) were in her top-three most viewed.
- For all three candidates, on average, longer videos get more views:
Read More »
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June 11th, 2008, 02:01pm
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Nicholas Carr has written an unreadably long article (just kidding, it’s worth the read) about the effect that the Internet is having on our ability to concentrate. His argument is that for the Internet to be useful, it needs to appropriate new content, and integrate this content its existing body of knowledge. This newly assimilated content is then changed by the Internet to be displayed as all media online is displayed: surrounded by ads, on top of layers of other content, and endlessly interlinked with other content. The process of gathering and processing information has become an exercise in distraction.
Read More »
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April 8th, 2008, 12:10am
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In the 24/7 world of the blogosphere, where the action never stops and the best scoop could be just around the next virtual corner, the life of a top blogger can be one full of Google, Technorati and endless caffeinated beverages with sleep and sometimes even food coming as a distant afterthought. With 112 million active blogs being tracked by blog search engine Technorati, the blogosphere has become an extremely important part of the web 2.0 world and the allure of becoming an elite blogger has attracted tens of thousands of full time bloggers worldwide.
Many bloggers are paid by the post (and the number of hits their post gets), leading to what some critics label the new virtual sweatshop. While the life of a blogger can often feature the ultimate in flexibility - where working from home and “on your own schedule” is the norm, it can be precisely this flexibility that can lead to unhealthy work practices and overburdening stress for those unable to maintain a healthy median between work and play. Read More »
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April 3rd, 2008, 12:26am
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It was looking like a good week for wikinomics in terms of digital content - EMI headhunted Douglas Merrill, the CIO of Google, which a few years ago would have seemed as likely as Exxon headhunting David Suzuki. When the hiring was announced Douglas Merrill said “I have two passions. One is creating platforms and tools that make it easier for consumers to achieve their goals. The other is music.” If you mash up a decent platform with music… well let’s just say I like where this is going. Maybe, just maybe the music industry is really, finally heading in the right direction - and just in time, because if this article (Internet Piracy will drive authors to stop writing) is any indication some people in the book publishing industry are getting set to take their place.
Now the very notion that Internet book piracy will drive authors to stop writing seems patendly absurd. Read More »
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March 26th, 2008, 03:38pm
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The iPhone, Xbox, BlackBerries, and other proprietary, closed Internet-enabled devices are dooming the PC and taking the Internet with it; or so says Jonathan Zittrain. I’m currently reading an advance copy of Zittrain’s new book, “The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It,” in which he discusses the trend away from the generative PC to “sterile appliances tethered to a network of control.”
The battle for the democratization of the internet – net neutrality – is fairly loud (although not nearly loud enough if you think about what is at stake). Similarly, there’s a lot of talk about open APIs and open platforms for customizable applications. However, the discussion around the transformation of the PC itself from an open platform to locked-down appliance is much more subdued. But, as Zittrain notes, “the endpoint matters.” Read More »
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March 14th, 2008, 03:32pm
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There are a lot of things I love about the internet. I love the way I can find information on anything that pops in to my head at any second of any day. I love the way the internet makes fascinating products from strange fellows. Most of all, I love the way the internet gives voice to anyone. All that aside, I’m having a hard time seeing the internet in a rosy light this week. It seems like everywhere I look this week, someone is attempting to limit privacy or curtail freedom of speech online.
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February 29th, 2008, 04:23pm
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Breaking news from the Digital Music Forum East 2008 Conference. In Ars Technica’s coverage of the conference, they posted the highlights of Ted Cohen’s opening speech which contained the groundbreaking news: Music 1.0 is dead. To be fair, the former Senior Vice President of Digital Development and Distribution for EMI seems to have a pretty good idea about what’s going on.
What surprises me, is that it needs to be said at all. Is there anyone anywhere who doesn’t understand what kind of trouble the old music industry model is experiencing. There’s more print and and bandwith devoted to the topic of its slow death every day than Gutenberg could have imagined in his wildest dreams and yes, I can see the irony in writing that in a piece on the same topic.
Here’s just one example of the what I’m getting at. Last year 48% of U.S. teenagers did not buy a single cd - a ten per cent increase over 2006. One estimate puts the ratio of illegal to legal downloading at 20 to 1. Clearly, it’s time to re-think things.
Cohen suggests a solution. He says that instead of wallowing in their desperation, the industry needs to be to be “wildly creative” and look a new models of doing business. I have a wildly creative suggestion. Instead of trying to swim up stream, all the time, the music industry could try getting with the program. Do I have a concrete solution? No. But there are success stories that the industry can look to for starters.
The success of Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want album is just one example of the music industry trying to drag itself into the 21st century. The digital market is only going to grow as legal downloads occupy an increasingly important and sizable component of revenue. It’s time the music industry took these fringe ideas and ran with them instead of trying to prop up a failing business model.
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February 22nd, 2008, 02:42pm
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In a post by Don earlier this month, he wondered if China would ever bring down its firewall. In the post, he speculates that the coming Olympic Games would only make the crackdown worse. Well it looks like he may have been right and wrong according to this piece in the National Post yesterday.
The article says China will open up very limited parts of the “Great Firewall” in order to give visiting foreigners unrestricted access to the internet for the duration of the games. They’re able to do this because the Chinese Internet censorship system is precise enough that it can filter (or not) searches from specific IP addresses as well parts or all of any webpage - the Chinese are hoping to medal in this discipline in 2008.
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February 15th, 2008, 12:12pm
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While looking for the beta version of Firefox 3, I came upon a post on the Mozilla Labs blog announcing the winners of the the Extend Firefox 2 contest. The contest asked contestants:
“Will you be the brain behind the next great Web innovation? Do you have the drive to take your Firefox Add-on idea to the masses? Are you ready to affect everyday life for millions of people around the world?”
Read More »
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