Neal Goldman’s Inform Technologies LLC converts news into math as each article is calculated in a multi-dimensional universe of topics to match the relevance to a news reader’s interests. Adding to its unique offering allowing users to dig deeper into stories, the news aggregator now offers audio, video, and RSS.
via FutureFeeder
The internet has played an important role in the life decisions of 60 million Americans, research shows.
Whether it be career advice, helping people through an illness or finding a new house, 45% of Americans turn to the web for help, a survey by US-based Pew Internet think-tank has found.
It set out to find out whether the web and e-mail strengthen social ties.
The answer seems to be yes, especially in times of crisis when people use it to mobilise their social networks.
In the past, it has been suggested that the internet and e-mail could diminish real relationships.
But the report, entitled The Strength of Internet Ties, found that e-mail supplements rather than replaces offline communications.
Microsoft has said it will allow rival software companies access to license parts of the source code for its Windows operating system.
The concession was made in response to a 2004 European Commission anti-trust ruling, which ordered the company to be more open to competitors’ needs.
It came three weeks ahead of the EU’s compliance deadline, which threatened fines of 2m euros (£1.4m; $2.4m) a day.
The commission said it was not sure the offer would help resolve the dispute.
Microsoft’s legal chief, Brad Smith insisted “the source code is the ultimate documentation.
“It should have the answer to any questions that remain.”
But competition commissioner Neelie Kroes disagreed.
“Normally speaking, the source code is not the ultimate documentation of anything,” she said.
”[This is] precisely the reason why programmers are required to provide comprehensive documentation to go along with their source code.”
It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.
In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.
This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.
“The use of the word ‘annoy’ is particularly problematic,” says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “What’s annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else.”
From Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog
Books are being scanned to make them searchable on the Internet. Television broadcasts are being recorded and archived for online posterity. Radio shows, too, are getting their digital conversion—to podcasts.
With a few keystrokes, we’ll soon be able to tap much of the world’s knowledge. And we’ll do it from nearly anywhere—already, newer iPods can carry all your music, digital photos and such TV classics as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” along with more contemporary prime-time fare.
Will all this instantly accessible information make us much smarter, or simply more stressed? When can we break to think, absorb and ponder all this data?
The French Parliament voted last night to allow free sharing of music and movies on the Internet, setting up a conflict with both the French government and with media companies.
If the amendment survives, France would be the first country to legalize so called peer-to-peer downloading, said Jean-Baptiste Soufron, legal counsel to the Association of Audionautes, a French group that defends people accused of improperly sharing music files.
The law would be a blow to media companies that increasingly use the courts worldwide to sue people for downloading or sharing music and movie files. Entertainment companies such as Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc. and News Corp.’s Fox say free downloading of unauthorized copies of TV shows and movies before they are released on DVD will cost them $5 billion in revenue this year.
``The deputies used this vote to show their independence from the government, but they don’t know what they are doing,’’ Nicolas Seydoux, chief executive of French cinema company Gaumont SA, said in an interview on France Inter radio. ``We are not trying to ban anything, just to make sure the work of others isn’t stolen.’’
The government can overturn the amendment, either by re- opening debate or if the Senate votes it down when the bill moves to the upper house. French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres has asked that parliament re-open debate on the amendment today, Agence France Presse reported.
Leading Internet companies are gearing up for a clash with the phone and cable giants early next year as Congress begins to redraft the telecom laws for the broadband era, concerned that the network operators will soon be able to put a chokehold on the Web by blocking consumers from popular sites in favor of their own. Or they could degrade delivery of Web pages whose providers don’t pay extra.
That could result in an Internet of haves, who can afford to pay the network operators more to ensure smooth service, and have-nots.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin announced today that Google is the first private-sector company to contribute to the Library’s initiative to develop a plan to begin building a World Digital Library (WDL) for use by other libraries around the globe. The effort would be supported by funds from nonexclusive, public and private partnerships, of which Google is the first.
The concept for the WDL came from a speech that Billington delivered to the newly established U.S. National Commission for UNESCO on June 6, 2005, at Georgetown University. The full text is available at www.loc.gov/about/welcome/speeches.
In his speech, Billington proposed that public research institutions and libraries work with private funders to begin digitizing significant primary materials of different cultures from institutions across the globe. Billington said that the World Digital Library would bring together online “rare and unique cultural materials held in U.S. and Western repositories with those of other great cultures such as those that lie beyond Europe and involve more than 1 billion people: Chinese East Asia, Indian South Asia and the worlds of Islam stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Asia to Africa.”
Two weeks or so ago I posed a question to the newly minted SKYPE USA GM, Henry Gomez, about the issues of adult content and licensed content going over the Skype pipe when Video was announced.
One of my questions centered around the ability for Skype to be a multicast streaming pipe. Now Gomez, who is very bright, seemed to not see this as an issue that mattered to Skype, but he was just on the job.
Basically when you add in encryption that Skype already has it becomes impossible to know what’s going through the pipe. That means someone in London could in effect Skypecast English Premiere League Football to an ex-pat in the USA. Vice versa someone here in the USA could Skypecast NBA basketball, which has rights deals in other parts of the world, virtually anywhere.
The attacks have been traced to the Chinese province of Guangdong, and the techniques used make it appear unlikely to come from any other source than the military, said Alan Paller, the director of the SANS Institute, an education and research organization focusing on cybersecurity.
“These attacks come from someone with intense discipline. No other organization could do this if they were not a military organization,” Paller said in a conference call to announced a new cybersecurity education program.
In the attacks, Paller said, the perpetrators “were in and out with no keystroke errors and left no fingerprints, and created a backdoor in less than 30 minutes. How can this be done by anyone other than a military organization?”
One of the extraordinary stories of the Internet age is that of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This radical and rapidly growing publication, which includes close to 4 million entries, is now a much-used resource. But it is also controversial: if anyone can edit entries, how do users know if Wikipedia is as accurate as established sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica?
Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems. One article was revealed as falsely suggesting that a former assistant to US Senator Robert Kennedy may have been involved in his assassination. And podcasting pioneer Adam Curry has been accused of editing the entry on podcasting to remove references to competitors’ work. Curry says he merely thought he was making the entry more accurate.
However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.
The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.
In its latest acquisition of a social networking service, internet powerhouse Yahoo on Friday chomped down on del.icio.us, a startup that enables people to more easily compile and share their favorite content on the web.
The Sunnyvale, California-based company didn’t disclose how much it paid for New York-based del.icio.us because the purchase price wasn’t large enough to have a significant impact on its finances.
On Tuesday, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin announced the city’s plan to cover the city with Wi-Fi Internet access within a year. And unlike other citywide wireless networks that have been proposed in cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco, New Orleans plans to operate the network itself.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page have ambitious long-term plans for Google’s expansion into the fields of biology and genetics through the fusion of science, medicine, and technology. Their goal—through Google, its charitable foundation, and an evolving entity called Google.org—is to empower millions of individuals and scientists with information that will lead to healthier and smarter living through the prevention and cure of a wide range of diseases. Some of this work, done in partnership with others, is already under way, making use of Google’s array of small teams of gifted employees and its unwavering emphasis on innovation, unmatched search capacity, and vast computational resources.
“Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world,” Brin says. “We can store an incredible amount of data very cheaply.”
He and Larry want to make it easier for users to find the right information faster, and the company is pouring the bulk of its resources into enhancing the breadth and quality of search. This involves wholly different methods of searching that may eventually make today’s Google seem primitive. As these evolve, the search mechanisms of the future will produce better answers to queries, just as Google is superior to the early search engines that preceded it.
“The ultimate search engine,” says Page, “would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”