It seems that the top-ranked site on Google if you search for “Jew” is an anti-semitic site. So this is CT doing our googlebombing best to correct this by linking to the Wikipedia entry for “Jew”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew instead. (See “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/04/joogle.html for more details).
From the category archives:
Internet
The WTO has just handed down a “preliminary ruling”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3568281.stm that Internet policy wonks like myself have been waiting for with considerable impatience. Last June, the Caribbean island state of Antigua and Barbuda took a WTO case against the US for restrictions of trade. The issue: various US laws that have been applied to stamp out Internet gambling, with unpleasant consequences for the Antiguan economy. Antigua has just won in this first stage of the process.
“Caoine”:http://caoine.org/mt/archives/2004_03.php#002966 is feeling remarkably generous. She has decided to donate her 2004 Amazon referrals income to a charity, but can’t decide which one. This seems like a good opportunity to ask blog readers who might know something about this, which charities do provide good value for your donated dollar? I’ve always thought Oxfam was good value, but my evidence for that isn’t entirely overwhelming. (I remember “Peter Unger”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/unger/ did some investigations and decided they were worth supporting, so that’s some evidence, but that was one data point several years ago.) If anyone has any better suggestions, or reasons why Oxfam isn’t really as good as I’ve always thought, I’d be happy to hear them.
It seems “googling” is now used by many as a synonym for online searches just like kleenex is used to refer to a tissue or xeroxing to using a copier. I have yet to see empirical evidence that suggests Google is used by the majority of Internet users, yet many people talk about it as though it was the only existing search engine. References to Google as the be-all and end-all of search engines abound at least among journalists and academics, and perhaps it is not surprising that such people know about and use Google. But not everybody does although you’d be hard-pressed to know that judging from the rhetoric.
I have a small piece in this month’s First Monday in which I discuss this issue and why it is problematic to assume everyone uses a certain service when that is not necessarily the case.
Actually, I only mention one concern in that piece. Another that I do not bring up there but have alluded to elsewhere is that it is problematic to have so much riding on a proprietary service. We do not know where it is headed and since the details of its algorithm for displaying results are not transparent to the public we should not depend on it to guarantee equal access to all types of information indefinitely.
For a country with a better than average social welfare safety net, Britain still seems to enjoy plenty of social entrepreneurship. These days the UK is a seething hotbed of activity aimed at opening up the political process to the masses.
MySociety has just launched a blog-based website called Downing Street Says. It strips out into a readable format each topic covered in the Prime Minister’s spokesman’s daily Q&A with political correspondents, and allows the public to add comments. (BBC story here.)Official transcripts of the daily Q&A and the PM’s monthly press conference are available somewhere on the UK government website. But they’re difficult to find, published in long clumps of text, and of course have no comments sections. Downing Street Says has been put together by volunteers who simply want to make the process more open to the public, and it makes for an interesting read.
I’m still a bit on the fence about how much these initiatives really improve democracy, but hats off to the people who’ve used their spare time and talents to put this together. Also worth looking at is faxyourmp, and a whole slate of projects that MySociety is currently fundraising for. James Crabtree at VoxPolitics is an excellent source of information and opinion about developments in this field.
Now if only someone would take on Hansard…
CT doesn’t have many of these posts – lots of links with little analysis. Most of the following are horror stories of various kinds.
I was in Israel this past weekend and was trying to describe to my cousin the size of Lake Michigan. (This was in the context of telling him about my new surroundings in Chicagoland.) I realized I don’t know the actual size of the lake so I thought we’d go online and check. I did a search on Google for “lake michigan” map size. No more, no less. The top result was a map of Israel and Lake Michigan superimposed on each other. Thanks, Web. This was certainly an effective way of explaining to an Israeli the size of Lake Michigan.:) (I realize the question of a map of Israel can be a tricky issue. I am not posting this to start an argument about that. I thought from a Web-search point-of-view, this was an interesting/amusing case worth sharing.)
Before I leave, I thought that I would string together a list of links and quotes from non-political humor sites. Enjoy.
Did anyone else get the Nigerian Spam email from “John Adams” of the “Senate Committee on Banks and Currency”? I thought at first it would be moderately amusing, perhaps suggesting I get involved with something obviously fraudulent like purportedly buying the Midwest for pennies per hectare, but it turned out to just be a regular fraud letter with the grammatical mistakes fixed. I haven’t been following these letters for a while (thanks Thunderbird spam filter!) but it might be fun to see if they evolve a little.
A “piece in the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1071251586971&p=1012571727085 contains the following startling claim:
bq. Webroot, a small US security software company that provides spyware blocking software for Earthlink, estimates up to 18 per cent of computers could be infected with keystroke loggers or RATs. Its estimate is based on results from 300,000 people who in November used its “spyware audit”, a free internet-based program that detects whether a computer has been infected.
18 per cent sounds like a crazily high number to me — the sort of number people come up with when they have a commercial interest (you know, “piracy is costing the music industry $40 trillion per nanosecond”). But it would be interesting to have some indication of how widespread the problem really is.
I just acquired a Handspring Treo 600, which is a rather nice bit of kit to have and certainly beats both my old Palm m100 and Nokia 8210 combination. I used to read email with those by using the infra-red connection between the two but once spam started reaching its current extent it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Now I’d like to use the Treo to read email from time to time but I need a decent IMAP-enabled mail client to take advantage of the server-side installation of SpamAssassin on my university mailserver. Any recommendations?
Like everyone else I’m plagued by spam. Since 1930 gmt on Saturday I’ve received 17 legitimate emails and 353 spams. The good news is that using “Mozilla Thunderbird”:http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/ ‘s spamblocking software I’ve filtered out nearly all of it (and the latest version of “Mozilla Firebird”:http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/ is very good at stopping annoying pop-up advertising). People who use different (better?) operating systems may have better options, but for those of us condemned to Windoze, those two programs may be the best mail and browser options.
The Economist reports that Google is planning to go public next spring. “All told, 75% of referrals to websites now originate from Google’s algorithms. That,” the story says, “is power.” But how to make money from it? Meanwhile, The New York Times says that Microsoft might like to buy Google, or alternatively bump it out of the way. As the story in the _Economist_ notes, “Microsoft smells blood. It is currently working on its own search algorithm, which it hopes to make public early next year, around the probable time of Google’s share listing.”
“Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.”
Next week the body that oversees the technical co-ordination of the internet, ICANN, meets at Carthage in Tunisia. The top item on the agenda, for anyone who cares about privacy and freedom of expression, is the WHOIS database. This is the set of data of domain name owners which was originally collected so that network administrators could find and fix technical problems and keep the internet running smoothly.
Of course no collection of personal data can remain long without various interests campaigning to open it up to a variety of unintended uses. In this case, those interests include IP rights holders, law enforcement, oppressive regimes, stalkers, and of course spammers.
I just got spam for generic Viagra that began with this salutation:
ego jackknife blest lachesis piotr catholicism cavemen calcify bedfast bile creedal introduction
I’d imagine that it’s a device to get through the fearsome AOL spam guards, but it’s almost beautiful in its way.