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+1!

See the article Facebook's 'Like This' Button Is Tracking You for details about how facebook (and now google) use the http image requests and your cookies to basically get a full history on your web browsing.

After having read the article and thought of how many sites I visit with a "like button" and therefore how much data facebook/google has about my browsing I felt disturbed to say the least.

Even wikileaks has one of these on their site. Wonder how meany people realize that facebook knows when/how-often they visit wikileaks...

In other news, Microsoft was questioned by several media outlets on Monday morning about a recently discovered build of MS Office labeled 'MSOffice.trojanhorse' which was given for free to several so-called 'Oppressed Nonprofit' organizations. The software giant did not release a formal statement, but did advise one reporter that "all 'MSOffice.trojanhorse' users should keep their internet connection up while using their free copy of the office suite." ;)

Finally! Someone with a brain (or just common sense) was put in charge of the new shuffle's design.

I've been holding off on getting a new jogging ipod for a while because the 3rd gen shuffle no-button design was ridiculous. Steve-o thought he could sell a whole bunch of button-less shuffles and lock the consumers (not customers) into buying expensive replacement headphones over the next few years.

Turns out the "consumers" saw right though the ploy and didn't buy the poorly designed ipods in the first place. All hail common sense and voting with our wallets!

And now to hand over another $49 to Apple :S

Horatio: Looks like this server...(takes off his sunglasses)...has been shut down.

I bet 80% of .gov sites also don't have properly setup DNS, let alone DNSSEC.

eg. Try going to http://fbi.gov

Without the proper CNAME record you need to type "www" before the hostname. Silly.

Not sure what MS is announcing tonight, but I got a free Acer Aspire 1420P Convertible Tablet PC when I attended the MS PDC in November and the thing is freaking amazing.

Some highlights:

• Runs Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate (VERY smooth)
• Intel Core2 Duo U2300 processor
• 2GB of DDR3 1066 MHz memory
• 11.6" HD 1366 x 768 Swivel multi-touch screen
• WLAN + WWAN chips
• Multi-Card reader
• HDMI output

Complete spec here.

If anyone has ever looked at the network usage of a "smart" you will have seen INCREDIBLE waste. For example, I've looked at youtube access on the iphone; the app makes *multiple* requests for the same video (using HTTP byte ranges) at startup. We're talking thousands of bytes wasted on each view of a video. So basically we're paying for the application engineer's terrible network programming. Not cool.

ttp:cryptomeorgtsa-screeningzip

The cryptome URL has been redacted. Nothing to see here, move along.

Sincerely,
TSA

Everyone take a deep breath. 8M is the number of web requests to their server in en entire year, not the number of phones that were "of interest."

From a comment in TFA:

...the 8 million automated requests or pings were generated by thousands (NOT millions) of instances in which law enforcement or public safety agencies sought customer location information. Several thousand instances over the course of a year should not be shocking given that we have 47 million customers and requests from law enforcement and public safety agencies are due to a variety of circumstances: exigent or emergency situations, criminal investigations, or cases where a Sprint customer consents to sharing location information.

It's also important to note that we complied with applicable state and federal laws in all of the instances where we fulfilled a law enforcement or public safety request for location information.

Matt Sullivan
Sprint Nextel
Matthew.sullivan@sprint.com

I was at the talk, and yes Don Box said "I will fight you if you try to take away my text editor" but it was after having being asked a leading question by Eric Meijer. Something along the lines of "will we ever write software entirely without writting text?"

However, what was Don doing for the rest of the PDC? He was hawking Entity Framework and M, both of which allow users to model data access using rich graphical tools!

The talk is here: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT52.

As long as their money is green, they can call me "ZIT guy" for all I care (which is fairly accurate some days ;)