Ummm, the techdirt article is based on an unsourced report - and if you look at the article that techdirt links to, it's a totally unsubstantiated piece of garbage, Are you really going to believe Amazon is losing money on every e-book transaction because of this nonsense article? No "facts" are provided, just unfounded conjecture.

Corporations and organizations in general exist because when transaction costs become to high, it may become more efficient to conduct business within a hierarchical, rigid organization, rather than in a merketplace (read Coase "The Nature of the Firm"). While the whole "digital revolution" thing reduces transaction costs in some areas, I doubt it will ever make organizations obsolete in all areas of economy. For instance in healthcare or law, the relatinship between agents and principals is determined by the enormous information assymetries (read Arrow "Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care"). While they may be reduced to some extent, so far things like personal health records did not get much traction neither with patients, nor with doctors. Well, maybe we the information technology is just not mature enough, maybe we are not yet ready for it, maybe we will never be--and keep holding to the good old "trust relationship" with our doctors instead of shopping for them on the amazon. The point is, openness or closeness are not the ends in themselves, neiter are they good or bad. It is all the question of economic efficiency and common sense.

Though of course, it may even be yet another site responsible for the problem.

Someone posts on their blog "Hey, [link to search engine with 'love beads'] love beads are great.

Google then follows this link to the search engine. The page returned from the search engine contains search results and an affiliate link to "Buy 'love beads' at Target" linking to the target search page. Google follows this link and voila, we have the issue at hand.

No malice on Targets part (though they could do more to make sure it's not indexed).

there's something like that. corporate culture is created by the initial visionholders of a company. then, this affects their hirings. in the end entire corporation becomes something shaped with the vision, and continues to operate as such. there are numerous corporations which are maintaining a definitive culture over 100 years in europe. there are corporations which had their corporate culture shaped in front of our eyes, like microsoft. corporate culture makes or breaks corporations.

2 unrelated points:

1) Google hasn't proposed security through obscurity. Any game theorist will tell you that any system of sufficient complexity, open to a large user base, which contains "winning conditions" can be manipulated to the benefit of a few of the participants at the expense of the others. This isn't a matter of "security" at all, but the desire to keep ad and search from becoming the stock market. To do that, you need to keep the rules of the game both fluid and secret while basing them on a set of relatively open and obvious axioms (e.g. the published parts of PageRank) that all users can use to their collective and individual advantage.

The difference between a system like this and security is that security is designed to allow access to only a privileged few. Systems like this are designed to allow everyone to participate without being able to exercise undue influence. While this might sound similar, there are quite a few fundamental differences that prevent approaching them similarly.

2) Security through obscurity isn't security through secrets. Passwords and private keys, for example, are secrets that work very well as part of a security plan. Obscurity is where you have an insecure element in your security plan which you rely on due to its obfuscation. In the real world, a good example would be leaving your back door unlocked. Anyone who attempts to enter your house from the front will find the door locked, but those who know that you leave your back door unlocked can come and go at will. At first, this seems logical until you consider that someone might accidentally try your back door or observe a friend entering without a key, and then can mount an attack (walk in) at any time of their choosing.

Certainly, if Google were doing security, here, their unpublished (and frequently changing) PageRank and other metrics would be an example of security through obscurity, but that's now what they're doing.

I'm sure it wasn't at&t in NY, it takes 5 minutes to even bring up a web page outside in times square

and that's on a good day

Doing a Google search of just the name, the first hit that comes up that mentions the 1995 incident is on the 4th page of 10-per-page search results. Before that there are a bunch of links about what he's currently doing.

It would appear that if it is Jesse Hirsh, its somewhat buried already.

And doing the "site:textfiles.com university computer system" search in Google, although the first hit is about Jesse Hirsh, Jesse's name isn't in the blurb shown in the Google search results, so you wouldn't know that the first hit in the search results had anything to do with Jesse Hirsh unless you actually followed the link.

The vibration problem appears to have been caused by the engines being "steerable" and having a hard time finding their "sweet spot", so they kept adjusting where they were pointing during the firing.

More information here.

In Utah at least, there are two areas where the analog signals have already been turned off. Granted they are areas that are served via translator stations, but AFIK, the analog signals were turned off (one in December, one earlier).

All stations should be broadcasting in digital already. Most Utah stations have been broadcasting in digital for a while. They turned on the digital broadcast tower in 1999 (see here) for which most local stations use. The only reason for the delay would be to give the consumer with old televisions more time to get a converter box if they need one. The infrastructure on the broadcaster side has to all be in place and ready to go by now, otherwise they'd probably miss the deadline.