Submission + - The Environmental Impact of Google Searches (timesonline.co.uk)

Submitted by paleshadows on Sunday January 11, 2009 @12:34PM

paleshadows writes: The timesonline reports that researchers claim that each query submitted to Google has a quantifiable impact. Specifically, two queries performed through a desktop computer generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a cup of tea. From the article: "While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 [whereas] boiling a kettle generates about 15g [...] Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centers. However, with more than 200m Internet searches estimated daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the Internet is provoking concern. A recent report [argues that] the global IT industry generate[s] as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines — about 2% of global CO2 emissions." The article also points to the www.co2stats.com website, which was set up by said researchers in an effort to help individuals and organizations in making their website green, energy-efficient, and carbon neutral.

Submission + - Dr. Dobb's Journal going web-only (wordpress.com)

Submitted by paleshadows on Monday January 05, 2009 @05:49AM

paleshadows writes: The first issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ) was published in January 1976. A few days ago, Herb Sutter (the chair of the ISO C++ committee and a long-time DDJ columnist) announced through his latest blog post that, "as of January 2009, Dr. Dobb's Journal is permanently suspending print publication and going web-only." This follows an earlier announcement that PC magazine is to become digital-only too. (As of February 2009.) To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmer's magazine left standing.

Submission + - Inferring personality from email addresses (pressebox.de)

Submitted by paleshadows on Wednesday August 13, 2008 @02:02AM

paleshadows writes: Three researchers from the University of Leipzig published an interesting paper titled "How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses" [pdf]. From the abstract:

"Email addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extraversion."

Submission + - Pidgin forked due to controversy (pidgin.im)

Submitted by paleshadows on Wednesday April 30, 2008 @12:59PM

paleshadows writes: Pidgin, the premier multi-protocol instant messaging client, has been forked. This is the result of a heated, emotional, and very interesting debate over a controversial new feature: As of version 2.4, the ability to manually resize the text input area has been removed; instead, it automatically resizes depending on how much is typed. It turns out that this feature, along with the uncompromising unwillingness of the developers to provide an option to turn it off, annoys the bejesus of very many users. One comment made by a Professor that teaches "Collaboration in an Open Source World" argued that

It's easy to see why open source developers could develop dogmas. [...] The most dangerous dogma is the one exhibited here: the God feature. "One technological solution can meet every possible user-desired variation of a feature." [...] You [the developers] are ignoring the fan base with a dedication to your convictions that is alarmingly evident to even the most unobservant of followers, and as such, you are demonstrating that you no longer deserve to be in the position of servicing the needs of your user base.
The debate raises two interesting questions: If many users find a new (functionally correct) UI behavior "annoying", do the developers have some ethical obligation to rectify? Is there something significant to be gained by enforcing a UI behavior that the developers like but many users hate? The proclaimed philosophy underlying the new pidgin fork, which is dubbed Funpidgin, is that the answers are "yes", and "no", respectively. Accordingly, the Funpidgin webpage says that

"What makes us different from the official client, is that we work for you. Unlike the Pidgin developers, we believe the user should have the final say in what goes into the program."

Submission + - VM-based rootkits proved easily detectable (stanford.edu)

Submitted by paleshadows on Sunday September 30, 2007 @11:55PM

paleshadows writes: A year and a half has passed since SubVirt, the first VMM (virtual machine monitor) based rootkit, was introduced. The idea spawned two lively slashdot discussions: the first, which followed the initial report about SubVirt, and the second, which was conducted after Joanna Rutkowska has recycled the idea (apparently without giving credit to the initial authors). Conversely, in this year's HotOS workshop, researchers from Stanford, CMU, VMware, and XenSource have published a paper titled " Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities" which shows that VMM-based rootkits are actually easily detectable. The introduction of the paper explains that

"While commodity VMMs conform to the PC architecture, virtual implementations of this architecture differ substantially from physical implementations. These differences are not incidental: performance demands and practical engineering limitations necessitate divergences (sometimes radical ones) from native hardware, both in semantics and performance. Consequently, we believe the potential for preventing VMM detection under close scrutiny is illusory — and fundamentally in conflict with the technical limitations of virtualized platforms."

The paper concludes by saying that

"Perhaps the most concise argument against the utility of VMBRs (VM-based rootkits) is: "Why bother?" VMBRs change the malware defender's problem from a very difficult one (discovering whether the trusted computing base of a system has been compromised), to the much easier problem of detecting a VMM."

Submission + - Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

Submitted by paleshadows on Thursday August 30, 2007 @11:57AM

paleshadows writes: Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilzes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain "reputation", whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demo (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf).