10629420
submission
pcause writes:
Silicon Alley Insider has the most damning evidence released in the Viacom/YouTube suit. It seems clear from these snippets that YouTube knew it was pirating content and did it to grow fast and sell for a lot of $$. It also seems clear that Google knew the site was pirated content and bought it and continued the pirating.
8397362
submission
pcause writes:
Ars Techina has a nice article about the FTC's concern that consumers don't understand the implications of storing their data in the cloud. From the article: But that data is now sitting on servers outside of your control, where it can be accessed far more easily by Google itself, hackers, and law enforcement than it ever could if kept within the device. Once data passes over the network, it gets much easier to access in realtime; once it is stored on a remote server, it gets much easier to access at any time. And those are just the phone settings. Google also has access to search history data, anything stored in Google Docs or Spreadsheets, complete schedules stored in Google Calendar, and recent Maps searches. Combine them all, and companies like Google become one-stop shops for authorities looking for personal information.
Have /. readers really thought about this? Do you think the average consumer even has a clue about this issue?
691027
submission
pcause writes:
Here is a review of various lightweight Linux distros. Not sure I agree with the conclusions, since I am a PuppyLinux user, but it is a nice overview of some current options.
616570
submission
pcause writes:
The Internet (physical as opposed to technical) was really not designed for applications that want to use maximum bandwidth all of the time, such as P2P and streaming video. Here in the US we've seen Comcast try balance the demands ofP2P traffic with other traffic and its backbone capacity. In the UK, this article discusses a flame war caused by the iPlayer, between the BBC and ISPs about the same issue. This is an issue that isn't going away any time soon.
So the question so: who pays? Should the content owners, who make the profits / get the benefits pay for the extra infrastructure or should the consumer pay? It isn't going to be the ISP, since the costs are large, capital is tight and the only way to recover is to pass on the additional cost to the consumer. This issue is what the so-called "Net Neutrality" debate is really about!
564174
submission
pcause writes:
The New York Times has published a front page article that begins to expose the depth of data that the web companies are coillecting about you. The Times used Comscore to create the analysis and Comscroe did a lousy job becuase they missed a lot of the data that is collected, and so the informaiton is even more pervasive than discussed.
The companies say we can trust them becuase of their privacy policies? Does anyone really believe that? SHould this colleciton be more tightly regulated?
517948
submission
pcause writes:
A recent study says that 6% of web users generate 50% of the click throughs. Worse for advertisers, most have incomes under 40,000 and the clicks are not related to any offline buying. This is VERY bad news for ad supported web sites and businesses, as rates should drop if this is the case. Can you hear the sound of the Web 2.0 bubble bursting?
179071
submission
pcause writes:
There has been a lot of
talk recently about the need for programmers to shift paradigms and begin building more parallel applications and systems. The need to do this and the hardware and systems to support it have been around for a while, but we haven't seen a lot of progress. The article says that gaming systems have made progress, but MMOGs are typically years late and I'll bet part of the problem is trying to be more parallel/distributed.
Since this discussion has been going on for over a decade with little progress in terms of widespread change, one has to ask is parallel programming just too difficult for most programmers? Are the tools inadequate or perhaps is it that it is very difficult to think about parallel systems. Maybe it is a fundamental human limit. Will we really see progress in the next 10 years that matches the progress of the silicon?
92310
submission
pcause writes:
Recently there was a glitch when someone at Netscape took down a page that had an important DTD (RSS) used by many applications and services. This got me thinking that many or all of the important DTDs that software and commerce depend on are hosted at various commercial entities. Is this a sane way to build an XML based Internet infrastructure? Companies come and go and get bought all the time. This means that the storage ad availability of those DTDs is in constant jeopardy.
It strikes me that we need an infrastructure akin to the root server structure to hold the key DTDs that are used throughout the industry. Perhaps W3C should operate this. But how would we pay for this?
Well, ./, what do you think?
