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Security

Submission + - What MSN, Google, Yahoo and AOL know about you

Submitted by
hotgist
hotgist writes: " What Microsoft's MSN, Google, Yahoo and AOL Know About You

America's top four Internet companies, Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft's MSN, promise they will protect the personal information of people who use their online services to search, shop and socialize. But a close read of their privacy policies reveals as much exposure as protection. The massive amounts of data these companies collect, which can include records of the searches you make, the health problems you research and the investments you monitor, can be requested by government investigators and subpoenaed by your legal adversaries. But this same information is generally not available to you."

Software

Submission + - Why Desktop Email Still Triumph's

Submitted by
p3net
p3net writes: "Shortly before the release of Thunderbird 2.0 RC1, Wired had an interesting interview with Scott MacGregor, the lead developer of Thunderbird. He presents some interesting views as to why desktop email clients still triumph, even in this much-dominated web age."
Google

Submission + - Google Pushes Open Source OCR

Submitted by
SocialWorm
SocialWorm writes: "Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will "advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies." OCRopus will be available under the Apache 2.0 License. Obviously, there may be search and image search implications from OCRopus."
Businesses

Are Unfinished Products Now the Norm? 111

Posted by Cliff from the not-ready-for-prime-time dept.
Paul asks: "Long ago when digital synthesizers first became commonly available, I recall a reviewer lamenting how he was getting more and more products to test whose software was unfinished and buggy and would require updates and fixes (this, before the internet allowed easy downloads, would have meant a journey to a specialist repair center). The review also commented how this common problem with computer software was spreading (this was before Windows 95 was out), and asked if it was going to become the norm. These days it seems ubiquitous, with PDAs, digital cameras, PVRs and all manner of complex goods needing after-market firmware fixes often simply to make them have the features promised in the adverts, let alone add enhancements. Are we seeing this spread beyond computers and computer-based products; jokes apart, will we be booting our cars up and installing flash updates every week to prevent computer viruses getting into the control systems? Can anyone comment on any recent purchases where they've been badly let down by missing features, or are still waiting for promised updates even whilst a new model is now on the shelves? How can we make the manufacturers take better responsibility? Apart from reading every review possible before making a purchase, what strategy do you have, or propose, for not being caught out?"
Data Storage

Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability 267

Posted by Zonk from the fun-saturday-night-reading dept.
oski4410 writes "The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: 'Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.'"

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