The PC Informant

Preliminary look at Internet Explorer 9

Vic Laurie — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:51:49 +0000

Microsoft has been working on the next version of Internet Explorer and has released a few details. Stephen Shankland at CNET reports:

For those who doubted that Microsoft was serious in its effort to re-engage with the Web, it’s time to put the skepticism aside.

At its Mix conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Microsoft gave programmers, Web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its Web browser. Specifically, Microsoft released what it’s calling the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, a prototype that’s designed to show off the company’s effort to improve how the browser deals with the Web as it exists today and, just as important, to add support for new Web technologies that are coming right now.

ExtremeTech has some discussion of new features like GPU acceleration and JavaScript compilation.

The preliminary look at IE9 is promising but in the meantime Firefox and Chrome are also likely to improve. Incidentally, IE9 will not work in Windows XP.

More about the loss of privacy

Vic Laurie — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:28:36 +0000

The discussion of how the Internet acts to reduce privacy continues. Steve Lohr at the New York Times has written an article, How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time. Computers can assemble and analyze the various facts that people post about themselves to create a revealing picture. Lohr writes:

Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.

“Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,” said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division. “You can find out who an individual is without it.”

It isn’t just the information you reveal about yourself but also what others say about you that can be used. Lohr goes on to say:

You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say.

Videos about Google services

Vic Laurie — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:01:42 +0000

Google has made some videos to explain a little bit about how its services work. The videos are pretty elementary but they are short so you might take a look.

How search works:

How search ads work:

How Google Apps work:

Reviews of security suites

Vic Laurie — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:44:12 +0000

Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to fork out for the costs of a commercial security suite. There are some very good free alternatives, However, if you are more comfortable with the pay versions of software, Neil Rubenking has reviews of the latest at PCMag. His top choice is still Norton Internet Security 2010 ($69.99 direct for 3 licenses). Don’t forget that on top of the initial price, most pay security software requires a subscription for updates after a year.

Easy way to disable the keyboard

Vic Laurie — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:09:30 +0000

Do you have a cat that likes to jump on your computer keyboard? Or maybe there’s a three-year old in your house that loves to pound the keys when you’re not looking. Here is a little free application to turn the keyboard on and off. It’s called Keyboard Locker and it’s from the How-to Geek. It’ll let you leave your PC unattended for a few minutes without having to fear that strange things may be entered into your keyboard while you’re gone. Of course, assuming you use a USB connection, you can also just unplug the keyboard.

Does Google’s search algorithm rule the Web?

Vic Laurie — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:56:43 +0000

That’s the thesis of a Wired Magazine article by Steven Levy. Before Google, there were many search engines. But the search algorithms of Google made a difference. Somehow Google searches were faster and more accurate. And Google grew and grew. The search algorithms also change constantly. As Google amassed greater and greater databases, it kept tweaking its algorithms to match the way people search. In fact, the average searcher does not formulate a search query with any great skill and Google’s forte is figuring out what the searcher actually wants. Misspelled words, mistaken syntax, Google takes it all in and does a remarkable job of interpreting what you really meant. One thing that has come out of the mountains of data that Google has accumulated is the power of really large databases, something that researchers in science and other disciplines are beginning to appreciate.

Levy’s article discusses how Google works. Here is an example excerpt:

And Google keeps improving. Recently, search engineer Maureen Heymans discovered a problem with “Cindy Louise Greenslade.” The algorithm figured out that it should look for a person — in this case a psychologist in Garden Grove, California — but it failed to place Greenslade’s homepage in the top 10 results. Heymans found that, in essence, Google had downgraded the relevance of her homepage because Greenslade used only her middle initial, not her full middle name as in the query. “We needed to be smarter than that,” Heymans says. So she added a signal that looks for middle initials. Now Greenslade’s homepage is the fifth result.

At any moment, dozens of these changes are going through a well-oiled testing process. Google employs hundreds of people around the world to sit at their home computer and judge results for various queries, marking whether the tweaks return better or worse results than before. But Google also has a larger army of testers — its billions of users, virtually all of whom are unwittingly participating in its constant quality experiments. Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group. There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,” says search quality engineer Patrick Riley. Then he corrects himself. “Essentially,” he says, “all the queries are involved in some test.” In other words, just about every time you search on Google, you’re a lab rat.

FCC plan to increase broadband coverage in US

Vic Laurie — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:30:56 +0000

The US Federal Communications Commission wants to increase high-speed Internet in America. The New York Times reports:

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service.

In the meantime, the FCC is instituting a service to help gather statistics on broadband coverage and usage. The Times article notes:

In a move that could affect policy decisions years from now, the F.C.C. will begin assessing the speeds and costs of consumer broadband service. Until then, consumers can take matters into their own hands with a new suite of online and mobile phone applications released by the F.C.C. that will allow them to test the speed of their home Internet and see if they’re paying for data speeds as advertised.

PC World describes the new FCC service for measuring and reporting your own broadband speed:

The Federal Communications Commission recently launched a free broadband speed test you can use to check the speed of your Internet connection. The test will reveal how fast your connection lets you upload and download data, as well as other provide information about high-speed Internet service. You can then compare your FCC test results with the speeds promised by your Internet service provider (ISP).

You can find the test on the homepage of broadband.gov, but before you use it there are a few things you should know about the broadband test. This isn’t just a free public service; the FCC will store your test data and could use some of your information to form its national broadband strategy.

The new FCC site is here.

Predicting human movement

Vic Laurie — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:22:06 +0000

Although the actions of individual humans are not very predictable, those of large numbers of people often follow discernible patterns. For example, consider a report about human movement in Ars Technica that shows what analysis of cell phone data shows:

We’d like to think of ourselves as dynamic, unpredictable individuals, but according to new research, that’s not the case at all. In a study published in last week’s Science, researchers looked at customer location data culled from cellular service providers. By looking at how customers moved around, the authors of the study found that it may be possible to predict human movement patterns and location up to 93 percent of the time. These findings may be useful in multiple fields, including city planning, mobile communication resource management, and anticipating the spread of viruses.

Privacy died and no one cared?

Vic Laurie — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:03:37 +0000

It is a commonplace observation that privacy in the modern world is dead. But what is also being said more often is that most people don’t care. Declan McCullagh of CBSNews.com has an article at CNET, Why no one cares about privacy anymore. He writes:

Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness. Participating in YouTube, Loopt, FriendFeed, Flickr, and other elements of modern digital society means giving up some privacy, yet millions of people are willing to make that trade-off every day. Of people with an online profile, nearly 40 percent have disabled privacy settings so anyone may view it, according to a Pew Internet survey released a year ago. The percentage is probably higher today.

Is the concept of privacy a generational thing? McCullagh writes:

If any of this concerns you, then you didn’t grow up with the Internet. It’s difficult to overstate how thoroughly today’s youth–call them Generation X-hibitionist–have adjusted to living in a world of porn spam and Viagra ads that utterly lacks quaint 20th-century conceptions of privacy.

Later he says:

Perhaps the real issue is not technology but psychology. Irwin Altman, a professor emeritus in the University of Utah’s psychology department, created one of the more widely cited theories of privacy before Facebook’s founder was born. “If one can choose how much or how little to divulge about oneself to another voluntarily, privacy is maintained,” Altman wrote, effectively blessing the social media of a generation later. “If another person can influence how much information we divulge about ourselves or how much information input we let in about others, a lower level of privacy exists.”

For a different point of view, there is another article at CNET. This one is by Chris Matyszczyk and is entitled Why people really do care about privacy. Among other things, he says:

People care about privacy because having a private life makes them feel like people, rather than billboards. It’s an essence of humanity, as we currently know it, that we only allow certain people to see more of who we really are, what we really do, what we really think, and how we really feel. There are many reasons for that. One of them is that we don’t really trust other people all that much.

If all of our information were made public, wouldn’t we all become just a little too predictable? This–remarkably coincidental–is exactly what algorithm worshipers would love: “We know who you are. We know what you think. We know what you like. So you’ll definitely buy this product, won’t you?”

Still another analysis is from a Microsoft researcher. AppScout reports:

Microsoft researcher danah boyd (she prefers no caps) presented a pretty bleak picture of how privacy and publicity is managed online today in her SXSW Interactive keynote. Targeting Chatroulette, Facebook, Google Buzz as examples, boyd says consumers have no idea what they are sharing online–and that the business that build social networks don’t either.

Are you concerned about the loss of privacy in general? Or is the bigger concern fear of what governments and big business can do with all the information they collect about individuals?

The Internet of things

Vic Laurie — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:48:53 +0000

The Bits Blog at the New York Times discusses the possibilities of more than just computers being connected to the Internet. With microprocessors and sensors, all sorts of things might be “online”. The blog reports on an article from McKinsey & Company that begins:

More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks.