News: Amazons Discovers The Perils Of Browsing

By | November 24, 2011
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 Interesting piece on the downside of Amazon’s new book-searching feature, launched last month, which allows customers to do a full-text search on more than 120,000 books. The Register reports that it has quietly disabled printing after researchers managed to print out 108 consecutive pages from a bestselling book.
 
As a failed bookseller, I sympathise. It would drive me nuts when people would come into the shop, take out a pen and paper, and start taking notes from books they never bought.

News: A Worm With A Mission

By | November 24, 2011
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 Further to my posting about SpamCop, it seems that a new virus, actually a worm, is aiming at bringing down SpamCop and some other anti-spam sites. Is it more evidence of collusion between sleazy spammers and spotty virus writers?
 
Sophos reports that W32/Mimail-E is a worm which spreads via email using addresses harvested from the hard drive of the infected computer. It arrives with the subject line : don’t be late!, and the message Will meet tonight as we agreed, because on Wednesday I don’t think I’ll make it, so don’t be late. And yes, by the way here is the file you asked for. It’s all written there. See you. It looks as if it’s sent by someone called John on your domain.
 
The worm will then attempt denial of service attacks — bombarding a specific website with tonnes of digital rubbish — on anti-spam sites such as spews.org , spamhaus.org and spamcop.net.

News: Information Overload

By | November 24, 2011
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 In the end this may be more important than anything else in the evolution of technology: information is growing very, very fast. The BBC quotes a study by the University of California, Berkeley that:
  • every year 800MB of information is produced for every person on the planet;
  • information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical disks has doubled since 1999;
  • The amount of information stored in books, journals and other documents has grown 43% in the same period;
  • the amount of information generated has grown about 30%;
  • in 2002 alone about five exabytes (an exabyte, unless I’m much mistaken, is a billion gigabytes) of new information was generated by the world’s print, film, magnetic and optical storage systems.
And yet we still don’t have decent programs for letting us find stuff — words, pictures, sound — on our own computer. Why is that?

News: RFID Tags’ Dirty Secret

By | November 24, 2011
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 A story from Reuters that says one of the biggest hurdles facing RFID tags — the widgets that store information about products — is that they still aren’t very good. “The tags fall far below the 99 percent reliability rate of UPC tags because of the difficulty of transmitting clean radio signals,” the piece says.
 
Many of the companies currently making them may not survive long enough to see the market emerge, apparently. “We are at an incredibly early stage of this technology and what it is actually capable of doing. All the promise of real-time supply chain visibility is just that. It’s promise,” IDC analyst Christopher Boone said.