Microsoft Struggles to Catch Google

In a story today on Computerworld Microsoft is attempting to catch up with Google and Yahoo in search capabilities. They have a long way to go. In June, Google sites captured 49.5% of the U.S. search market, while Yahoo sites ranked second with 25.1% of U.S. searches, followed by a distant Microsoft with only 13.2%, according to comScore Networks Inc.

Microsoft though began a new center, the Internet Services Research Center, as a part of Microsoft's research group. Interestingly enough though, the center will have teams in the U.S., but also some in Beijing.

Maybe Microsoft can go hard on those Chinese government types who are pushovers for Google.

Ahead or Behind the Curve?

Today, 29 July 2007, the BBC reported that Prime Minister of Great Britain, Gordon Brown, stated that the world owes the US a debt.

On the cusp of his first visit with George Bush, Brown stated that the U.S. leadership in the war against international terrorism is a debt that the world owes America.

Some analysts had speculated that Brown would distance himself from George Bush.

So far Brown has not publicly stated he would.

Newest Expansion Pack to Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword

One of the more intriguing developments in the gaming world, for an educator at least, is the accurate and realistic portrayal of history in the play. One of the best is Civilization IV. To the basic game is the newest expansion pack, Beyond the Sword, the second release after the Warlords edition.

The creator, Sid Meier, did not intend to write an educational game, precisely what makes it so fun probably, although an educator can do a great deal with the game to teach history. In a recent interview, Meier notes:

I read an interesting article recently about how some teachers actually use Civilization III in their classes as a teaching tool. Would you endorse or recommend the use of Civilization III as an educational product?

Sid: There's certainly nothing in the game that's just totally, flat-out wrong. I think Civilization is a good place to learn some basic ideas about history, and to be a part of it; to make the decisions. The great thing about a game is that you're the star of it. You're actually there making the decisions. Yes, it's been used in a lot of different educational situations, and if you can get a kid interested in history through a game, that's...We certainly lead them through the Civilopedia. We let them know that there's more out there if you want to explore it.

I've heard about a lot of people who played games as a kid and have gained a lot of useful knowledge that they were able to use later in life. So I certainly encourage people to use Civilization as a way to introduce them to history and make it exciting

Who Knows What Evil Lurks Inside a Cell Phone?

Ever wonder if something dangerous lurks in your cell phone? You should. In the tragedy that killed U.S. pets by ingesting tainted Chinese dog food, and to toothpaste that made people ill, a story in today's Computerworld alerted users to consider what's in your cell phone. In a widely publicized case, Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China's food and drug administration, was executed on corruption charges when it established that China did not have enough quality controls in place for the tainted goods leaving China.

And unlike toothpaste cell phones seem safe enough. However, cell phones can be lethal. A number of people in China have been killed because of problems with their cell phones. Indeed, a typical cell phone contains heavy, toxic metals such as lead and beryllium, poisonous flame retardants like bromide and enough cadmium to contaminate thousands of gallons of water. These ingredients expose the user to toxins.

The major cell phone manufacturing countries--the U.S., Finland, Sweden, Germany, South Korea, and Japan-- protect users with their rigorous safety procedures, and control and monitor the safety of cell phone manufacturing. National governments, consumer and industry groups, magazines and journals, and other actors monitor, test, and review cell phone safety.

If China is to be a successful major world economic player it needs to do everything it can to raise quality and review standards to ensure the safety of cell phone users.

Would You Like to Know What the U.S. Military Is Thinking?

Computerworldtoday released a story about classified U.S. military information and corporate data which is available over P2P (peer-to-peer file sharing networks).

Experts testified before Congress by relating that data leakage is worse than thought previously.

Millions of documents are housed freely on file sharing networks after being inadvertently exposed by individuals downloading P2P software on systems that held the data.

For example, would you like the Pentagon's secret backbone network infrastructure diagram, complete with IP addresses and password change scripts? You can have that. Also there is contractor data on radio frequency manipulation to beat Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) in Iraq; physical terrorism threat assessments for three major U.S cities; and, information on five separate Department of Defense information security system audits.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, (D-Calif.) heard this testimony.

Let's hope Henry gets good and sick of this breach and plugs the holes, the sooner the better.

Skeletons In Your Closet?

Reuters today reported on a Web site that traces convict ancestors in the Land Down Under.

The records of tens of thousands of British convicts sent to Australia starting in the 18th century are no online so if you had something to hide about your family past, its all out now. 160,000 convicts were forcibly removed from England and transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868. The crimes ranged from petty crimes to serious crimes like murder and assault.

The first cargo of 732 convicts landed in Sydney Cove in January 1788 on 11 ships from the British First Fleet.

Use A Computer, Go To Jail

Not exactly but Computerworld released a study today indicating MySpace is inhabited by 29,000 registered sex offenders, according to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooppdate. Following a subpoena, MySpace turned over the names of the convicted sex offenders.

Better Than Bombay?

The 23 July 2007 issue of Computerworld ran a story about how possibly Pakistan is a good site to outsource IT, to which "Anonymous"
posted:

Let's see, we have the Taliban massing on its western border with Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden is reputed to be hiding out in its mountainous western border region with Afghanistan. Journalists have been beheaded there. The President of the country is routinely under threat of assasination [sic]. And, you want to outsource your software development there? Get real.

I've been doing my best and reading Tariq Ali to appreciate the difficulties of the West versus the Muslim world but really the way out of the morass of poverty is to get your house in order. Any investor willing to part with their money is truly providing an opportunity for Pakistanis, if there were only enough people willing to embrace the chance. There are so many more affordable but stable environments. Pakistan is not one of them.

Big Brother IS Watching

Today's Computerworld ran an article by David Strom. He lists what he describes as a "Paranoia Product List" of items in case you, and you rightfully should be, are concerned about leaving tracks on the Internet:

General-purpose packet-capture tools; Wildpackets OmniAnalysis Platform, Network General Sniffer InfiniStream, NetQoS Gigastor, ETelemetry Locate; IM auditing and monitoring tools, Symantec IM Manager, Akonix F7 Enterprise, Facetime IM Auditor; E-mail/IM encryption tools, PGP Desktop and a free version of PGP, Hushmail.com, X-IM.net, PSST; Anonymous proxies, Anonymizer.com's Anonymous Surfing and Total Net Shield; Free anonymous surfing and proxies, Protected desktop, and Mojopac.com.

Whither Turkey?

Photo by Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

An article in the New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise (Sebnem Arsu contributed) today reported that the Turkish ruling party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan--the Justice and Development party (A.K.)--won a decisive victory in national parliamentary elections. The vote indicates the direction of Turkish democracy.

The vote sent a message to the secular state establishment, which opposed Erdogan's Islamic agenda. The secularists, the Republican People's Party, received only 20 percent of the vote. The Nationalist Action Party, an anti-Kurdish group, won 14 percent of the vote.

As the only non-European, Muslim NATO member and a strong American ally its stability is critical in light of chronic chaos in the Middle East. The powerful and secular military might react and it has deposed elected governments four times since the Turkish state was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.

The A.K. arises from a religious, merchant class in rural Turkey. It advocates membership for Turkey in the European Union. It has strengthened economic ties with Israel, along with a non-vindictive policy towards the Kurdish minority.

Erdogan began as an Islamist, and for many leaders of the party, whose wives wear headscarves, comparisons were drawn to struggling administrations in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, or countries with wives whose heads were uncovered.

One ploy of Turkey’s secular state elite, backed by its military, used a legal maneuver to block Mr. Erdogan’s candidate from becoming president. And why? The wife of the candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, wears a Muslim headscarf.

It is refreshing to see a Middle Eastern Muslim political scene with a mixed crowd of headscarf and non-headscarf wearers.

The best policy is to take a `wait and see' attitude until Erdogan either steers the country in a more religious and anti-Western direction or if his victory is more simply modifying Turkey's secularity in a moderately religious direction. Not every Muslim is an Islamist and Erdogan should be given a chance to show his true colors.

In fact, if I were even more optimistic, although I frankly confess usually I am not, Erdogan's victory could be a sign that religiosity is more robust, charismatic, fervent, but mature and still soundly democratic at the same time. The best case scenario is that Turkey is Muslim, democratic, and secular all in one which would be a terrific political model to emulate in the region. The icing on the cake is that Israel is not demonized and Turkey and Israel cooperate in the region.

Is that too much to hope for?

Obama Hard Ball

The MySpace and Web 2.0 phenomenon is hitting the political sphere. When Senator Barack Obama tried to own his own MySpace address, he ran smack into an admirer, Joe Anthony, who had beat him to the punch for the page. Anthony had racked up 160,000 Obamans (friends) for Barack already. Negotiations began for Obama to get his name and MySpace address. Anthony requested 39K for his work on the Obama page. It got ugly but Obama seized the account in any case and his MySpace page only had 75,000 friends. It looks like he lost some buddies in the MySpace takeover.

7,000 Iraq Refugees to Enter U.S.

Only 800 Iraqis refugees were allowed into the U.S. since 2003, but 7,000 will enter the U.S. this year. I wonder why so many Iraqis want to emigrate if America is perceived so negatively in Iraq?

More Google Cookie Crumbling

Computerworld ran a story on 19 July 2007 about the fall-out from Google's recent decision to revise its cookie policy. The new and improved cookies will last only two years.

However, in the recent development critics charge that "No users will experience any gains in privacy at all due to Google's change in policy," stated Randy Abrams, director of technical education at ESET, a vendor of antivirus products.

Ever wonder how long Google's cookies last on your computer? Currently, the cookies set by the company are designed to expire in 2038.

That is longer than any cookie I know.

Follow the Campaign Money for the Next President

Federal Computer Week released a story, 16 July 2007 about the Federal Election Commission. The first day that the FEC offered its first interactive campaign finance application, the Web site garnished 90,000. This figure is an increase over its usual 7,000 visitors monthly.

The site cost about $12,000 to build and took about six months to develop.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an independent regulatory agency created in 1975 by Congress to administer and enforce campaign finance legislation in the United States. It was created in a provision of the 1974 amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act. It describes its duties as "to disclose campaign finance information, to enforce the provisions of the law such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions, and to oversee the public funding of Presidential elections."

Would You Like $968 Million to Prepare?

Computerworld released a story announcing that the U.S. is offering $968 million for disaster technology. According to the Reuters news agency the money is in the form of grants to help state and local public safety agencies buy sophisticated radios and technology for communications during disasters, according to a Commerce Department spokesperson.

Who Said the Germans Don't Have a Heart?

An article today in Computerworld reported that German police understood how an angry computer user was so frustrated with his computer that he tossed it out the window. Apparently in the middle of the night a man was so frustrated that in an outburst his startled neighbors heard the commotion. The Hanover police responding to the melee sympathized with his technical frustrations. They decided not to press charges but they did make him clean up the mess.

"Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer. `Who hasn't felt like doing that?' said a police spokesman. I think we can all relate to computer users everywhere who have felt, and some have done, the same thing.

Political Globalized Islam

Two worthwhile books with flawed logic from a French theorist: The Failure of Political Islam & Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah by Olivier Roy.

Will fundamentalist Muslims manage to take power, or will the mostly nonfundamentalist autocrats now in power stay there?

The fundamentalists could well take over several governments in a short period: Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) has launched a virtual civil war; in Egypt, radical fundamentalists control parts of the cities and countryside; fundamentalist parties are gaining in nearly all the Muslim countries with electoral politics (Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Malaysia). The fundamentalist challenge to the established order is real.

So how is political Islam a failure?

The failure Roy refers to is one that distinguishes between Islamism and neofundamentalism. For Roy, the former means the drive for political power, and the latter means focusing on the family and the mosque. Think Iran for Islamism; think Saudi Arabia for neofundamentalism.

Islamism has failed and the weaker cause of neofundamentalism has flourished accoring to Roy.

True enough, Roy points out that fundamentalist Islam is a form of modernization. Contrary to the usual assumption, it is not medieval in spirit at all but an acutely modern form of protest. In Roy's elegant formulation, it "is the sharia [Islamic sacred law] plus electricity."

Though fundamentalist Islam cannot work, what Roy misses is that the realization that fundamentalism does not work could be years or decades off. We have no idea whatsoever from knowing the full import of fundamentalism. For example, as the Marxist-Leninist precedent shows, regimes kill and repress their opponents and also export their ideology abroad. The mullahs in Iran relish in power as most people appear to enjoy it. The salient point: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely," Lord Acton, is not discussed by Roy.

In 1933, sixteen years after the Bolshevik revolution, communism had a strong life after the revolution; sixteen years after the Iranian Revolution fundamentalism is alive and well, despite Roy's objection.

Roy was wrong on Algeria. The Muslim FIS in Algeria is superceded by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA): they specialize in murdering the children of police officers, women without veils, unsympathetic journalists, and non-Muslim foreigners. They kill their victims in particularly horrifying ways, slitting throats and cutting off heads. Educated and/or Western-oriented, French speakers, or those wearing a business are attractive as potential victims.

Leading American specialists on the subject, such as John Entelis, John Esposito, and John Voll, argue that we should look beyond fundamentalism's rough edges and bristling rhetoric and relax.

However, you can only engage in dialogue those who are willing to accept its consequence: democracy, freedom, free choice.

We need to learn from history and to hope with the Who, "We don't get fooled again."

The Declaration of Independence

Are Google Cookies Crummy?

Today Computerworld released a story about Google which states their new policy: user cookies will expire after two years. However, for the two-year cookie policy to work: users must not return to the search site. The solution then is pretty simple, no? Users should just stop searching on Google. I would think that it is clear by now that many ordinary computer users do not understand what cookies are or how they work.

What are cookies? Cookies are small bits of code stored on a computer; cookies are handy for users though because their user preferences are stored on the computer. Another common aspect of cookies that users often overlook is that they are able to control their cookies at any time via their browsers. Users can shut off or modify how cookies are downloaded to their computers.

A user might view the cookie issue as convenience, Google is looking out for me, or more sinisterly, Google is deciding something for me that I'd rather do myself.

Privacy advocates think Google can do better. According to the Computerworld article:

"Google's paying attention to the issue of cookie expiration, but as a practical matter, I think this change will have little impact on online privacy. . . . Users still know too little about how Google collects information, what information is collected and what it's used for. And, of course, [for] anyone who returns to the Google site within two years, the cookie will be renewed. I think two days rather than two years is probably a better period for a search cookie,"

stated Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.

How Does Search Really Work? Or, Can I Trust Google?

Computing Reviews released an interesting topic: “Adversarial
Information Retrieval: The Manipulation of Web Content:” by Dennis Fetterly of Microsoft Research. To summarize, Fetterly demonstrates: how search engine results can be manipulated by content providers. By using methods such as adding unrelated content to meta tags, duplicating information, and cloaking content so it is indexed
differently, Web pages can improve their result rankings. While the economic incentive for achieving high rankings is significant, manipulated results undermine the trust of millions of users. Fetterly suggests research into link-based spam detection and the identification of spam blogs, and advocates the development of a clear set of rules
for search engines. This is a worthwhile read.