Congratulations, Mrs. the James (aka Zannah). Now, if you don’t stop blogging on your honeymoon, I’m gonna have to come out there and pounce you…
OK, this is superbly strange. I was just surfing around MetaBaby (one of my favorite sites), and came across this page. Why is it strange? Because Phil Jache is my friend, he’s sitting right here next to me, and he didn’t do this. He made a page months ago with this URL, but with none of the current text and graphics on it, and it was long enough ago that it should have expired by now. Weeeeeeiiiiirrrrrrd.
Am I the only one who recognized the overwhelming lack of a need for another Jesus Day, given that the world’s already got Christmas and Easter? Dubya is a fargin’ nutburger. (Update: apparently, I’m not the only one who noted this small fact.)
I’m sitting here, migrating four machines from home-built hardware to Compaq DeskPro EN boxes, reinstalling operating systems, moving stuff around, and having to think a lot. My brain hurts.
I was playing around with Gnutella a while back, after reading an article about it, and noticed that every single search returned at least one hit which was named the exact same thing as my search string. When I grabbed it, it turned out to be an HTML page which was a porn ad. Someone has made doing this much, much easier with a program called ShareZilla — it intercepts all Gnutella searches and inserts an ad for you in the returns. Things like this will probably hurt Gnutella a great deal; the source to the app is open, and the network is distributed, not centralized, so they probably won’t ever be able to stop people from doing things like this.
Very, very cool — it turns out that ciprofloxacin, one of the most used antibiotics in the world, is effective against anthrax. The first drug usually given to women with urinary tract infections is cipro; who knew that they could all also rest easier, knowing that they were safe from bioterrorism for a little while?
The response around the web to Joel Spolsky’s Microsoft Passport article (both in the email to Joel that he displays on his site and the little quips on other weblogs) is pretty interesting to me. People are automatically saying “This is evil! We must stop this!”, and I can’t help thinking that it’s purely because it’s Microsoft’s doing. Why can’t I help thinking this? Because nobody’s complaining about the various Yahoo sites, or the Go Network sites, doing the exact same thing via nearly identical mechanisms. (Since I only made oblique reference to it yesterday, I’ll point to it again — I wrote down my thoughts in response to Joel’s article.)
In fact, Yahoo even has a mechanism, web beacons, that allows them to use cookies from non-Yahoo sites within their pages and yahoo.com cookies from non-Yahoo sites. Has anyone written a scathing article about their attempts to take over the world?
In fact, Yahoo even has a mechanism, web beacons, that allows them to use cookies from non-Yahoo sites within their pages and yahoo.com cookies from non-Yahoo sites. Has anyone written a scathing article about their attempts to take over the world?
Here’s the difference —
1) Yahoo! is only placing Yahoo! beacons on other Yahoo! web sites, like GeoCities (which doesn’t have a Yahoo! domain name because they were bought out).
2) The Web Beacons seem to merely be used for user tracking information and not a single-sign-in/wallet system like Passport (that could change, obviously, but that’s how it currently works).
• Posted by: Aaron Swartz on Jul 30, 2000, 8:59 AM1) Yahoo! is only placing Yahoo! beacons on other Yahoo! web sites, like GeoCities (which doesn’t have a Yahoo! domain name because they were bought out).
Surf before you type, Aaron. Go to http://www.geocities.com/ in your browser, and tell me what your address bar shows when the page loads; geocities.com is a historical relic.
Do you have any proof whatsoever that Yahoo is only placing them on Yahoo sites? My understanding of the explanation page was that they will use beacons on any advertiser’s website — their corporate, non-Yahoo website — that places ads on Yahoo. In fact, this is stated explicitly on the web beacons page, in the last paragraph under the Yahoo! Points section.
To me, this is a great example of the FUD out there. Evil, evil Microsoft does something, and you assume the absolute worst; nice, nice Yahoo does something, and you’re willing to assume the absolute best. Whaddya say that instead of assuming things, let’s wait and see what actually happens, what actual uses all this is put to.
• Posted by: Jason Levine on Jul 30, 2000, 10:00 AMSurf before you type, Aaron. Go to http://www.geocities.com/ in your browser, and tell me what your address bar shows when the page loads; geocities.com is a historical relic.
Yes, but since Cool URIs don’t change the thousands of GeoCities websites are still over at geocities.com — geocities.yahoo.com is just for sign-up and other corporate-info type stuff.
Do you have any proof whatsoever that Yahoo is only placing them on Yahoo sites?
No, but at least Yahoo! isn’t actively endorsing me to put them on my page, nor are they encouraging me (or even allowing me) to use the Yahoo! ID system to track my users. Microsoft on the other hand (read my other post) is actively trying to drum up support for the Passport program and cause websites to store their users with it. Indeed, Passport is a major part of the new .NET strategy, which many have seen as a “let’s have Microsoft take over the Internet” move.
Evil, evil Microsoft does something, and you assume the absolute worst; nice, nice Yahoo does something, and you’re willing to assume the absolute best.
Well, perhaps that’s because of reputation. Microsoft has ruined their reputation through various and rampant privacy violations. Also, Microsoft’s strategy has always been of the embrace and extend type. Thus, it’s natural to be worried about their behavior when they try something like this.
Whaddya say that instead of assuming things, let’s wait and see what actually happens, what actual uses all this is put to.
Here’s an actual fact. Microsoft is trying to get lots of sites (not just Microsoft ones) to use the Passport system. This has a number of latent privacy problems that probably aren’t noticed by most web users. Joel is trying to explain the problems of these systems and inform web users about them. I’m all for information and discussion about these systems.
Perhaps, we can encourage Microsoft to open up the Passport system as an open standard (using XML-RPC or SOAP, perhaps?) so that we can choose who we want storing our data. If we don’t trust Microsoft we can go to another server, or set up our own.
Microsoft has a lot of clout, if they’re trying to push their log in system on the rest of the Internet (which it sure looks like) I think it’s a good idea to start thinking about privacy problems like these before blindly accepting as a good idea and fate.
• Posted by: Aaron Swartz on Jul 30, 2000, 10:18 AM