Canadian community first to go completely solar

Canadian community first to go completely solar

Canadian community first to go completely solar

Canadian community first to go completely solar

Drake Landing solar Community is setting a huge precedence and holding the bar high for energy efficient building.

Canadian community first to go completely solar

Microsoft BrowserRank versus Google PageRank

Nevertheless, some of Microsoft’s arguments about Google’s PageRank system are well founded. SEO, search engine optimization, is an actual business function. There are people who claim to be experts, but if you’ve ever worked with one, you’d know that they cannot guarantee results, merely an understanding of some of the ways in which Google works. Do a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and hope it works out for you.

On the other hand, there are businesses that thrive, and are extremely profitable, and all they do is game Google search traffic. We’ve all been there, a page that ranks high, seems to be relevant, but is just a set of paid links. This kind of thing is akin to the prevalence of viruses on Windows: when you are popular and ubiquitous, you are prone to more attacks, and unsavory practices.

However, BrowserRank does raise some interesting points. It tries to judge a page by its usage, which kind of means popularity,too. This makes it great for well trafficked sites, perhaps. Interestingly enough, the Microsoft researchers admit that the paucity of data that would be attached to the tail pages of a site, in other words places where user data is sparse, would require some sort of page ranking algorithm, akin to Google’s.

BrowserRank collects user data from the browser and server side of the process. The researchers are very clear in saying that they used a large group of users to verify their claims that BrowserRank was a better measurement than PageRank, and that it was “under legal agreements with them.” Perhaps a sign that Microsoft is sensitive to the notion that it is collecting more personal data than Google may be, or just sensitive in general? On the other hand, doesn’t something like an Alexa toolbar also rank your site based on its usage?

The pdf of the original research paper can be found here . BrowserRank seems to be a finesse approach to page rankins in search, while PageRank goes for volume. Does Microsoft have a version 1, 2, and 3 of search in the offering? We know that it is only on version 3 that Redmond kind of manages to play the game as it ought to be played.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38586/118/

Escaped spammer murders family, commits suicide

The surviving teenager was shot in the neck, but was able to run to a nearby house and call for help. An 8-month-old boy was found in the car, unharmed.

Between 2003 and 2005, Davidson sent thousands of spam emails advertising various products and services. He became immensely wealthy and court documents show he deposited upwards of $3.5 million into his bank accounts during that time.

U.S. Attorney Troy Eid says the situation is a nightmare and called Davidson a “coward”.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38592/118/

Qantas 747 makes emergency landing after door blows out

The pilot made an emergency descent from 30000 feet to approximately 10000 feet and eventually landed in the Philippines to the thunderous applause of the relieved passengers.

Such explosive decompressions aren’t anything new and they do happen from time to time because of faulty maintenance or metal fatigue. But some experts are already blaming the explosion on a bomb. Sky News interviewed David Learmount, an editor at Flight International magazine, who said some kind of explosive in the suitcase might have caused the explosion.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38593/113/

Kaminsky (finally) provides DNS flaw details

Kaminsky said the word is getting out about the patches, but there are still many systems that are vulnerable. From the period of July 8 through July 13, 86 percent of the people testing their system on his Web site were vulnerable. Today it’s 52 percent. “Not perfect; not even good enough,” he said. But “I’ll take 52 any day of week and twice on Sunday.”

He started off by saying that he was trying to find a way to do content distribution using DNS when realized the problem. “How much trouble are we in? A lot.”

Of the public discussion from individuals within the security community, Kaminsky said Halvar Flake’s speculation was the closest. For those who said they knew of flaws in DNS before today, Kaminsky said “you didn’t know this one.”
Kaminsky described the flaw he’s been working on as containing three flaws; two have been known, but one was not. Security researchers always thought it was hard to poison DNS records. He said to think of the process as a race, with a good guy and bad guy each trying to get a secret number transaction ID. “You can get there first,” he said, “but you can’t cross finish line unless you have the secret number.” The good guy will always have it, but the bad guy has a 1 in 65,000 chance of getting it because the transaction ID is based in part on the port number used.

One bug with DNS is that the bad guy can start the race anytime he wants. If he doesn’t know the transaction number, he can always guess. Another fundamental flaw is that there will be multiple bad guys trying to guess the transaction number. The flaw Kaminsky found that builds on the first two is that not only can multiple bad guys participate in a single race, but there can also be multiple races. The example he gave was www.blackhat.com. A bad guy shouldn’t just try to guess the transaction ID for that address, but also for 1.blackhat.com, 2.blackhat.com, etc.

Everyone thought, he said, if “one sets a long time to live (TTL), say, for one year, that would work.” But Kaminsky found that going to look up 1.blackhat.com, 2.blackhat.com, etc, he can find the name server and then guess the transaction ID. Kaminsky said the process of getting a response is about 10 seconds.

“Patch is the way to go; it shuts down the attack vector,” said Jerry Dixon, former director of National Cyber Security Division of DHS. This was echoed by Rich Mogul of Securosis, and by Joao Damas, a senior program manager at the Internet Systems Consortium.

Kaminsky said the current patch has made exploits thousands of times harder–one in several hundred million, “not infinity.” The bug is core to the design; it’s fundamental to the design.”

What have we learned? “We learned what needs to be done to fix the Net in the future. I await the security community’s judgment on what we’ve done.”

As for the long-term “Where do we go from here?” Kaminsky said there’s going to be an awesome debate about that.

On August 6, Kaminsky will present “End of Cache as we know it” at Black Hat in Las Vegas.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-9998906-83.html

Microsoft: Windows 7 on track

“The product is tracking very, very well,” Veghte said. “We are committed and looking good, relative to our commitment–(shipping Windows 7) three years from general availability of Windows Vista.”

Microsoft has released few details on the product, largely assuring customers that it would be making big architectural changes and that it will have a new multitouch user interface.
Most of Veghte’s talk, as expected, was on Windows Vista and how Microsoft sees a large perception gap. Veghte showed the Mojave Project, first detailed here, in which users predisposed against Vista reacted favorably when shown Vista when it was presented under the guise of being a new version of Windows, code-named Mojave.

Even outside focus groups, Veghte said that not only are customers buying the operating system, but more are liking it, pointing to recent internal figures showing that 89 percent of users said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the product. Some 83 percent said they would recommend Vista to a friend or family member, Veghte said.

He also demoed Internet Explorer 8, which he said would be released in final form later this year. An early beta was shown off at the Mix ‘08 trade show in the spring.

Update: In the closing Q and A session, CEO Steve Ballmer was asked what Windows 7 would look like, but declined to offer any new details saying to do so would be a “no-win” situation.

“It’s going to look great; It’s going to be quite compatible,” he said, to some laughter. “If I wanted to start selling Windows 7 today, we’d start selling windows 7 today. Then you’d complain.”

He did reiterate what has already been said, saying that Windows 7 is designed to avoid making big changes. “The design point is compatible form the get-go in large measure,” he said.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9998827-56.html?tag=nefd.lede

NASA spacecraft reveal cause of auroras

NASA’s five THEMIS spacecraft in different orbits around Earth spotted the trigger for the substorms, powerful energy bursts in the planet’s magnetic field that can interfere with satellites, power grids and supercharge the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights.

“We discovered what sparks the magnificent light show of the aurora,” said THEMIS principal investigator Vassilis Angelopoulos, a space scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Angelopoulos and his team used the THEMIS probes to monitor the energy levels in Earth’s magnetic field. In February of this year, the spacecraft spotted substorms originating in the tail of the magnetosphere that streams out away from the sun. As energy levels in the magnetic field lines built up, they drew ever closer to one another until they reconnected, setting off a storm, researchers said.

For the last three decades, researchers were undecided on whether the substorms stemmed from magnetic field lines reconnecting, or originated much closer to Earth where they were triggered by explosive instability.

“Our data show clearly and for the first time that magnetic reconnection is the trigger,” said Angelopoulos.

The research is detailed in the July 24 online edition of the journal Science.

First discovered in the 19th century, magnetic substorms are recurring energy bursts stemming from the release of charged particles — collected from the sun’s solar wind — in the Earth’s magnetic field. The high-energy particles zoom down the Earth’s magnetic field lines until they collide with the planet’s upper atmosphere to create dazzling, shifting colors in the aurora borealis.

Researchers hope that by better understanding the storms, they will be able to prepare for or predict major space weather events before the cosmic tempests interfere with communications or endanger astronauts in Earth orbit.
“We need to understand this environment and eventually be able to predict when these large energy releases will happen so astronauts can go inside their spacecraft and we can turn off critical systems on satellites so they will not be damaged,” Angelopoulos said, adding that previous missions could only track bursts at a single point and time. “To resolve this question properly requires correlations and signal-timing at multiple locations. This is precisely what was missing until now.”

NASA’s $200 million THEMIS spacecraft, short for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms, launched in February 2007 on a two-year mission to hunt for the substorm source. The five dishwasher-sized spacecraft are arranged in different orbits between the Earth and moon, and are working in conjunction with 20 ground-based observatories across the northern United States and Canada to monitor substorm activity.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25836608/

Symbian and Android to make love, not war

“The question is, how many open source mobile platforms do we need? The mobile market does not need more divergence. It needs convergence, and this would be a way to accomplish this,” said Gold. “The mobile market needs some level of consolidation of platforms if it is to make big leaps forward, as developers currently struggle to make their applications available on so many divergent platforms.” Other key players in the mobile OS arena are Windows Mobile, Palm and Apple.

Reasoning behind the merger
Google has already slipped with Android, the analyst notes. The search giant would be better served if it focused on bringing its services and cross-device applications to the mobile phone space where it can leverage its advertising engine to generate substantial revenues. Symbian already enjoys dominant market share in smart phones but it could benefit from some Android features that could fill its own gaps. Gold thinks that an open version of Symbian “won’t be available for 18-24 months so there is ample time to combine the two code bases, combining the best of both into a consolidated OS.”

The most important reason for the merger is the fact that Symbian partners have realized that competing in the OS market is not where they need to be. Instead, mobile phone vendors should concentrate on providing a compelling end user experience and service offerings. By releasing resources allocated to the OS development, phone vendors can concentrate their efforts on generating new revenue streams by selling games, music, videos, applications and premium services. Most key players have already learned this lesson.

Nokia in particular is focused on expanding service offerings and it acquired couple of established online properties to complete the puzzle. The fruit of these efforts is OVI, Nokia’s online service that aims to be a one-stop shop for music, games and user-generated content, connecting and sharing users who do not necessarily have to own Nokia-branded device. Gold says that such end-user services can keep users loyal to the brand and generate substantial revenues.

Apple has learned this lesson long ago with its computers and is repeating the strategy with the iPhone. The company first brought the iTunes music store to the iPhone and then it introduced App Store to enable users to browse, download and buy third-party iPhone applications directly on the handset. Apple takes 30 percent of whatever developers charge for their applications. The Cupertino-based gadget maker also has high hopes for the recently introduced MobileMe suite of online services which offers 20GB of online storage, push email, calendar and contacts and seamless synchronization capabilities for the iPhone for $99 a year.

A gargantuan task
When you look at it from the computer industry perspective, the desktop OS market converged in its infancy and it came down to today’s three basic choices: Windows, OS X or various flavors of UNIX. We have a feeling that the mobile OS is moving in this direction and will ultimately end up with three choices: Symbian, Windows Mobile and the iPhone OS (it’s doubtful that mobile Linux variants will sustain market consolidation).

But combining Android and Symbian into a single product could be a gargantuan task, especially if the new OS has to provide backwards compatibility with the existing library of Symbian applications and the upcoming library of Android applications. Symbian has already said it will undertake major efforts to merge code bases from its supporting partners (Symbian, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, DoCoMo) into a new platform that will be able to run legacy applications. Gold thinks this is the opportunity to add the Android code base as well.

“Now would be the time to add another code base rather than doing it sometime down the road when things are more fixed,” , he said in an email interview with TGDaily. Ultimately, the final outcome will be decided by politics. “It is the Symbian board who will make that decision, based on the voting shares of its members,” said Gold.

We have also noted that an android and a symbian melding together would honor the late Philip K. Dick , and provide a better ending to Blade Runner than the numerous endings already provided.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38580/145/

Facebook Connect: laying the seeds for revolution

Now, let’s assume you don’t care. You like social networks. You still have a personal copy of your photos somewhere, and the rest of your content online is kind of done with once it’s out there. Let’s assume Facebook Connect succeeds. You may think it is great to have the ability to share various online experiences and apps with your social circle online, but you are, for want of a better term, the platform. The platform knows where you go, what you like, what you don’t like, and how you like to do certain things. Your daily reading habits will become more accessible, for example. Your flow through the Web is a shared experience, and increasingly, apathy and inertia sets in, and you decide to just update either your Facebook page, or MySpace, or LinkedIn, or whatever. One funnel for who you are to those that may be interested in you. Of course, you can have a “public” persona and a private one. You’re you on Facebook, and you’re that other you, Pervy McPete, off platform. Sounds almost Matrix-like in a desperate, analogy sort of way.

But, genuine concerns about personal space and privacy are important to consider from a cultural perspective. A culture that encourages people to have an online persona that is so open may also be creating a society that is less daring, and more prone to repeating bad jokes, or watching inane viral videos. And, you are the platform. The platform will need revenue, and it will try and find the quickest way to the money by targeting you as effectively as possible.

Shouldn’t we be suspicious of any system that seems to “know” what we want? We wouldn’t tolerate the same level of intrusion from Microsoft Windows, or our cell phone company. Yet, many of us are blind to the implications of it within the context of social networks. We somehow assume that we are protected by a site’s Privacy Policy. Is that really true? Can we really trust a commercial organization not to exploit us for gain, especially if they find a way around our pesky concerns? We’ve never put so much of ourselves out there so publicly. Never happened. It’s as if there is a personal journal of you online, and you don’t have any real control over it, only what goes in it. Try to hide it and it defeats the object of you having it. By its very nature, it has to be public.

Interoperability and openness between sites, and their data has become more of an argument about why not then, exactly how are we going to get this right for the user. Maybe, as users, we have become too engrossed by the process than the results.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38578/128/

Knol: Google does a pedia

Knol doesn’t rely on just anybody to create its collection of knowledgeable articles. You get to be the author, the buck stops here byline on a contribution, and if you write it, you kind of own it. Unlike Wikipedia, which it is compared to, Knol has a commercial bent. You get to run ads, too, and, in theory, make some money off of your expertise. It’s not a new concept, but it is a Google concept, and that’s about all it takes for the world domination theorists to come out of the woodwork. But, does it have legs?

After months of teasing and internal testing, Google officially launched its eagerly-anticipated online encyclopedia announced in December . The service dubbed Knol aims to organize the collective knowledge of Internet users into a searchable, browsable service that has been compared to Wikipedia. However, this is where similarity with world’s famous online encyclopedia stops. At first glance, Knol feels more inviting and Web 2.0-like, which may attract those put off by the academic appeal of Wikipedia. But, ultimately, it will come down to content and Google thinks it got it right with Knol.

“Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects,” explained Knol product manager Cedric Dupont and software engineer Michael McNally in a Google blog post Wednesday. You will not have to be a rocket scientist to post a knol because everyone can become an author. And you also get a chance to earn some money on content you post, if you opt to run.

Similarly to the Facebook culture, Google will try to persuade authors to use their real names (although this will not be a requirement) and to stand behind their work, unlike Wikipedia where mostly anonymous authors post articles. Google says it will provide optional author identity confirmation via telephone or credit card verification. Verified authors will have a “verified” stamp added to their knols.

With Knol, multiple authors will be able to write about the same topic. “The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. “We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good,” said Google.

It remains to be seen if Knol will have more fact-checked content than stuff on Wikipedia, where entries are sometimes gamed for nefarious purposes, limiting its efficacy at times. Readers can suggest edits to a knol but its author always remains in charge able to accept, reject or modify a reader’s suggestions before their contribution becomes visible. Google thinks this fact alone can mean a world of difference to the authority of its offerings. Readers will also have the opportunity to submit comments, rate or write a review of a knol.

Google didn’t forget about the fun factor either so it inked an agreement with the New Yorker magazine to allow an author to add one cartoon per knol from the magazine’s cartoon repository. Another interesting features allows knol authors to choose between two licensing methods for their work: the ubiquitous, and open Creative Commons or a full copyright license which reserves all rights to the author.

Analysts think that Knol’s success will be determined by its ability to achieve a critical mass of contributors and readers. “It’s a long shot, if you had to give it odds on whether this will change the world or not,” said Gartner analyst Andrew Frank. The analyst explains that there are not many companies that have the resources and courage to challenge Wikipedia. “It’s interesting and certainly shows how Google is one of the few companies with the scale to be able to do an experiment like this without being intimidated by Wikipedia,” he said.

Most of the content on Knol at launch iwas medical articles. Interestingly enough, on the same day, Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medical School and the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health were all supporting the launch of The Medpedia Project . It’s kind of bizarre that Google does a lot of things that are passive-aggressive acts of competition. Or maybe they just get fed up of sending all that traffic to Wikipedia, and not seeing any ad money coming back. Damn those world domination theorists!
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38575/118/