You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide From Human Flesh Search Engines & Your Cell Phone
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on March 5, 2010 by admin in Technology
Friday, March 5th, 2010You might as well come out come out wherever you are, because between Human Flesh Search Engines, cell phone GPS, social network analysis, and erosion of privacy rights, they’re gonna find you anyway. Unless of course you’re Osama Bin Laden.
 I wish this were a parody graphic. It’s from Google China’s Human Flesh Search page. |
If you’re not paranoid or have nothing to hide, things like the UK’s millions of security cameras, the TSA subjecting you to cavity searches, and Google tracking everything you do won’t bother you, and may even comfort you somehow. Personally, although I’m not doing anything particularly questionable with my time, and am not ashamed of the questionable activities I do engage in, I enjoy the ability to say “none of your businesss” and go off into the forest to sit on a rock and think for awhile. Back in 2002, the fact that cell phone providers were going to add the GPS-powered E911 feature to phones raised the question what do they plan to do with this information? Well the answers are finally in. If you’re the Iranian government, they’ll help you prosecute and arrest political protesters. If you’re the FBI or the White House, they’ll help you track callers without a warrant, because the current administration – much like the Bush gang – believes that cell phone users have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when using a cell phone. “So”, you say to yourself, “I’ll just ditch my cell phone then”. Ha. Forget it. They (whoever “they” are) will still find you, either using social networking like they did with Saddam Hussein , or with the latest in reverse lookups, disturbingly referred to in China as Human Flesh Search Engines. Interested in working part time as a “Google Human Flesh Searcher”? Explore your options here. I wonder if this would work for catching Osama Bin Laden? Read the rest of this entry »
The Adobe Apocalypse
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 19, 2010 by admin in Technology
Friday, February 19th, 2010Why I hate Adobe, and how their products could bring down western civilization.
I’ve been deriving secret glee from Steve Jobs’ repeated slams against Adobe Flash. Although I have a lot of friends who are hard-core Adobephiles, I have to admit I’ve always quietly loathed the company’s products. I always found the interface of two of their flagship products – Photoshop
Cool New Search Tools That Aren’t Google
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 11, 2010 by admin in Technology
Thursday, February 11th, 2010Google still hasn’t found what I’m looking for, but fortunately there are lots of cool new search alternatives.
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Yesterday’s underwhelming launch of Google’s Buzz highlighted something that’s frustrated me for a couple of years, mostly since Google achieved search engine dominance. That “something” is the ability to search productively from a small variety of sources and get useful results; something Google has made it a little difficult to do, first by crushing the competition, later by failing to innovate in many ways, much like their predecessors. It would be idiotic of me to not give them credit for the ways in which they have innovated, especially web advertising (we’re using it all over this site!), but the fact is, the web is always evolving rapidly, and business models aren’t always keeping up. And Google’s ideas are generally focused on increasing Google’s revenue, not pure, user-centric innovation. Fortunately, we seem to be entering a new era of real search innovation; the only downside is that key players are going in so many directions that you almost need a search tool to find the right search tool. As an example, take a look at TheSearchEnginelist.com, one of the best-organized and largest lists you’ll find. Even this list omits a fairly large number of newer useful tools, which collectively take a rather diverse set of approaches to the problem. One approach is centered around the idea that you need help figuring out what you’re looking for in the first place. Like InstaFound.com, which tries to pick the “best of the best” from other engines and give you a single result, or Jamesoo, which assembles a newspaper-like results page from RSS feeds. But the former can also lead to the “worst of the worst”, and the latter can just be utterly irrelevant. Of these types of engines, WolframAlpha is pretty impressive, but not really geared toward daily use by the average person. There are also some cool new specialized search tools, especially when it comes to images and multimedia. TinEye and Gazopa both offer “similar image search”, which helps you find images based on existing images. Their predecessor Pixsta.com was acquired last year and put to work as the shopping site Empora, which demonstrates the value of this kind of search. There are also cool tools like Fizy (requires log in), which searches for song files and YouTube links based on simple song or artist input, and is REALLY FAST. It’s likely that all this innovation will lead to a few useful search tools rather than a single behemoth like Google. A couple of likely directions would be customizable aggregators like yourversion.com, or social search like Aardvark. Or as we’ve mentioned before, recommender engines. Along the way we’ll see lots of gimmicky approaches like Greenseng, a “green” search engine, or g8search, which is sort of like AdSense on steroids. And there are a few mysterious startups with dramatic homepages like RockMelt, which we touched on previously, or DiscoveryEngine, which apparently has an active crawler called DiscoBot but on their “about” page is only saying “We will sell no wine before its time”. There are in fact so many new tools that we’re going to revisit the topic in another piece soon. I personally use all three major search engines and a variety of aggregators to find stuff, but if YOU have any thoughts or tips, feel free to share them. Social search is where it’s at! Read the rest of this entry »
You Won’t Find The G-Spot With Your iPad
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 4, 2010 by admin in Technology
Thursday, February 4th, 2010If you’re an Apple or Google lover who thinks Microsoft is The Evil One, you really need to get up to speed. No, One Bing Shall Not Rule Them all.
If you’re the sort of person who thinks of Microsoft as The Evil One, you haven’t really followed what Google and Apple have been up to lately. And if you think that tablet devices don’t have a big future you’re probably also fortunate that you don’t have investment dollars either, because you’d be kicking yourself down the road for the opportunities you missed. Yes, the tablet wars are on. Steve Ballmer rushed the announcement of the HP/Windows Slate to beat Steve Jobs recent unveiling of the iPad. And hot on the tails of Jobs’ announcement, Google released a rather feeble concept video of their Chrome Operating System in use on an imaginary tablet device (images here). And then of course there’s the lawsuit against the Indian company that allegedly stole the CrunchPad and renamed it the JooJoo. But what’s really going to be interesting about how this all plays out is that it’s not about the devices per se, it’s about who controls how you do what you do, and all the big players know this. Yes, Apple kicked Adobe in the face over flash, but in a way, who cares? Flash has been a crashmonster since its inception. What’s really at stake here is how you get on the web, where you buy things, and how you do your business. And Apple’s closed system on the iPad is geared toward this end. Google already has search pretty well locked down, and they additionally want you phoning and creating all your office documents through tools like the Google Phone, Google Voice, Google Docs, and G-Mail. Imagine a future in which the coolest new device doesn’t play nice with the coolest new tools you want to use on it. And if you can’t even install your own software, because it’s all located on a remote server that you have no contorl over. And to take “Evil” to a new level in this realm, now that Apple makes their own chips for their exclusionary device, they’re essentially like Intel and Microsoft rolled into one. Adding a little irony to all of this is the fact that Apple is talking to Microsoft about replacing Google on the iPhone with Bing. Who is your evil nemesis now? Read the rest of this entry »
Google Earth’s GeoEye & 360Cities 3D Panoramas
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on January 4, 2010 by admin in Technology
Monday, January 4th, 2010Being constantly under surveillance has never been so much fun.
Here’s a quick preview of 360 Cities with -appropriately enough – Dead or Alive as a backing track |
Do you ever get that funny feeling that someone is watching you? Well if not, you should. We’re getting closer every day to full time coverage of every location on the planet. Between things like the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in England, the way Google has you covered from your desktop to the sky, and the members of 360Cities obsessively creating cool 360 degree panoramas of the planet (see their blog for the latest views), it won’t be long before there truly will be nowhere to hide. Especially with tools like PhotoSynth to put the info all together. You may or may not find this kind of coverage invasive, but you know what? It’s really kind of FUN too. You may have read that Google made a deal with spy satellite company GeoEye last year to gain a competitive edge over Microsoft, Yahoo and other satellite image search providers. What you may not realize though is that the satellite can capture objects 16 inches across from 423 miles up in space! Don’t worry, Google isn’t allowed to use those images, only the NGA and men of integrity with security clearances like Dick Cheney are. And your secrets are always safe with the US government and politicians named Dick, right? In any case, the upside of all of this is that Google has been showing off the images on their Google Earth GeoEye pages. Even if you’re not stunned with the images, it’s a blast pretending you’re shooting the opening titles for a James Bond film by zooming in and out from the Earth, from an orbital view to street level in seconds. Likewise with the 360 Cities panoromas; some of the images aren’t so thrilling, but moving around in them is an entirely new experience, and a cool one at that. See a sample below. Read the rest of this entry »