bruceb news

When I opened Google News today, I was greeted by this screen, asking me to “collect private badges for [my] favorite topics”:

Here’s the way it was described in the Google Blog:

“On Google News, the average reader of political news has read 20 articles about politics in the last six months. Where do you stand?

“Starting today, in the U.S. edition of Google News, you can see how voracious a news reader you are by earning Google News badges as you read articles about your favorite topics. The more you read, the higher level badge you’ll receive, starting with Bronze, then moving up the ladder to Silver, Gold, Platinum and finally, Ultimate.

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Everyone might get something useful out of David Pogue’s column today for the New York Times, a collection of tips and tricks for cellphones and computers. Some of them are basic, some won’t apply, but I’ll bet you find a pearl or two that give you an “A Ha!” moment.

Random examples:

• Do you know what the strange pictures are that turn up in advertisements, like the one above? They’re “QR codes” – take a picture of them with a special app on your iPhone or Android phone (e.g. Google Goggles), and you’ll be taken to a web page.
• Microsoft runs a free voice-activated business directory at (800) BING-411.

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The iPad was not the first tablet on the market. Microsoft was one of the first companies to deliver a tablet, with the first prototype demonstrated more than ten years ago. No one cared.

Apple created the demand for the iPad more or less from scratch, leaving Microsoft looking completely helpless. For a while it plaintively complained in interviews, “Hey, there are Windows tablets, too,” but eventually the Microsoft spokespeople lapsed into sullen silence and let Apple run away with the tablet market. Microsoft still shows no sign of a coherent tablet strategy. It periodically claims that it will have a great tablet OS eventually but the promises get more vague and dates are delayed over and over, as if it’s having trouble thinking of something – anything – that might be interesting. […] continued

Previously:
Google Spam
Google Spam – Google Responds

If you are interested in Search Engine Optimization and the business of running web sites, the New York Times has published a must-read article, “The Dirty Little Secrets Of Search.” The paper launched an investigation to discover why JC Penney was ranking number one in Google search results for dozens of words or phrases – “dresses,” “bedding,” “area rugs,” and many more. For months – running through the holiday shopping season – a search for “Samsonite carry on luggage” would show Penney first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

The Times unfolds the story like a thriller, right down to an expensive dinner with the owner of a black-hat SEO company who won’t disclose his real name and speaks “in an animated hush, like a man worried about eavesdroppers.”

Here’s the way the NYT describes the dark side of SEO:

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As internal unrest in Egypt worsens, the government has cut off nearly all Internet traffic into and out of the country.

A few days ago the government cut off access to social networking websites, including Facebook and Twitter. Today the entire country is offline after the four companies that handle virtually all traffic were ordered to shut down.

At the same time, the government has begun to shut down cellphones in selected areas, according to the New York Times.

Here’s a nice summary in The Atlantic of how this was achieved and what the implications are. Basically, Egypt has a relatively small number of cables carrying Internet traffic into the country, and the four major ISPs followed orders from the government to shut everything down. […] continued

You’re looking at a graph that will get an inordinate amount of attention in the global technical community and cause tremendous disruption for the next few years. Let me give you a very broad overview of an issue that you hope will be solved long before you ever have to know much about it.

The Internet is built on IPv4 addresses, a scheme created in the early 1980s. You’ll recall that when you type in a domain name (“www.bruceb.com”), your computer looks up the name in, roughly, giant telephone books before your browser is sent to the “real” address – the IPv4 address. […] continued

Ooh! A milestone! I’m sure you’re as excited as I am! This is article number 2000 in the never-ending series of Bruceb News posts!

I get such joy out of writing these articles for you, using too many words to describe things that normal people find uninteresting. There’s such a reward when I’m in the zone, able to combine being condescending on the one hand and inaccurate on the other, selflessly trying to serve my devoted audience of fifteen readers. Hi, mom! Oh wait, fourteen readers. She unsubscribed. Well, the rest of you know who you are. In fact, you probably know each other. […] continued

In December the Transportation Security Administration released its airport security screening procedure guidelines with redactions that failed to remove the underlying text. (Boing Boing: “Unfortunately, the security geniuses at the DHS don’t know that drawing black blocks over the words you want to eliminate from your PDF doesn’t actually make the words go away, and can be defeated by nefarious al Qaeda operatives through a complex technique known as ctrl-a/ctrl-c/ctrl-v.”) It has happened over and over in lawsuits and releases by high profile government agencies.

So it’s hardly a surprise to see another story in the news yesterday about a botched attempt to redact words from a legal document. […] continued

The Wall Street Journal reports today: “Hackers in Europe and China successfully broke into computers at nearly 2,500 companies and government agencies over the last 18 months in a coordinated global attack that exposed vast amounts of personal and corporate secrets to theft, according to a computer-security company that discovered the breach.”

This is apparently not related to the attacks from China that caused Google to make noises last month about closing its operations in that country.  In fact, the New York Times calmly notes that this is a relatively small blip in the world of compromised computers and botnets. The Conficker botnet reached its peak at 15 million computers and continues to contaminate more than 7 million systems globally. […] continued

Two recent announcements.

The New York Times officially added “Times Skimmer” to its family of web sites, with an attractive interface for browsing through news stories without scrolling. Here’s the announcement, and here’s more information about Times Skimmer. Make sure you’re also familiar with the standalone New York Times Reader, an even better way to read the news on a computer.

Google rolled out a minor change to its home page, adding an effect that initially displays an almost bare page with a search box. The other menus and links will fade in when you move the mouse. […] continued