Anybody who hasn’t heard of Google Wave had better sit up. It’s been in development by a team led by the brothers at Google Labs who brought us Google Maps (along with the API that’s helped make it so useful and popular).
They’ve dubbed it as what email would have been if it were invented today. It takes the best of online/offline collaborative messaging and smooshes them together into what the preview announcement describes as product, platform and protocol (which will be open). All of this is currently being made available to developers to start hacking together “robots” and “gadgets” which will surely bring about some terrifyingly brilliant, if not convoluted and sinister collective artificial intelligence which I’ll dub Skynet (when Wolfram escapes into its own robot instance) but is probably closer to Borg.
Anyway. Sounds neat.
Slashdot has recently had a few posts involving Openfire and I just have one question: what the heck is Openfire, exactly? The Openfire website doesn’t tell us anything other than it “is a real time collaboration (RTC) server”. In the Openfire Support forum, somebody asks this question point-blank and the only useful answers tell the person that they don’t need Openfire. Can anybody shed any light on this? Is it just an instant messaging/chat server? Does it burn coal or use nuclear energy? Will your attractiveness to the opposite sex increase exponentially? Come on, how hard can it be to have a Features page?
This isn’t so much about Openfire specifically, but just poor website representation of a product. This actually happens more often than I find believable.
Honestly, the thing I love about this story is that it’s a bunch of rich villagers running Google out of town. Finally, the victimized, well-to-do of the world are standing up for themselves.
This whole kerfuffle about Google Street View being a burglars’ aid is ridiculous. You don’t need a map to tell who’s loaded or not, just a car. Or a bike. Or a pair of legs and eyes.
“We’ve already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike.”
By this logic, Chicago, San Francisco and London and all the other (rich) cities that have Street View should have been looted and burnt to the ground by now. What this statement actually tells us is that statistically their crime rate has had a small bump – they’re not out of their norm yet, as in the past 7 years recorded crime in that area (the borough of Milton-Keynes) has hovered around 10-13 reported burglaries per year, and 6 out of 52 weeks is a very small sample period.
Similarly, the terrorist-tool argument is nonsense: if your really a terrorist, you’ll launch at high visibility targets…or better yet, just into populated areas. I don’t need to point out current events in Israel and Gaza to make the case. Clearly, that’s exactly what both sides are doing. And all the claims that the Mumbai attackers used Google Earth to coordinate their activities is speciously anecdotal, being trotted out by hysterical right-wingers. Seriously: I haven’t found a single report that hasn’t been out of the mouth of somebody with the agenda to censor Google’s activities. If you find one, please tell me.
Intro: this is a brief account, excerpted from the original which was much longer and had more detailed forensic information. I decided not to publish it since it might be under investigation but several traces of it are still publicly available if you know where to look.
I have to admit, I am often amused by the level of deviousness that goes into scamming, fraud, etc. Email phishing is particularly interesting because it is a specialized form of social engineering fraud which is filtered through technology and preys on the naïve and their understanding of technology.
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Barack Obama’s recent gift to Gordon Brown was a stack of 25 classic American movies on Region 1 encoded DVDs. The article in question on the Telegraph website states:
A Downing Street spokesman said he was “confident” that any gift Obama gave Brown would have been “well thought through,” but referred me to the White House for assistance on the “technical aspects”.
The author, Tim Walker, then gleefully crows:
By the way, when Obama’s unlikely gift was disclosed, a reader emailed me to ask if Clueless was among the films. Funnily enough, it was not.
One wonders if indeed the gift was well thought through and was, in fact, a sly and subtle message to Brown about DRM failsauce
