Monday, February 8, 2010
What Happened In My Birth Year
What Happened In My Birth Year is a new site I’ve been working on. Feedback to this project very welcome, bug reports too!
[Thanks Tony, Niniane and Aaron for early testing!]
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Google to Air Super Bowl Ad?
On their way to become a more normal company, Google went from No Ads to Mostly Good Ads. Two examples are the “story” videos for for Google search and one for the Nexus One phone. Some speculations are that Google will now air an ad in the Super Bowl due in some hours. Wikipedia explains:
The Super Bowl has been the championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the premier association of professional American football, since 1967. In most years, the Super Bowl is the most-watched American television broadcast. Many popular singers and musicians have performed during the event’s pre-game and halftime ceremonies. The day on which the Super Bowl is played is now considered a de facto American national holiday, called Super Bowl Sunday. Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest day for U.S. food consumption, after Thanksgiving Day. (...)
Because of its high viewership, commercial airtime for the Super Bowl broadcast is the most expensive of the year. Due to the high cost of investing in advertising on the Super Bowl, companies regularly develop their most expensive advertisements for this broadcast. As a result, watching and discussing the broadcast’s commercials has become a significant aspect of the event.
As Wikipedia’s Super Bowl advertising history page notes, one past highlight was in 1984, when “the ad for Apple’s Macintosh followed a 1984 theme. Directed by Ridley Scott, the ad featured a woman wearing track-and-field clothing sprinting into a large auditorium and hurling a large hammer into a screen”.
[Via Paul.]
Update: The ad which aired was above Parisian Love commercial. [Thanks George!]
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Frequency of Strip Versions of Various Games (xkcd)
[Cartoon from Xkcd by Randall Munroe, (cc) free to share but not to sell]
Google Chrome PageRank Checker
I was just trying to find out the PageRank of a couple of sites using Internet Explorer’s Google Toolbar, but something was broken. Google Chrome has a nice PageRank extension, though. As you can see in the screenshot, it’s helpful by immediately showing the actual value instead of just a green bar. A couple of times it reverted to zero after loading, but otherwise the values it was showing looked like they were the correct ones. (Considering it doesn’t look like it’s an offical extension, I’m not sure though how accurate the values are now, or will be in the future.)
Friday, February 5, 2010
Google People Hopper
Google’s social network site Orkut has a new application that lets you morph one face into another. Called People Hopper, it was broken yesterday but is working now. I’ve created a profile for this purpose (I deleted my real one a while ago) and morphed the first picture, Mr. John Cleese, into Tony Ruscoe below:
The interesting part here is that the intermediate steps themselves are other people from Orkut. Clicking on any face will take you to their profile. Nice here is that Google does some face detection, so you don’t need to work with perfectly cropped portraits. Beyond this, the general area of face search/ portrait comparison/ finding likely-looking faces might have some privacy implications in the future. Will Google Images be able to find your appearance twin in a couple of years – and would we want to be found?
[Thanks WebSonic.nl and Tony!]
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Google + NSA?
The Washington Post writes:
The world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.
Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google – and its users – from future attack.
The Washington Post’s sources say “the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications.”
Aren’t partnerships a two way street, though? What if the NSA comes knocking on Google’s door asking for help next time?
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The Brain-Computer Interface X Prize
Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites recently rolled out SpaceShipTwo, a commercial passenger spaceship designed after the winning ship that captured the $10M Ansari X PRIZE for spaceflight in 2004. (...)
The latest X PRIZE, however, has nothing to do with the commercialization of outer space. The Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) X PRIZE will reward nothing less than a team that provides vision to the blind, new bodies to disabled people, and perhaps event a geographical “sixth sense” akin to a GPS iPhone app in the brain.
[Thanks Sugar!]
Google Chrome OS Tablet Design Exploration
Google’s Chromium.org site contains some pictures “of how a Chrome OS tablet UI might look in hardware”.
Design studies for other hardware are available too.
[Via Spiegel. Pics CC-licensed by Google.]
Did YouTube Block Marijuana Questions in Obama Interview?
Google’s YouTube allowed viewers to submit a question for US president Obama. Over 11,000 questions were asked and over 667,000 votes were cast, YouTube writes, saying they “collected the top questions”. Now, Toke of the Town however writes that “YouTube Censors Marijuana Question In Obama Interview”:
Yes, questions about marijuana were the most popular in the CitizenTube voting Monday afternoon.
But YouTube, in a gutless move, decided at the last minute not to present the highest ranked questions to the President. (...)
So they chunked all the votes, and just picked the questions they would have asked anyway.
It seems obvious now that when YouTube said “We’ve collected the top questions,” they didn’t mean the questions viewers thought were tops. They mean the questions they picked to be tops.
Sorted by popularity, the top 3 questions of the “Other” category on the Google Moderator board set up for the purpose are:
- “Mr. President, When you asked the country to give you questions, one of the most asked was ’Are you going to legalize Marijuana’. When you read it, you laughed like it wasnt serious. Why is that?” -Anonymous, Florida
- “What are your plans for cannabis legalization?” -Anonymous, Oklahoma
- “Why don’t you legalize marijuana, it seems like a great way to gain tax money, and people should have to right to use it if they please, and it would cripple gang activity? Do you plan to?” -Lussy Picker, Kentucky
“Other” was one of several categories, and questions were also submittable by video. Of the top 10 questions in that category, 8 were related to cannabis legalization. One other was about ensuring that the internet remains free of censorship, and another about DMCA takedown reqests suppressing freedom of speech and fair use on sites like YouTube. Also, 9 out of 10 video questions in the “Other” category – including the whole top 5 – were about marijuana. Voting is closed by now, so I suppose these results are rather stable.
The YouTube employee doing the interview puts it this way during the introduction of the video (my emphasis): “Hello everyone, we’re here at the White House today for a very unique event: an exlusive interview with President Obama, in which the questions come from American people who’ve submitted them and chosen them online.” He continues that “all of the questions you’ll see here today were voted into the top tier of the thousands of questions we received, and none of them have been chosen by the White House, or seen by the president”.
If anyone of you has more information, please add a comment. Is above outline correct?
[Via Reddit.]
Update: DarthNole comments:
They also arbitrarily moved top rated questions into the “other” category without concent from the original poster and without considering whether they really belonged there or not. The Top Rated question under “Health Care” was about legalizing marijuana for medical uses (re-schedule marijuana) until YouTube decided that all marijuana questions belonged in the “other” category.
Update 2: Google replied to a question per email, saying:
We were only able to ask a small handful of the over 11,000 questions we received. In picking questions we wanted to ensure we minimized duplicates, asked a broad range of questions to cover as many issues as possible, and had a mix of video and text questions. We also wanted to make sure the questions would lead to substantive answers and hadn’t been asked in previous programs we’ve had with the President. We had plenty more questions to ask, but the president’s time was obviously limited.
Note: A Marijuana related question had been asked before, in another interview session. Google also says the White House did not block any particular topic or question.
An App Store for Google Docs, Gmail?
The Wall Street Journal writes:
Google Inc. is preparing to launch a store selling online business software that integrates with its Web services, according to people briefed by the company, enlisting software developers in its battle against Microsoft Corp.
These people said the store will sell business software designed by outside developers to integrate and add capabilities to Google Apps, such as enhanced security features or the ability to import contacts.
Google eventually plans to allow customers to purchase its partners’ software through the site, taking a cut for itself and sharing some revenue with the developers, these people said. Google will allow users to quickly access their purchased applications through the menu at the top of their screens within Gmail or Google Docs, they said.
[Thanks MBegin!]
Finding Out a Visitor’s Name by Checking Their Social Network Browser History
In A Practical Attack to De-Anonymize Social Network Users, the authors write:
In this paper, we introduce a novel de-anonymization attack against users of social networking sites. In particular, we show that information about the group memberships of a user (i.e., the groups of a social network to which a user belongs) is often sufficient to uniquely identify this user. When unique identification is not possible, then the attack might still significantly reduce the size of the set of candidates that the victim belongs to.
To make the de-anonymization attack practical, we present a way in which an adversary can learn information about the group memberships of a user who is just browsing the web. To do this, an attacker can leverage the well-known technique of history stealing ... More precisely, using history stealing, an attacker can probe the browser history of a victim for certain URLs that reveal group memberships on a social network. By combining this information with previously collected group membership data from the social network, it is possible to de-anonymize any user (of this social network) who visits the attacker’s website. In some cases, this allows an attacker who operates a malicious website to uniquely identify his visitors by their name (or, more precisely, the names used on the corresponding social network profiles).
The authors argue that once you get a group fingerprint of a person – that is, “only a single user in the social network is a member of exactly these groups” – they’d be able to precisely identify 42% of tested social network Xing. Furthermore:
For one million users, we can narrow down the candidate set to less than 32 users, and for 90% of all users, the candidate set is reduced from initially ~1.8 million to less than 2,912 users. These results show that one can significantly narrow down the search space of candidates (who are then compared against the victim, one by one, using the basic attack).
[Via Spiegel.]
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Picasa Web Album Limits (1000 x 1000)
Google apparently previously said that on Picasa Web Albums, you can “Store up to 8,192,000 photos from a 5MP camera”. However, Picasa is limited to 1000 albums containing 1000 pics each... which is far less than the advertised 8,192,000. People complained about this, some wanting a refund for buying additional Picasa storage and now Google’s explanatory text reads “Store up to 10,000 photos from a 5MP camera”. [Thanks Dave K.!]
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Wikiracing
Wikipedia states: “A Wikirace ... is a race by as many people as you wish, using wikilinks to travel from one Wikipedia page to another. The first person to reach the destination page, or the person that reaches the destination using the fewest number of links, wins the race.”
Anyone dare race from Google to Doink the Clown?
[Via Milivella.]
Gmail Buzz?
Scott noticed that when you create a label named “buzz” in Gmail, the app will tell you:
“Sorry, you can’t create a label named ’buzz’ (it’s a reserved system label). Please try another name”
Does anyone know what this could be? The label wasn’t always reserved, according to Scott, who says he had used the name buzz before.
Looking up the word “buzz” in Google, we get several definitions, like the following: “If a place is buzzing with activity or conversation, there is a lot of activity or conversation there, especially because something important or exciting is about to happen.” Other definitions include “a long continuous sound” and “a word, idea, or activity which has recently become extremely popular” and “If you buzz someone, you call them, usually using an internal telephone line or a buzzer.”
[Thanks Scott!]
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