The conversation thing

I was talking to a friend today about web crawlers and he told me that when google was indexing the server, all employees at his former work place were looking anxiously to huge raise in sales .

Everyone receives Google these days with lots and lots of love, but will there be a time, when things will be the other way around? When one or some very powerful spiders may be regarded as the sentinels in the Matrix? Is China in this situation already? I know that internet is being censored there, and I reckon censorship might me applied by means of active surveillance over published material on the internet within a certain geoarea.

Internet is here for over 15 years now, right? What is 15 years to humankind history? Piece of cake! Will technology change so (more…)

Talking to some friends today about this issue, it hit me that there is a potential need for online “swiss banking accounts” for online processed personal data. You place the sensitive information in the black box, and the end-program that needs authentification takes from there the criptic info, not the real data (real person identification).

Second life is about a virtual world. How about inventing a virtual Switzerland?

the saga continues

What do you think is the first thing I do when entering my blog’s admin panel? The very first thing is to go to the counterize section to see what IP’s have visited me, who is online now and what pages were most visited today… of course, I also get all sorts of statistics from google analytics.

For instance, since the last post, I have received visits from Seattle, Los Angeles and area, New York, Florida, London, Frankfurt, Lebanon, France and Romania. As you can imagine, while most people that visit my blog use automatic ips, they are anonymous to me. But, for some of them, their real identity is obvious from their IP’s. So, this (more…)

First of all, I have to say that I do not believe in the conspiracy theory. Anyone who has read Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, knows why.

Now this being said, today I will share my thoughts on the limitations of privacy policies through internet.

We all know what spam is, right? Someone has stolen your e-mail address (or you have given it to a certain company that sold it to a third party without your consent), and all of a sudden you get all sorts of unsolicited e-mails, like the many ones I receive that try to make me believe my d*ck is not that satisfying to the ladies well, he better not be satisfying some other ladies or else …

Oddly enough, I am not bothered by this type of spam. I mean you get my address, (more…)

That, and his viral last day at Microsoft video

The Snow Witch

gToon on audio production, Simon Taylor the narrator and additional sound design by Overman. The music is by Tilopa (album Out of the Blue) and is available from Magnatune.com (Filmed entirely in the Sims 2, October 2006)

Just seen on Euronews a documentary on Second Life and its leagal issues. Apparently, there are some lawsuits regarding the ownership of land and property in Second Life.

In May 2006, Marc Bragg has filed suit against Linden Lab for “a virtual land deal gone sour.” According to the press-release issued by Bragg, “The suit seeks financial damages in the thousands, in part for a breach of a virtual land auction contract and for violation of the Pennsylvania Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law. This suit is unique because the land doesn’t actually exist.” Technically, the land does exist–both as data, and as a user experience–but not as terra firma and he argues that when you mention the term “own” by no means can it be made to signify “licenced” or “rent”.

Property is an interesting concept if we relate it to virtuality. ownership is by no means related to physicality, that’s something we all agree (copyright on an idea is one very good example) and exchange is what gives value to the owned property.

I’ve tried Second Life just today and it seems addictive, but honestly, I would not spend a dollar on things that are a simulacrum of reality. I would most definitely spend money on new inventions, objects, be they as weird as they might be… It’s a brilliant idea for the Linden Lab, I cannot argue, but my take on this is a no.

And then again, in love and science, never say never

The succes of Second life (haven’t tried it yet - Ruxi, you should be ashamed of yourself) has taken industry leaders into creating avatars that can access all virtual worlds and use universal tools. Yesterday and today at Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo the top of this industry discuss the future of media and communication/

The challenge IBM and Linden Lab has put themselves to is to how to make avatars transcende from one world to another. Am I talking kantian phylosophy already ?

While I think virtual worlds are one very powerfull trend right now, I, personally, am not that interested. I mean, I would be very interested if I started to play a little, buuut knowing that I would give up my personal life just to play the virtual one, I have to say pass from the beginning.

I have experienced this while playing sims ™ about 6 or 7 years ago when I realized that my own character behaves exactly like me: always tired, needing to sleep, over stressed, with little time to do anything for himself …. so I said … why take (more…)

… and sometimes you might even get a Nobel prize for it.

Fathers of mp3 industry, France’s Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg win the Nobel prize in physics for independently discovering a physical effect in 1988 which has led to hard disks being as we know them today. Nanotechnology gives sensitive read-out heads for compact hard disks, sensitivity that lets the electronics industry use smaller and smaller disks.

“The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,” Borje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told The Associated Press. “You would not have an iPod without this effect.”

Further on, cnn.com quotes Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics, who said the prize honored a terrific combination of great physics and huge practical application:

“I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry. Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime.”

I’ve learned about this effect in university. Probably different storage systems will appear and other incredible ways of reading data will be developed, but indeed Fert and Gruenberg’s discovery actually made a point in the last 20 year computer industry.

Remember the first 5MB hard-disk?

Now that’s evolution….

Speaking of which, where do you think we’re heading in this quest for “you can never be too thin” Apple approach, the actual trend for everything in electronics and computer business?

I’ve just read the iht.com article on Muriel Cooper and have discovered a great mind. Never knew where the MIT logo came from and that it was her idea.

She was one of the visionaries that forseen design as interactive and driven by simplicity. In the 60s when tehnology was only in its infancy, people tended to see it as a big monster capable of changing social realities but unflexible.

Cooper has reinforced the idea that on-screen design can be better than just linecodes …. Almost 40 years after we’ve come to Microsoft surface and Apple’s iPhone. Muriel Cooper sure was right!