“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
- Google CEO Eric Schmidt
“…doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.
But at any rate they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
- George Orwell, 1984
Rants, Technical, The Future, privacy
1984, facebook, Google, Orwell, privacy, quotes
As someone who is no friend to Facebook, I was quite interested to hear that Google will be stepping into the social networking world with their newest product: Google Buzz. The introductory video looked good enough showing a slick, simple interface, easy message, photo and video posting and an good time to be had by all. Perhaps, I thought, this means Facebook’s hegemony over the social networking sphere was coming to a close. Anything is better than Facebook’s blatant disregard for privacy right? Wrong. Read more…
Google, Rants, Technical, The Future, privacy
buzz, do no evil, facebook, Google, google buzz, privacy
Is your code fast and efficient? Is your nasty for-loop killing penguins somewhere and You don’t even know about it? We all hacked and brute-forced through a problem at one time or another – it is inevitable. How much CO2 will your hack release into the atmosphere? Writing power-inefficient code is like driving a fuel-inefficient car – we’ve all done it but it’s just not cool anymore. With green finally becoming the buzz-word everywhere, it is time to take a look at a few numbers surrounding the environmental cost of bad code.
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Technical, The Future
environment, programming
The Botnet. It is a term that we have grown accustomed to hearing more and more often these days. These networks of zombie machines are responsible for much of the billions of Spam messages that find their way around the Internet every day. The Botnet is a blunt weapon of mass distraction costing billions of dollars in lost time, resources and fraud.
But botnets might be destined for more than just Spam. As it stands, botnets are some of the largest accumulations of computing power in the world today rivaled only by supercomputers and massive server farms such as those of Google. Read more…
The Future
botnet, emergent behavior, machine intelligence