ndmckinney|net

Longer than anyone thought, but still a poor showing nevertheless.

[From Microsoft kills Windows 7E, puts IE back in upcoming OS - Network World]

TechCrunch is reporting that the FCC has sent letters of inquiry to Apple, AT&T and Google regarding the rejection of Google Voice related apps from Apple’s app store. In the letters, the FCC is asking both Apple and AT&T about their levels of decision making in approving/rejecting apps.

AT&T has maintained that it has no involvement in the approval process, although their loosely-written press release gives a wide latitude for interpretation.

I suspect that the FTC and DoJ may get involved next, given the administration’s strong antitrust policy.

[From FCC Takes On Apple And AT&T Over Google Voice Rejection]

Quick disclaimer: I love cryptography. I don’t fully understand the math that goes into it, but I love it all the same.

Something that has baffled me for quite some time is why we don’t see more cryptography in consumer computing. Passwords, simple authentication tokens, are ubiquitous, even on single-user Windows computers. Real encryption, on the other hand, in virtually non-existant.

Why?

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When I was much, much younger, I was online. Every summer, I would spend a couple weeks with my grandparents. My uncle, a professor of computer science at a nearby college, secured for me a spare computer, a modem, and user account. A handshake later and I was connected to the network. A further authentication and I was online.

Looking back, the early internet didn’t really do much. I had access to a wealth of information, and I would spend hours crawling through Gopherspace, soaking up information like a sponge. Years later, and Gopher is a figment of the past, lost forever to the ever-evolving digital landscape.

What kills old technology?

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Sun Microsystems, one of the stalwarts of the computing industry, has a simple motto: “the network is the computer.” Yesterday, Google took that motto to an entirely new level with the announcement of it’s Chrome OS.

Details on Chrome are sparse (which has not stopped technology writers from writing ad nauseum about all the features it will have). What it appears from Google’s press release, however, is that Chrome will be an incarnation of the old “network computer” (NC) concept, where the bulk of the computing will be conducted on centralized servers. Rebranded “cloud computing”, this server-centric model is the latest fad.

NCs have a significant limitation not found in personal computers: to fully function, an NC requires a constant, reliable network connection. Chrome will likely utilize Google’s “Gears” framework. Even so, the dramatic push of an entire operating environment to the web seems both radical and unwise. When Gmail went down for several hours earlier this year, the world panicked. The harm caused by a Gmail outage will be miniscule compared to an outage of thousands of computers.

It is far too early to tell if Chrome will be a mere dumb terminal or something far more sophisticated. A number of important questions also remain to be answered, such as how open the Chrome platform will be, the willingness of people to adopt a new operating platform, and the response of the existing operating system developers.

I love that flickr is so friendly.

According to a number of news sources, the FTC stated today that it will not oppose the proposed acquisition of DoubleClick by Google. The proposed deal, at US$ 3.1 billion deal would make Google the largest internet advertising company in the world.

However, the European Commission has not yet ruled on whether or not Google’s proposed purchase of DoubleClick violates Article 139/2004 [rules on merger control]. A ruling on this is due by April 2008.

One of the more interesting aspects of having an RSS reader is that, assuming you catch the original post, you can see when someone publishes an update to their original post. Take for example this set of postings from Slate magazine, shown in order of most recent publication:

I am not sure why they chose to change the word “jihad” to “war”, especially considering that the article title still uses “jihad” in the title. Either way, I’m curious whether or not major (and minor, for that matter) media publications should disclose when they make changes of any sort, no matter how innocent, after publication. I can see how the argument can go both ways. On the one hand, some weblogs, such as Boing Boing, use the strikeout font to indicate when they’ve made changes after publication, usually to correct for factual errors. As you can imagine, this is perhaps the stupidest way an awkward to achieve such disclosure. On the other hand, the corrections page tends to get buried in the back of a publication, leaving the more attractive space free for errors. Even with the corrections model, though, it is becoming easier to have a permanent space for corrections (the message being “we are always going to make mistakes”).

This particular instance is probably more benign than in other instances, where substantive content is radically changed. I also receive alerts from Reuters, and those articles always contain a summary of the changes that were made as a caption at the beginning, although the specific details are not disclosed. This may be the most reasonable balance on the internet, since the corrections pages will not necessarily be stumbled upon as it would be in a print publication.

My question is this: is it better to have a full disclosure policy (à la Boing Boing), a limited disclosure policy (the Reuters model), or to simply make changes and hope no one notices (the Slate way)?

UPDATE: Ironic, I know, but the entry was edited so the pop-up image would display correctly.

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