kahunaburger

The Guardian in the UK had this idea to hook up readers of their newspaper with undecided voters in the US. You go to the Guardian web site, request an address from an undecided voter in US, write a letter (and included why you think it’s a bad idea to vote for Bush) and then hope that your letter turns an undecided voter into a Kerry-supporter.

Looks like things were not received as well as originally anticipated. Have a look at the emails the Guardian received: Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | Reaction from the US to the Guardian’s Clark County project

Comments(0)

Hehe NewMexiKen: Yup! (originally found at dangerousmeta).

Comments(0)

If it hasn’t happened already, I bet you will see companies blocking access to google.com from within corporate firewalls in the future.

Take a look at some of the “Zeitgeist” pages on google.com (for example the one for August 2004 at http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-aug04.html. What you see are some serious statistics that Google created from all the searches it received during the month of August 2004. Things at google.com work the same as elsewhere on the web: for each visit to their servers a visitor will leave a footprint in the access logs of the server that tells Google what you were looking for and where you came from (your IP address). Some information can be supressed by your browser or software that sits between your browser and google.com (for example information about the specific browser you are using or whether you used a link to go to google.com). However the other two pieces mentioned before, IP-address and request, cannot be hidden easily (yes, there are anonymizing proxies, but those are not commonly used from within corporate networks).

The IP-address can be used to determine where the request came from (country, company, university, home dsl connection, phone connection, etc.). There are a lot of companies who specialized in this field and those will be happy to sell you solutions that will match an IP-address as accurate as possible to a location and/or company (an example for this can be found on this page on kahunaburger.com - look for “VisualRoute”).

Things start to get interesting when you correlate the where and the what. Big companies usually only have a few places where Internet traffic leaves the corporate networks. So it is easy for Google to select all those queries that have been made from, say, within microsoft.com. And even if a company has a lot of entry points into the public Internet, it is not too difficult to find all queries that originate from those places.
Besides the noise queries there will also be queries that are directly related to Microsoft’s future business. They may see requests from Microsoft’s R&D departments looking for information on “natural language processing” or find queries from Microsoft’s HR department looking for details on a candidate that they are planning to hire.

I would not be surprised if besides those “Zeitgeist” pages above there were internal reports that listed the “most interesting” queries that originated from “Fortune 500″ companies and especially Google’s competition.

I’m not saying that Google would be the only place where things like this could happen, but as the dominator in the search market, it’s more likely to happen there than anywhere else. And nothing in their privacy policy stops them from collection and even selling this information (as long as it cannot be related to you as an individual).

So, to come back to my original hypothesis: Keeping all this in mind, don’t you think that companies would try to limit the information leakage by closing the connection to Google?

Comments(0)

Exactly a year ago (see here) Pia was getting ready to change our lives forever. And, boy, did she change them!

Happy birthday little pumpkin!

Three pumpkins

Comments(0)

baby sunglasses

baby sunglasses   baby sunglasses   baby sunglasses   baby sunglasses   baby sunglasses

Comments(2)

Oh joy: my favorite German News Magazine “Der SPIEGEL” has finally decided that English-speaking folks also deserve an alternate view of World News. If you’re sick of Fox News, Murdoch and other biased publications have a look at International - SPIEGEL ONLINE. There’s not a lot there yet (they just started), but I suspect that this will soon change.

Comments(0)

Yesteday I went through the process of upgrading our Gateway Entertainment PC (FMC-901X) from MCE2004 (SP1) to MCE2005 (SP2). I was actually surprised that it only took a few hours and that I did not have to revert to the backup I created before starting the upgrade.

All in all I did:
1) install Service Pack 2 (while MCE 2004 was still installed)
2) verified that MCE 2004 was still working
3) installed the upgrade to MCE 2005
4) installed an MCE version of the display driver for the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (before doing that I would always get an error message upon starting MCE which said that my graphics card or driver was not compatible with MCE)
5) used Windows Update to install the update 1 for MCE 2005 (do yourself a favor and install that as soon as you have MCE 2005 installed otherwise you’re going on a wild-goose chase with some of the other problems)
6) reinstalled the latest WinTV drivers from hauppage.com

After doing all that, everything seems to work just fine (if we forget about the LCD display of the Gateway unit for the moment, but that’s only a minor problem).

You’ve probably read about MCE 2005 at other sites already and I’m not going to repeat that, however I did not see the “Movies” feature in any of the other MCE 2005 descriptions (or at least I can’t remember seeing it).
From the “My TV” menu you can get to a new menu entry called “Movies”. When you select that, this is what you’re going to see (partial screenshot only):

Right hand side shows all movies that are currently on all the channels you receive. “On Next” will show you all the movies which are going to start in a little (so you don’t miss anything).
You can drill down and get to details about a movie and can also directly select an actor or a director:

When you do that (as for Dustin above), you see all the movies that the system knows about for this specific actor. This does not necessarily mean that the movies are actually on TV any time soon.

Neat - well done.

Comments(2)

An angel?

Comments(1)

Ages ago we had planned a 3 week trip to Europe to see my parents, family, friends and do some travelling in Switzerland. Beginning of September we left via Albuquerque, Dallas for Frankfurt and finally on to Munich. Here are a few photos from the trip and a short write-up to give you an impression of Pia’s first time in Europe.
(more…)

Comments(3)

What do countries like Belarus, Afghanistan, Mozambique and the U.S. have in common?

Yes, you guessed right: they all have a rotten enough voting system to make others want to come to those countries to supervise election procedures.

Sigh - I just wish it would make a difference …

Comments(0)