I should have been clearer with this, but I wasn't. Google doesn't do most of the stuff I wrote about, yet!. The key sentence is: "suppose Google uses search results for popular phrases to link to".
Still, the current behaviour is bad enough for employees of Barnes & Noble...
…comes up at least twice. When Microsoft decided to introduce its “smart”-tag technology into beta versions of Internet Explorer 6.0, users all over the world were outraged. Suddenly the application that just was a window to the web started changing the content it received. “Why not give the user some extra features?”, someone inside Microsoft thought, “like, linking keywords in webpages to Microsoft products?”
After a public outcry on how Microsoft was using its browser monopoly to control which content reached its viewers, they backpedaled and eventually canned the idea. Smart-tags still exist in Microsoft Office, but not in Internet Explorer.
Now, years later, Google introduced the same feature to its Google toolbar. In its new incarnation, it automatically creates new links on a website in your browser. Other than Microsoft however, the links look exactly like all the other links on the webpage. Currently, the “blogosphere” is running hot, discussing if this is a good thing or not.
Today, after reading Dave’s newest post on the issue, I decided to comment. I’d say that the most obvious problem hasn’t been discussed yet.
Here’s the point that needs to be made: suppose Google uses search results for popular phrases to link to. So suddenly
Whatever the perceived “use” of such a feature may be, this is a direct affront to the principles of freedom of expression.
More examples? A New York Times article on Japanese history in the US gets linked to Michelle Malkin’s book “In defense of internment” on Amazon… I have plenty.
There shouldn’t even be a discussion about this!
Google cannot be allowed to change the content of my website and if there’s no way around it, how do I distance myself from links that don’t reflect my views? Imagine a gay-community page linked to Pat Robertson… and the author wouldn’t even know that his users see this.
Now we haven’t even touched on the possibility that German users of the Google Toolbar might get totally different links than US users, so you couldn’t even find out what your users get to see. Not to mention the fact that, in Germany, you can be dragged to court for the content of pages that you link to from your page, if they contain content that’s illegal in Germany (Nazi-material, for example, or software that can be used to circumvent copy-protection mechanisms on Audio-CDs). You can, get this, even be held responsible for links contained in pages that you’ve linked to.
Now, let’s hope someone at Google realizes that this is a bad idea. Just like Microsoft did years ago.
Leaked republican strategy memo. It's a great exercise in the art of reframing and a great way to learn about politics. Go read it!
The best thing about a "hospital" for the insane is the insanity of the institution. Mental Health Portland searches for a final resting place for 5000 rusty cans full of cremated remains of "patients" who (I wonder why), never actually got better. Instead they were locked away until they died. Only to be found again in an abandoned building.
I just uploaded WordPress 1.5 and have started to work on the upgrade. Porting all maurus.net - functionality to the new themes structure is a lot of fun. I've hacked my 1.2.2 - installation to a point where this is causing me a serious headache. Interestingly 1.5 seems to be able to accomodate all my changes without any non-standard patches. This is great software!
The German weekly "Der Spiegel" picked up the story (you can read it here). They, unlike the New York Times, also identify the source of the study: Texas A&M University.
Already, from Bruce’s comments:
It’s important to qualify what is meant by “broken” — the ability to find collisions weakens the use of a cryptographic hash in digital signatures. The speedup is about 0.0005 over the brute force average for finding a collision.
and
It’s a 2^69 attack against SHA-1, which has the distinct problem of being 32x the complexity of bruting MD5 (2^5 = 32). We never did see a MD5 brute; we needed Wang’s reduction to a 2^24 to 2^32 for us to eventually end up with vectors.
So there’s no need to panic, there’s need for a response and responsible management of this issue.
It’s already all over the net, but Bruce Schneier says it best:
SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing. [full text]
Now I’m waiting for the usual suspects (Bruce included, of course) to weigh in. Is RIPE-MD160 vulnerable as well? Does the attack actually work? More to follow…
From today’s New York Times:
You see, for all the carnage in President Bush’s budget, one program is being showered with additional cash - almost three times as much as it got in 2001. It’s “abstinence only” sex education, and the best research suggests that it will cost far more lives than the Clinton administration’s much more notorious sex scandal.
Mr. Bush means well. But “abstinence only” is a misnomer that in practice is an assault on sex education itself. There’s a good deal of evidence that the result will not be more young rosy-cheeked virgins - it will be more pregnancies, abortions, gonorrhea and deaths from AIDS.To get federal funds, for example, abstinence-only programs are typically barred by law from discussing condoms or other forms of contraception - except to describe how they can fail. So kids in these programs go all through high school without learning anything but abstinence, even though more than 60 percent of American teenagers have sex before age 18.
This is interesting. But there’s more:
The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers’ gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France.
And here’s the big finale:
More troubling, the [virginity] pledgers were much less likely to use contraception when they did have sex - only 40 percent of the males used condoms, compared with 59 percent of those who did not take the pledge.
Go and read the full article. (via rc3.org)
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