BREAKING NEWS, INDEED!

There’s been a flood of emails around the net today pretending to be from MSNBC. According to MXlab, the “Subject starts with msnbc.com – BREAKING NEWS and can contain the following: ‘Google launches free music downloads in China’, ‘Plane crashes into prep school, hundreds of kids killed’, ‘Please give your opinions for change’, ‘US Dollar hits 6-year high, further gains expected'” and more. The URL does appear to be legit but the site it leads you to is not. Upon arrival you’ll be asked to download a spoof adobe flash update that is, in reality, a trojan horse.

Cuil? Nah, not so cool.

Brett mentioned Cuil, the next big “google killer”, yesterday and I applaud him for keeping a straight face while typing up his review. I’ll sum up ‘Cuil’, in my opinion, quite shortly: over-hyped failure. These days it’s almost ‘fightin words’ to go against the mighty google and there’s a reason for that. Google is, hands down, the best search engine currently available. It’s dependable enough to trust when your in-laws call saying they’re on their way over for thanksgiving dinner and you need a turkey recipe that will knock their socks off because you were just going to order a pizza. Don’t believe me? The proof is in the pudding:
GOOGLE SEARCH
CUIL SEARCH

Ok, so I broke a few ‘search engine rules’ while doing that, but google still got me what I wanted; point made, game set. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not against someone doing a better search engine. In fact, I’d welcome it. It would keep the industry fresh and full of new and better ideas. At the very least it’d revitalize the industry even if it were just for a brief moment. Cuil failed to deliver.

I understand that almost everyone is ripping on Cuil today, myself included, and the reason is probably a simple one: We’re disappointed. Google does, indeed, have the search engine market cornered and that makes a great deal of us just a little worried (*tinfoil hat on* if they can censor searches in china, what else can they censor *tinfoil hat off*) . I’d actually like to see Cuil get up, dust itself off, and keep at it. Who knows, maybe one day they will topple google – or at the very least match them.

Amazon, Tivo, and the Webocalypse.

The good people over at ars technica are reporting a rather neat (or horribly awful, depending on your view) team-up between Amazon and Tivo. Soon you’ll be able to buy those product placements from your favorite TV shows without even doing an amazon search. I could see this going one of two ways: TiVo customers (and impulse buyers) will love it OR it will be the most annoying piece of integrated technology since Microsoft gave us “clippy” the ever-so-annoying paper clip ‘helper’.

In other, non-related news, the times online is reporting the Webocalypse. Ok, ok, so it’s not really the end of the web, but it’s a start. Basically google has to give up 12 TB of YouTube user data to Viacom. Somehow Viacom thinks this will stop people from posting clips and shows on YouTube. It won’t. It will, however, give them more information than any possible ‘focus group’ could ever get on the viewing habits of young people. I’m assuming I don’t even need to mention the privacy issues this action brings up. Also The European Parliament added a law so each member state’s authorities could determine what software is appropriate for use on the internet. The article itself is a tad alarmist, but there are some very good points. I’m wondering how this might influence those of us across the pond.

FCC, CC, NN.

Net Neutrality is a pretty basic concept – keep the net open, and unrestricted to any content. Google does a pretty nice job of summing this up a little more in depth: “Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of what content they view and what applications they use on the Internet. The Internet has operated according to this neutrality principle since its earliest days… Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet.”

Late last week, the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin seemed to share this thought by “moving to prohibit ComCast from throttling BitTorrent traffic”. In fact, he is also wanting to reprimand ComCast for choking down on the BitTorrent protocol – a blow that would leave any NN enthusiast pretty happy. Not so fast, though: the rest of the FCC still needs to decide, which could still take a few weeks. This is definitely something to pay attention to.

Google Gets Lively

Ultra mega powerhouse Google announced Lively, a ‘build your own avatar’ animated chat program, yesterday. It’s currently only available for Windows XP/Vista users who are running Firefox or internet exploder. With me being the ever inquisitive connoisseur, I had to check this out. The first thing that crossed my mind after setting up my avatar (which is not a quick process) was “this is Google’s answer to second life”. Another thing you notice right off the bat is it’s slow; very, very, terribly slow. But, hey, it’s still in beta, so you can’t really expect all that much from it just yet. The controls are a little awkward and the help pages seem to leave out basic things like walking around (a task that’s still baffling me); but man oh boy, I sure can body slam people. Google tacked on a ton of interactive animations: you can kick, hug, dance, ‘kung-fu’, and yes, even body slam other people – just to name a few. You can also build your own chat room and embed it into your site or blog. All in all it’s a pretty nifty chat setup, but again, it’s still in beta and most people would probably ditch it just for the load times.

Partition madness!

So, you’ve found out the hard way that your ESP wasn’t quite correct when setting up those Linux partitions? Your root directory is almost full, while your home directory is almost empty (or vice-versa)? Thinking about reinstalling that machine? Not so fast! There are tools available to re-allocate partition space – GParted being my favorite. GParted is a free, open source tool to re-distribute disc space to new or existing partitions. You can get a bootable “live cd” here. Simply boot your server, or machine, off this disc and follow the basic setup instructions – the defaults are normally fine. Once GParted starts, you can remove allocated disc space from partitions that have too much space (by using the ‘move’ option) and give them to partitions that don’t have enough. It’s a very simple and easy to use interface. Once you remove some disc space from a partition, apply it, then select the partition you want the disc space to go to and add it there, then apply again. Reboot and you’re done. Depending on the size, type, etc of hard discs you’re using and how much space you’re moving around, it could take quite a while to complete. All in all it’s a very painless and easy way to reallocate partition space.

One Billion Strong… And Growing.

there's a billion of these litte guys!Tech Tree is reporting there are (estimated) over one billion PCs installed around the globe. The Gartner Group called them ‘installed’ PCs as their estimation is for personal computers in use – not just shipped ones or machines sold. They factor in not only new machines, but second hand PCs as well. That’s over 1,000,000,000 PCs in use folks! The growth rate of installed base PCs is estimated to grow roughly 12% each year as more and more countries develop. They’ve also figured in “churning” and figure some 16% of installed machines will be replace this year alone. If you’re planning on being a part of that 16% who replaces an older PC, there are many donation and recycling options available for your old hardware.

2010: R.I.P. IPV4?

It’s no big secret that our current numbering scheme for internet protocol addressing is limited, but some sources are reporting its demise as soon as 2010. IPV6 has been adopted as the solution for many, many years now because it’s a virtually limitless numbering scheme. The down-side? IPV6 is rather tricky to understand and implement. Instead of receiving an ip address like 69.51.xx.xx, you’ll now be issued one like 2008:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334 once ipv6 is implemented. There’s really no need to panic, though, your operating system more than likely supports IPV6 already and IPV4 will not just disappear over night. Instead, I think we’ll see a gradual decline in the use of IPV4 as IPV6 begins to become more and more of an industry standard. I believe by 2010 there will be more of a hybrid use of IPV4 and IPV6 and not just the flat-out demise of IPV4.

Also, don’t forget to grab your copy of Firefox 3 today!