This was cool - it also led me to download Celestia

Google helps you kill time with 100,000 Stars experiment

Its good to see that people are still doing research on this. This study provides some useful feedback as well as a number of references I was unaware of.

This article in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology directly challenges the notion that the age of an edit can be used to evaluate it's reliability. I'd like to be able to read this article (particularly as I'm referenced in the abstract) but like a lot of scientific scholarship the article is not available to the general public.

On the other hand, this study seems to indicate that the age of an edit could be used to evaluate its reliability.

I think the reason for the split in the results might relate to how easy it is for a layperson to identify that a given piece of information is incorrect. Some kinds of vandalism are more subtle than others. Subtle vandalism is more likely to survive.

RE: Evaluating WikiTrust: A trust support tool for Wikipedia

Intel is quite clearly serious about offering competition to ARM in the embedded market, and has just announced a new Atom processor series that offers a unique selling point: an integral FPGA processor. Billed as 'the first configurable Intel Atom-based processor,' the Atom E600C series combines an Intel Atom 'Tunnel Creek' chip with an Altera Field Programmable Gate Array — offering, the company claims, significantly more flexibility for ODMs and OEMs.

By adding in the FPGA, customers are able to make fundamental changes at a hardware level without having to go through a hardware revision cycle - which means lowered development costs and faster time to market.

I've been waiting for this for 10 years. I think this kind of solution may be useful in PCs for accelerating graphics work and other math intensive PC tasks.

Intel Launches Atom CPU With Integrated FPGA

We entrust Google with our most private communications because we assume the company takes every precaution to safeguard our data. It doesn't. A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses.

GCreep: Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats (Updated)

Now that the media excitement of the aftermath of Operation Aurora has calmed down and we are all soothing ourselves to sleep by the sound of promptly applying Windows Updates, it is a good time to take a look back and try and figure out what the changing threat landscape means for real-world information security (besides Selling! More! Security! Products!) and what lessons can be learned from it.

Some good thoughts here. I wrote on this subject here.

One Exploit Should Not Ruin Your Day « …And You Will Know me by the Trail of Bits

Chris Klaus founded Intenet Security Systems in 1994, while he was a sophomore at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Chris’s product, the Internet Scanner, offered well being to companies connecting to the internet as the world wide web emerged, and it did so under a freemium model.  Beginning as a side project in his dorm room where $1,000 checks started showing up, Chris asked a professor where he could find a good lawyer for his business, and that lawyer introduced him to Tom Noonan.  Chris dropped out of Tech to pursue the business full time, John Imlay and Sig Mosely invested, and Internet Security Systems grew rapidly in an emerging market.  ISS’s rapid growth culminated in its initial public offering on NASDAQ in march of 1998 and in an acquisition by IBM for $1.3 billion in October, 2006.

Very interesting!

Atlanta's Security Cluster: Spotlight on ISS

Jello:

Been playing around with Drew Conway's scripts he demo'd at the bay area R meetup at linkedin last week - saw it here.

Files to do this yourself are here.

Information on the libraries: Igraph twitteR ggplot2

Installation (for OS X):

- Install latest Mac OS X R build 2.10
- Install latest tcltk
- In R, execute: install.packages("igraph"); install.packages("twitteR"); install.packages("ggplot2");

Have at :) Beware the API limit.

Oh, the MS zoomable thing.

Very interesting...

Social Map of #ASW3 Hashtag on Twitter (Atlanta Startup Weekend 3)

Recently, Comcast has added a "Domain Helper" to its DNS servers. Now, instead of implementing the DNS protocol as specified in the RFC, Comcast will redirect your query to a Comcast-branded Yahoo! search page, using the text of your DNS query as search input to Yahoo. Never mind that this breaks the Internet ... there are ads to be served!

This service is reminiscent of Verisign's SiteFinder service from ~2003, about which much hubbub is preserved in the MemeStreams archive. (See below.)

Comcast customers can opt out of Domain Helper:

When a non-existent web address is typed into a browser, a built-in error message is displayed. The Comcast's Domain Helper service is designed to help guide you to a useful search page that has a list of recommended sites that come close to matching the original web address that did not exist.

If you are a residential or commercial cable modem subscriber, and you wish to opt-out of the Comcast Domain Helper service, please complete the form below.

At the end of this process they inform you that it may take two days for the opt-out procedure to be completed. Meanwhile, enjoy the broken DNS!

From the archive, a small selection on SiteFinder:

VeriSign has dropped all its lawsuits against internet overseeing organization ICANN, agreed to hand over ownership of the root zone, and in return been awarded control of all dotcoms until 2012.

The Omniture server sets a cookie so that people can be watched over time to see what typos they are making.

The dispute over who controls key portions of the Internet's address system erupted into open conflict today when VeriSign Inc., the world's largest addressing company, sued the Internet's most visible regulatory body, charging that it has been unfairly prevented from developing new services for Internet users.

We all rely on them [DNS servers], and their management should be done in a way appropriate for their status.

Omniture is now tracking hits to every nonexistent .com/.net domain thanks to Verisign.

Comcast Domain Helper Opt-Out

There is just one problem: In Atlanta, The ‘California State of Mind’ is a Cancer. It is a disease. It has no applicability here and it destroys lives. The commonly stated idea that the differences between Silicon Valley and Atlanta is one purely of scale is false, and the implication of these differences cannot be understated. There are emergent properties of a startup economy that large, that do not exist at our scale whatsoever.

I can’t say that strongly enough. In Georgia, the California State of Mind will try to kill you and will ruin your life. Its not like us. It wants to kill your family. It belongs on the terrorist watch list. Without the supportive environment of the Valley, the valley game-plan has disastrous effects on human lives.

Jello wrote an article for Techdrawl as part of the series he is doing on Startup Geography. It is also up on Hacker News (presently the #1 item).

The previous piece is here.

A California State of Mind (As a Cancer on Atlanta)

Tom Vanderbilt:

Who and where was this invisible metropolis? What infrastructure was needed to create this city of ether?

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.

The tilting CD tower gives way to the MP3-laden hard drive which itself yields to a service like Pandora, music that is always “there,” waiting to be heard.

But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

Have you read Vanderbilt's "Traffic"?

Ultimately, Traffic is about more than driving: it’s about human nature.

Data Center Overload