] While still teaching at Berkeley, Stonebraker founded
] Ingres Corp. to commercialize the relational database
] technology. (The company was acquired in 1990 by ASK
] Computer Systems.) Shortly after launching Ingres Corp.,
] Stonebraker and his students pushed databases ahead yet
] again with POSTGRES, a relational database that could
] understand "objects," groups of simpler pieces of data.

29 years of relational databases...

One finding is that social networks embedded into systems do not match individuals’ perceptions of their personal social network. This finding and others raise issues for the use of social networks in groupware. Based on the evaluation results, several design considerations are discussed.

This paper by David McDonald appears in the proceedings of the ACM 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Recommending Collaboration with Social Networks: A Comparative Evaluation [PDF]

For example, a display magically presents a personalized advertisement, the most relevant video feed, or the desired page from a secret government document. Such capability requires more than an abundance of networked displays, devices, and sensors; it relies implicitly on recommendation systems that either directly serve the end user or provide critical services to some other application.

This article appears in the October 2003 issue of IEEE Computer magazine. The author is David McDonald of the University of Washington.

Ubiquitous Recommendation Systems | IEEE Computer, October 2003

This is an interesting paper about how the architecture Google has created to manage their massive search index database.

Also worth noting, pages on MemeStreams are the first results for the search term "google filesystem", on Google. Ironic? Not really, its actually "Google File System", or GFS.

Paper on Google's filesystem

] A Princeton PhD student has published a paper detailing
] the music industry's latest CD copy protection scheme -
] and how the technique can be bypassed by simply holding
] down the host computer's Shift key when a 'protected' CD
] is inserted.

Of course this was another dumbass scheme in the first place. There is *no way* to "fix" CDs and retain backward compatibility with the huge installed base.

The Register | Anotehr CD copy protection scheme fails

] You also have an incredibly overzealous vocal minority
] that thinks it still owns the Internet, and the
] anarchists that think everything should be free. And then
] you have everybody else that uses the Internet every day
] and doesn't know what ICANN is. I think this is a broken
] model that we have talked to ICANN and the Department of
] Commerce about.

No shortage of things to be angry about in this interview.

"The vocal minority that still thinks it owns the internet". Last I checked, the point was that no one owned the Internet. The problem is that VeriSign thinks and acts like they own the Internet. This vocal minority they speak of are the people who run the Internet, and develop its standards.

CRN Interview: Stratton Sclavos, VeriSign

More comments from Decius:

] The giant recorder of Web addresses sure sparked a fire
] when it redirected site-not-found messages to its own
] search engine. It's a bum rap.

Businessweek doesn't get it. This guy oversimplifies the objections to the service, explains away his oversimiplification, and then claims that sitefinder should be allowed. This is what is known as a straw man arguement. Read the IAB's comments on the servie. Read verisign's technical response. Even Verisign hasn't managed to provide a coherent explanation of how services other then HTTP and SMTP are supposed to handle this change. If you think the internet is made up of SMTP, HTTP, Ping, and Traceroute then you don't understand the internet, and therefore you don't know what you're talking about.

BW Online | October 7, 2003 | Verisign Didn't Deserve This Spanking

I don't think I could respond to this any better then Decius has:

] This is a significant test for the entire community
] because if the community can't find a way to introduce
] new services while reaching a resolution on technical
] matters that might arise, then the Internet
] infrastructure will never improve. It's tantamount to
] saying that the Internet world is flat and therefore
] there is no need for further exploration.

Look asshole, if you were interested in reaching resolution on the technical matters that might arise, you would have proposed your change to the community rather then making a unilateral decision. You would have pre-announced a date for the cutover so that people would be prepared to make any changes that they needed to make beforehand. The only people who are buying into your bullshit are people who own stock in your company and have a vested interest in beleiving in you. The rest of us are simply more and more sure that we are never going to do business with you for any reason. The rest of us aren't your shareholders. We're your customers. And you can rest assured that we are quite capable of continuing to deploy innovative services on the Internet without you.

Tell me why I should do business with a company that was not just forced to settle in a fraudulent marketing scheme, but also made significant, unannounced changes in a critical infrastructure service in violation of your contract without prior notification? Your business is about TRUST, and I'd be CRAZY to TRUST you after pulling a stunt like this!

Innovation and the Internet | Verisign Speaks to the technical community

] Seriously, though, I'm interested in figuring out how we
] can build a Net that is a lot less prone to viruses and
] spam, and not just by putting in filters and setting up
] caches to test things before they get into your computer.
] That doesn't really solve anything. We need an
] evolutionary step of some sort, or we need to look at the
] problem in a different way.
]
] I'm not convinced there's not something modest we can do
] that would make a big difference. You have to find a way
] to structure your systems in a safer way. Writing
] everything in Java [a programming language created by
] Sun] will help, because stuff written in antique
] programming languages like C [a widely used language
] created by Bell Labs in the early 1970s] is full of
] holes. Those languages weren't designed for writing
] distributed programs to be used over a network. Yet
] that's what Microsoft still uses. But even Java doesn't
] prevent people from making stupid mistakes.

Juicy intervew with Bill Joy

] VeriSign Inc., the firm that operates a key piece of the
] Internet's address system, said it would temporarily shut
] down a new service that makes money off the typos of Web
] users after the Internet's oversight body threatened to
] take legal action against the company.

Thats great!

However, at the time I blogged this, the gtld's were still sending me to sitefinder..

VeriSign Freezes Search Service (TechNews.com)