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Qik Stream
'Technology & Society' Category
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Digital Fingerprints
January 29, 2007There is a fascinating article in Science News about how scientists are investigating ways to identify individuals based on the rhythm of their keystrokes when they type and their individual patterns of using a mouse. This research goes beyond, but is complemented by, research in text analysis that can sometimes identify authorship of a piece [...]
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Slate “textcasting” news
June 7, 2006Textcasting has arrived. By Andy Bowers Slate’s new “textcasting” hack leverages the iTunes podcast distribution infrastructure to deliver text stories to iPods. How? By embedding the stories in the metadata of silent MP3s. And you needed another reason to get a new ipod?!
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End of the internet?
April 13, 2006The End of the Internet? Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, wrote this article back in February. In fact, we probably blogged about it right here because net neutrality is a HUGE issue for libraries. And if you didn’t get a chance to read the article the first time around, Amy [...]
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Maine Seeks to Opt Out of GATS Library Agreement
April 12, 2006Maine Seeks to Opt Out of GATS Library Agreement According to a recent post on American Libraries, the state of Maine has petitioned the Bush administration to have the state excluded from the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) Library Agreement that is currently being negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland. Maine Governor John Baldacci wrote, [...]
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New ways of searching and the role of libraries in privacy
February 28, 2006Here is a dilemma: lots of information is online, but it is hard to find. Here’s another: search engine technology based on keywords has trouble finding the information you need because of the inherent ambiguity of human languages. Here’s a third: systems that help us find what we need based on our personal preferences expose [...]
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scroogle
February 15, 2006Have you heard of Scroogle? This is a search interface — created by the non-profit org google-watch. Put in your search term into the “google scraper” (there’s also one available for yahoo!), scroogle searches google, and returns google results WITHOUT ads, WITHOUT cookies and WITHOUT search term records (their access log is deleted within 48 [...]
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San Jose Mercury News on Privacy
February 6, 2006What was once private is now under Google’s domain San Jose Mercury News Editorial, Feb. 06, 2006. This time, the government wasn’t looking for information that could be traced to specific people. But next time, it could, and the effects on personal privacy could be devastating. Search engine companies and other Internet firms are amassing [...]
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Memes, folksonomies, etc…
February 6, 2006Memography and the Memetic Web, By Bob Doyle. EContentmag.com (January/February 2006 Issue). The new “Memetic Web” lets you add your own machine-readable meaning to a page, with a link to the meme aboutness page, so inference engines could also discover something about your meaning.
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Should Search Engines Remember What You Search For?
February 2, 2006Keeping Secrets – A simple prescription for keeping Google’s records out of government hands, By Tim Wu, Slate, Jan. 23, 2006. With all the recent press about the subpoena of records from search engines (e.g., Google subpoena roils the Web, By Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, January 21, 2006), this article puts the underlying issues in [...]
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google search results
January 26, 2006Check out and compare these search results from Google China and Google US. I would say that Google has now broken at least 4 of their 10 commandments. In other google news, the NYTimes reports today that the DOJ suit is not a matter of protecting user privacy, but of protecting trade secrets. Google lawyer [...]
