Posted on June 5th, 2006%
I’ve been using Google AdSense on my sites for quite some time. One of the largest of those sites is CSFBL, my online baseball game.
Google shut down that site’s access to AdSense because of the following statement on the “Support Us” page:
You’ve all seen the ads throughout the site. Please support CSFBL by supporting these advertisers!
They stated that such a statement “contained language that encouraged clicking on ads”. I could see if I said, “Click on the ads on this site to make us money” — but that’s not what I said. After all, I’ve heard radio ads (promoting radio advertising) state, “Support this station by supporting its advertisers.”
Perhaps I should say, “Please visit the companies that advertise on this site, but please don’t click on their ads for fear that such clicks will be deemed invalid.”
I could argue, but why bother — I won’t win, and it’s a heck of a lot easier to complain here, remove the one . . .
→ Read More: The strong arm of Google AdSense
Posted on December 8th, 2005%
On December 6, 2005, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued Patent #6,973,669 to Microsoft. The patent is for “Pausing television programming in response to selection of hypertext link.”
Here is the crux of the patent’s claim:
In an interactive television system … a method for pausing the display of a television program that is displayed at the television system in response to a selection of a hyperlink that is displayed with the television program…
In other words, an on-screen pause button that you click on to pause, and subsequently resume, the program.
Where does this fail the patent test (useful, novel, non-obvious)?
It’s potentially useful, though I’d say a remote control with a pause button is many orders of magnitude more useful than clicking on a hyperlink.
It’s marginally novel — VCRs have been displaying on-screen pause indicators for years. The only difference is clicking on an on-screen hyperlink instead of a (more user-friendly) pause button.
It’s definitely . . .
→ Read More: Microsoft patents an on-screen pause button
Posted on November 28th, 2005%
As reported on SlashDot:
As reported in the Guardian, Carrigan frets that alien radio signals could pose a security risk.
The threat of this is as realistic as the 1996 movie Independence Day, where Jeff Goldblum uploaded a virus to the alien mothership from an Apple PowerBook.
Why is it so difficult for one species to submit a technology virus to another, relatively unknown, species? Well, consider. We know nothing of their technology. We know nothign of their programming languages, code methodologies, or hardware/software. We know nothing of their communication methods — wireless, wired, etc. — and even if we knew what frequencies were used, it would be incredibly difficult to figure out what the sequence of 0′s and 1′s meant. Not to mention the fact that, even if we got past all that, we would know little about their security systems and, in turn, ways to thwart them.
Is it remotely possible? Yes. Considering infinite time and infinite events, . . .
→ Read More: SETI as security risk, and ET hackers
Posted on November 21st, 2005%
A post on the Guardian’s Technology blog, entitled Top 20 geek novels — the results (and highlighted by Slashdot), indicates the results of a whopping 132-person survey to find the most popular geek novels.
Knowing that any 132-person survey is rather unscientific at best, looking through the list of 20 books, I realize that I’ve read seven of them, making me 35% geek, using a straight scoring system of 5% per book read. However, if you weigh things based on the ranking of the book (I read the top three books, and five of the top eight), I’d be 45% geek, using a reverse point system (where reading the first book counts as “20″, and reading the last book counts as “1″).
Needless to say, I guess I’m between 1/3 and 1/2 geek. Fine by me — I thought it would be somewhat higher.
As for the list itself, I’m kind of surprised that no Star Trek or Star Wars . . .
→ Read More: Top 20 geek books (and three of my own)
Posted on September 26th, 2005%
C|Net’s News.com recently reported that three trade organizations representing record and movie companies released a program called Digital File Check, a so-called “powerful scanning engine that allows you to search your computer for installed file-sharing programmes , as well as media files.” That quote is directly from the home page, as is the grammatically-incorrect space before the comma.
Since I like being a victim, I decided to run this on my laptop, which was recently overhauled as a result of a hard drive crash. Here’s some interesting information on the overall experience.
The Digital File Check (DFC) Web site is written mostly in Flash. It is also configured to scale to window size, so peole with desktop resolutions of 800×600 will have a difficult time reading the blurry text without zooming in. Whoever designed this site needs to take some hints from usability expert Jakob Nielsen.
Nowhere on the DFC Web site does it say it only works . . .
→ Read More: Digital File Check: Disabling file sharing, thanks to record companies
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