Sen No Sen

Slashdot reports on how Balmer Vows to Kill Google

“At some point in the conversation, Mr. Ballmer said: ‘Just tell me it’s not Google,'’ Lucovosky said in his statement. Lucovosky replied that he was joining Google. ‘At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office,’ Lucovosky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. ‘I’m going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f***ing kill Google.’

Terrific!

Go, Google, Go!

Go, Slashdot! LOL!

While not normally worthy of a link, this article by John C. Dvorak on the number 30 Billion might be an exception:

… when we put all the numbers together, we can estimate that there are a minimum of 30 billion Windows system crashes a year.

(via digg/links)

Jeffrey Zeldman describes the visual and structural relaunch:

…both old and new. Old in its mission to help people who make websites see farther and jump higher. New in its design, structure, publishing system, and brand extensions.

(via kottke.org)

Must read Jason Kottke’s thought-provoking look ahead: GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS?

• You’re probably wondering why Yahoo bought Konfabulator
• An update on Google Browser, GooOS and Google Desktop
• A platform that everyone can stand on and why Apple, Microsoft, and, yes, even Google will have to change their ways to be a part of it
• The next killer app: desktop Web servers
• Does the Mozilla Foundation have the vision to make Firefox the most important piece of software of this decade?
• Web 3.0
• Finally, the end of Microsoft’s operating system dominance

(via Slashdot comment)

ideologi

What started out as a search for a community of minds has manifested itself as the crystalized vision of a universal exchange of ideas
(…)
>ideologi is an Internet-based system that facilitates ad hoc brainstorming sessions (called Exchanges) that individuals and organizations around the world can join. Users (called Participants) of ideologi can either submit answers to a countless number of active Exchanges, or submit their own questions to initiate an Exchange within ideologi.

> If a participant is interested in creating an Exchange in ideologi, a participant assumes the role of an Initiator by submitting the specifics of the Exchange for approval by Ideologi Foundation.

(Hat tip to unmediated)

Tired of coming to FeedBurner to analyze your stats? Use the API. Tired of “logging in” via a “browser” to “edit” your feed “settings”? Use the API.

Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog has the lowdown.

(via Read/Write Web - a great post with lots more on Web 2.0, API’s and Mash-Ups)

Still got a few days to look into this: blogday.wikispaces.org

In one long moment In August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new Blogs, Preferably, Blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.

(via unmediated)

From the Information Dynamics Laboratory comes The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems

…the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.

(via unmediated)

FrSIRT Advisories: Microsoft Internet Explorer “Msdds.dll” Remote Code Execution / Exploit

A critical vulnerability was identified in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which could be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands. This issue is due to a memory corruption error when instantiating the “Msdds.dll” (Microsoft Design Tools Diagram Surface) object as an ActiveX control, which could be exploited by an attacker to take complete control of an affected system via a specially crafted Web page.

This vulnerability has been confirmed on Windows XP SP2 with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 SP2 and Microsoft Office 2002 (fully patched).

Note : The “Msdds.dll” library is installed with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Update: 18 Aug:
Apparently only DLL Version 7.0.9064.9112 is vulnerable, in Office 2002 and Visual Studio 2002. Heise reports that a kill-bit needs to be set in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\

The key {EC444CB6-3E7E-4865-B1C3-0DE72EF39B3F} needs to be set to: “Compatibility Flags”=dword:00000400

See Jan Berend Wever’s COM objects and MSIE vulnerabilities recap + additional fix

And then there’s ZOTOB and The battle of Plug&Play worms!

(via Heise Online)

Introducing LibriVox!

An open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then *you*, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this webblog/podcast every week (day ?). LibriVox is a VOLUNTEER project: if you have problems with the quality of a recording, get busy and make another one; If you wish to listen, please enjoy; if you wish to record, please contact librivox.

Brilliant idea. Way to go, Hugh!

(via dose magazine)

David Kirkpatrick of FORTUNE: Cashing in on RSS

You know that blogs are cool, but do you know that blogs, and a related technology called RSS, may hold the future for software? That’s the view of Jim Moore, a longtime friend of mine, whom I talked to earlier this week. Moore and his three business partners caused quite a stir last month, when they announced that they have raised $100 million for the first-ever venture capital fund devoted to these technologies, called RSS Investors.

While rssinvestors.com is under construction, another interesting reference from the article is to Flock.

(via Scripting News)

Woah!

Technorati is tracking 900,000 new blog posts created every day.

Dave Sifry put up this graphic: Posts per Day, with Event Milestones

(via Steve Rubel)

Forbes’ summer feature Best of the Web includes a comprehensive directory of the web’s best blogs.

Among others, they list meta blogs, economics blogs, art blogs, city blogs, health and fitness blogs, medical blogs, music blogs, literary blogs, career blogs and their own favorites.

A real Fundgrube!

(via 92Y Blog)

A new citizen journalism service called HappyNews: links only to happy news “geared to lift spirits and inspire lives.”

“Real News, Compelling Stories, Always Positive”

The world can certainly do with more of that…. also sports an RSS feed

(via Micro Persuasion)

You don’t get to blog

It is, I’m horrified to report, a direct quote: %u201CWe gotta get into that blogging thing if we want to get snaps from younger readers…%u201D

Now, if you happen to hear these words coming from a very senior, 50-something editor at a well-known American newspaper I’m sure your reaction will be exactly like mine, namely: “uh-oh, I’m going to have a grand mal seizure now…”

(via unmediated)