This is almost too much to be believed.
I say almost because whenever you have legislation written to the specifics of a market or technology, by lawmakers with little or no understanding of the market or technology there are bound to be mistakes.
Let’s hope this is simply a mistake, as opposed to the end of privacy on the Internet.
TalkDigger is a great tool that lets you search conversations about a specific URL.
This is a metasearch that covers Technorati, Google Blog, Bloglines, Feedster, BlogDigger, Icerocket, MSN Search, Google, Yahoo!
You can outuput the results as an RSS feed to keep track of your sites and stay involved in the conversation.
With reports that a “New Worm Chats with Users on AIM” link and even goes so far as to respond “lol no its not its a virus” when questioned it’s not too far of a leap to imagine personalized viruses.
Don’t imagine the personalized viruses tailored to your DNA that many sci-fi novels talk about, but instead think the evolution of Spear-Phishing.
This kind of an attack could use the information it gathers about you (contact names, frequency of contact, online purchase history, emails, IM history etc) to masquerade as a “trusted” contact to everyone you know. If it wasn’t too intrusive, then it would be difficult to even notice if your system had been infected.
Imagine that instead of trying to steal your credit card numbers, or other information that has a lot of attention focused on security this “personalized” virus simply pretended to be you occasionally.
It could IM/email your contacts, and suggest products or services. If it only chose things that you would recommend, or have purchased (think of Amazon’s suggestion engine), to the type of people who would be interested (search for keywords in email/IM interactions), and could do it in your ‘voice’ (copy phrasing from IM/email) it would be very effective. Perhaps it would even place VOIP calls, and remix your voice for maximum effectiveness.
Whatever the mechanism, the fact remains that eventually one of your friends would say ‘Thanks for the heads up on that (stock pick, book, software package, membership website etc)’ and it would come out that you didn’t actually tell them about it.
The question is – would you mind?
Think of it this way – If someone had a website with EXACTLY the news that you were interested in, and nothing else you would be very happy to read it. It wouldn’t matter that the site was a splog newsmaster site, or the product of a great news team. Either way you are happy with the end result.
By the same token, you really would like to let all of your friends know about the products and services that you think would improve their lives. It would be even better if you were able to do so without taking any effort on your part, and it just “worked in the background”.
By making itself unobtrusive, and even helpful you would have very little incentive to track down and remove the bot. From there it’s just a short step to reminding you about appointments, screening phone calls etc. After all if it’s doing a good enough job, you might even want it to help you to manage your relationships a little. Imagine being able to delegate those obligatory chats to your Fetch* .
As I have discussed before the revolution in personalized content may well evolve from search engine spammers. That is just one niche in the digital ecosystem. In order for digital life to evolve there needs to be competition and consequences. With anti-virus, anti-spyware and other types of competitive software in the mix only the fittest will survive.
I can’t wait to see what comes out from this.
* Fetch = autonomous adaptive software agent or knowledge based agent.
Trust + MMORG = Reputation Economy
new reputation economies will pervasively reshape culture as dramatically as the invention of money. Entirely novel kinds of human interaction will spawn new social classes, power structures and lifestyles. Reputation economies will be abstractions of relationships, in the same way that money abstracts material wealth and labor.
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FGHLink is a windows based tool to make HTML code out of the data from sponsors in the adult business. If your sponsor provides free hosted galleries with descriptions or thumbnails (small pictures) you can make HTML links with this tool.
“About This Site” is a plugin for Firefox that makes it easy to check:
* Alexa traffic detail and related sites
* Del.icio.us linkbacks
* Google related pages, cache and link information
* Kinja site readers
* Netcraft reports
* Open Directory site listing
* Popdex search for citations
* Technorati link cosmos
* Wayback Machine archive
* Whois query
* Yahoo linkdomain
This plugin to show metadata is very useful for SEO as well as SEM.
Google Analytics launches. Lot’s of features including “Funnel Visualization” that have been lacking from easy to use free stats packages.
Surj Patel is leading an open Linux mobile development effort. This could be the start of the Open Platform Handset that I have been hoping will develop.
One of my friends takes great joy in tormenting Google cheerleaders. He likes to say things like “I’m going to use Yahoo, it’s the best search engine”, or “I’m going to Yahoo for it, that way I will actually find it”. When he wants to find something Y! is the first place that he goes.
What makes this funy is that he makes a good part of his living through “creative search engine marketing” and is generally much more able to game Yahoo than Google.
But now it looks like a lot more people may be thinking his way. Yahoo has launched personalized social search.
Save to My Web is a simple, sociable button you can add to any and every page of your blog or website. Users click to save your content and add it directly to their stored pages on My Web 2.0. From there, the page is easy to retrieve, and easy to share with others. …
By distributing the tagging/microchunking of content to it’s users, Yahoo goes from search & communities (Y! groups) to search + communities + reconstructor. This could be the missing piece for the Yahoo triple play, a la Media 2.0 Strategic Maxims.
via John Battelle’s Searchblog
Ends vs Means
Mature people who actually care about the world don’t ponder the question “do the ends justify the means,” because they know that there IS no end.
From Decemberist via tecznotes