SDR2006-10-08 Podcast – SDRNews
Announcer: This is the Tech Podcast Network. If it’s tech, it’s here.
Andy McCaskey: It’s Slashdot Review for Sunday, October 8, 2006. My name is Andy McCaskey and this is Slashdot Review.
Got some news tonight but it was a beautiful day in the Midwest and I had a family visit going on, and it was kind of a hard day to come inside and work on the script in preparation for the show. But we have an interesting day of tech news ahead for you.
Today’s Slashdot Review comes to you with support from our sponsor gotomeeting. Gotomeeting has the reputation of being easy to use and affordable. Business meetings that work. We’ll also pass along thanks today to Peter York at downloadradio.org the provider of the Slashdot Review Bittorrent feed.
In the headlines or actually the first item that we have up here is the Google code search – an example of unintended consequences. The tool was announced on Thursday and basically allows people through Google to peak into lines of code whenever that source code has been published on the Internet. It was intended of course as a developer’s resource to find open source tools or code fragments and so forth but almost immediately bad guys have pounced upon it, looking for vulnerabilities and the word “proprietary” as in the proprietary source code statement that somehow got posted on the Net.
All is not lost though because there is a second example of unintended consequences that turned out to be a good bit more positive. You remember last summer Google got into a lot of controversy associated with the plan to scan everything that was in print and they have been fighting some lawsuits as book publishers have feared that this would reduce the sales of their books. But there is actually now some evidence turning up that particularly for smaller publishers that the Google search has enabled smaller publishers to get the word out about the books that they have. People can look at them and sample them and it has actually resulted in more orders than they had had before, which they are able to tie directly to leads that have come to them from Google. Amazon has also been very positive. So a little bit of unintended consequences. Both stories related to Google directly.
Here’s one that I dug up from another source not from Slashdot. Actually it comes from the Register and it talks about the worst password practices, The worst offenders are sysadmins. They have strong passwords but they are very infrequently changed. This particular survey went out to a large number of IT professionals and they found that amongst the survey group, 99 % of the individual passwords or user passwords were updated within a one year period of time. But it was far less for privileged accounts. In fact the passwords on 13 % of the routers and servers that were administered by these people were never changed. Password on 21 % of the local workstations were never changed and 42% of admin passwords for applications such as databases and so forth.
Foronceandforall.com, which is a review site had an interesting article on “iPod forever”, and he came up with ten reasons why the iPod in his mind will last forever. It is too cool in his mind and too well known to suffer a setback in the marketplace. He had about ten reasons along these lines of reasoning. He talks about price points being fairly reasonable and Apple has been quite aggressive in defending particular price points for certain capabilities. And amongst young people, particularly teenagers, the shuffle has been affordable and a somewhat of a status symbol amongst a large number of young users. He pointed to the iPodosphere, this entire arrangement and ecosystem of accessories that has grown up around the iPod itself.
Of course it is not harmed at all by some competitors, who have been pretty inept with some of the products that they have thrown into the marketplace, and Apple has been able to defend themselves very easily on that. He also points to switching costs, that consumers are basically lazy in that once you get set up on iTunes, the iTunes music store you are used to doing that with Apple products and so forth. It is kind of against human nature to switch to a different product or a different system. So there are about ten reasons he thought the iPod would last for a very long time but he did note that one thing could work against it – kind of the success could result in a situation where the iPod has become so common that people will start buying other products just to show their individuality and be away from the crowd of iPod users and have their own chance to be unique.
Two stories out of the Washington, DC area, both regarding hacking by China into the Department of Commerce and the Department of State. This came not only from Infoweek, who reported the Department of Commerce hack, which included rootkits and various types of malware, but also the Washington Post. This apparently was the second major attack that had originated in China that was acknowledged by the federal government since July of this year.
The Washington Post reported that the Bureau of Industry and Security, which is a section of Department of Commerce responsible for overseeing exports, which are dual purpose exports for both commercial and military applications were targets for the attack although their particular machines apparently were not breached. There had also been some incidents at the State Department. The UK has been targeted as well. More than 300 agencies and private companies were apparently targeted by Chinese hackers in the year 2005. So there’s a lot of activity that’s going on there.
Briefly let me move over to a little bit of discussion of things that are on the site at Slashdotreview. The new things that are going up this weekend are transcripts, links to the stories, not only the actual content of this new informal approach but links and show notes. We are going to continue to try and improve this because I think this could be a good resource for people, particularly for items that I find at other places that won’t be on Slashdot directly.
News in London – the Philips Simplicity Exposition. This is an exhibit and event fusing design and technology. It would include e-black boards lighting, skin tone scanners, immersive game environments, all sorts of things that merge the design and fine arts world with products. Before you discount the effect of these sorts of – I guess you would say soft elements – to a product I would just have to ask you whether you saved your ipod box in the packaging it came in. I think a lot of us have because it just looks too nice to throw away.
Two release candidates have hit the marketplace, at least the beta tester marketplace: one from windows vista for their technical beta testers and a release candidate rc2 for firefox featuring a tweaked UI, improved stability, new tabbed browsing and a new Resume System restorer, which will allow you to open up all those tabs if you happen to close the browser itself.
A few production notes here tonight. We have got a new Edirol mike interface, the UA25 and as one of the laws of unintended consequence that’s disabled the autofader on castblaster. I don’t know if it is a driver problem or what, but I guess you would characterize it as collective strangeness. So once again I can’t hear exactly the entry points and so forth as I am trying to produce the show here tonight. I appreciate your patience on that.
I’m still recording everything as a backup because I’ve been down that road before when something somewhere gets broken and if you don’t want to have a chance to do it again it’s a good thing to have a recorder running in the background. I think that almost every podcaster has exactly the same paranoia that comes from having to do shows two and three times if you are not careful.
Some listener emails: Jeff Belman said – this is in reference to music again – he has been turned onto a number of new groups which he probably would never have found on his own. I believe it was Jeff’s suggestion that maybe we could have some music links on the site itself and I hope that once we get through this transition I can add some of that material.
Mark Berossa has been a long-term listener and he said “I always skip the 40 seconds of the podcast because I found the headlines to be redundant for such a short podcast so those won’t be missed.” Mark is a long term listener and provided links on his blog as early as March 2005. I certainly thank him for his support and loyalty here.
Some more comments: Joseph Sip pointed out that it is really necessary in this new format to make it very clear when you are shifting into and out of ads because with more conversational delivery, the difference is hard to tell whether it is something that is a review that was published somewhere, something that I found myself or something I have been paid to promote.
I really try to pay attention to that and if you will notice the advertising content in almost every case now I am starting to put music underneath that. So that would be one way to identify advertising content. And the second thing is I will not follow up advertising content without some informal comments before that to give you some transition as we move from a news item through comments into some advertising, into some paid advertising material. Of course when I do have samples or items that I have not paid for directly then I will be sure and identify that as well, so it’s clear as far as the comments that I make. So anyway thanks to Joseph for those particular things that he wrote in.
You might want to check out YouTube. First of all as you’ve probably heard Google is negotiating to buy YouTube for 1.6 billion dollars and of course they are providing over a 100 million video downloads a day. Just amazing.
Two clips from our group from the Philips Simplicity Exposition. I want to ask you in particular to hang onto the very last three or four seconds of the longer video, which has a crystal ball which is really, really interesting. There are about 50 videos now on the YouTube group for Slashdotreview, just click on the YouTube logo at slashdotreview.com.
That’s it for this evening. Don’t forget our dial-in line for comments 732-357-3682, Comments and suggestions to slashdotreview@gmail.com. My name is Andy McCaskey, I have no affiliation with slashdot other than as a regular reader. Thanks for listening and we will see you tomorrow.