Friday, November 25, 2005

Tech Topics in the News

Top of the tech news at the beginning of the week was the Sony BMG flap. A search of Google News or Yahoo news for Sony BMG will bring you what's current. There's a nice story on an Austin news site describing Mark Russinovich's discovery of Sony's spyware boobytrap, and how he spread the word from his blog.
       What displaced the Sony story was the latest worm outbreak. Be careful out there...
       The indefatigable Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a report, Online Activities and Pursuits, pointing out that search engine use has increased greatly. According to the chart on page 4, "On an average day, about 94 million adults use the internet. Here is the proportion of that daily population who are doing some well-known internet activities... Email    77% ; Search engine     63%..." That's about what we have observed on our public machines--most people want to check their email, but other uses are increasing noticably.
       Meanwhile, Google has renamed its book scanning project, now calling it "Google Book Search", to emphasize that although both materials in copyright and public domain materials are being scanned and will be searchable, there will be only limited access to the full texts unless the book is in the public domain. This seems not likely to mollify the publishers who have been opposing the project.

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