Sneak is a big fan of Lauren Weinstein. This is partly because the picture on his blog suggests it would be unwise to diss him – he appears to be a huge, hairy-arsed biker, although of course he could easily be a puny weakling with a girl's name and a photo of a hairy-arsed biker. The other reason Sneak gives Weinstein the thumbs up is for his prominent role in working to safeguard privacy.
Sneak particularly admired this recent summary of Google’s questionable business practices:

 

Google keeps records of your searches, and can tie them to other activities via cookies. Google scans the e-mail you send and receive through Gmail. Google collects a variety of information on your other browsing activities through various optional toolbars and services.

Now, with the new Sun Microsystems deal, if hosted versions of word processing and related applications are developed [as is rumoured], Google could quite possibly be tied into your document editing ... if you use such services.

Google refuses to hire a privacy officer (after all, they're the "Trust us -- First do no evil" company, and they're smarter than everyone else about... well... everything, right?)

Google refuses to detail their data retention policies or the extent to which they make that growing corpus of data available to outside entities. ... "Trust us" is not enough.

Why does Google so strenuously resist at least consulting with the privacy community? What have they got to lose if everything they're doing is on the up and up?

Stirring stuff. At a guess, what Google stands to lose might be its $300 share price.

October 14, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2)

As fans of desert-based robot racing will already be aware, the weekend saw the second running of the Darpa Grand Challenge race for robotic ground vehicles. And it was a stupendous success for well-funded teams able to put huge quantities of processing power into big 4x4 trucks.
The winner, driving off with a $2m prize, was a modified VW Touareg entered by Stanford University but built with just a little help from huge international manufacturer Volkswagen and its California-based Electronics Research Laboratory.
Dubbed “Stanley”, the winning vehicle boasted seven networked 1.6GHz Pentium M motherboards, hooked up to a stereo visual system, 24GHz radar and a state of the art GPS navigation unit. It completed a challenging 130 mile course in less than seven hours, just minutes ahead of two similarly well-heeled challengers.
Sadly underdogs like Ghostrider, a 125cc motorcycle steered by a single AMD chip and fiendish ingenuity, proved all too capable of crashing into things.
The race turned out not to be such a grand challenge after all, as the big prize has been won on only the second running of the race, an outcome that looked like a tall order after the ignominious end to the first attempt in 2004. That first race saw half the field to struggle to cross the start line, with the front-runner getting stuck and spinning its tyres until they caught fire after only 7.4 miles.

October 10, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)