I hate Google’s new branding strategy

Have you noticed of late Google being a bit.. well.. monopolistic?

Well I have. Don't get me wrong, I love the company and the work they do – but their business and public relations practices are beginning to smell a lot like Microsoft.

Take Adwords and Adsense for example. It is the sole reason that Google has the money it has – text based advertising. Recently, the text underneath the bulk of adsense ads (like the ones below) that used to say Ads by Google, now has a Google logo image, furthering their brand to all who use the internet and see their ads.

With Google's recent purchase of DoubleClick for billions of dollars, I can see their stake in on-line advertising boom further. 

Then we come to YouTube. Love it or hate it, we have to live with it; And regardless of whether you think that it showing copyrighted video clips over the internet goes against intellectual property laws, Google is making a killing from the 'Tube. Rumours are rife to the meaning of the YouTube deal; Many people (including me) believe that Goggle acquired YouTube because they were losing so much money over them selling Adsense ad space, that a takeover in the end would in fact save them money. 

It could also be said, now that Google own YouTube and Google Video (obviously), they have a giant 55% share in the on-line video market — easily having the monopoly.

Digg this, or die trying

A storm is brewing up in America over the publishing of keys that allow the circumvention of HD-DVD and Blu-ray copy protection systems.

The AACS have been recently quashing bloggers, directories and search engines over the discovered keys, giving cease and desist letter to those who infringe upon the copyright.

However, a rebellion is starting on the world famous Digg website. Initially, Digg's stance was to remove any stories linking the keys. As more users became aware of Digg censoring the story, the owner and founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, decided to come outright with it. In a bold move he titled a new blog entry with the key it self in.

Hi, nice site! Now buy some Viagra.

This is a screeny of my admin panel to Movable Type comments.

Grind’s my gears: Scraggly, struggling PCFormat: For white trash only

I read PCFormat and I have done for many many years but of late, standard have been more than slipping. With a bleak circulation, PCFormat decided a rebranding was the answer… smoother fonts, better colours, and the most white cover-girls you'll ever see, wearing as less as possible of course.

Being male, a Computer Science University student and heterosexual, I am exactly who PCFormat consider their key demographic, and by putting as many white girls with barely skimpy clothes on the cover and throughout each month they plan to keep people like me reading. It'll also hopefully distract people form the fact that the magazine has shrunk about 20 pages every year, and has even got smaller width and height wise in the last few months.

What really grinds my gears is that PCF have never put a non-white girl on the cover; I'm afraid this leave a very sour taste in my mouth indeed.

However, I am not impressed (which would be obvious if you've read the above and get sarcasm… duh!). I will see how the magazine pans out over the next few issues, to see if things get better. But for now, this is a long standing subscriber who is not at all happy.

All I can see in the future is a tiny little flip-book with a pair of breast on the front to attract someone at least when buying a magazine.

Guido Fawkes on Newsnight

During watching the UK show, Newsnight, a opinion-politics based show (you just have to watch it), there was a five minute piece from the notorious UK politics blogger, Guido Fawkes. He anonymously created a feature which tried to reveal the conspiracy of news representation in the on the BBC in the UK – as they can never give a completely unbiased story. He also claimed that as political correspondents working for the BBC have contacts with or even are friends with some UK politicians, that they naturally protect their contacts and friends within government.

What was hilarious about this feature was that when Guido interviewed the presenter of the show Jeremy Paxman (Paxo), Paxo called his accusations, (on national TV)

… absolute bollocks…

and refered to his ideas as being,

… stupid conspiracies …

Legend!
A look through Fawkes’ blog, and I can quickly see what Paxo’s talking about – half of the articles this week were about whether or not Gordon Brown picked his nose during the Budget speech that Blair was giving. Is this news, or even worth watching?

Science vs. Faith

I saw this and it made me chuckle… science vs. faith

Lots of work, stress and virus troubles. Cancel or Allow?

I have got alot of work to complete recently – my algorithms assignment, software engineering and final programming project (to be uploaded in the not to distant future).

So I, Andy Callaghan, officially blame Windows Vista for making my life even more stressful by ‘contracting’ a virus mid-programming and doing my work.

Due to the Windows virus, I got banned from the Uni network. The viral traffic was detected by the Universities firewalls. They completely locked me down… no email or web (except the windows update site, naturally). I was crapping myself. I couldn’t access (still can’t to a degree) my network drive in the University so none of my work could be accessed.

After installing all the anti-virus software they could throw at me, they unbanned then quickly banned me again a day after with the same reason – Poebot virus traffic.

All of this, was occurring on a fully up-to-date legal version of Windows Vista – reportedly the most secure operating system that M$ have ever produced. Safe? Yeah right. The user-access control is a joke! (but you can Cancel of Allow anything that the system may do!).

It is simply not sensible to trust all my work and grades in an insecure system.

I duly formatted the Vista infestation off of my machine, and reinstalled Win XP.

To add insult to injury the Windows installer, of course, completely scrubbed the boot sector of my drive for it’s own boot loader, erasing GRUB – so I couldn’t boot into openSuse. I rebuilt the boot-loader from the openSuse disk, to then find that Windows had corrupted my root drive for Linux.

A re-install of openSuse allowed me to see that my t’internet connection had been re-enabled as my entire machine was functioning in openSuse. However in Windows, after a fresh install and driver install of what I could, the following still don’t work.

• Network
• Sound
• Dual screen (even with Nvidia drivers installed)
• Webcam, printer and scanner (but these are less important)

I am now enjoying openSuse, merely because it works perfectly and is a lot less likely to lose my work by viruses. Kdevelop rocks!

This is a picture of my openSuse desktop, in all of it’s dual-head transparency loveliness.

Ending comments:

If (exoskeleton || (green && wiggles)) eat_it();

Grinds my gears: The decline of mobile phones

The mobile phone business is big. Really big. This in turn generates many competitors in the market for mobile phones. Arguably this is a good thing in terms of MS-style dominance, but bad in an other – it breeds fashion, style and battling statistics.

To some people, the only distinction between old and new handsets is how many features they have, how many different fascias you can buy for it, or how many mega-pixels can the camera capture. Some of my friends have even bought hugely expensive handsets as they looked ‘purty’.

This has meant that some mobile phones have merely morphed into a fashion accessory rather than an object of engineering brilliance. After all the technological advances in voice transmission, it can simple come down to how nice it looks.

Voice-over-IP is one of the best leaps in technology as far as phones go that we’ll see in along time, but why do no phone support it? It could be because each new phone that comes to market is backed by one or a few networks that try they’re best at locking out all competition. This is where my rant this evening lies

Smartphones are the future, but phone locking features heavily in all Windows Mobile OS phones. Devices running this operating system have a bootstrapping-style chip which prevents not only the OS from being replaced, but also forbid the change of network (easily).

You may say that this is only just Microsoft that are being anal about their Operating system’s security but no… Apple’s new iPhone not only block OS and network changes, but they lock out all third party apps from being installed. This is a step down a path that is very difficult to come back from in my opinion. The mobile phone’s future will be locked, proprietary, expensive and slow to progress if this style of OS implementation keeps going.

In my eyes, the future is with a small fully open sourced phone called openMoko. Not only is it stylish, but any programmer or hacker is able to change any part of it’s OS design and functionality. I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

To change the mentality of all phone manufacturers, a major mobile phone producer like Nokia would need to produce a phone which was completely open source and be successful with it. All the hard-nut Linux-followers would buy it, and perfectly normal, Joe Doe users like me would too.

An open source mobile phone future is a much better one – locking for MS phones yes, but also the choice for a free and unrestricted platform with a huge and promising future.

Windows Live OneCare fails basic virus detection tests

An independent security group that test the effectiveness of the major virus scanners have failed to certify Windows Live OneCare because of it’s crappy performance in the tests.

The following programs were tested:

Avast
AVG
AVIRA
BitDefender
Dr.Web
eScan
NOD32
FortiClient
F-Prot
F-Secure
AVK
Kaspersky
McAfee
MS OneCare
Norman VC
Symantec Norton
Trustport AVW

WIndows Live OneCare on average detected only 80% of infections, whereas other programs such as AVK can boast over 99.4% detection rate of all the viruses detected.

See the report here

Repugnant Idiotic Ar*ehole Association (of America)

In a strangely horrifyingly horrendous (but non-suprising) move, the RIAA are now going after university and college students in the US, after issuing over 600 letters of settlement to persons across the states.

Sweetly, the RIAA have set up a website where the students who receive the letter can enter in a code and settle the case online, as if justice through the courts wasn’t even and option to them.

What made me so angry upon reading this website was that the RIAA had been quoted saying the following to the defendants:

… to help fund the fine of the copyright infringement of music, you can drop out of college of university …

Are they serious? Destroying young lives as well as old?

To quote their website…

The unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted music is JUST AS ILLEGAL AS SHOPLIFTING A CD. Burning CD’s from peer-to-peer networks like KaZaA, Morpheus or Gnutella is against the law

So, if I walked right now into a music store in America and a CD, I wonder how much the RIAA would sue me; Almost worth trying…

Say if I stole an ice-cream from you. You would no longer have that tasty ice-cream. Whereas if I chose to ’steal’ an album over the internet the company who sell it still have it, the artist still owns the all the songs and Johnny Public can still sleep safe at night! Stealing involves physical objects. Music sharing is not stealing.

Shoplifting is a completely different crime, involving physical objects and material and not groups of ones and zeros. Filesharing is caring, not stealing.