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AOL’s search logs: the ultimate “Database Of Intentions”
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Andrew Orlowski
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AOL Labs prompted a weekend of hyperventilation in the ‘blogosphere’ by publishing the search queries from 650,000 users. This mini-scandal may yet prove valuable, however, as it reveals an intriguing psychological study of the boundaries of what is considered acceptable privacy. In his turgid book on Google – one so obsequious and unchallenging that Google…
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Whatever happened to… the smartphone?
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Andrew Orlowski
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At one time, the future of mobiles looked simple. The smartphone was a new kind of gadget that was subsuming the pager, the camera, the PDA, the Walkman, and almost every other iece of technology you could carry – and offering it in volume at an irresistible price. Often free. Over time, every phone would…
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Addicted to antitrust, Microsoft outlines 12-Step Recovery
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Antitrust addict Microsoft has outlined a 12-Step Recovery Program, which it says will help prevent it from lapsing back into anti-competitive practices in the future. The declaration follows three major “interventions” in fifteen years. A 1991 investigation by the Federal Trade Commission resulted in a Consent Decree signed in 1995. A 1997 investigation by the…
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Old net geezers play trip-you-up
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Andrew Orlowski
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The rolling net “neutrality” debate brought two of the internet’s most distinguished elder statesmen together in mortal combat this week. The two gentlemen, Vint Cerf and Dave Farber, said they agreed on most things. But where they didn’t, they tried to pull the chair away just as their opponent tried to sit down.… Read More
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The New Paranoid style in American politics
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Andrew Orlowski
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The most interesting thing to emerge from the so-called ‘Net Neutrality’ bid had nothing to do with telecomms technology or policy. It’s the startling and, at the same time, banal fact that paranoia has become the default flavour of politics on the net. Phantoms fight phantoms, here. When the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote his famous…
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Microsoft’s future file system dies, again
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Microsoft’s most ambitious software plan – to base Windows on a native database – has died again. The feature was originally touted in 1991 for ‘Cairo’, which Microsoft then described as an object-oriented operating system, built on top of Windows NT. Cairo was sidelined as a result of Microsoft’s focus on the internet, and the…