For those of you that don’t like to be tracked by browser cookies when you are traveling around the Internet – you should know that browser privacy settings or most Cookie cleaners are not finding these little hidden files.
Adobe has built in their own tracking cookies into Flash that can store information about what sites or movies you are viewing. These are not blocked by your privacy settings in the web browswer, or even removed by most privacy / antivirus software. Vipre by Sunbelt Software is starting a beta to start cleaning these files as well.
That doesn’t bother me as much as what they are doing with these limited flash cookies. Flash cookies themselves aren’t as valuable to marketers or website owners as a browser cookie. A study by University of California showed that websites are using these flash cookies to give you a unique marker, so when the website cookies are deleted, when you revisit the website it will use this unique flash cookie to respawn the original cookies that you have deleted. The study stated that more than 50% are using flash cookies to store information about their users.
If you would like to remove these cookies manually as found on a Wired article:
Where to find these flash cookies:
* Windows: LSO files are stored typically with a “.SOL” extension, within each user’s Application Data directory, under Macromedia\FlashPlayer\#SharedObjects.
* Mac OS X: For Web sites, ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/FlashPlayer. For AIR Applications, ~/Library/Preferences/[package name (ID)of your app] and ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/FlashPlayer/macromedia.com/Support/flashplayer/sys
* GNU-Linux: ~/.macromedia
Hey – did you hear that Microsoft has upgraded their search engine named Bing? If you haven’t, you either don’t pay attention to the blur of TV commercials as you fast forward, or you don’t watch anything on Hulu. So, I thought I would give a post to you people of how bing compares. First I did a simple search:
It found Google, that’s a good start! =) It even lets you search google from Bing. Maybe that’s how I should start to search now…
No seriously, Microsoft has actually done well at this new search engine. Much better than their Live.com & MSN.com. I came across this site called BlindSearch by Michael Kordahi. It lets you enter a search query then it shows the results from Google, Yahoo, & Bing side by side. However, he doesn’t show you which search engine is which, so you can have a good “Blind Search”. The site will let you reveal the engines after you choose to.
So, I thought I would give my own test. Searching for things like Amazon or IRS worked fine, but do give different results than Google or Yahoo on more difficult querys. So, the conspiracy theory that Microsoft is just using Google search is probably false. So, I thought I might try the most important search – “brentb blog”. (-ha!) The results did not impress me to the Bing side.
Not even in the top 5? Come on! Well, they covered a lot of ground, but they haven’t won my search business. (However, I may be looking for competitive search advertising-please post a comment if you have any experience with Bing advertising.)
Not everyone can get a username yet. Here are the requirements from facebook:
Eligibility is limited to anyone who joined Facebook before usernames were publicly announced at 3 p.m. (EDT) on June 9, 2009. These users will have the chance to claim usernames at 12:01 a.m. (EDT) on Saturday, June 13, 2009.
This limitation is temporary. All users who joined Facebook after the cut-off will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009.
Make sure you go out and grab your username, because this will be worse than the days of AOL when you had to make your username brentb3887. I am still kicking myself, however since I was not home that night – so I forgot to register for my desired name brentb until the next night and it was gone.
Apple presented at the WWDC at noon today. I missed my lunch watching the live updates come from MacRumors (thank you and great job, guys!). For those that did not want to miss their lunch – here are some updates I thought were interesting:
Steve Jobs did not make an appearance
iPhone OS 3.0 will be released for the older models June 17th (Free for iPhone users – iTouch will be $9.99)
iPhone OS 3.0 New Features (Copy/Paste/Undo, Cross Program Search, MMS Support (Not until possibly late summer for AT&T customers, PC Tethering (Yep, not suppored by AT&T again), website form autofill support, and more Landscape keyboards
New iPhone 3GS will be released June 19 (Faster hardware, Better auto-focus camera, records video, and voice control)
New Pricing with the iPhone 3GS Release - 3G 8GB: $99, 3GS 16GB: $199, 3GS 32GB: $299
Apple Reports Current Apps offered on each platform: iPhone (50,000), Andriod (4,900), Nokia (1,088), Blackberry (1,030), Palm (18)
At the Google I/O Conference they talked about all their Web Elements that developers can use, and trying to increase development for their Andriod OS with a new bribe, I mean challenge, to try to catch the ever-growing iPhone. All these things are still great – but the one thing I took from reading of this conference was this brand new product they are making called Google Wave.
Google Wave is like a personal outlook, social network and work space all put together. You create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can exchange text, photos, special gadgets, and much more. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly while you are watching it in real time.
Here are some main points that I thought were interesting from the keynote:
Created by the same Project Managers as Google Maps
Currently 1.5 years into development
Building it as a open architecture for others to develop new plugins or host their own version
Live updating chat windows
Word or iPhone like spell check that updates live as typing
Can playback revisions of any “wave” from beginning of wave to oldest version
Can insert a reply into any part of original message
Just drag images into the wave to post a colection of images to share
Post to a blog from a wave and allow blog visitors to post comments from your blog directly to your wave
Can have a space that is shared among different users where they can be all editing at the same time – showing the changes of all users to all users as they are happening
Another developing plugin called “Rosy” can translate what is being typed to another language as you type the sentence
When typing a link location, plugin called “Linky” can automatically turn text into a link when the link is verified as a real URL, and can even tell what the link is going to. If “Linky” detects a video, it offers to just embed the video instead of a link
If you would like to watch the over 1 hour keynote yourself, you may watch it below:
iTunes 8.2 was released with the major update offering support for the iPhone 3.0 operating system. I have been a registered iPhone developer for some time, so I have been playing with the new iTunes while in beta.
iTunes hasn’t changed too much, which I was a little disappointed. I would like to see some development with the management of the Applications. You can make Playlists for music – but you can’t sort Applications in iTunes other than it’s default alphabetic. I love the iPhone, but I want a mouse when I have 8-9 pages of Apps on my phone that I want to sort. Matt with usrlocal.com posted that after he restored his configuration from before the beta upgrade, the order of the applications on your iPhone are not saved to iTunes. So, if you spent a good amount of times getting all those apps in the right spot, currently those apps will go back to default order. I will be upgrading my phone with the release as soon as it comes out – so I will report if this is still true out of beta, but I have a sneaky feeling it will act the same.
With the iTunes update coming out this week – it is looking very good that the iPhone 3.0 will be annoced at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference next week. Rumor has it, that Steve Jobs will be there as well. I do hope he will show up for this important release (and also a release of a Apple Tablet? Hmm….)
As I was watching another TV show on hulu with my TV sitting dark in my living room – I started thinking about how TV has already started this major shift to a new medium. When a full hour show on normal broadcast TV is cut down to by more than 15 minutes by skipping past all the commercials on my DVR, I started to wonder how will these advertisers let this content shift to a medium where they have less advertising time?
I have been pondering this until just last night. When watching a episode of Family Guy for a nice laugh – I noticed that I didn’t even care that I was actually watching the small commerical spots inserted several times during the show. Not only can you not fast forward through them – but hulu is kind enough if you have already watched the ad and you back the video back up before it – it will not play the ad again.
I believe that advertisers will actually pay more for the spot on hulu than on broadcast TV for several reasons:
The viewer is actually going to watch your ad
You can target your ads to certain demographics that hulu provides you (ie: they could show different ads depending on who is watching the same show)
Better tracking of when and where their ads are being shown (today they have to rely on Nielsen to estimate how many viewers are watching. With hulu – they know how many people have watched their ad)
Bottom line – I don’t think Advertisers or the content creators are going to be the losers of this new medium shift. The losers are going to be the cable & satellite providers trying to charge $50-75 for something people can get in like quality on demand. These companies can only make it becoming the best Internet provider offered for the customer.
Wolfram Alpha. This was a new site that I kept hearing some things about. Not a lot was said about the new site other than it would be more of a mathematical engine. The creator of Wolfram Alpha is Stephen Wolfram the creator of Mathematica. All I could think about is - oh no, another company trying to become Google. After the recent launch, I went to check it out. I think they actually might have something here to complement normal web search engines.
Wolfram Alpha does not find keywords in an index to show you results. Wolfram Alpha first tries to figure out what you are asking, and then instead of showing you where to find the answer – it tries to answer the mathematical question for you. Like any search engine – you have to get used to the way to ask the question, but it tries to help you along as you learn. For example – I asked the engine how many houses were being built in California verses Iowa. “average house price Iowa compared average house price California”
Input interpretation:
Result:
Housing:
With a quick question, I was able to find out the information that was needed from respected sources and it lays it out in an easy to read format.
Another question that I asked is just my first name “Brent” to see what would be resulted:
With that query I was able to see that 130,082 people are expected to be alive with my first name in the US, and the popularity of my first name has been dropping since 1970. With another quick search I found that the first name Michael is currently used 1 out of 101 names.
It still doesn’t always understand what you are asking, but after I listened to an interview with Stephen Wolfram, they are watching how people search and are tweaking it to make it even easier. Even Google wasn’t perfect in the beginning. My only other recommendation to the Wolfram Alpha team, I know Stephen Wolfram should get credit for this engine, but using his own name for the domain? I would rather see a domain used that told what it did.
It doesn’t take long for software to appear on the torrents ready for downloading. As people are ready to move away from Vista to something new and better without going to the Mac side – downloads of Microsoft Windows 7 has skyrocketed. Although beta version were available to download, when the release candidate was leaked a lot of people jumped on BitTorrent to get themselves a copy. Altough, the person who leaked this copy to the public had more to share than just the copy of windows 7.
According to a eWeek article the pirate also included their own software with this package:
According to researchers at Damballa, attackers hid a Trojan inside of pirated copies of the operating system and began circulating them on BitTorrent sites. Damballa reported that it shut down the botnet’s command and control server May 10, but by that time infection rates had risen as high as 552 users per hour.
….
In the case of Windows 7 RC, pirated copies were leaked on BitTorrent sites with a Trojan horse that, once downloaded, attempts to install a bundle of other malware on the infected machine. Blocking infections is tricky, as many anti-virus tools do not yet support Windows 7 and the operating system is infected before the tools can even be installed, according to Damballa.
To have preinfected software in pirated software is not new, but having it on the OS installation is something I haven’t heard of before. Antivirus is not usually the first thing people install when trying out a new operating system, especially when Windows 7 is not very antivirus software friendly currently.
So, for those that are looking for that cheap (free) software online – remember you get what you pay for. =) How about just using the public beta directly from Microsoft?
I attended a conference called IgniteIT Iowa a little while ago, and was very impressed. They had lots of activities and speakers, but I participated in the “Scratch” activity. Scratch is a program written and provided free by MIT. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Just playing with the program for about an hour I was able to make a very simple but animated story. It felt like a very fun easy version of flash. Here is a video from MIT to show a little more about it:
Click the button to download a free version to give it a try:
For those of you that don’t like to be tracked by browser cookies when you are traveling around the Internet – you should know that browser privacy settings or most Cookie cleaners are not finding these little hidden files.
Apple presented at the WWDC at noon today. I missed my lunch watching the live updates come from 
iTunes 8.2 was released with the major update offering support for the iPhone 3.0 operating system. I have been a registered iPhone developer for some time, so I have been playing with the new iTunes while in beta. 
As I was watching another TV show on 
It doesn’t take long for software to appear on the torrents ready for downloading. As people are ready to move away from Vista to something new and better without going to the Mac side – downloads of Microsoft Windows 7 has skyrocketed. Although beta version were available to download, when the release candidate was leaked a lot of people jumped on BitTorrent to get themselves a copy. Altough, the person who leaked this copy to the public had more to share than just the copy of windows 7.
I attended a conference called 