christo - Slashdot User

Submission + - AOL, Netflix and the end of open research (cnet.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 30, 2007 @01:54PM

An anonymous reader writes: In 2006, heads rolled at AOL after the company released anonymized logs of user searches. With last week's announcement that researchers had been able to learn the identities of users in the scrubbed Netflix dataset, could the days of companies sharing data with academic researchers be numbered? Shortly after the AOL incident, Google's Eric Schmidt called the data release "a terrible thing," and assured the public that "this kind of thing could not happen at Google." Will any high tech company ever take this kind of chance again? If not, how will this impact research and and the development of future technologies that could have come from the study of real data.

Submission + - FBI data-mines grocery stores. Did Visa/MC help? (cnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @10:50AM

An anonymous reader writes: Recent media reports indicate that in 2005-06, the FBI went trawling through grocery store records in order to track down Iranian terror cells. They hoped to be able to locate Iranians through the purchase of specific food items. The problem with this, of course, is that most Iranians buy their middle eastern food at small ethnic markets, and not the big supermarket chains — for the simple reason that muslims are required to eat halal meat, which is not sold in most places. The majority of mom and pop ethnic markets do not have the detailed computer purchase histories that Safeway or Whole Foods have. Thus, what is more likely is that the FBI simply put together a list of everyone who had purchased anything at a middle eastern food market. As this "CNET article discusses, all signs point to the credit card companies (Visa, Mastercard, Amex) providing this data, and not the individual stores. This could be the tip of a (potentially illegal) data-mining iceberg. http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9812473-46.html

Submission + - TV Torrents: When 'piracy' is easier than purchase

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13, 2007 @11:04AM

An anonymous reader writes: NBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. They join Linux users, and people outside western markets whose only method of watching The Daily Show is to turn to illegal downloads. Online media stores such as iTunes, Amazon and Walmart have never been able to compete with the pirates on price, or freedom and flexibility — as the content they sell is typically wrapped in restrictive DRM. The one advantage that legal purchase offered was ease of use. CNET looks into the issue, and discovers that with mature open-source media players such as Miro supporting BitTorrent RSS feeds, it is actually trivially easy for users to subscribe to their favorite shows. Want to wake up to the latest episode of The Colbert Report, Top Gear or any of hundreds of TV shows automatically downloaded and waiting for you? CNET offers an easy three step guide.

The Morality of Web Advertisement Blocking 974

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @12:22PM from the can't-see-a-problem dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There has been some recent coverage of the over-hyped boycott of Firefox, in response to the rising popularity of the Adblock Plus Firefox extension. A recent editorial on CNET looks into the issue, and explores the moral and legal issues involved in client-side web advertisement blocking. Whereas TiVo users freeload on the relatively fixed broadcasting costs paid by TV networks, users of web ad-blocking technology are actively denying website owners revenue that would otherwise go to pay for the bandwidth costs of serving up those web pages. If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft? Is this right? "

Slashdot Top Deals