IBM Scientists Rely on the Principle of Uncertainty To Develop Web-Privacy Answers

Called Privacy-Preserving Data Mining, the research relies on the notion that one's personal data can be protected by being scrambled or randomized prior to being communicated. By applying this technique, a retailer could generate highly accurate data models without ever seeing personal information. "The beauty of this research is that retailers and other Web businesses are able to extract the valuable demographic information they need without necessarily knowing the underlying personal consumer data", said Harriet P. Pearson, IBM's Chief Privacy Officer. "I believe we'll see technological approaches such as this playing a larger role in managing the privacy issues of today and the future."

BBC News | UK | Palace pop spectacle wows Jubilee crowds

More than a million people gathered in London to listen to some of the world's greatest rock and pop legends perform at Buckingham Palace in honour of the Queen's 50 years on the throne.

I missed the first hour of the concert on TV but caught the last two hours. It certainly catered for people of my generation ;-). It was great to see so many rock legends in one place at one time. The fireworks were pretty spectacular too ;-) Thoroughly enjoyable. It made me feel proud to be British.

The World Cup Blog is quite amusing. I've been watching England vs Sweden as a background task - a 1-1 score draw. No doubt there'll be lots of soul (no pun intended) searching about England's performance - pretty dire and lacking in imagination and flair. I don't intend to say much about the World Cup on DJ as there's plenty of media coverage. Even Tennent's, the Scottish beer brewer, is getting in on the act with their http://www.notattheworldcup.com website. I do like the current set of Tennent's TV 'pintlings' ads though ;-)

From Friday's Guardian Unlimited | Netnews | Europe votes to end data privacy

European law enforcement agencies were given sweeping powers yesterday to monitor telephone, internet and email traffic in a move denounced by critics as the biggest threat to data privacy in a generation.

Music Industry Unveils Piracy-Proof Format

"We can state with absolute certainty that no computer in the world can access the data on this disc," said spokesman Brett Campbell. "We are also confident that no-one is going to be able to produce pirate copies in this format without going to a heck of a lot of trouble. This is without doubt the best anti-piracy invention the music industry has ever seen."

I've also heard it said that some audiophiles prefer the sound output from this format of disc ;-)

via vfth - Web Page Design for Designers - Editorial June 2002 - Feature - Style Sheets without Tears - 3

Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has released a PDF version of his web page exposé of the Xbox innards - Keeping Secrets in Hardware: the Microsoft XBox Case Study.

There's even more on RSS auto-discovery on Mark's site. Looks like it'll reach critical mass soon ;-)

Ha! the Linux Journal On-Line | Obsolete Microkernel Dooms Mac OS X to Lag Linux in Performance article is rightly being derided as troll fodder. Although interesting from the point of view of an exposition of monolithic vs microkernel the article seems fundamentally flawed - not least because Mac OS X is not an example of a traditional microkernel OS!! The comments on the article are interesting too ;-)

Dave's been busy! - Aggregator Auto-Discovery

This page details the changes in the implementation of RSS Auto-Discovery in Radio and Frontier, and includes a heads-up for developers who have built on the aggregator, your code may have to change to support redirected subscriptions.

QUEEN NIGHT ON CHANNEL 4 has been playing in the background on the TV. I'm reliving some of my student days through the music of Queen and, earlier tonight, the Kenny Everett comedy sketches.

Quite rightly Paul Snively backlashes against the backlashed Ted Nelson:

The thing that always strikes me about the backlash against Nelson is that no one is willing to address his points about the disparity between the Web and Xanadu. No one has the intellectual honesty to examine the materials that Nelson has made available whether it's in the form of writing, such as Computer Lib/Dream Machines, or in the form of the Xanadu Green or Gold code or the ZigZag codand explain why Nelson's specific architectural vision is wrong. All of the attacks are ad hominem in nature.

Ted Nelson used to be visiting professor in the Department of Information Science at Strathclyde. I remember his inaugural lecture at the university. A very interesting guy. I seem to recall thinking during his lecture that the concepts in Project Xanadu were well ahead of their time but I couldn't imagine they'd ever make it into a real implementation.