Search / 8 posts tagged Randall Stross

The converse side of Google providing targeting information for foreign terrorists (or militaries) is the question of Google censoring information that’s politically objectionable to host governments, rather than have its search (or YouTube) banned nationwide.

Note to readers: iPhonetics should not be confused with iPhonatics. A regular reader — noticing my raft of recent iPhone postings — offered a pointer to this story published in London’s Daily Telegraph.

Four scholars look at Google November 1, 2008 by Paul Lomio Today’s Financial Times includes a review essay by James Harkin, “Net prophets - Incorporated just 10 years ago, Google predicts and shapes our view of the world.”  The essay is a review of these three books: Planet Google: How One Company

Is Google good or is it evil? Is the company an all-knowing behemoth that is hubristically “transforming our lives”, big brother-style, with its intrusive technology or is it a plucky, selfless Silicon Valley start-up that is “audaciously” organizing all the world’s information for all of our benefit?

True story: back in 1999, at the height of the dotcom boom, my husband and I had an idea for a review site that would be accessible via both the web and mobile phones. It would be a site where anyone could review and rank any kind of product or service.

Really interesting “Digital Domain” article by Randall Stross in today’s Business section of the New York Times, “First It Was Song Downloads.  Now It’s Organic Chemistry,” about college textbooks and sites such as PirateBay.org.

The International Herald Tribune has posted an article discussing the fact that e-mails don’t always reach their destinations…and the sender isn’t always notified: The basic Internet e-mail standard - SMTP, or simple mail transport protocol - has always provided for the destination server to send back an error message if the original message cannot be delivered.

I came across an interesting article in the New York Times by Randall Stross which discusses consumer VoIP services, the differences in quality between them and the general trend towards multiple services of lower reliability replacing a single service (PSTN) of extreme reliability.