I had this idea about a year ago, my brother thought oh my, another one of your off the wall ideas that has nothing to do with anything. I think it’s a cool idea, an opportunity to show what people around the country and the world are keeping in their pockets. I would do it with geo tagging so you could see what people in silicon valley are keeping in their pockets (what’s more popular, blackberry or palm devices?), as compared to what people in rural Alabama keep in their pockets. There would be some interesting data to see what everyone is carrying around.

Of course you would have to depend on honesty, and what someone has in their pockets during the day may be different than at night. I saw a similar type of post at digg a while ago, something like what is in your day bag / briefcase kind of thing.

Today I found a post at Boing Boing that talks about a site from another country that asks people to scan their face and contents of their pockets.. close, to my idea. Cool to see other people having cool ideas.

Saw an announcement that Digg is adding more social network, or myspace like features. I think this is an excellent idea, although I already consider digg to be a social network, I do look forward to seeing a personal profile page that can highlight some favorite posts and such. I’m interested to see what kind of groups form, and I wonder if there will be a social network open id type of thing one day that will let people pull personal details from and have a central way to add new items to a personal feed that would auto-appear on multiple social network sites. I would love to highlight an article or blog post on one site and have it automatically be added to my facebook, myspace, digg and mash pages. I am sure there are people who would enjoy this functionality as well.

Digg post and comments about the social network additions.

Don’t know why they picked this name, and I suppose the 360 network taught some lessons. The most interesting part about this article is the thought of mixing all the yahoo mini apps - kind of like a facebook widget adder, this could really take off as long as they have different modules being able to be more private than others. I believe that simple things like flickr’s setting for viewable by family, or friends, applied to various modules within could be really cool. They made some progress with this in 360. Can’t wait ti see a social network done right. Of course having a myspace like page that has my music and games right there where people could join in, may actually get some non yahoo id having folks to connect with me more often by joining. I hate it when I want to communicate with people on messenger or share via flickr and friends aren’t already using the yahoo services… time will tell.

From yahoo news / reuters:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news)/span> is testing an experimental social network service called Mash that makes it easy for Yahoo users to share tidbits of their lives with friends and family online, the company said on Sunday.

Mash, to which a limited number of public users began being invited as testers on Friday, was described by a spokeswoman as a new, next-generation service that is independent from the company’s 2- year-old Yahoo 360 degree profile service.

While Yahoo was early among Internet companies to embrace the trend toward sharing media with friends by purchasing start-ups like photo site Flickr.com, it has struggled to catch up with the Web’s biggest new trend: Social networking.

Mash amounts to a new stab at competing with the likes of News Corp’s MySpace, Facebook, Bebo or Google’s Orkut, which have attracted tens of millions of users worldwide.

The Silicon Valley company emphasized it is in the early stages of testing the new service. One aspect of the service is the power it gives users to edit their friends profiles and add personal blurbs, subject to approval by the profile owner.

“Ongoing product innovation is important to Yahoo and we continue to test various products and services to gain feedback from our users. Mash, an experimental profile service, is an example of this ongoing testing,” a company statement said.

Eventually, Mash could connect to a variety of existing Yahoo services and mini-applications known as Widgets, acting as a personal profile both on the public Internet or among a private group of friends, depending on individual preference. Yahoo has more than 500 million monthly users of its various services including a quarter million Yahoo Mail e-mail users.

Interesting article talking about some of the business in hacking nad virus writing groups. No surprise that they will make license agreements similar to what microsoft and other unreasonable agreements that are floating around. Malware writers taking lessons from corporate legal, who is surprised by that?

from yahoo news / AP

 Online crooks getting more professional

By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer Mon Sep 17, 1:09 AM ET

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Online crooks are quickly enlarging an already vast sales and distribution network to propagate spam and send malicious software in hopes of infecting millions of computers worldwide, according to a new report.

In a report to be released Monday, security software maker Symantec Corp. says sophisticated thieves sell code to criminal middlemen for as much as $1,000 per program. The middlemen then push the code to consumers, who may be duped into participating in a scam, or who may have their passwords, financial data and other personal data stolen and used by identity theft rings.

The savviest hackers lock middlemen into long-term service contracts so they can automatically push the newest exploits on unwitting consumers and compensate for patches developed by legitimate programmers.

The agreements — not unlike contracts between software powerhouses such as Oracle Corp. or Microsoft Corp. and their corporate clients — leave a trail of code that, in principal, makes it easier for authorities to catch both the hacker and the person who’s buying the program. But researchers who worked on Symantec’s newest Internet Security Threat Report said the amount of money to be made from computer attacks still outweighs the danger.

“These people are taking a huge risk, and either they’re stupid — which we don’t believe is the case — or they’re making big money,” said Alfred Huger, vice president of Symantec Security Response.

Symantec’s new report covers the first six months of 2007 and draws on attack data gathered from more than 120 million computers running Symantec antivirus software and more than 2 million decoy e-mail accounts designed to attract spam and other shady messages from around the world.

Among the findings:

• The sale of stolen personal information online continues to grow. The United States is the top country for so-called underground economy servers, home to 64 percent of the computers known to Symantec to be places where thieves barter over the sale over verified credit card numbers, government-issued identification numbers and other data. Germany was second and Sweden ranked third.

• China had the most computers infected by Web robots, or bots — software that performs automated tasks online, such as propagating spam, often without the knowledge or consent of the computer’s owner. China had one-third the world’s computers conscripted by “bot herders.”

• The number of threats caused by malicious code has ballooned. In the first six months of the year, 212,101 new malicious code threats were reported to Symantec, an increase of 185 percent over the previous six months.

But researchers agreed that professional-grade service agreements between cyber criminals and their agents was the most alarming trend.

A small number of malicious “toolkits” — bundles of exploits that allow criminals to customize their own scams and attacks — is responsible for a growing number of attacks.

Only three toolkits were responsible for 42 percent of the 2.3 million so-called ‘phishing’ messages spotted and blocked by Symantec during the first six months of the year. Crooks use phishing messages to try and steal personal and financial information by tricking people into entering private information into bogus Web sites that look like the sites of legitimate brands such as banks or popular retailers.

Such toolkits cost $300 to $800.

Another widely available toolkit in early 2007 — called MPack — sold online for $1,000 and allowed users to launch attacks in Web browsers against people who surf on malicious or compromised sites. In some cases it appeared to come with a support pack from its authors, Symantec said.

“The reliability and robustness of MPack implies that it benefited from professional development,” researchers wrote.

Other researchers discovered more hopeful signs.

According to a report expected Monday from IBM Corp.’s Internet Security Systems X-Force researchers, the number of computer vulnerabilities either publicly disclosed by companies or discovered by threat researchers declined during the first half of the year.

IBM tallied 3,273 vulnerabilities — down 3.3 percent from the first half of last year. IBM said it was the first time the vulnerability numbers fell during the first half of the year since X-Force began cataloging them in 1997, when there were 106 known vulnerabilities.

Reasonable agreement should be more well known.

from yahoo news:

Search startup ready to challenge Google

But one startup, Powerset, is pursuing a particularly challenging goal: It’s aiming to outshine the Internet’s brightest star with a new search engine built to outsmart Google.

After nearly two years of hushed development, Powerset is finally providing a peek at a “natural-language” technology that is supposed to make it easier to communicate with search engines.

Powerset’s algorithms are programmed to understand search requests submitted in plain English, a change from the “keyword” system used by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and the owners of the other leading engines.

The distinction means Web surfers will theoretically be able to get more meaningful results by typing more precise search requests in the form of straightforward questions like “What did Steve Jobs say about Apple?” instead of entering an ungrammatical mishmash like “Apple Steve Jobs said.”

Barney Pell, Powerset’s co-founder and chief executive, likens the hit-and-miss-process of searching with keywords to talking to a 2-year-old.

“In one sense, you are happy you can talk to it at all, but you still really want it to grow up so you can hold a real conversation,” he said.

This isn’t the first time a search engine has tried to understand simple English, but Powerset has drawn more attention because its natural-language technology is being licensed from the Palo Alto Research Center.

Better known as PARC, the Xerox Corp. subsidiary is renowned for hatching breakthroughs — like the computer mouse and the graphical interface for personal computers — that were later commercialized by other companies.

PARC’s top natural-language specialist, Ronald Kaplan, is now Powerset’s chief technology and scientific officer.

“We have the best natural-language search technology that has ever been developed,” Pell, an artificial intelligence expert, boasted in an interview last week.

Backed by $12.5 million in venture capital, Powerset offered its first public preview Monday morning at the conference hosted by TechCrunch, a blog widely read by venture capitalists and other high-tech luminaries.

Powerset is gradually opening its testing ground, dubbed Powerlabs, to 16,000 people who signed up to get an early glimpse at the search engine. During this test phase, Powerlabs is only indexing material from Wikipedia, a popular Web encyclopedia.

The San Francisco-based startup is so confident that its methods are superior to Google that Powerlabs will present some answers alongside what its rival returns when asked the same questions. Powerset is requiring its users to vote on which engine produced better results before they are allowed to enter another search request.

“Google is the king,” Pell said. “Their system does an amazing job, given what they have to go on. But we think they have plateaued.”

Much larger companies — all relying on keyword search — haven’t been able to knock Google from its pedestal. Despite huge investments in search by Yahoo and Microsoft, Google has steadily expanded its market share during the past three years and now processes more than half of all search requests on the Internet.

But even Google’s executives acknowledge that today’s search technology doesn’t do as good a job as it should in divining what people are looking for on the Internet. That’s one reason Google has hired thousands of more workers and spent nearly $2.2 billion on research and development since the end of 2005.

Other search engines have previously promised to understand conversational English with little success.

In the 1990s, Ask Jeeves was founded on the premise that Internet search requests should be presented as simple questions. It frustrated users with too many irrelevant answers.

After nearly failing in the dot-com bust, the company embraced the keyword approach to search and abandoned its mascot — a cartoon butler named Jeeves — to distance itself from the days it relied on natural-language algorithms. It is now known simply as Ask.com.

More recently, New York-based Hakia has been tackling natural-language search requests without making much of a dent in the market.

Industry analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research is skeptical about Powerset’s prospects, too. She doubts Powerset will be able to comprehend all the different ways that people seeking the same type of information can phrase their questions.

For instance, the questions “What caused the collapse of Enron?” and “What caused the downfall of Enron?” typically produce different search results even though they are essentially asking the same thing, Li said. That’s because computers have trouble recognizing synonyms and other subtle nuances in language.

“Understanding the meaning of many words is difficult without people involved,” she said.

This should be an interesting attempt. I bet that some things will be better and some things will not work as well. Of course google has a major anti spam team and many other advantages over a lot of search directories. I think Ask Jeeves had tried to do some of this and was later sued for using the technology that is apparently copyrighted somehow. All in all it should make finding stuff on the internet easier and better in the future. This may make a good toolbar with suggested questions perhaps. We’ll see where it goes. For now I don’t need any more toolbars, and I am pretty comfortable searching with keywords actually.