Year: 2002

Forbes: netizens don’t value privacy all that much. The average surfer that I meet does not know about privacy, and does not worry too much when explained either.

Broad and insightful talk by Diamond on why history unfolded differently across continents. Note that he’s talking about why and not how. Based on his book: Guns, Germs and Steel.

Today, I couldn’t access Google. When I tried, I got this site instead.

We keep hearing about India’s and Hindu’s peaceful history. But if India’s poor treatment of Buddhism is anything to go by, we’re no better than any others. Guess we were lucky to have Gandhi and a non-overthrowable British Government. Otherwise, we’d have gone to war as well.

Bottomquark’s review of distributed computing projects. What’s striking is that there are commercial distributed projects — where companies pay for the use of your idle time. That’s a powerful concept. Instead of buying computers from a vendor, or even computing time from a vendor, these projects are buying computing time retail.

The reason I guess this works is the dis-aggregation of computing time. When I buy a computer, I need its use for about 12 hours a day. But I’m paying for its availability 24 hours a day. Since I have that spare power, I can sell it as long as there’s a liquid market for such power.

Shortly, there will be companies creating this market — focusing on aggregating the retail computing power, and using them across several projects. (Google is already trying to do that through its toolbar, and so is Intel.)

Further, projects that earler could not be executed for lack of computing resources, but generating sufficient interest across the world, can now be undertaken. Like Internet Movie Project, for instance. Because people who are interested in the project will pay for it through their spare computing time.

distributed.net cracked RC5-64. RC5-64 is an encryption algorithm developed by RSA. It took 4 years. It looks long. But the big deal is, the algorithm therefore can’t be used for long-term security. More importantly, it’s becoming practical to use distributed computing on a massive scale.

Get an idea of how much trouble copyright is generating for Google. via LinuxJournal

Remember the Oracle of Google? Looks like it’s a lot more versatile than I thought. I asked it who coined the word “robot”. And the Oracle picked the right answer despite a mis-spelling!. (The answer is Karl Capek)

I found this site on neuroscience (for kids). Nice. Has lots of brain games (no — not smart ones — more like testing your reaction time, etc.) Actually I was reading up on neuroscience because of this article on how neuroscience helped figure out the meaning behind a Zen garden. via missing matter

Open source should not be forced by governments, argues the Initiative for Software Choice. Their argument (which open source proponents agree with) is that software should be chosen on merit. But the argument is also self-serving, as the initiative is funded by software companies.