Links

Where is Google X? It used to at labs.google.com/googlex, but there’s a 404 now. More at MetaFilter.

AmazType is a typographic book search based on Amazon. I didn’t understand what that meant either, until I searched for Six Degrees. Try it. Then click on a few of the book images.

Bruce Schneier on The Failure of Two-Factor Authentication. Two factor authentication replaces passwords with two things: something you have (e.g. a security token that changes numbers every minute) and something you know (e.g. password). Bruce says this won’t help against two new kinds of attacks we’re seeing:

Man-in-the-Middle attack. An attacker puts up a fake bank website and entices user to that website. User types in his password, and the attacker in turn uses it to access the bank’s real website. Done right, the user will never realize that he isn’t at the bank’s website. Then the attacker either disconnects the user and makes any fraudulent transactions he wants, or passes along the user’s banking transactions while making his own transactions at the same time.

Trojan attack. Attacker gets Trojan installed on user’s computer. When user logs into his bank’s website, the attacker piggybacks on that session via the Trojan to make any fraudulent transaction he wants.

Telecom Italia’s Gandhi ad.

The long tail of software.

The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the long tail: queries asked a little over once a day.

Search is a long tail business and that is the source of its power and profit. Read Chris Anderson’s Wired article

Cognitive daily.

Are rich kids more troubled than poor kids?
How do we decide what we’re seeing?
What else are we doing when we watch a movie?
What are we doing when we watch a movie? etc.

Bollycat: a list of Bollywood films plagiarized from Hollywood.

17-year old Panna Felsen defeats 3 robots in arm-wrestling. The slashdot comments are hilarious.

Harvard rejects applicants using hacker services.

MoSoSos: Mobile Social Software services.

I checked in to dodgeball, she said, and “I got an alert that ‘so-and-so has a crush on you, and he is at X bar, go and say hi.'” she said.

So McGunigle went to the bar, and by coincidence, it was the same guy she’d just seen on the subway. Like her, he’d been too shy to make an approach, but not to send a text message.