Same data for the Olympics, different way of presentation:
Singapore rather covers Thaksin in the front page. That’s because we haven’t won any medals yet. Channel NewsAsia Beijing Olympic site talks about the Olympic spirit, the dance and some Olympic history.
American and U.K. media is feeding you lies about what happened in Georgia the night of August 7th, 2008. CNN claims that Russia invaded Georgia. The truth is Georgia had committed the act of genocide against people of South Ossetia, and Russia had no choice but to protect its own citizens!
I’ve been reading a little on the South Ossetia incident. I haven’t heard of this place before this attack. I thought Georgia is a place in USA actually. But news reports have been bias here. The media seem to pay more attention to Georgia as a victim instead of presenting a more objective view of the situation. This could possibly be due to Russia’s politicians reluctance to release statements on the war, but the media seems to be siding Georgia on this one.
[Note: Most of the news I read is USA new sites.]
Oh no, the US economy is apparently not doing well. Starbucks closing 600 stores. US is about Starbucks right?
Starbucks closing 600 underperforming stores in the United States
SEATTLE (AP) — Starbucks Corp. has announced it’s closing 600 underperforming stores in the United States.
The Seattle-based premium coffee company also announced Tuesday it expects to open fewer than 200 new company-operated stores in the United States in fiscal 2009.
The company says it will try to place workers from closed stores in remaining Starbucks. (Source: Yahoo)
With the US dollar dropping and the local dollar appreciating, it’s even harder to get a decent earning from US cheques. It probably is a good time to buy into foreign markets, taking advantage of the good rise in local dollar. Not the US market though.
Speaking of Internet Explorer, AVG has been disguising as Internet Explorer to visit websites. Web developers and webmasters aren’t too pleased. AVG’s LinkScanner is estimated having to be downloaded by more than 20 million people. The LinkScanner attempts to disguise itself as a real live human click claiming itself to be Internet Explorer 6. It just screws up web analytics.
AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6
…webmasters who rely on log files for their traffic numbers may be unaware their stats are skewed. And others complain that LinkScanner has added extra dollars to their bandwidth bill.
…(Paid AVG) appears that scans now use these agents as well:
- Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
- User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
- User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)
…the first agent is by far the most common. Which is bad news for webmasters. That’s also the Internet Explorer 6 user agent. Unlike the other two - and the original “1813″ agent - it’s a perfectly valid agent that may turn up with real clicks.
AVG’s chief of research Roger Thompson says the for-pay LinkScanner is only using the IE6 user agent
In an effort to fix this problem, one web master advocates redirecting AVG scans back to AVG’s site. “Many webmasters simply tell LinkScanner to scan AVG’s site instead, so their site gets marked as malware free every time - while AVG gets handed the extra bandwidth cost,” says the webmaster of TheSilhouettes.org.
But this assumes that AVG is using a unique agent. And at the moment, it’s not. The send-it-back-to-AVG method may redirect legitimate clicks as well.
Which gets to the heart of the matter: AVG’s security philosophy is fundamentally at odds with webmaster peace of mind. The company wants to scan search results, and it wants to scan them in a way that’s difficult to distinguish from real traffic. “In order to detect the really tricky - and by association, the most important - malicious content, we need to look just like a browser driven by a human being,” AVG chief of research Roger Thompson has told us.
And if that causes problems for webmasters, Thompson says, so be it. “I don’t want to sound flip about this, but if you want to make omelets, you have to break some eggs.”
Clearly, the company doesn’t fully realize the importance of web analytics.
“In order to make an omelet you have to crack some eggs. But a good omelet has cheese, ham, peppers, mushrooms and all sorts of other ingredients which AVG seem to have forgotten about.”
But AVG continues to say it’s working to solve the problem - including the bandwidth issue. Referring to LinkScanner’s new IE6-like user agent, Thompson told us, “We intend to leave those in place until we can find the right balance point which will allow us to continue to provide the best possible protection for our customers, without imposing too much extra bandwidth on websites.” (Source: The Register)
I was reading what the chief of research had to say - “If you want to make omelets, you have to break some eggs.” Sir, that’s just a nonsensical comparison, when you break eggs, you don’t get your neighbors to pay for them.
Bandwidth is a clear issue. It is not free. This solution is another example of how innocent parties are penalizes just because of a tiny number of visited sites infected with malware.
(By the way, I go around disguised at GoogleBot as my user agent. But that won’t hurt your bandwidth, I have reasons for doing so.)
On tech news today, Symbian adopts the Eclipse Public License, set up the Symbian Foundation and went opensource.
Industry leaders to unify the Symbian mobile platform and set it free
…industry leaders are coming together to establish Symbian Foundation, to bring to life a shared vision and to create the most proven, open and complete mobile software platform - available for free. To achieve this, the foundation will unify Symbian, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) software to create an unparalleled open software platform for converged mobile devices, enabling the whole mobile ecosystem to accelerate innovation.
The Symbian Foundation platform will be available to members under a royalty-free license from this non-profit foundation. The Symbian Foundation will provide, manage and unify the platform for its members. Also, it will commit to moving the platform to open source during the next two years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free, bringing additional innovation to the platform and engaging even a broader community in future developments.
The platform will be free and open to develop on from the start whether you are enthusiast, web designer, professional developer or service provider. To develop on the platform you will not need to be a member of the foundation. The Symbian Foundation’s developer program will provide a single point of access for developer support; providing a wide offering of tools and resources. (Source: Symbian Foundation)
Symbian is used by Nokia. It’s like Apple has the iPhone, Microsoft has Windows Mobile and even Google’s coming up with something too. Symbian’s having a rather unexciting future with all the other platforms (especially the iPhone) making news every now and then.
For years Nokia kept the OS closed and all of a sudden they open it. And why’s that so? Because they used it enough already, they earned their cash and they finally decide to share. This news would have been more exciting if released years ago, not anymore.
Okay, on less exciting new - Java is finally fully open and free and without any proprietary code.
This week the IcedTea Project reached an important milestone - The latest OpenJDK binary included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation - in keeping with the portability goal of the Java platform. As of writing, Fedora 9 is the only operating system to include a free and open Java SE 6 implementation that has passed the Java TCK.
More at SoftWhere
Wow that took them really long, since 2006 they’ve been talking about this.
Reddit decides to go open source. Reddit is already using open source software - Debian, lighttpd, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Slony-I, various python libraries, Psychopg, pylons, Solr, Tomcat, Ganglia, Mercurial, Git, gettext (translation), daemontools, and memcached. The only thing that isn’t open source is Reddit itself so they decide to open source it.
(Souce: Reddit)
Oh so that’s what the penguin is about.