The Times: Tech column - Evil adware/Talking washing machine/Long bets
By David Rowan
THIS is the extraordinary story of how millions of computer users have unwittingly ceded control of their PCs to an American advertising company that plans to sell its computing power, disk space and bandwidth on the open market. Let it be a lesson to anyone who downloads software from the Internet without studying the small print.
One program, called KaZaA, has proved such an effective successor to Napster that it has been downloaded more than 20 million times since February - almost 3 million in the past week alone. KaZaA's popularity is well deserved: it lets you share music, video and picture files and, best of all, it is free. Typically such programs come bundled with software that shows you adverts when you are online. KaZaA has gone one step further. It is also bundling a program called Altnet SecureInstall that, it emerged last week, can turn any PC hosting it into part of a completely unrelated peer-to-peer network controlled by its parent company.
According to the small print, by downloading KaZaA you give up "the right to access and use the unused computing power and storage space on your computer and/or Internet access or bandwidth for the aggregation of content and use in distributed computing". This means that Altnet SecureInstall can use your machine to serve ads or content to other computers along the network. The advertising company that owns Brilliant Digital Entertainment, said last week that it would "turn on" affected PCs within the next two months. This news has not gone down well among the Internet community, not least among university IT departments, which fear that student downloads of KaZaA could end up blocking their networks' bandwidth with adverts. The company says that it will seek permission before using the computers and that their owners may be rewarded with vouchers. But with millions of privately owned PCs potentially at its service, Brilliant hopes that this commercial form of "distributed computing" will prove lucrative.
Opinion on the talk boards is less favourable, with comparisons being made to the malicious "trojans" that virus-writers hide within seemingly innocuous files. The program is also generating a new lexicon: Brilliant's software is being called "crapware", "parasiteware" and "hijackware". And such intrusive programs are absolutely legal - so think twice before you next download software.
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NEVER mind the digital revolution, technology geniuses at Electrolux have finally invented the world's first talking washing machine. They are most excited about their new "Washy Talky" model, which goes on sale this month in India. No wonder: its "warm, female, middle-class accent" can say such things as "Drop detergent, close lid and relax"; and, if you have not been listening, a more firm "Please close the lid".
It works, apparently, using an Interactive Voice Response System and features a Digital Load Imbalance Detector alongside a Fuzzy Logic Microcomputer. Whew. Such a rabid combination of jargon and superfluous novelty features can mean only one thing: after last year's redundancies and profit slump, the company is trying to reinvent its image as cutting-edge.
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All too often tech PRs and scientists make outlandish predictions that make headlines but little else. Now an online forum, www.longbets.org, hopes to force dreamers to back their claims with cash using that most fashionable Internet activity, the online bet. If someone makes a brash prediction, someone else can bet them that they are wrong. They have to commit real money, which is invested.
If or when they are proved right, they can claim their winnings for charity. Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief techie, has bet Eric Schmidt, of Google, $2,000 that "by 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes". Tech investor Esther Dyson has bet Bill Campbell, of the software firm Intuit, $10,000 that, by 2012, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times will have called Russia "the world leader in software development". And Jason Epstein, the former Random House boss, has bet the Internet pioneer Vint Cerf that, within eight years, more than half of all books sold will be printed on demand in the shop.
(The Times, April 19 2002)
THIS is the extraordinary story of how millions of computer users have unwittingly ceded control of their PCs to an American advertising company that plans to sell its computing power, disk space and bandwidth on the open market. Let it be a lesson to anyone who downloads software from the Internet without studying the small print.
One program, called KaZaA, has proved such an effective successor to Napster that it has been downloaded more than 20 million times since February - almost 3 million in the past week alone. KaZaA's popularity is well deserved: it lets you share music, video and picture files and, best of all, it is free. Typically such programs come bundled with software that shows you adverts when you are online. KaZaA has gone one step further. It is also bundling a program called Altnet SecureInstall that, it emerged last week, can turn any PC hosting it into part of a completely unrelated peer-to-peer network controlled by its parent company.
According to the small print, by downloading KaZaA you give up "the right to access and use the unused computing power and storage space on your computer and/or Internet access or bandwidth for the aggregation of content and use in distributed computing". This means that Altnet SecureInstall can use your machine to serve ads or content to other computers along the network. The advertising company that owns Brilliant Digital Entertainment, said last week that it would "turn on" affected PCs within the next two months. This news has not gone down well among the Internet community, not least among university IT departments, which fear that student downloads of KaZaA could end up blocking their networks' bandwidth with adverts. The company says that it will seek permission before using the computers and that their owners may be rewarded with vouchers. But with millions of privately owned PCs potentially at its service, Brilliant hopes that this commercial form of "distributed computing" will prove lucrative.
Opinion on the talk boards is less favourable, with comparisons being made to the malicious "trojans" that virus-writers hide within seemingly innocuous files. The program is also generating a new lexicon: Brilliant's software is being called "crapware", "parasiteware" and "hijackware". And such intrusive programs are absolutely legal - so think twice before you next download software.
++++
NEVER mind the digital revolution, technology geniuses at Electrolux have finally invented the world's first talking washing machine. They are most excited about their new "Washy Talky" model, which goes on sale this month in India. No wonder: its "warm, female, middle-class accent" can say such things as "Drop detergent, close lid and relax"; and, if you have not been listening, a more firm "Please close the lid".
It works, apparently, using an Interactive Voice Response System and features a Digital Load Imbalance Detector alongside a Fuzzy Logic Microcomputer. Whew. Such a rabid combination of jargon and superfluous novelty features can mean only one thing: after last year's redundancies and profit slump, the company is trying to reinvent its image as cutting-edge.
++++
All too often tech PRs and scientists make outlandish predictions that make headlines but little else. Now an online forum, www.longbets.org, hopes to force dreamers to back their claims with cash using that most fashionable Internet activity, the online bet. If someone makes a brash prediction, someone else can bet them that they are wrong. They have to commit real money, which is invested.
If or when they are proved right, they can claim their winnings for charity. Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief techie, has bet Eric Schmidt, of Google, $2,000 that "by 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes". Tech investor Esther Dyson has bet Bill Campbell, of the software firm Intuit, $10,000 that, by 2012, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times will have called Russia "the world leader in software development". And Jason Epstein, the former Random House boss, has bet the Internet pioneer Vint Cerf that, within eight years, more than half of all books sold will be printed on demand in the shop.
(The Times, April 19 2002)
posted by David Rowan at Friday, April 19, 2002
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