Into Tech

My laptop has started to show steady data input and output as soon as it connects to the web via a wireless router. This continues for as long as I leave the machine connected. AVG 8, Ad-Aware and Spybot have revealed nothing.
Robert Caldicott

You are right to be concerned because the unknown data traffic could be spam or worse, if your PC has been hacked. However, the most likely cause is Microsoft’s Windows Update, which dribbles away in the background so as not to interfere with normal usage. Otherwise, your firewall should tell you which applications have your permission to access the internet, and which ones are active. Active processes should also be visible in the Windows Task Manager or the superior Process Explorer, a free download. In your case, the culprit may be setupxv.exe, which could be malware or fake anti-spyware.

The web is another common source of unknown data traffic. Some pages refresh adverts or update their contents periodically without telling you, but this should stop if you close down all browsers.

If you can’t see what’s sending traffic, you can try using a packet sniffer to capture and examine the data being transferred. Sadly, I use Wireshark (wireshark.org), which is not a simple option for beginners. There are alternatives listed at sectools.org and SnapFiles. SmartSniff looks easier to use. Other suggestions welcome!

We’ve pointed out for years, that Nicholas Carr is one of the smartest, most astute thinkers out there — and he always writes interesting articles, that make interesting points and get you to think about things in a different manner. However, it’s frustrating that he continually makes all these great observations, and then at the end jumps to a totally bizarre and often outright incorrect conclusion that isn’t supported at all by the points he made earlier in the article. Yet, because he leads people down the garden path so beautifully, many people take that fanciful leap with Carr, missing the fact that there’s really nothing holding up the structure on the other side.

He did this about a year ago, in pointing out that Google’s main business was in driving all sorts of complementary businesses forward by making them cheaper (or all the way to free), such that they helped its main business (getting eyeballs to sell to advertisers). That’s a good, and important observation — but where Carr went wrong, was to claim that building up complementary businesses was somehow unique to Google, and couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be replicated by most other businesses. That’s simply incorrect. As we’ve been pointing out, if you want to succeed in today’s digital market, you absolutely need to recognize the complementary markets that impact your business — because all markets have those complements.

Yet, it appears that Carr liked his mythological Google-uniqueness scenario so much that he’s trotting it out again, suggesting that Google is in a dangerous position because as it drives prices in those complementary businesses down, it’s apparently wreaking havoc on all sorts of other companies and business models, even if the end result is better for consumers.

What Carr’s missing (and this is common to much of Carr’s writing) is that these complementary markets where the price is being driven to zero isn’t a bad thing, but the natural efficiency of the marketplace, driving goods with zero or close to zero marginal cost down to their most efficiently priced positions — where they then help make many other businesses and markets (those the focus on scarce goods, such as selling attention) much more valuable. It’s the same thing as Luddites complaining about technology making things more efficient. Yes, automated phone switching equipment made phone operators obsolete, but it also enabled much bigger markets and the net benefit to society was huge. Making a market more efficient, even if it changes the business model of those who lived off of the inefficiency before, is not a bad thing. That’s the natural state of the market, and contrary to Carr’s assertion, it’s not just a few companies that are benefiting from this. Plenty of companies and individuals are understanding this every day, and using this basic concept of using infinite complements to make scarce goods more valuable. Carr does a huge disservice to his readers in suggesting that it’s somehow unique to companies like Google and Microsoft. It’s not.

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RSS has been used for more than a decade, but have only recently become commonly used. It is used to provide headlines and summaries of information in a concise and standardized way in one place, without the inconvenience of visiting separate site on the internet.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (although versions before RSS 2.0 [...]

Is there an external hard drive that is really automatic?
Michael Abraham

Clickfree external hard drives are promoted as offering the “first out-of-the-box automatic backup” and can handle up to 10 PCs. I’ve not used one, but the 160GB model was warmly recommended by a reader who bought it from QVC.

On the day that Google’s Chrome browser launched I saw a few reports claiming that it already had jumped to somewhere between 2 and 3% of the market. Those numbers seemed ridiculously high for a first day launch of a new piece of software — especially in a market where the majority of people still use the browser that came included with their operating system, and have not chosen to download and use an alternative like Firefox. While some more recent stats suggest both lower penetration, and that Chrome got a first day bump that seems to now be going away, another study suggests that most of the Chrome marketshare actually came from Internet Explorer users, rather than Firefox or Opera. In fact, the report found that all of the market share difference came from IE. That seems hard to believe. I would imagine that the folks most likely to download and use Chrome are those who are already comfortable with downloading and using an alternative browser. So, can anyone explain these results?

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Google’s been pretty busy recently, launching its Chrome browser at the start of the month and following up with news that it’s currently working on a project to digitise the world’s newspapers so that they can be browsed online.

The massive undertaking has actually been underway for a couple of years already as in 2006 Google began archiving issues of the New York Times and Washington Post.

I was looking for a handy place to put a bit of info from Nielsen Online: the UK’s Top 10 web browsers, according to their “unique audience” (online use). Market shares are also given as percentages:

1. Internet Explorer………. 25,169,576…..75%
2. Mozilla (Firefox)………… 4,014,924…..12%
3. AOL Explorer…………….2,554,037…….8%
4. Yahoo! Browser………….1,359,823……4%
5. Opera Browser……………..111,443…….0.33%
6. MSN Explorer Browser…….75,428…….0.22%
7. Flock…………………………..14,356…….0.04%
8. Avant Browser……………….10,765…….0.03%
9. Safari……………………………9,826…….0.03%
10. SlimBrowser…………………8,840……..0.03%

(I’ve asked why Safari gets such a low score. It looks very wrong.)

I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Google’s Chrome will soon be in the top 5, but it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has sent a letter to the Justice Department opposing Yahoo’s plan to hand much of its search advertising over to Google. We’ve already explained some reasons why this combination shouldn’t set off antitrust alarms, but the reasons given by the ANA don’t make much sense. It claims that the deal would basically mean that one company would control 90% of the market, which would lead to increased prices for advertisers. However, that doesn’t necessarily seem true to follow — because Google doesn’t set prices for ads. Google’s ad system is, famously, an auction system where the prices are set by the market. So it’s difficult to see why the inclusion of Yahoo’s ad inventory would significantly raise the prices — unless the argument is that the market is artificially depressed right now, and this would just raise it to the proper levels. However, apparently, that might not matter much, as reports are coming out that the Justice Department has already hired a big time antitrust lawyer to use against Google. This is increasingly looking like a political attack on a company that is “big” rather than looking to see if its success actually harms or helps consumers.

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“The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising,” says The Wall Street Journal. “Mr Litvack’s hiring is the strongest signal yet that the US is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of US online-search ads.”

For weeks, US lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal, lawyers close to the review said. Such efforts don’t always mean a case will be brought, however.

Later, the story says:

It is relatively rare for the Justice Department to hire a special counsel from outside the department. David Boies was brought in as a special counsel to build the landmark antitrust case against Microsoft in 1998. Stephen Axinn, another well-known New York litigator, was hired to challenge WorldCom Inc.’s proposed buyout of Sprint Corp. The companies abandoned that transaction in 2000 after the department and Mr. Axinn challenged the deal.

Here’s an interesting game project by Nick Diakopoulos, Kurt Luther, and Irfan Essa of the Georgia Institute of Technology. AudioPuzzler involves listening to snippets of dialogue drawn from a selection of short videos, then accurately transcribing and re-ordering the contents to make cogent sentences. Once you’ve completed a puzzle, you get to watch the video.

It’s sort of like Typing of the Dead, but with a useful purpose - Diakopoulos and co are looking into ways of creating high accuracy video transcriptions, which don’t rely on automatic methods. Perhaps a game like AudioPuzzler could be used to create close-captioned videos without requiring lots of staff and financial resources.

Have a go anyway - it’s quite unusual.

(Via WaterCoolerGames)