Daily Blog: Scouting the Internet and World at large

Gloom and doom, someone's finally knocked the wind out of Google's sails. At least that's what it looks like on the surface. One writer over at Market Watch see's a long road ahead for the advertising giant as it faces a plateau in revenue growth. But despite the relatively smart look into what makes Google tick, this article will likely be seen by most as an obvious knock against the company. Face it; it's cool to hate Google.

It wasn't long ago that I wrote about how the notion of Google would someday overpowering Microsoft was ludicrous. Some might find it hard to believe, but companies rarely rise and fall overnight. Historically, a company that ignores trends and discounts competitors suffers a slow and agonizing decline. Not only is there no evidence that Microsoft does this, but it's even more unlikely that Google could quickly dislodge a company that not owns a lion's share of the PC operating system market.

Nothing draws a crowd like shocking news. It seems that the latest craze in America is over bacteria, and how it can be found just about everywhere. Every few weeks I noticed the latest expose where some investigative reporter tested some otherwise mundane place or thing and was surprised to find "hundreds" of different kinds of bacteria. I can only shake my head in disbelief, because one of the first things you learn in high school biology class is that every environment is teaming with bacteria. The only catch is that most of it is harmless to human beings.

If you follow Maslow's hierarchy of human needs you'll notice that only after we satisfy our basic needs do we really move on to worry about other things like what kind of shirt am I going to wear, does it make me look fat, and where I'm going to take a vacation this year. Somewhere above all of these trivial concerns is fear of bacteria, or any of a host of other things that we were blissfully unaware of. It seems that only after someone points out that our toilet bowel is cleaner than the average fast food ice bin that we sit up and take notice.

Origin of..

For most of us, emoticons have been around longer than we can remember. Even so-called "old farts" such as myself who started to use BBSes back in the 80s can't remember a time when people weren't using the little sideways smilies. That's why a pending patent application by Cingular Wireless threw everyone for a loop. Apparently the company wants to patent the series of keystrokes used to text the icon.

Granted, a lot has changed since the smiley was first invented. Most systems now replace the little text representation with a graphical icon, but the underlying creation of the smiley remains the same. So a group of technology archeologist set out to uncover the origin of the smiley emoticon. After much searching they uncovered the first reference to it, a bulletin board post from 1982 by Scott Fahlman.

One would think that 1982 constitutes prior art, but unfortunately that is not always the case with US patent office. I expect that if this application is granted you will see a justifiable uproar from those that believe our current IP & Patent systems are broken. Essentially what you have is a company acquiring a patent on something they did not invent, nor had any hand in creating. Essentially they are patenting someone else's work. Likewise, if the item is trivial enough that anyone can claim it, then it's too trivial to be granted patent protection.

The key here is to remember that the patent system was created to grant temporary rights to the inventors of new technology, and to foster creativity, not stifle it. Today we run a serious risk of doing the later.

Matters of Security

For a year or two now Mac users have been mighty smug in the fact that there have been no virus on the OS X platform. Recently several proof of concept viruses were created, but until this week none were ever spotted "in the wild". A recent spate of warnings about vulnerabilities within OS X, which is based upon the UNIX design, woke some from their blissful slumber. According to sources, the OS X kernel contained several security issues that had been patched long ago in Linux and Unix distributions.

For those of us who believe that no platform is truly safe, it was simply another "I told you so" moment. However, for those looking to ding the OS whenever possible it was the tip of an iceberg. If Mac failed to patch known vulnerabilities, is the platform truly as safe as diehard Mac lovers believe? Is all the talk of Mac security just hype? It's still hard to tell, but it's certain that this first real Mac virus will put that notion to the test.

John C. Dvorak tends to agree in his article warning against complacency in the Mac camp. He claims that ultimately this virus will be a test of the system, and the development culture at Apple. He also warns that it could be the first of many attacks on the OS, which in due time should demonstrate whether Mac OS is more or less secure than Windows.