‘Microsoft We Don’t Feel So Good About’.

David Gelles and Richard Waters, in a piece titled “Google Ditches Windows on Security Concerns” in the Financial Times:

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac
computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. “Linux is
open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee.
“Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”

[Daring Fireball]

I wish the “security” company I worked for had that much sense. Unfortunately, they make it as hard to get Mac (or Linux) machines as Google has made it to get Windows. And since the Powers That Be decided to “outsource” our entire IT department to a company that manufactures Windows PCs, I don’t expect that to change any time soon.

Browser add-on blocks Google Analytics. Google has released an add-on for Web browsers that blocks information from being sent to its Analytics service. [MacCentral]

This is rather pointless, as Tor blocks Google Analytics, and any other form of spying on the Internet. Anyone who wants their browsing to be private is using it, which means that the people complaining about Google Analytics tracking their activity are only announcing their own ignorance or stupidity (or both).

Browsing the web without Tor and complaining about privacy is like standing on a crowded sidewalk and then complaining that people can see you.

Playing Online: Google Wave. Google Wave excites me because it is everything the other two mediums are. In my series, I said that there were two types of online roleplaying mediums – real-time and correspondence. Real-Time (chat, VTT) requires a greater time commitment but it is immediate and requires no effort of patience. Correspondence mediums (forum, email) have practically zero time commitment, but are slower and require great patience, and are more alien to tabletop gamers than real-time online mediums are.

Google Wave is a hybrid medium. It is both real-time and correspondence, when you choose for it to be. Google Wave is like a chat room with email-style archival, document-style accessible, immediate editing, and even forum-style multiplicity of threads and folders for organizing your material, that every player can quickly access and organize. Play-By-Posters and Play-By-Chatters will find in Google Wave everything their mediums used to do, and everything the other one did as well. [The Spirits of Eden]