The Desktop Fishbowl
Charles blogs all the random nerd stuff he can find.

Friday, 15 February 2002

And JOHO does a perfect parody of the Blogger Manifesto. 1:51:16 PM

Oh. Addendum to the last post. If you're connected to an ISP in Australia, then chances are you're already going through proxy server. Australian ISPs are charged for their bandwidth per byte downloaded, so the caching web proxy is the first line of defense against huge bandwidth bills. And as an aside, a friend of mine who works for iiNet in Perth tells me that the traffic flowing over their network as a result of the Morpheus file-sharing software is 1.5Gb every 20 minutes, which costs the ISP approximately $30,000 per month. 12:32:36 PM

Hardly deserves a medal. News.com: Comcast to stop storing Web users' data [via Tomalak's Realm] Next up: Comcast executives to stop beating their wives. Alert Ted Koppel. [diveintomark] As far as I've been able to see, what happened was that Comcast decided to set up a network of transparent web proxies. This is a good thing, IMHO - next time there's a big world tragedy, all the Comcast customers will hit the caches instead of the CNN front page, and there'll be a few thousand fewer people bringing the net to its knees during emergencies. I've only dealt with two proxy servers before, Microsoft Proxy Server, and Squid. Both of them kept, in their default configuration, detailed logs in the same way that Webservers keep detailed logs. IP address. What was being requested. What was the response. You can get packages that analyse Squid proxy logs so you can see what your ratio of cache hits to misses are, and so on. It looks like all that happened was the sysadmins who were installing the servers knew about the logs but didn't think about the privacy, this was just business as usual, the default configuration. Someone else knew what proxy servers generally logged, and kicked up a stink. Comcast said "Well, it's accepted industry practice, and the logs can be useful", and then stopped logging. Where's the big deal? 12:26:29 PM

Dave Winer wants Google to write a program that indexes his hard drive. This is way outside Google's sphere of excellence. Google's search technology is designed to index things that are part of a hyperlinked environment (the core being their Page Rank™ algorithms), and designed to run on big, dedicated servers where the most important factor is speed of search through a massive database. This can sort of translate to intranets - you have the hyperlinked environment, and the search tool would run on a server. It doesn't translate at all to local hard drives, where you would need to optimise the index in the other direction (space over speed), and none of the documents you are searching through are linked to anything else. The only leverage Google would get from their existing product is the trusted brand-name, and a few routines to index PDFs and Word documents. On top of this, Google would be putting themselves firmly in the sights of Microsoft, who have made no secret of wanting to replace their filesystem with a database (an idea that is at least five years overdue, and final proof that the Linux guys don't innovate - or we'd have done this ages ago). Presumably once Windows has SQL Server in the background, full-text indexing is only a matter of an add-in module. That would really put Google in the same boat as Netscape. 12:07:09 PM

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