Tales of Hoffman

Tales of Hoffman
Another attempt at relevance.

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Monday, October 14, 2002

Tales of Hoffman Hits the Road Come see me at the AAFP Scientific Assembly in the Medscape booth. I'll be there from Thursday through Saturday. It would be extremely cool to actually meet someone who has read my weblog. I'll also try to lob in a few posts from the exhibition floor to let you know what's going on.
8:35:39 PM    comment []

Clash of Internet Privacy Policies. A good article from the NY Times about how new "automatic" settings in Microsoft's IE browser are making it very difficult for large scale sites on the web to serve their pages without jumping through hoops. I'm all for protecting privacy on the web, but in my opinion, the "Privacy Mafia" has gone overboard in scaring everyday surfers about abuses of their privacy on the net. At Medscape, we deal with this issue every single day, and having folks nervous about who's placing cookies on their machine makes it extremely difficult to deliver the level of service that we know our readers want.

Let's face it: With the amount of traffic that a large scale site gets, not only does the site not necessarily care where you, Mr. Smith, goes, but I've never seen a company with the processing power and knowhow to actually make sense of that data in a way that can do harm to you. In short...relax. By all means, read privacy policies and avoid sites who have policies with which you feel uncomfortable, but don't assume that cookies are harmful to you. Most companies that are placing cookies on your machine are doing so in order to provide you with better service.

8:55:43 AM    comment []

F.C.C. Blocks EchoStar Deal With DirecTV. This article from the NY Times is actually old news left over from Friday, but interesting to those of us who use DirecTV, Tivo and HDTV. I'm all for competition in the satellite TV industry, but this news is potentially bad for those of us looking for the availability of more HDTV programming on two fronts: First off, the pairing of EchoStar and DirecTV would have given that combined company enough satellite capacity to offer many, many more HDTV channels than either one can possibly deliver today. Secondly, if this deal is off, all signs point to DirecTV being acquired by News Corp., who -- through their actions (or rather inactions) with their Fox network -- have shown no inclination to produce or broadcast true HDTV programming.
8:43:32 AM    comment []