byJoeyBaker » Tech

Google Wave for Journalism, a #Hackshackers Event

Joey — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:00:45 +0000

Google isn’t just thinking of Wave as another web app that it creates and you use on one site — it wants you to be able to use it across all sites on the web. Say, for example, you have a blog. As a post, you could share a wave with the public and allow others to see what you and the other people in your wave are doing. And these visitors to your blog could even join in as well right from your blog, and all the information would be placed right into the original wave.
—via Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web

Updated with a section re: workflow related to creating new waves and privacy one day after the original post.

Tonight I hit a few personal firsts. It was my first meetup, first time at the Googleplex, and first time getting a product demo of Google Wave from a live person.…because that’s all this meetup was. A product demo. Which was probably great for some of the room who had either not seen Wave before (very few people) or who didn’t grok the potential (a good many more) – but far less entertaining for those of us who lapped up the initial product demo and wanted specifics on how Wave is good for journalism.

Before I go any further – a sincere thank you to Google and the Google folks who were very gracious hosts. Providing a very comfortable meeting place, staying late to answer questions, let alone taking the time to talk with us at all is a step well above what most any other company is willing to do. It’s a brilliant feather in Google’s cap, and speaks well of their commitment to transparency and the Wave product.

There were a few questions asked by journalists about how to use Wave for journalism:

‘Can we have an off-the-record conversation so the Wave won’t be in the caught in the Google cache?’

‘What does a Wave journalistic workflow look like?’

These, and all other questions were answered with the well-rehearsed zeal of a PR team pitching their product.To be fair, Wave is in preview mode right now (apparently, preview comes before a beta), so anything and everything we see in Wave is considered broken and incomplete until told otherwise. Further, I completely appreciate the desire for Wave to be a clean-break from our traditional forms of communication, but the devotion that the Wave folks perpetuated for their product came off somewhere between arrogance and zealot-ness.

Hindsight

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s very far off, but Wave truly does have the potential to replace email, Word, IM, blogs, and most other communication tools. But, it seems that Google has blinders on – pitching what they have now as The Answer is looking 2 product generations ahead and too far.Wave probably should have been pitched as an event coordinator. It’s the most common use case Google presented tonight, and seems to be the most practical, current, application of Wave. Presenting Wave as an all-in-one solution for planning a lunch outing or meeting, and then showing how it can be used for notes and/or a backchannel is a solid pitch – and a good reason to add another inbox to the pile.Think of it this way: Twitter was pitched as a micro-blogging platform, not a replacement to blogging. Nonetheless, we all woke up one day to realize we were blogging less and tweeting more. Wave can take the same approach. A few generations down the road, when Google has worked out all the kinks of public waves, speed, privacy, federation, UI and so on, we’ll all wake up to discover that we’re using email less and Wave more.

A Hole in the Wave Workflow: Copy to New Wave

The copy to new wave function.

Wave, as it specifically applies to journalism, wasn’t touched on much at the meetup. I do want to address one glaring hole in the currently suggested Wave workflow.Suppose you’re writing an article in Wave and us the inline chat function with your editors. When it comes time to publish, you’re not likely to want deleted information about sources… or financial data… or discussions about your blue~ish cat to be visible to the public.Google’s current solution is the feature aptly titled “copy to new wave.” This brings just the text of the blip over to a new wave, erasing the history and conversations. This gives you a “work wave” and a “final product wave.” That’s where this issue arises.First, maintaining two waves for a single topic is data-duplication as sounds very un-Wavy, and un-Googly. More practically, this solution breaks down when embedding a Wave.If a story is breaking news, the first time the wave is published there might be just a few lines of copy. As the story develops, this will be expanded. On the surface, this seems like a perfect use case for Wave. However, if you have to maintain two waves you can’t keep creating a new wave to embed when you’re ready to move content off your work wave and onto the published wave. Followers, their comments, and contributions aren’t copied over – and it will make a mess of your inbox.Clearly, this solution is imperfect. The simplest solution I can see is to expand the power of the draft mode to allow groups of users to collaborate on a section of the wave. Oh, and allow for the true deletion of blips – remove them from playback too. (Perhaps this is triggered by alt-clicking delete?)

Notes

Some brief notes I took at the meetup. I did enjoy the event and am looking forward to the next Hacks & Hackers.

The pre-meetup wave. With polling data!
The Google-created, post-meetup wave. With minutes!

The reason given for Wave’s playback feature was to allow users first joining a complex Wave to catchup. This makes me realize – Waves shouldn’t be so complex that you need to catchup. Wikipedia, for example is always an organized page to look at – though it hides the discussion in a separate tab. What Wave needs to do is enable two views: one that presents the final product, and one that shows the inline discussion and misc blips.
Twitter was the back channel, not wave.
Google envisions wave as the single inbox
Great point from Google folk about bots in Wave: they can be used to pull content in. This is a pretty good case for Waves being used as Topics.
Rosy is an extension being worked on for live translation.
The solution to hiding your work is to create a new wave, but this seems non-embed friendly.
Google will allow read only, anon, public, access
The pitch to use wave as a conference back channel sounds identical to twitter – and almost a total failure to recognize that Twitter is being used for that already
Basically all the use cases we’ve already heard presented: event planning, meeting notes, panel notes
One hour, seven minutes into the talk we officially see some real journalism examples finally getting to real jour. examples
- A magazine on wave – looks crappy, but does lead to a good question about Wave allowing customizable, and better looking waves (e.g. text-wrapped images) – and isn’t answered.
Google folk sounding very zealot like, politically correct, with good PR, but almost… oblivious.

I went expecting to have a conversation about what journalists need out of a next-gen communication/content creation system. What I got was a generic pitch for a half-done product from a faux marketing team who were more politically correct than informative. I leave you with this closing thought: Similar Posts:

MobileMe Reviewed

Joey — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:25:33 +0000

I’ve just gotten my hands on a full MobileMe account (thanks Ramon!) and I thought I’d take the opportunity to compliment and complain.

Features Not Working

As of this writing, the following features of me.com are not working.

Backup software (download link redirects)
According to the System Status: Homepage & Groups is currently not operating
Still experiencing system slow downs, especially when accessing account settings.

MobileMe got off to a rocky start. The dotmac website stated that they system would be offline from 8pm-2am beginning Wednesday evening (Jul 9) to facilitate the transition. The presumption was that me.com would go live at 2am, which did not happen. Me.com went through periods of service and through Friday (the day of the iPhone 3G launch). The system became fast enough to be usable on Saturday (Jul 12, the date

It’s so shiiiinyyy

Let’s get this clear, me.com is pretty. Really, really pretty. It almost feels like a desktop app. You can use keyboard shortcuts just like a desktop app (replace ⌘ key with the ctrl key and you already know the keyboard shortcuts). You can drag and drop just like a desktop app. Windows slide down just like a desktop app. In case you didn’t get it, it feels like a desktop app!Switching between modules requires a load time, but actions within any one of the modules doesn’t seem to incur a load time at all (very cool).Based on SproutCore, MobileMe feels quick. Yet, there are still a few remaining speed issues. I’ve tried to upload over 5GB of photos to my iDisk via the desktop interface and the transfer has taken 9+ hours to get half way; reading another 9 hours to complete. (This upload later failed; twice.) Accessing the ‘account settings’ section of the web interface is hit or miss. Sometimes it pops right up, sometimes it just displays “loading” for eternity. No doubt, these are both symptoms of a freshly launched app, nonetheless, they are annoying.

iDisk

iDisk web interface.The iDisk webapp works much as you’d expect. It’s the same column interface that Finder has. Clicking on a folder reveals the files and directories contained. I haven’t figured out the pattern yet, but sometimes the app displays a loading icon you click on a folder, and sometimes it doesn’t. Also, the app gives no indication that you’ve clicked on an empty folder. In contrast, Finder tells the user that a directory has “0 items,” the iDisk webapp has no visual indication, and frequently left me watching the computer screen hoping something would load.The interface does not allow for previewing of files. Click on a jpg and the app will tell you that it’s a jpg, but it doesn’t display a thumbnail. The system also does not recognize RAW files. It would be nice to have a ‘quicklook’ like functionality so that a user didn’t have to download a file to see what it is.


.jpg: no preview	.nef: not recognized

Preferences for iDisk are extremely simple. You have the choice of displaying a ‘Simple Folder Layout’ – only Documents, Public and Movies are shown in iDisk home. The app behaves as you’d expect it too, and in someways is more responsive than the desktop plugin. Which is continually having connection issues. It seems that my iDisk can’t stay connect for more than several hours at a time – no big deal until I try to transfer several gigabytes of files.Deleting files on the iDisk via the desktop takes a very long time. But, the process is fast on the web app, and the changes are reflected nearly instantaneously on the desktop side.In addition, I was surprised to see the webapp lacking two key features. 1) It is not capable of uploading directories, even though it can upload multiple files. The help instructs users to compress (zip) their directories first – what a poor solution. 2) Even though Contacts and Mail have instant search, iDisk does not. erm… makers of Spotlight – HELLO! I’d like to be able to search my files online too please. K, thanks.I was impressed at the integration, but constantly frustrated by webapp limitations and the glacial communications times when using the desktop interface. iDisk is not ready for large file transfers but with luck, Apple will fix the bugs and speed will increase in the near future.

Gallery

Gallery web interfaceGallery is the me.com interface for hosting your photos. Think of it as the web based iPhoto.The frontend is the same that users have come to know and love. It’s extremely fast, good looking and offers a variety of options to viewers.

Uploading to Gallery

Uploads are very quick and the interface not only allows the user to upload multiple files at once, but has the option to add more files while an upload is in progress – nifty!It’s possible to sync Gallery with either Aperture or iPhoto but, in my opinion, there is one glaring sync error. Apple gives MobileMe users 20GB of storage to divide between email, iDisk, Gallery, and Backup. 20GB may seem like a lot but when all of these services are taken into account, the space goes fast. Ideally, MobileMe could offer users a complete cloud storage solution for all data. 20GB is simply not enough to accomplish that.Following that logic, Apple should allow Gallery to use photos placed in the Pictures folder of iDisk. Not only would this ease the storage constraints, but it would simplify the interface between the two apps.It’s worth noting that Gallery has no photo editing capabilities or instant search. I don’t think these are features that many users will miss, but as search is a key Apple technology and web-based photo editing is becoming more popular, it would have been nice for Apple to through those features in.And that is as far as my complaints with Gallery go. It is otherwise and extremely well designed and extremely responsive app.

Calendar

Calendar web interface

Entering info into an event is a bit different on the web than in iCal.

Calendar isn’t quite as slick as iCal, but it’s still the slickest calendar interface I’ve seen to date. It has all the simplicity of gCal with fewer pages loads. (Less pages loaded means the app is faster.)Notably, Calendar falls into the class of MobileMe apps that could use instant search and curiously doesn’t have it.While Calendar has no trouble syncing your iCal calendars, it does not import your subscription calendars. I can’t fathom why this is, but it sure is annoying to not have holidays visible.Aside from the different info panel (see photo, right), Calendar does maintain an interface virtually identical to iCal. This means that Calendar shares the same flaw that I find with iCal – it has poor support for ToDo items. As a simple list, ToDo is horribly uncomplicated and hard to use. There’s no way to attach a todo to an event, one can’t postpone todo items, and there is no method to group tasks with multiple calendars. Nonetheless, Calendar does what it’s supposed to do elegantly and without trouble.

Contacts

Contacts web interfaceContacts should be the simplest app in the suite. Or at least, it makes sense to me that a simple database interface would be ease to do. …so of course, it fell to the bottom of the maintenance list.My first sync (on Friday) caused some of my contacts to duplicate. I’m not sure why some duplicated and some didn’t, but it was sure annoying and not what I expected from a first class sync app. Once I got that problem taken care of, I headed over to the webapp and tried dealing with my contacts there.As with the rest of the me.com apps, Contacts online is very similar to contacts on the desktop. One glaring thing that is missing the smart contact groups. Normal groups show up online fine, but it’s a strange thing to be missing when the instant search works so well. (whoohooo! instant search!)One strange bug I encountered was that editing a contact name didn’t always update the name in the contact list.I won’t say that Contacts is bad, far from it – it looks to be a promising web interface. But, it sure is buggy.

Mail

Mail web interfaceLet me start by saying this. I really prefer desktop apps for email – I want the ability to search and write messages while offline. To accomplish this, I use Apple’s Mail.app. But, I’ve used Yahoo, AOL, gmail, Comcast, squirrel mail, and a host (20+?) of other email webapps.Let me say this, for all it’s simplicity and flash, the new MoblieMe email app sucks. I like the instant search, but aside from that, there are a lot of serious flaws.Mail doesn’t import other email accounts. The reason I so like Mail.app is that I can have a ton of email accounts in it. I’ve got 6 active right now. They all do different things and I don’t want them confused. Now maybe I’m unique in that respect, but I still want Mail’s web interface to show those other accounts. I was quite surprised to find that it didn’t. After all, gmail does it.Mail doesn’t support smart folders. Not too much of a surprise in light of Contacts not supporting smart groups, but very disappointing. But, Mail has instant search!New Message opens a popup. Really Apple? really? Didn’t you learn anything from AOL’s mistakes and Gmail’s success? Lets keep everything in one window, mhhhkay?New Message doesn’t auto-complete the “To:” field. Granted, I ran into this problem when I clicked on the address book, but that doesn’t indicate that auot-complete wasn’t working. This seems to be an obvious feature that everybody uses.I count myself lucky that I don’t depend on me.com as my primary email. The webapp is easily the weakest in the suite, and needs quick updating.

Other nifty things

In general, the help provided is very good. Clicking on a help link or pressing [ctrl+?] launches a new popup (appropriate in this case) which loads faster than OSX help windows do!I did all of my testing in Safari Version 3.1.1 (5525.20), so your mileage in a different browser may vary. I’m very interested to know how IE deals with me.com.You can set me.com to remember who you are for 2 weeks at a time, a good security measure.This is way improved over dotmac.It’s possible to setup your own domain name to point to your homepage. That means you can get your iWeb site to live at its own URL.Users can set how they divide storage between their email and their iDisk –very handy!Aside from where I specifically mentioned, the me.com is fast. Load times are negligible and speed should only increase as Apple works out the kinks.Syncing a computer with MobileMe is similarly speedy, I could be mistaken, but it seemed snappier than the dotmac sync.

What I really think…

I’m horribly disappointed with iDisk. I really expected better from a cloud storage solution. For now, I’m sticking with Wua.la. I don’t doubt that Apple will work out the kinks, but right now, it’s broken.Gallery, Contacts and Calendar are really nifty apps that are well done, but have several bugs.Though usable, Mail needs a lot of work. Stick with gmail, Yahoo, or a desktop client.Now for the million dollar question. Is it worth $100 a year?

Do you need to host a website or share you pictures online, but have little technical know-how?
Do you already have a dotmac email address?
Do you want a really slick way of showing off your photos and videos?
Do you need a really simple way to sync two computers?
Do you want a set-it-and-forget-it strategy to get an offsite backup of your most essential data?

If you answered yes to any of the above, give me.com a serious think. Note I didn’t ask if you need a way to get your calendar, or contacts, or email, or photos, or data, online. There are free solutions for all of these, they’re just far more manual than MobileMe.I really appreciate the approach of MobileMe. And incase you didn’t catch it, the interface is slick! I trust that once all of the bugs are worked out, life @me will be really sweet.A totally arbitrary rating, for those that need a number: 7.45/10

Update

AppleInsider raises an interesting point that I completely missed. MobileMe is marketed as a push solution for all your devices, and it fails at this goal. Though changes made on an iPhone are apparently recognized instantly by the cloud, changes made on a Mac still need to be synced. That is not a push solution, not at all. I suspect that the next version of OSX aliviate, if not fix this issue with support for exchange built into all the necessary apps. Nonetheless, it is a severe disappointment to not have push now – as was promised. Syncing is a 2nd class solution, especially when it duplicates my contacts!

Update 2

Check out this for a great look at how Apple is fixing the problem.

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Penguins Are Way Harder to Figure Out Than Humans

Joey — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:30:50 +0000

The BBC reports a very cool new technology that allows scientists to track penguins based on their biometrics.I certainly can’t tell one penguin from another, and if software can do that, think of the implications. Imagine a computer that knows, and can automatically keyword photos based on who’s in them. Just tell the computer once, who someone is, and you’re good to go.Similar Posts:

Google Tries Tighter Aim for Web Ads – NYTimes.Com

Joey — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:06:31 +0000

Mr. Fox said that Google’s approach was different from what Yahoo, AOL and others call behavioral targeting. Those companies look at what a user did a few days earlier to show them ads about the same topic today. Google says it believes that search engine advertising is most effective if it relates to what the user has most recently searched for.“We are trying to understand what the user is trying to do right now,” Mr. Fox said. “In some cases, those queries are ambiguous, so you need a little more context.”

-Google Tries Tighter Aim for Web Ads – NYTimes.com

Quick post:

Google being smart yet again. This is what everyone should be doing.In the same way that if I’m reading the sports section of the paper, I want to see ads about golf balls, I don’t want to see ads for photo equipment when I’m searching for movie times.Cheers to Google.Similar Posts:

How I Want My Data: Locality & Cloud Aware

Joey — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 05:02:15 +0000

Boy, do I wish I had written this down first. The op-ed talks about ‘syncing.’ Or more appropriately, dealing with getting your data on any of your devices (smartphone, laptops, desktops, DVRs, etc…) whenever you want without any hassle.This is something that I (and I’m sure many others) have been struggling with for a while. I personally own a boatload of devices; several computers, portable devices, and such; all of which I want to stay in sync. I’ve got a theoretical solution to the problem which I’ll detail below.Jon Stoke’s article points out several obvious problems: there is currently no easy way to sync your data, the stop-gap solutions that exist now are poorly done and anything but set-and-forget, and that computers should be very good at performing a simple repetitive task (just like syncing files). However, Stokes forgets to tackle on important issue. Yes, I want my data to be the synced across all my devices. It’s horribly inconvenient to have to deal with multiple versions of files and its a tragedy when I realize that the file that I need is not on the machine that I’m working on right now. Yet, the data that I want on each device is not identical.

The bigger issue

For instance, I’ve got a rather large iTunes library. Last I checked, it’s over 115GB. It lives happily on my desktop which has more than enough storage available to handle that amount of frivolous data happily. The obvious problem is that I do not want all that music on my laptop which only has a 80GB hard drive, and it certainly won’t all fit on my iPod Nano.Or, take my photo library. It’s as large as my music library and then some. I do want some of it on my laptop: current work, my portfolio, the images I have up on my site; but some random shoot from 3 years ago? There’s no need to carry that with me (at least until SSD reach multi-terabyte capacities).

Solution

The problem is not that I need a solution to have all my data all the time. If I did or could, the solution would be fairly easy – the technology to sync two equally sized devices together already exists. No, the problem is that I want certain data to go to certain devices and not to others. My solution, and suggestion for those that can make this happen is this:

Time Machine by Apple is a ready-made solution for syncing to devices. It already syncs one hard drive with versions itself. It can even do it across a network. All that needs to be done is to transition it from a backup utility to a sync utility. I’m no engineer, but I don’t imagine it would be a very hard task to accomplish. Especially if you consider the underling technology behind time machine.
As Stokes suggests, the ‘drive’ paradigm is very cumbersome once you get more than a couple of hard drives floating around. Changing this to the ‘cloud‘ paradigm would be fantastic.Think about it like this: Google has tons (literally) of hard drives in their servers which provide the space for them to provide all their services to their millions of users. But as a user, you have no idea where your data is actually physically stored. It’s somewhere, but you don’t actually know where your gmail emails are stored, nor do you care.Introducing a similar solution at the personal level is a logical evolution. No, it’s not really applicable to the ‘average user’ who only has a laptop and perhaps one external hard drive, but for small businesses or power users it could be a god-send.Again, I’m no engineer, but I imagine it working something like this: You’re home has a network setup, or at least one computer that is ‘cloud-aware.’ When you plug a drive into the system for the first time, it will ask you if you’d like to make this disk a part of the cloud – akin to the way Time Machine asks if you’d like to make a new disk a time machine backup drive. This is to ensure that portable storage (like a hard drive that’s meant to travel with your laptop, or a flash card) won’t get data stored on them that belongs in the cloud.Once configured, the cloud would be just be similar to a RAID 5 array. It handles all of your backup for you, it presents itself as one drive, if you unplug a drive from the system, or one dies, the cloud automatically compensates – all without you worrying about it.Furthermore, the cloud is accessible to all of your devices. It’s online, so if you have a password, you can get your data anywhere. Think, Back to My Mac, but simpler. If your device is connected to the internet, it automatically connects to your cloud.Not into dealing with a mess of hard drives? Perhaps third-party companies can offer cloud storage for a price. Amazon and Google (among others) are already perfectly positioned to do this. Apple’s iDisk already offers an omni-present storage space, and approaches this paradigm.Cloud storage can help to solve many of the syncing problems, your data is always accessible, no matter where you are.
There is one glaring disadvantage though – what if you’re offline? Or what if the files are huge and would take too long (even over broadband) to access remotely?Here’s where my solution gets a new twist.I propose a new kind of metadata that I’ll call ‘Locality.’
This is what I Imagine the interface looking like. Click for a large view.
Every file has metadata attached to it. It’s how the computer knows what date it was created, who last opened it, etc… What I’m proposing is an addition that keeps track of what devices a file is supposed to be stored on. All of your devices will know about all of your other devices. Your smartphone, iPod, laptop, DVR, desktop, and so on, will all know that each other exist. That way, they will be able to automatically keep track of what data is supposed to be on each device – automatically.The ‘Save’ dialog in every OS functions basically the same. It asks you what you want to name the file, where you want to put it, and the file type. A system that is ‘locality-aware,’ would ask you one more thing: which devices you want your data on. It could for instance, default to storing everything on your cloud. If you’re offline, then it stores the file locally, until you can connect. However, the user can also decide which other devices get the data stored locally – in other words – you can decide right in a save dialog where you want to always access your data.For example, If you’re saving a new Word (or Pages) document, you can set it to save on your cloud and also go to your smartphone. The next time your computer comes in to contact with either your smartphone or your cloud, it sends that file off. That way if your smartphone contacts your cloud (more likely that it contacting your laptop) it gets the file right away.The advantage to this system is that you can decide to keep a huge library of pictures safely on your cloud. Where it can be accessed by any of your devices, but isn’t stored on them, so space isn’t an issue. If you choose, however, you can tell any of your locality-aware devices to set the locality of a file however you choose. You can set some songs to go to your desktop and your iPod, but not to your smartphone.

Apple is most likely going to rebrand .Mac, mostly likely calling it “mobile me.” In theory, it will tie the iPhone more closely to Mac computers via a cloud interface. Who knows, maybe Apple is on the right track.I seriously doubt that Apple will present a solution as complete as what I’ve just suggested. I’m certain that my solution requires a re-wiring of an OS. Nonetheless, here’s hoping that it’s a step in the right direction.Similar Posts:

Inteview: Nikon’s New Scene Recognition System

Joey — Wed, 28 May 2008 02:43:27 +0000

-Nikon | Imaging Products | Scene Recognition System

Nikon has posted an interesting (though clearly biased) interview with Hiroshi Takeuchi, one of the engineers behind the new scene recognition system in the D3 and D300. Aside from the cool graphic (above), it’s interesting to read about how this has been developed (and makes me anxious to try it out).Apparently, the tie-in with the AF system works very well, which allows you to compose your picture first, then auto-focus. This is much improved over the auto-focus in the center, then compose system that every other camera has depended on.Similar Posts:

TV Is Dead

Joey — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:43:25 +0000

This is a great clip about what web 2.0 is – from an academic (but still very exciting) point of view.Similar Posts:

Vuze Says Some ISPs Abuse TCP Resets; Data Not That Clearcut

Joey — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:49:36 +0000

They then ranked ISPs by how many attempted TCP connections were interrupted by reset packets. And guess who is at the top of the list.If you said “Comcast,” you guessed correctly. According to the Vuze people’s initial results, the number of reset connections was 20 percent for that ISP’s subscribers.

-Vuze says some ISPs abuse TCP resets; data not that clearcut

Well, they are a bit of a biased source – but this is certainly a limit on the internet – censorship in a form not quite as extreme as China’s but certainly uncalled for. It is reasons like this that we need government regulation on the internet.The technology is 15 years old at this point. For a country that depends as heavily as they do on the internet, the US, the internet is still a wild-west of legality.Similar Posts:

CNN.Com Survives Random Outages – CNET News.com

Joey — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:37:44 +0000

CNN.com survives random outages | Defense in Depth – computer security, hacking, crime, viruses – CNET News.com

To make the attack on CNN a literal truth, Chinese Hackers have launched a DoS attack on CNN.com. They’ve got so far as to launch a downloadable tool for all those interested in assisting in the next attack.How does bringing down a media outlet help stop western media bias? …when the bias is that the Chinese society is closed and not open to hearing outside opinions?Similar Posts:

Press Secretary to the Rescue – Ryan Grim – Politico.com

Joey — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:13:51 +0000

Wang crawled to the master bedroom, hid behind the bed and tried to think of who might have a BlackBerry on hand. The obvious answer: a Hill staffer like Pitts.

Press secretary to the rescue – Ryan Grim – Politico.com

Here’s a feel-good story: a Washington Press Secretary helps out one of his reporters in the midst of a home-invasion. Here’s to always being ‘connected.’Similar Posts: