tired of opening wmv files in a new media player window? tired of having that be the only file that cannot be played in your browser?
after installing Sorenson Squeeze, a video compressor, my Safari browser now plays wmv files in the browser window, exactly like all other video files.
finally: the mac is getting somewhere.
research group surveyed japanese familiarity with mailer-daemon.
One response in particular made me laugh:
% japanese who thought mailer-daemon was a message from a foreigner: 14.1%
they must have forgot to add a question survey percent of folks who think anything daemon (mailer-daemon, microsoft daemon, whateva) means a demon is taking over the computer
I first learned of this during an archives course I took over the summer: on the last census, a large percent of Canadians indicated they did not consent to the release of their personal information in one hundred years time.
puzzling? genealogists and historians rely on this data and I agree wholeheartedly that the non-consenting people now have the potential to skew statistical results.
I think this is a perfect example of how Canada has gotten too liberal without balancing its understanding of what such information means. even a simple explanatory note after the check box (for future historical research or so your ancestors can find you) would likely have steered some folks away from selecting it.
bizarre sense of privacy exclusion taken to the extreme. “i vow to pretend I did not exist whatsoever. Mormons be damned!” (Mormons being the leaders when it comes to genealogy because it is necessary to baptize one’s ancestors when one accepts Joseph Smith as lord-only-knows-what kind of prophet. But, my, the Mormons have the best genealogy resources in the world.
Dion is promising, if elected, to implement compulsory notification for privacy breaches.
Here is the excerpt from his speech:
“…we need to change private-sector privacy laws, so companies are forced to notify customers when their personal information gets leaked. If your social security number gets into the wrong hands, you deserve to find out about it, so you can avoid becoming a victim of identity theft. This kind of change would finally cause businesses to take the security of their customers more seriously.”
California was the leader in compulsory breach notification. And now that the privacy legislation for the private sector is now under review here in Canada (PIPEDA), one consideration has been to add such notification legislation here.
At a conference I attended, I spoke to one of the lawyers involved in this review. She made an interesting point: in California, automatic breach notification has had a counter-productive effect. Instead of “notifying” people when breaches occur, they are getting so much mail (due to every little electronic mishap), that people are throwing the notices away without reading them.
Don’t you think that is something to consider here? Beef up the reasonableness side of the law (i.e. ensure companies notify when it is severe enough). But don’t make every single glitch worhty of notice. That takes the brain work out of it and will only produce negative results in my opinion.
according to police, a wife under suspicion for killing her husband googled ‘How to commit murder’
this is timely news in light of Google’s recent decision to anonymize its searchs after two years.