Asia Tech Blog

I have to say I was disappointed, being a longtime supporter of TeXtra, a video poscast by tech Journalist Natali Del Conte. Right at the intro to her show is a statement that Textra is not just a “chick reads the news show”, inferring that Del Conte is a serious journalist and not just a pretty face. Now, leaving aside the “look at my perky bottom” glamour pics displayed on the site, on tuesday she threw out a glib comment regarding Thailand’s impending Lese Mageste lawsuit against YouTube saying that it would make more sense for Thailand to go after the uploader of the video, however she would rather see YouTube Get sued then someone get beheaded over it.

Beheaded? Please! Pick up a book, or do a quick Google before making a comment like that. I guess this girl thinks Thais are a bunch of barbarians living in the middle ages.

I’m disappointed because I’ve enjoyed TeXtra, and aside from the silly glam pics, I always liked Del Conte’s straight forward opinions on tech industry news.

I’m sure she knows that the difference between a “chick reads the news” show, and serious journalism is the serious journalist checks their facts before speaking.

If not, that bottom better stay perky. There’s lots of chicks waiting to read the news.

The Textra link is http://textra.podshow.com/ The comment is in the Tuesday May 8 show.

Popular news site Digg.com is currently being swamped by a massive user revolt after users complained that Digg was censoring stories and banning users who reported on the disclosure of the hex key for unencrypting HD-DVDs.

At 9am Bangkok time Digg was flooded with posts from it’s own users, many of them directing their anger at Digg founder Kevin Rose, whom many say has sold out to corporate interests in hopes of making a windfall off Digg.

One user responded with a rather creative reply, reciting the code in Haiku;

oh nine eff nine one
one oh two nine dee seven
four ee three five bee

dee eight four one five
six see five six three five six
eight eight see zero
-Digg user “Virak”

However this turns out, it will be very interesting to see how this plays out at Digg over the next few days. Further banning or censorship may strengthen the revolt, or Digg could cave in again, but this time to the users, the ones who really made the site what it is.

Response posted by Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder:

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hel_l, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

When Vista ships, the days of getting a working copy for $1 will go with it.

For years the pirates of Panthip, a technology superstore in central Bangkok have been making their living burning copies of Windows for sale to both locals, and bargin hunting tourists. Those days will be coming to a close with Vista’s new anti-piracy features that will severely limit the functionality of any installation that doesn’t authenticate. The self-satisfied who brag about their one dollar Windows purchase will now be restricted to older versions of XP as Windows 98, ME, and soon 2000 reach their end of life and no longer recieve vital security updates.

While anti-copy protection advocates complain about false positives, one has to wonder why Microsoft hasn’t done this before. How long were the law abiding going to have to pay a hundred times more but get the same product?

True, Microsoft’s pricing in much of Asia is out of step with with the realities of local economic conditions, where a copy of XP Pro can go for as much as a month’s salary for an office worker, but this should be a boon to the open source community, not the pirates. Ubuntu Linux goes as far as providing free CDs, and free tech support along with a lightweight OS that can be used on less expensive computers, so why bother with Windows at all?

Easy. It sells, and pirates are interested in sales, not promoting alternatives.

The often unreported problem with rampant software piracy is the amount of computers running it who can function fully enough to become spam sending zombies, but not fully enough to get the security updates from the manufacturer needed to secure the machine against malware that hijacks it.

In case there are those of you out there who think that your BETA copy of Vista will be good enough to keep you going, those will expire and stop functioning late next spring, so have a few hundred dollars saved up, because there will be no joy in Singapore, Shanghai, or Bangkok. That i unless you find joy in paying for software that won’t work.

Questionable aquisitions, inability to integrate new features, and incompatibility with Firefox may be spelling the end of an internet mainstay.

Have you tried browsing Yahoo with Firefox lately? Chances are if you try it regularly Firefox will crash. Tried doing a simple search on Yahoo owned Altavista only to have it redirect you to Yahoo’s cluttered page after the first page of results? These are just a few of the troubles leading some to believe that the venerable giant Yahoo is in it’s death throws.

When Google was powering past Yahoo in the search game, Yahoo bought Altavista, the leading edge search engine since 1996, and killed it.

Venerable Altavista Dies - Search Engine Lowdown, March 2004

With this baffling action Yahoo lost all the advantages of the Altavista brand, and the best chance to take on Google who is now leaving Yahoo behind, buried under the weight of it’s cluttered user interface. Purchases of Flikr, and Alltheweb have proved equally lackluster, failing to rejuvinate what some experts are beginning to call “a dinosaur that just hasn’t died yet”.

Yahoo tried to spark new interest with Yahoo Answers which is the misleading name of the section where the most non expert people in the world gather to guess at the solution to a user’s query which is so time limited as to be useless.

So while Google marches on toward search engine glory, and Myspace and YouTube become social and entertainment meccas, Yahoo tries to do all of the above and drowns in it’s own mediocritry.

How the mighty have fallen.

Did Mozilla Cave to Pressure From Advertising Giants?

Mozilla realeased their Firefox version 2.0 last week with a little less privacy protection than the previous versions carried. Version 1.5 allowed Firefox users to reject third party cookies, most often set by banner ads from large web advertisers to track users as they move from site to site, aggragating it with search queries to build customer profiles that help in targeting ads. Information collected is so specific that it is possible to determine much personal information, even identities as AOL found out when it realeased search data from customers this past spring.

Group Seeks FTC Investigation Into AOL - Yahoo Business

Was this a mere oversight after massive BETA testing? Open source fanboys loudly proclaim that open source software is the best way to catch bugs, so should we assume this is intentional, or that Mozilla developers, and millions of BETA testers missed this important feature?

Fortunately there is still a way to reject third party cookies if you know how to alter your config file;

In your address bar, type about:config
scroll down till you see network.cookie.cookieBehavior
right-click, choose “modify”
change value in popup box to “1″

Close the tab and your worries are over.

I love Firefox, and it’s sad to see it’s evil side coming out.

Needless too say, the uproar is beginning, and hopefully the Mozilla gang will cave in to it’s users, the people who took a chance on an upstart browser that had been steadily gaining market share through loyal and enthusiastic users spreading the word. Time will tell how much this loyalty has been tested here.