Summary: Will “BBC” stand for Bill’s British Cuckolds”?; US Computer Users are blissfully ignorant, it turns out; List of Ten Most Addictive Games is out.BBC in bed with Microsoft, or not….From Slashdot:
“The BBC’s head of technology denied rumors that a secret deal with Microsoft was behind the XP-only launch of the BBC’s iPlayer. According to Ashley Highfield, the reason that the player only supports Windows XP is that only a small number of Linux visitors have come to the BBC’s website. Why he would expect a large number of Linux-based visitors to the site when the media downloads are Windows XP only is not clear. He also thinks that ‘Launching a software service to every platform simultaneously would have been launch suicide,’ despite the example of many major sites that support Linux (even if this is through the closed-source flash player).”
This is interesting, because it is also the case that the BBC recently claimed that in Britain, there were only about five or six hundred Linux users that regularly signed on to their site. There are places in Britain where dozens of Linux Using BBC Reading Folk can stand up and glance out of their cubical to see the bemused and startled looks, on hearing this assertion, of many, many other Linux users. One Brit notes: “The claim is incredible – if true, it means that my office represents ~10% of the BBC’s entire GNU/Linux usage. [source]“Further investigation reveals that the actual number is much, much higher. Go read about it.Big Brother is Watching
Every single move you make online can, and often is, tracked by online marketers and advertising networks that gather and use the information for serving up targeted advertisements.But the average American consumer is largely unaware that such tracking goes on, the extent to which it is happening or how exactly information is being used.That’s according to a new poll released this week by the Samuelson Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The survey of nearly 1,200 California adults studied consumer perceptions about online privacy and common advertising practices.[source]
In case you are not busy with anything else:The alleged “The en most addictive online flash games ever made” are listed here.
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Speaking of technology, maybe you could get someone to wire up the Search function on your new blog so that it works properly.
Virg: I’m honored that you are searching for something on my humble site!Thanks for pointing out that the search box is not working. I’m looking into it.
BBC:Had a joke about the Beeb on a local forum already. Something about the BBC only counting the connects from Linux people and due to the fact you basically need Windows, specifically IE, to use this (and other) feature(s) they’d get no visible Linux people. So Linux people do not exist according to their logs thus it is not needed to create applications that work for Linux.Such nice circular reasoning 8DBB:I’d say that people are not only unaware but also either accept it or are to apathetic to fight this.The reason why I think people accept it is anecdotal friends living in the US told me that one store in their neighborhood started demanding to know their zip code before they could pay.This happens with cookies mainly. The best defense is either a browser that allows to selectively retain cookies or a plug-in that does it. If you want to be sure that you have no cookies then a program like CrapCleaner is a way out. Just don’t forget that this program will remove ALL cookies, including the ones you might want to keep due to automatic logins on preferred sites.