lintonchiswick.org

The Manchester Police Force and Facebook

Seemingly taken aback by the level of suspicion, Manchester Police have issued an official denial that GMP Updates is being used to scan user profiles. Their motives are probably squeaky clean. What is clear, though, is that Facebook needs a complete privacy overhaul before it can give its 70 million users a forum for anything other than the trivial.

For The First Post.

MindMentor, the Internet psychbot

For The First Post.

Microsoft's Yahoo! bid

For The First Post, here.

On the Valentine's Day trojan threat

For The First Post, here.

A filter for stupidity

StupidFilter is a project aimed at providing an open-source solution not to comment spam but comment stupidity... the hurried, publish-now-think-later, typing-not-writing brain-splurge that's the Internet equivalent to a primordial grunt. Using similar technology to the Bayesian method for spam filtering, the software will learn to recognise stupidity by drawing rules from a sizeable sample of YouTube comments. Perfect:

So acronyms, poor spelling, expletives, (hopefully) excessive use of exclamation marks will all register as signs of stupidity. From the FAQ:

Isn't filtering stupidity elitist?
Yes. Yes, it is. That's sort of the whole point.

Surely even the most enthusiastic fan of Web 2.0's ease/speed of publication and the democracy engendered by that can't pretend to be delighted by the comment blight that's resulted? And the dirty secret is that if every blog entry those very same fans write isn't followed by a string of nonsense, then they're already manually filtering out the stupid. Believe me.

The Guardian expresses concerns about any potential stupid filter's accuracy. They're concerns that all - to different degrees - apply to spam filters... but we've learned to live with their imperfections, and we'll learn to live with the StupidFilter's, too. LMFAO!!!!

Technorati Tags: Web, Web2, web2.0

Virtual burglary and real-life police

From The First Post:

News that Dutch police have arrested a teenager for stealing 4,000 euros worth of virtual furniture from an online, virtual-world hotel is the latest bizarre twist in an ongoing cyber-saga, in which virtual world property crimes are attracting real-life law-enforcement.

Habbo Hotel is, like the better-known Second Life, an online fantasy world. Once a hangout for uber-cool web designers, it's now inhabited by a mostly young teenage clientele, who socialise and play games in the lobbies, lounges and pools, and spend real money on virtual furniture, which they use to furnish their Habbo Hotel rooms.

Habbo currency can be bought via a credit card or premium telephone services, and furniture can cost up to $5 an item. Individually it's not much, but 90 per cent of the hotel's $60m annual revenue is earned by the sale of virtual goods.

The unfortunate Dutch 17-year-old is accused of tricking players out of their passwords, and using the information to steal virtual furniture, which he and a gang of five 15-year-old accomplices were storing in their own virtual hotel rooms.

Dutch police are claiming a first - the first real-life arrest for a virtual burglary. But, with $1.5bn spent worldwide on virtual goods each year, virtual crime wasn't born yesterday in the Netherlands...

Read the full story, here.

On social lending...

... and the credit crunch.

Rat and Mouse service announcement

Regular readers of the Rat and Mouse - London's property blog - might be wondering, well, where it's gone. Since yesterday, mid-day, the server's been attacked by hackers. It's a shared server and the break-in most likely happened via a different website. The hosts are currently working on the problem and hope to have service resumed shortly.

Minor royal, major headache

And the gagging order in the digital age.

Google's Australian Election Tools

Is this what our own election is going to look like?