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Archive for June 16th, 2005

The Importance of RSS

Thursday, June 16th, 2005

Kevin Hale: The Importance of RSS (to Google, mostly). [from Slashdot]

And so RSS feeds provide Google all the goodness of blogs without all the semantic garbage that might come with a system open to users that are not the content provider. RSS feeds provide Google clean data, good data and thanks to wide-spread adoption by companies and the major blog software entities, lots of it.

[...]

In addition to improving their search results, I think another reason Google is embracing RSS is because they don’t want to have to compete with it.

Kevin also offers us all a nice sound-bite of the zen of syndication:

For those of us that have adopted RSS feeds, gone are the days of wasting time making the rounds through over 100 bookmarks just to see who might have said something new. Gone are the days of waiting for the few obsessive compulsive bloggers who actually did that to post their findings so the rest of us could stay informed. Subscription makes it easy. Subscription makes it efficient.

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Shocker: BitTorrent now carrying malware

Thursday, June 16th, 2005

From Slashdot, an eWeek article describing how spyware-infested files are showing up on BitTorrent. The Slashdot article is, for once, a more signalicious source of information on the topic, since the eWeek writup is full of half-researched nonsense like the following:

Because BitTorrent strips digital files into tiny shreds and reassembles them locally once a user completes a download, it has emerged as the perfect place to bundle adware programs among the bits, without the end user ever knowing.

Just to clarify: this is not how the spyware vector works. The spyware/adware companies are infecting individual movie files and illegal software packages, and then seeding those through BitTorrent. Your BitTorrent client is perfectly happy to let you download the Trojan at your leisure; BT doesn’t care what’s inside a file, it just cares about getting it to you quickly and accurately. The BT protocol is not susceptible to “sneaking bits in” alongside legitimate chunks of your download, because to do so would invalidate the known cryptographic hash (taken from the benign version of the file), tipping your BT client off that the data can’t be trusted.

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