Filed under: World wide web, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

Is it just us, or has there been an explosion of on the internet scheduling services over the past few weeks? First there were Jiffle, Tungle, and When is Good. And now there’s Presdo. Like the other services, Presdo makes it easy to schedule meeting with one or more people. You send out a request, and other users can reply with the times that work ideal for them. But there are a few things that set Presdo apart.

First, it uses natural language recognition to help schedule your meetings. The home page isn’t filled with a bunch of boxes to fill out. Instead, you’ve one search box, into which you can type “lunch with Bob,” or “dinner with Joan.” On the next page, Presdo will make an educated guess as to the ideal time for your event. If you enter something vague like “take over the world with Pinky,” it’ll probably just use the default “tomorrow at 10am.” But it does a pretty good time of picking the proper times for meals.

You can also use Presdo to help find a place for your meeting. If you entered “Coffee with Mike,” Presdo will let you pull up a window to search for coffee shops with Google Maps. When you send out your invitation, recipients can either accept or offer their own suggested times.

[via TechCrunch]

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earthforce_1 writes “The vested interests of restrictive copyright are stacking the deck in Canada. The Public Policy Forum Symposium on intellectual property reform has bowed to pressure from certain interests and dis-invited noted copyright scholar Howard Knopf. The forum’s stated mandate is ‘…to strive for excellence in government — to serve as a neutral, independent forum for open dialogue on public policy, and to encourage reform in public sector management.’ For some reason, the US Ambassador to Canada and the former head of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Association have been invited — apparently they’re perceived to have a more neutral view of what Canadian copyright laws should be? More information at Howard Knopf’s blog.”

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The Los Angeles Times is reporting on a new California policy to match the DNA of suspected criminals to the criminal’s family members in order to use them as investigative leads. Use of partial DNA matching is drawing fire over privacy concerns from citizens and law experts. FBI officials are hesitating as well, though their concern is that the courts won’t accept such techniques. Quoting: “The policy, which takes effect immediately, is designed to work like this: The state’s crime lab will tell police about DNA profiles that come up during routine searches of California’s offender database and closely resemble, but don’t match, the DNA left at a crime scene. (Previously, the say refused to tell police about these partial matches.) When such partial matches do not surface or fail to produce a lead, a more customized familial search can be done in which personal software scans the database proactively for possible relatives. The software measures the chance of two people being related based on the rarity of the markers they share.”

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SkiifGeek writes “Race to Zero, a sideline competition being set up at this year’s DefCon, already has some Antivirus vendors steaming over the objectives of the contest. They are upset because it is essentially a polymorphism exercise. Entrants are given a set of malware samples which they have to then modify to pass through a battery of antivirus scanners without detection while still carrying a viable payload. Even if competitors ignore the published vulnerabilities and weaknesses affecting antivirus vendors, the competition should turn up some interesting results. It might provide technical insight and concepts for further research as similar competitions have done in the past.”

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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Web services, Freeware

Twitter users are increasingly starting to question whether the frequent number of Twitter accounts that are following them are actually people, or simply a form of Twitter spamming. The rule of thumb with that sort of question is usually that if you think something nefarious might be going on, unfortunately, you’re probably right.

The next question that invariably comes up is, well, why? What benefit do these purported Twitter spammers get from friending everyone they possibly can? The answer is twofold:

1. There is a huge number of very misguided people that seem to believe that the polite thing to do when someone follows you on Twitter is to follow them back. This is a ludicrous behavior. (As a quick aside, if one of the main things we struggle with in our high-speed, data filled lives is trying to keep a sane signal-to-noise ratio, and learning how to filter out the noise, why would we actively choose to follow random people’s Twitter updates? What an extraordinary waste of time.) The thing is, this behavior can be and is exploited. If someone follows 20,000 random Twitter accounts, there is a very good chance that they will get at least 10% of those people following them back. Perfect! Now they’ve an audience of 2,000 people to spam, for free.

Continue reading Twitter Twerp Scan - block Twitter spammers

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Lucas123 writes “A District Court judge has ordered the Executive Office of the President to tell the court by May 5 whether any e-mail server backup tapes were kept for a period from March to October 2003 to cover controversial issues such as reasons for starting the war in Iraq, the release of a former CIA operative’s name and the US Department of Justice’s actions. The White House has been working for months trying to fend off a lawsuit filed last May in federal court in Washington by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. The judge cited what he called an apparent contradiction by White House CIO Theresa Payton as to whether backup tapes had been preserved. He also suggested that White House employees be ordered to turn over any flash drives or other portable media that may contain e-mails. The White House missing email scandal has been developing for some time now.”

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “Business Week magazine has gone medieval on the RIAA, recounting in grisly detail the cruel ordeal to which the RIAA has subjected a absolutely innocent defendant, Tanya Andersen of Oregon. Nobody can read the story and come to any other conclusion than that the RIAA and its lawyers are total jerks. Of course we’ve been reading about Atlantic v. Andersen on p2pnet.net and on my blog, and discussing it here, but there’s something extra special about a mainstream publication like Business Week really letting them have it.”

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theodp writes “A just-published IBM patent application for a Software Inspection Management Tool claims to improve software quality by taking a chess-clock-like approach to code walkthroughs. An inspection rate monitor with ‘a pause button, a resume button, a complete button, a total lines inspected indication, and a total lines remaining to be inspected indication’ keeps tabs on participants’ progress and changes color when management’s expectations — measured in lines per hour — are not being met.”

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theodp writes “A just-published IBM patent application for a Software Inspection Management Tool claims to improve software quality by taking a chess-clock-like approach to code walkthroughs. An inspection rate monitor with ‘a pause button, a resume button, a complete button, a total lines inspected indication, and a total lines remaining to be inspected indication’ keeps tabs on participants’ progress and changes color when management’s expectations — measured in lines per hour — are not being met.”

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Bills have been introduced in both the Home and the Senate to liberalize copyright law in the case of orphaned works. The almost-identical bills would limit the penalties for infringement in cases where the copyright holder could no longer be identified. The idea is that one could declare their intent to use the work with the Copyright Office and if the copyright holder didn’t care to respond, they would only be able to get ‘reasonable compensation’ instead of excessive statutory penalties. Public Knowledge has more details on the bills.”

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