Security: The Ten Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online

Dark Reading: The Ten Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online:

most users have no idea how dangerous their online behavior is.

Indeed. But whilst this is all good advice, I can’t help but point out that whilst most of these activities pose a great threat on Windows, they pose much less of a threat on OSX or Linux. Most of these are threats because of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.

So the top tip is to get get Firefox and Thunderbird, especially if you are a Windows user, and even if you are not.

Opinon: Why blogs are killing Google…

…and why it doesn’t matter.

Google is great. If you are looking for something obvious; something with a unique name.

Google sucks. If you are looking for information about a topic which is an idea but could be expressed in many different terms. You have to guess they type of language people will use to describe it and hope that you can find a reference. And if you want to do an exlusive search (e.g you want to upgrade your Mac Mini but it’s an intel model so you want to exclude all results that are only relevant to PPC models) forget about it. Any kind of boolean search is a lottery that you’ll rarely win.

And this is where blogs make the process even worse.

The number of times I do a web search only to find a bunch of pages that are in the results because of comments in a reply to a blog post. Often these comments either don’t have anything to do with the actual information presented, or represent some side-trail. Old-skool web pages do have an advantage over blogs: they tended to present a coherent set of ideas on a focused topic. Well, the good ones did, anyway.

Why doesn’t this matter?

Eventually someone will come up with a proper search engine that takes into account the meaning of language, rather than the slap-dash approach of relying on words with no account of context. It will also be able to interpret the structure of a web page, so, for example, you could restrict your search to the main body of text on a web-page, or give added weight to pages which feature your search parameters in headings or tags.

In the mean-time, find yourself some good blogs. The next time you want to look for something, don’t search the web, search your favorite blogs and follow the links from there.

While you’re there don’t forget to read through some of the comments. Sometimes they are the best bits, even if they are irrelevant side-trails.

Opinion: Will web 2.0 crash, as web 1.0 did?

Frankly I don’t know.

But consider this. Web 1.0 failed because no-one was making any money. Are any of the web 2.0 companies making money, apart from a few major players?

Web 1.0 was more than just a failure, it was a disaster because it burned up venture capital with no hope of ever turning a profit. That, at least, is a lesson learned. I think.

Now we all know that money isn’t everything, but it is necessary.

What concerns me, is that whilst web 1.0 took with it the fortunes of many small investors, web 2.0, if the crash comes, will take with it much more important things. Social networks, personal photographic archives, blogs and their comments, online collaborative efforts and other such things.

If web 2.0 fails, it wont be the gushing wound that web 1.0 was, but a much more subtle bleeding associated with a failure to make real income to support itself in the long run.

I think we need a web 3.0. A web based on real-world economics where people pay their way. Maybe for that to be a reality we need to re-visit the idea of cybercash, where micro-payments can be made for content. Maybe we can help pay our way via a bit-torrent style bandwidth sharing arrangement. Skype do this now.

These notions are not very romantic, but sooner or later the romance stops and the real work of day to day life needs to be attended to.

The more touchy-feely and stylistically simple web 2.0 rose from the ashes of the techno-brash web 1.0. We felt the need to console ourselves a little and gather round the global fireplace and build a web that catered to our more basic human needs. One can only hope that it won’t take another crash for us to mature into the adult-hood of a web that can ‘work 9-5′ and bring home an honest wage to pay our way in this world.