Google Tech Talks June 21, 2007

How to extent media wiki environment with semantic aspects and how to provide natural language interfaces for varying knowledge bases.

From what I can tell it is not a real bug but a regression that's part of a new feature RichResults. The browsing history does not erase RichResults anymore. If you don't want RichResults keep track of where you went, in Firefox you need to enter

about:config
and then scroll down to:
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
and change the default.
The default setting is 12 and if you want nothing, you enter 0.

Refusal of the "RichResults" to obey the "Clear Private Data" command presents a significant privacy issue in Firefox 3. Read a message board on Ubuntu dedicated to this issue.

Did you ever wonder why WordPress out-of-the-box is not Search Engine Optimized and All in One Search Engine Optimization Plug-in is inadequate? Below is the explanation that WordPress provides:

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This January will be Apple's last presentation at the Macworld and CEO Steve Jobs will not appear. Industry events like Macworld Expo have been losing their luster inside Apple for some time.

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"There's one leg shorter than the other ones; you can fix it with a few packets of sugar."

"It's very, very low so there's only your head at the table."

These are a couple of my favorites. Check out the rest of the catalog of chairs from the Secrets of Efficient Meeting Collection.

Gibson Research Corporation writes on Ultra High Security Password Generator:

Since there is no "output from the previous encryption" to be used during the encryption of the first block, the switch shown in the diagram above is used to supply a 128-bit "Initialization Vector" (which is just 128-bits of secret random data) for the XOR-mixing of the first counter value. Thus, the first encryption is performed on a mixture of the 128-bit counter and the "Initialization Vector" value, and subsequent encryptions are performed on the mixture of the incrementing counter and the previous encrypted result.

 The result of the combination of the 256-bit Rijndael/AES secret key, the unknowable (therefore secret) present value of the 128-bit monotonically incrementing counter, and the 128-bit secret Initialization Vector (IV) is 512-bits of secret data providing extremely high security for the generation of this page's "perfect passwords". No one is going to figure out what passwords you have just received.

Make sure to write the generated password down.

"Wolfram Research has released the seventh version of Mathematica, and it does a lot more than symbolic algebra. New features include Secure Website and Network Connectivity, Statistical Model Analysis and Built-in Image Processing and Analysis:

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Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a security vulnerability of dynamic Web pages generated from information supplied to the web server and replayed as part of the response to the browser. In an XSS attack, a malicious user can create a specially crafted link to inject unwanted executable script or code (usually JavaScript) into a Web site. When an unsuspecting victim clicks the link, the malicious piece of JavaScript can then send the victims’ cookie away to a CGI script.

A full security review usually involves more than just seeking out XSS vulnerabilities; it also involves overall threat modeling, testing for overflows, information disclosure, error handling, SQL injection, authentication, and authorization bugs.

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In order to change the administrator, known in Unix as "root", password you will need a copy of Mac OS X Install disk. If you don't have the original disk, buy another one or call Apple (1-800-SOS-APPL) and ask for a replacement boot disk.

Once you have an install disk, double click on the Install Mac OS icon and you'll get a window with a restart button. Click on it, and your Mac will restart and go to the installation process.

You don't need to install the OS again! Click through windows until you get the regular set of choices on the menu bar. One of those menus is Utilities and one of the choices on that menu is Reset Password.

Change your password and choose Quit from the Installer.

Next time you start your computer you know your admin password.

Note: your admin password is only of limited security because anyone with an OS install disk can restart and reset your root password without knowing your existing password.

How to reset Mac OS X Admin Root password by using sudo command

About Proxify Anonymous Surfing

A web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the web privately and securely. The Proxify widget provides easy access to the Proxify service, directly from your Dashboard.

Proxify hides your IP address and our encrypted connection prevents monitoring of your network traffic. Once using Proxify, you can surf normally and forget that it is there, protecting you.

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later

The Economist reports that Dr Kelling's controversial "broken windows theory" of social behavior is correct.

A PLACE that is covered in graffiti and festooned with rubbish makes people feel uneasy. And with good reason, according to a group of researchers in the Netherlands. Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen deliberately created such settings as a part of a series of experiments designed to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change the way people behave. They found that they could, by a lot: doubling the number who are prepared to litter and steal.

Read more on how Broken Windows theory applies to social behavior online.

In this video interview, long-time online community expert Randy Farmer talks about the broken windows theory and its application to online spaces. He talks about building an online community culture, moderation, quality of service and trolls.

Forgetting the root password on Mac can feel like a disaster but you can easily recover it using a sudo command if you have the password to an administrator's account on the system.

Open a terminal window and type:

sudo passwd root

You will be prompted for your password (the password to the administrator's account). After that you will be prompted for the new root password twice.

The sudo command is a great tool to control who can do what on a system. In this scenario the sudo command allows you after authentication with the user password to run a command as if you were root. The command passwd root is the command to change the password for the root user.

Update 01/16/08 How to reset lost root password by switching to single-user mode (Command-S) known as command line interface in Unix. (Suggested in user comments.)

Reed more on how to change your lost root password with an Install Disk.

The latest update* to Moxietype Content Management System is the custom Meta Description field for every entry. Meta Description will not be posted on your page but included as Meta Description tag on the Source Page for every individual URL of your content.

If the meta description is place, and the term(s) searched are within the description, then the meta description will appear in the snippet. If there is no meta description tags, then the text around the terms within the body of the content will be displayed in the snippet.

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When trying to protect your privacy, the last thing you want is for a search engine to collect data on what is your search history behavior. That's called profiling.

Below is an abstract for the United States Patent Application 20050222989 "Results based personalization of advertisements in a search engine" filed by Google

Personalized advertisements are provided to a user using a search engine to obtain documents relevant to a search query. The advertisements are personalized in response to a search profile that is derived from personalized search results. The search results are personalized based on a user profile of the user providing the query. The user profile describes interests of the user, and can be derived from a variety of sources, including prior search queries, prior search results, expressed interests, demographic, geographic, psychographic, and activity information.

Most extensions and tools commonly used to prevent data profiling by search engines work by concealing information from outsiders. TrackMeNot takes the opposite approach and actually sends out a bunch of information for the search engines to process. It sends mostly false information, which means your real search activities remain hidden from view and search engines won't glean any useful data from your visit.

TrackMeNot 0.5.32
Works with Firefox: 1.5 – 3.0.*
Homepage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173

Description: Protects users against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines.

Update 12/21/08: Firefox Refusal of the "RichResults" to obey the "Clear Private Data" command and how to disable RichResults feature.

While at this time there is no way to make the Location bar behave exactly like in Firefox 2 there are several experimental add-ons which received good marks from the users. (Experimental add-ons may be alpha, beta or pre-production in quality, performance and features. Caution should be used when installing experimental add-ons, as some of them have not been tested by an editor and may harm your computer configuration.)

Clear Private Data... (Add-Ons) 0.2.2

This extension utilizes the "Clear Private Data..." feature that is part of Firefox version 1.5 and above. It makes this feature a lot more accessible via right-click context menu and an optional toolbar button.

Homepage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1280

Hide Unvisited 3

Hide pages (bookmarks) that you haven't visited from showing in the AwesomeBar. This is for users that don't want to see any bookmarks showing up unless they've used the bookmark since deleting certain pages/sites or clearing the history.

Homepage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429

Old Location Bar

If you like the look of Firefox 2 Location Bar. You will not be able to completely back to the Old Location Bar but there a few features listed: URL Bar displays the old way; Go Button is always present, only matches what you type, doesn't guess; and URL Bar turns Yellow when visiting a "Secure" page.

Homepage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/763

Our latest updates include customized Meta Description field for each entry as well as an automatically generated Meta Title, both of which will help to maximize Search Engine Optimization for our sites.*

Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it's worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't affect your ranking within search results.

Read more at the Official Google Webmaster Blog on good use of meta data:

Improve snippets with a meta description makeover

Meta tags and Web Search Results

Tag Galaxy is worth a spin.Once you get past the fiery star with (conceptually related) orbiting planets, the globe itself presents a surprisingly addictive interface for photo discovery.

Most knowledgeable webmasters find the idea of moving the site from one platform to another, from one domain to another, or both as a rather scary process. The reasons are rather simple.

First of all, setting up Redirect 301 or other blanket redirect from one domain to another is hardly going to work for all visitors. Run a simple Google search on the terms link:yoursite.com and see how many external pages are linked to your site. Well, you have to contact all of them and ask them to change the old link.

Second, open Google Webmaster account and see how many pages from your site are indexed in the Google Search Engine. Yes, you have to set up an individual redirect 301 for each one of those pages. Same goes for images. Those redirects can easily run into thousands individual redirects for a dynamic site.

If you still feel that you absolutely positively must move your site to a new platform and have a few hundred of hours of disposable manpower to do so properly, read a few recommendations from Google. Making a site is a rather simple process in comparison with retaining the precious Search Engine presence and ranking.

Without much thought nor hesitation I would recommend to everybody to block IPs in the range of 222.208.0.0 - 222.215.255.255, and 125.64.0.0 - 125.71.255.255 which belongs to CHINANET Sichuan province network — the homebase of some of the world's most dedicated and prolific spammers. They actually enter it manually.

No wonder unemployment is so low in China.

Lately, all I have been hearing about is how Word Press is "free." Now, the way I do math, anything that takes over ten hours to set-up and still doesn't function without a consultant and/or IT specialist has a cost associated with it, the cost of loss time, lowered productivity and no blog at the end of the day. For the last two weeks at my office we have been struggling to set-up a simple blog using WordPress.org that I have come to call the "buteverybodyusesit" software. I understand that developers and programmers love it because it is "free" and allows them to exploit gullible users in search of "free" software.

But I think there is some confusion regarding the defintion of free, which Word Press itself notes:

About the GPL

The GNU General Public License, or GPL, is an open source license. Open source doesn't just mean that you can view the source code - it has political and philosophical implications as well. Open source, or "Free Software", means you are free to modify and redistribute the source code under certain conditions. Free doesn't refer to the price, it refers to freedom. The difference between the two meanings of free is often characterized as "Free as in speech vs. free as in beer." The GPL is free as in speech.

codex.wordpress.org/License

So, while I am all for free beer and free speech I am also for the clear distinction between the two meanings of free.