Security of Google Desktop Search

October 14, 2004

What's that you say? Read the manual?

Since I don't have access to my XP box right now I sent Dave Winer a query about how the Google Desktop Search results are included with web results. He suggested it might be a Javascript include. A reasonable possibility but I didn't find mention of a need to run Javascript in the browser to use GDS. There is a page in the manual - who would have thought, actually read the manual - that describes the integration this way: "Wait a minute. How can web search return a page containing both www.google.com and Google Desktop Search results?

When Google Desktop Search is integrated with Google web search, what you're really doing is sending your query to two different programs and places. One copy of your query goes to www.google.com, which searches only the web and returns a page with those results to your computer. Another copy of your query goes to the Google Desktop Search application running on your computer, which searches only its cache on your computer for results. Google Desktop Search also intercepts www.google.com's results page before you can see it, changes it to include the Google Desktop Search results, and then lets your web browser show it to you. Google never knows what your Google Desktop Search results are."

So it appears it's both very cool software and well implemented so as to avoid the insecurity of send

Google desktop search

October 14, 2004

Dave Winer is very excited with Google Desktop Search. It does seem like something pretty cool and I'll have to check it out. It just might bring Windows XP one step closer to OS X. Dave notes that GDS is not available for the Mac. This seems a bit odd to me, the fact that it is a fractional web server means there are several ways it could quite easily work on the Mac. Perhaps they're waiting for some of the core searching features to be baked in in Tiger. Or perhaps they're looking at the fact that very similar functionality has been available since OS 8.6 for the Mac - longer than Google's been around. Admittedly the idea of a fractional web server is a thousand times cooler than a native app and the expandability should be great for this kind of platform. It is quite disappointing that they don't support the browsers that many community leaders use - Firefox comes to mind.

Which brings me to another idea that's been bugging me lately. When will there be a browser maker for Windows that understands spell checking. Certainly Apple's decision to bake spell checking into the operating system makes it easier, but the #1 feature of Safari as far as I'm concerned is that it can spell check anything I type on the web - critical for web content authors.

And you're surprised

October 13, 2004

The stepfather of a University of Colorado freshman who was found dead on September 17th in the Chi Psi frat house said of CU it is "one of the highest-risk environments" for new college students.

What amazes me is not this assessment. It amazes me that there are people who continue to deny this. Most importantly those who run the institution continue to foster this environment by not taking appropriate actions against coaches who do not recognize that rape is inappropriate. Further when there is strong evidence these same coaches wanted "plausible deniability" they knew that things were going wrong. Seriously wrong. It's time for the administration of CU to step aside and make way for a new team with real concern for the students and the community.

Drupal kicks ass

October 12, 2004

On my walk last night I was listening to the Gillmore Gang's replay of a blogging strategies session at Gnomedex. I started paying attention to the features they needed in blogging tools and content management. There wasn't anything they mentioned that Drupal won't do. There are several items like search that it is very good at and it is easy to setup and run for even pretty novice users. The added thing is that it has an aggregator baked in so everywhere you go your aggregator is accessible even if your desktop computer isn't. Now, I'd love to have a better aggregator built in and have more feed by feed control. I'd love to be able to throttle a feed such as the Las Vegas Herald which assimilates local news but comes as floods that wipe out all the other news in the top of my aggregator. Then again these are small wants/needs compared to the simplicity and power of Drupal.

SETI@Home

October 11, 2004

The Seti@Home project allows users to use their home computers to search for intelligent life. Today news from Columbus, Ohio says that a state programmer was fired for running the program on a state-owned computer server. Maybe using all those spare taxpayer dollars to run up your personal stats isn't such a good idea.

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