Date: 04/17/2003 02:21 PM
From: Charlie Llewellin ([email protected])
Subject: Voicemail Hackers Phone It In
Boy ... how can those phone companies look themselves in the face every morning ("Voicemail Hackers Phone It In," April 17, 2003). That is ... obscene.
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Date: Thursday, April 17, 2003 10:08 AM
From: Peter Caputa (mailto:[email protected])
Subject: Building a Bigger Search Engine
I agree with the end of the article. The bigger index is not that helpful ("Building a Bigger Search Engine," April 17, 2003). What search engines need to do better is rank relevancy of search engines. This could also be done through distributed computing as well as distributed decision making. The software should allow people to categorize and rank documents and store this information on their own PC.
These could be published using a peer-to-peer type of software, so that other people could reference them and link to them. So, not only will a thousand lists of a specific category be available, but the best category will be easily determined by a spider that determines the most linked to index. It would be like building an open P2P directory of the Web with no limit to the size of the directory. The number of references could actually be greater than the number of documents on the Web. A spider and algorithmic ranking technology could then be used to crawl this Web.
People debate the value of directories vs. spiders. I think the conversation should shift to how we can combine the value of both. I recommend reading Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-László Barabási.
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Date: Thursday, April 17, 2003 5:13 AM
From: Ben Porklens (mailto:[email protected])
Subject: Story: Voicemail Hackers Phone It In
This is a good example of why your phone bill should automatically be debted from your credit card ("Voicemail Hackers Phone It In," April 17, 2003).
In a case where the phone company refuses to drop the charge, simply dispute the charge with your creditor! It's much easier to have Visa, Mastercard and American Express fight AT&T for you!
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Date: Thursday 04/17/2003 03:51 PM
From: Paul Pritchard ([email protected])
Subject: Building a Bigger Search Engine
In your story, you missed one of the big problems with the "grub" client ("Building a Bigger Search Engine," April 17, 2003). The client sends your PC URLs to crawl, a large number of which are porn sites, including sites that have "rape" in their names. I know because I tried installing it and saw it doing this. So if you are running their screensaver, your PC will be crawling porn sites and might be crawling illegal sites. I'd rather not have to try explaining this to the FBI, so I uninstalled the client.
As a client, you have absolutely no control over what sites you are connecting to. Grub doesn't have any warning about this issue that I could find.
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