More convenience, less privacy

The Web offers a seductive bargain: you will get more of it if you will stop being nervous about your privacy | IslamOnline.net

Privacy online is like no other privacy.  That is not because the Web is a wild west full of sinister people bent on breaking into your digital lives (though, of course, some such criminals indeed roam the cyberspace). Rather, privacy on the web is a category of its own because of the peculiarity of the Web as a communications medium.

That peculiarity has two main features. One is the Web as the ultimate storage medium. The other is the Web as a medium that has given rise to a new breed of highly diverse service providers whom we entrust with vast amounts of information about ourselves. Think of Google, Yahoo, or Facebook.

Doomed, or saved, by the app

Web applications are making our bond with the operating system ever more tenuous, but an old breed of applications is countering the trend | IslamOnline.net

The cloud is here. Cloud computing, that is. The term is not self-explanatory, but what it essentially means is that more and more of the tasks we could perform only on hard disk-installed applications (apps) are now doable on the Web.

Whether you want to type and format a document, do a bit of number-crunching on a spreadsheet, or view PDF files, Web-based apps from Zoho, Google, or Scribd, among others, would often suffice. In the old days, as in the 1990s until the early 2000s, such tasks were mostly the preserve of applications installed on the hard disk, with Microsoft’s Office suite enjoying, or having enjoyed, a nearly dominant position in that domain.

You shall upgrade to Windows 7 (or not?)

Yes, it could be the greatest Windows yet, but particularly novel about the Seventh is that you may not need to buy it | Islamonline.net

In the minds of many, Windows, the operating system, has often been associated with some notion of inevitability:that it was inevitable that one upgrades to the most recent release of Windows. Or that Windows was inevitably going to be rendered unnecessary thanks to free or much cheaper alternatives. As is often the case, reality lies somewhere between these two extremes.

There is reason, though, to revisit the "inevitability debate" as Microsoft releases, with relatively uncharacteristic advertising restraint, the seventh in its Windows dynasty.

Let Amazon decide for you

Technology companies' innovative spirit is taking them into new territory: devising their own laws on how you use their services and devices | IslamOnline.net

You own your PDF files — unless, or until, they think otherwise. This may come as bad news since, if you are like many, you probably use PDF (Portable Document Format) for saving a variety of file types: text documents, pictures, and scan images, among others. 

In fact, PDF has become so widespread that the ability to display (and even annotate) PDF files has become almost a standard requirement in smart phones and e-book readers, such as Amazon's and Sony's.

PDF, of course, does not think.

For better results, search engines want your intelligence

Search engines are trying to get smarter by enlisting help from their users  | IslamOnline.net

Say you want to know how much salt there is in a pinch of salt. So you head to Google with your query. And, ever the generous, the search engine coughs back more than a million links.

And if you’ve left Google set to its default 10 results per page, you will be in no luck with the salt pinch query. The first link that may resemble an answer comes 11th (a Yahoo Answers page).

But you could also stop by Wolfram Alpha, a newcomer on the search engine scene. There you will get a smaller number of results: a single page that contains in neat tables all the information one would probably hope to know about the pinch of salt.

G8 Not Honoring AIDS Commitments, Says Expert

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – The AIDS community is increasingly concerned that the donor countries are finding in the current financial crisis an excuse to avoid fulfilling their commitments to AIDS treatment and prevention | IslamOnline.net

One reason for concern was the “pathetic silence” of the G8 countries on AIDS when they met in Italy earlier this month. G8 countries “think HIV can wait,” said Julio Montaner, Co-Chair of the International AIDS Society conference, to open today in Cape Town, South Africa.

“We must send a clear message that HIV is not waiting. Any retrenchment in our efforts to provide universal access to anti-retroviral treatment to AIDS, which was repeatedly promised by G8, will cause us to pay a huge toll in the future,” he added.

What Google Wants

Google’s operating system project is probably the search giant’s most forceful attempt to hasten the end of the operating system era | IslamOnline.net

Technology rumor sites, and probably everybody else, were caught off guard. Google, which is the subject of an ever-revolving rumor mill, announced last Tuesday that it’s working on an operating system, dubbed Chrome OS.

And that was a surprise. After all, it’s no secret that Google has been working to elevate the web browser to be the center of users’ interaction with information. Whether you wanted to compose a formal letter or share your photos with family, Google made sure that a web browser (and a Google account) would suffice.