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Mechanical Turk = Genius — Amazon is attempting to disintermediate the whole 'let's farm out our manual, monotonous tasks to the third world via some exploitative local company with ties to the home country' industry with their Amazon Mechanical Turk - an example of 'artificial Artificial Intelligence …
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Read/Write Web, TechCrunch, Rough Type, Things That, Oliver Thylmann, SearchViews, Mashable*, cruel to be kind and Geeking with Greg
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Feeds, well-formed XML and Vista — The Microsoft RSS Blog just announced that Vista will only accept RSS feeds that are well-formed XML. — I agree with Nick, who commented "This is the right thing to do, and I'm glad you're doing it - thanks". I'd like to add some emphasis to that statement though …
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PowerBook to gain iSight, iBook to go widescreen in 2006 — Along with its transition to Intel processors, Apple Computer in the first half of next year will introduce new eye-catching industrial designs for both of its laptop offerings, AppleInsider has learned.

Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware is now......"Windows Defender" — Over the last few months we have been working hard on creating the next version of the Microsoft anti-spyware technology. Today, we are announcing the new name for this technology... Microsoft Windows Defender. Does this mean a lot is changing??

Google Lunch? — As many people know, Google offers its employees free lunch and free dinner at the campus (Yahoo charges its employees). It's a lavish affair, with many different types of high quality food, drinks, desert, etc. I like visiting Google for lunch, and accept nearly every offer I get from a Google employee.
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Unsecured Wi-Fi would be outlawed by N.Y. county — According to a new proposal being considered by a suburb of New York City, any business or home office with an open wireless connection but no separate server to fend off Internet attacks would be violating the law.

More On Sony: Dangerous Decloaking Patch, EULAs And Phoning Home — My posting Monday on Sony's use of a rootkit as part of their Digital Rights Management (DRM) generated an outcry that's reached the mainstream media. As of this morning the story is being covered in newspapers …
Discussion:
Ed Bott's Windows Expertise, Techdirt, Good Morning Silicon Valley, TechBlog and TechSpot

Newsmaker: Kevin Mitnick on hacking's evolution — To many, the name Kevin Mitnick is synonymous with "notorious hacker." He was caught by the FBI in 1995 after a well-publicized pursuit. Mitnick pled guilty to charges of wire and computer fraud and served five years behind bars.

Improving Tabbed Browsing — A lot of us are fans of tabbed browsing. It's one of the most useful changes in window and document management since the Task Bar on Windows. People who like to work with multiple documents like quick, convenient access to them. It's part of the reason Microsoft moved Office to a SDI model.

Microsoft's "Live" strategy is a good and smart move — I was at the launch event for Windows Live and Office Live on Tuesday morning and have been running ever since, so apologies for not posting this sooner. I wrote a Forrester piece on this (subscription required). Here's the executive summary:

New AdSense referral feature launched — If you have wanted to make money by referring publishers to AdSense, yet haven't been accepted into the AdSense & AdWords referral program, you are in luck! You can now earn $100 per new publisher, when they sign up for AdSense and earn $100 in revenue.

VS.NET 2005 C# : IDE hang with simply code... Today I was doing some small research work with generics in VS.NET 2005 professional RTM and I was just typing normal code when the IDE suddenly locked up, a hardcore hang with 100% CPU usage. After a kill process, I restarted the IDE …

Google's Next Buy — By Rick Aristotle Munarriz (TMFBreakerRick) — Don't tell me that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) printed out 14 million new shares back in mid-September without a game plan. Don't tell me that Google fattened up its balance sheet to $7.6 billion just because legal tender …

Insert Ads into Podcasts with Fruitcast — Fruitcast launched today. It's a service that automatically inserts 15 second sound advertisements directly into a publsiher's podcast (either at the beginning, or the end, or both). — They've focused on keeping things ultra simple.
Discussion:
Thomas Hawk's Digital …, Geek News Central …, Mashable*, Blog Tips at ProBlogger and business2blog