Category: tech

tech

Sneaky Yahoo Might Be Tracking You Around The ‘Net

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Yahoo is now using something called “Web Beacons” to track Yahoo users around the net to see what you’re doing and where you are going – similar to cookies. Yahoo might be recording every website and every group you visit. They say that, “Yahoo! uses web beacons to access Yahoo! cookies inside and outside our network of web sites and in connection with Yahoo! products and services.” I’m not happy about that and have opted out. You can too. Here’s how:

1) Log into your Yahoo account and take a look at their updated privacy statement

2) About half-way down the page, in the section that refers to cookies, you will see a link that says web beacons. Click on the phrase web beacons.

3) That will bring you to a paragraph entitled “Outside the Yahoo Network.” In this section you’ll see a little “click here to opt out” link that will let you “opt-out” of their new method of snooping. Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted. Notice the “Success” message on the top of the next page. Be careful because on that page there is a “Cancel Opt-out” button that, if clicked, will *undo* the opt-out.

Thanks Chris for calling this to my attention

tech

New Star Wars Videogame

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There is new Star Wars video game being advertised on TV a lot these days. It’s called Stars Wars Battlefront and it looks pretty good. I went to the product site to check out some screenshots, watch a demo vid and generally review it. Although I rarely play my PS2 these days, I have to admit that I will probably rent this game and/or buy it because it seems pretty damn cool. The flash site is decently robust and its neat how its got a music player which streams classic star wars tunes. Check out the requisite AIM icons – the characters are very nicely rendered as pixel art. Some LucasArts games have crappy game play so I’m hoping that this one is good. If I actually do rent/buy/play it, I’ll post an update and a review.

tech

Video Game commercials

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If you’ve been pining away to see a replay of a video game commercial from the last few years, this fan site has them. I mean it, they have over 1600 video game commercials from across the globe. As the site says, “almost 90% of these commercials come from Japan and look very very very ODD.” I 100% agree. I love it! So far, my favorite is the Sega Worldcup 98 clip (found in chapter 1) but then again, I need to go to bed and I’ve only watched a few.

I found a link to these commercials on the f.u.b.a.r. forums. When you find a funny video game clip, post a comment and let me. Happy viewing!

tech

Search Engines In The News

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It seems that everyone these days is talking about Google, about how it’s impending IPO will give it a market cap greater than every the market cap of every other company in the world combined (okay, that is not really true), about how its one of the few companies to have its name turned into a verb (you are going out with her on a blind date and you haven’t googled her?!) and how search is the true killer app of the web (how many true killer apps are there anyway?). What isn’t talked about are the other search engines out there – no, not Ask Jeeves or MSN but the small guys, the ones that want to be the next Google. Appropriated from the 3/29/04 edition of Newsweek is this handy list of four cool search engines:

  1. Vivisimo – clusters search results into meaningful categories. eBay uses it to sort auction outcomes.
  2. Topix.net – Credit ex-Netscapers for the ability to automatically build pages around 4,000 online news sources.
  3. Coneteq – A Lebanese project (to be launched later this year) will let you search products by brand, price and location. NOTE: This may get my mother to finally start really using the ‘Net
  4. Feedster – Allows searchs of the thousands of personal web logs (this this one) and ranks results by dates
  5. Grokker – Plugs queries into the major search engins and uses home-cooked algorithms to analyze the pages and organize them into cagegories.

Check them out and post your reviews – I haven’t had time to yet…

tech

CGI: is there anything you can’t do?

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My friend Chris sent me this link to me today at work. Its the trailer for a new Playstation 2 game that is due to come out in the States sooner or later. Overall, it is just a fantastic little movie and definitely worth a view. The end to me is the best because I could have sworn that the characters shown were actually real actors who were filmed. That is not the case – they are CGI representations of those actors.