Day: July 14, 2009

Google Finally Adds Creative Commons Image Search Option

Google finally added the ability to restrict image searches to only images that are tagged with a Creative Commons license.

This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

Nice.

My Kind of Long Term Data Storage

Via the Long Now blog, I ran across this article describing researchers’ efforts to create a data storage system to last a thousand years or more. Rather than rely on optical or magnetic media, both of which can be corrupted fairly easily over decades — much less hundreds of years — of storage, Japanese researchers proposed a system of stacked wafers composed of mask ROM,

Thus, the researchers proposed the idea of saving data on the mask ROM with electron-beam direct-writing technology, stocking the wafers and packaging them with SiO2 to form a “slate.” When a wafer (reader) for reading data is attached to the slate, it becomes possible to supply power and communicate signals by wireless.

If four 15-inch wafers made by using 45nm CMOS technology are stacked, the memory capacity will be 2.5 Tbits.

As long as humidity levels are kept low, the proposed device would have a lifespan of hundreds of years.

The Long Now blog adds a nice twist on how to solve a problem inherent with any such device — a thousand years from now, how will our descendants know how to access the data?

If someone finds this disk 1,000 years from now, how will they know how to access the information?   We think a microetched instruction manual might do very nicely.

Nice. That’s how I plan to backup my World of Warcraft videos.

Jakob Nielsen Argues for Abandoning Password Masking on Websites

Jakob Nielsen makes the case against password masking — the convention of displaying asterisks or some other symbol instead of the actual characters typed in password entry boxes. Nielsen notes that password masking was originally implemented as a security measure, but questions just how much security it adds under the conditions most of us use the web,

Most websites (and many other applications) mask passwords as users type them, and thereby theoretically prevent miscreants from looking over users’ shoulders. Of course, a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn’t even protect fully against snoopers.

Nielsen suggests adding a  check box so users could decide whether or not to have their passwords masked so, for example, users in genuinely public situations such as at a public web terminal could still choose to have their passwords masked.

Nielsen argues this is one case where going against convention would be beneficial, but I wonder if he’s done any user-testing of this. My suspicion is that the overwhelming majority of users will assume there is something wrong with a website when the password isn’t masked and thereby likely cause even more confusion.

The standard on mobile devices of not masking the current character but masking previous characters is a good compromise and is becoming so widespread it may eventually break down that convention, but for now its hard to imagine a site abandoning password masking wouldn’t create more confusion and anxiety in its users than the problem it would allegedly solve.