Microsoft Wants Google to Censor…. Microsoft.com

Microsoft Wants Google to Censor…. Microsoft.com

In an attempt to make pirated content harder to find copyright holders ask Google to remove millions of search results every week. While these automated requests are usually legitimate, mistakes happen more often than one might expect. For example, in an embarrassing act of self-censorship Microsoft recently asked Google to censor links to its very own Microsoft.com.

Earlier this week we reported that Google has already received takedown requests for more than 100 million URLs this year.
While most of the submitted URLs do indeed link to infringing content, not all requests received by Google are correct.
The automated systems used by many of the copyright holders often trigger notices that include links to perfectly legitimate content, and sometimes even their own work. The latter happened in a recent DMCA takedown request sent by LeakID on behalf of Microsoft.
Instead of listing URLs of infringing material, Microsoft asked Google to remove links to their own websites, as can be seen below. The six links point to Microsoft’s store, support pages and product descriptions. A pretty embarrassing mistake to say the least.

Whoops..

Luckily for Microsoft, Google spotted the error, meaning that the pages in question have not been removed from the search results, although it would have been a fitting punishment if Google had decided to comply with the request.
While the above error is rather entertaining, matters gets more serious when copyright holders censor legitimate content produced by others. It’s hard to say how frequently this happens, but just by browsing through the many DMCA notices we have been able to find dozens of examples already.
Just two weeks ago we found that HBO had asked Google to remove a perfectly legal copy of the open source video player VLC, for example. The link in question was clearly submitted in error, but at the time of writing it’s still absent from Google’s search result.
Some individuals respond to these mistakes by blaming the search engine, and taking counter-action. For example, a person who uses the handle “Google dicksuck” decided to respond to the VLC takedown request by asking Google to remove HBO.com.

How about this takedown?

Unfortunately for him or her, Google did not remove the TV-network’s website.
Of course Google can’t really be blamed for responding to takedown requests because they are required to do so by law. Considering the millions of notices submitted to them every week, Google does a pretty good job at filtering out the most obvious mistakes.
The copyright holders on the other hand could take much more care to prevent these errors. Even if it’s just to avoid embarrassing themselves.
Update: A Microsoft spokesperson told TorrentFreak the following in response to our findings.
“We believe strongly in the effectiveness and the need for accuracy in the use of notice and takedown to address online infringement. To explain what happened here, Google’s online form requires identification of both the copyrighted content being infringed and the website address of the infringement.”
“A vendor properly listed those six urls as Microsoft copyrighted content that was being infringed, but then inadvertently copied and pasted those same six urls in the field to identify the locations of infringement. This simple clerical error was identified and corrected right away, and we have taken steps to address the process to avoid it being repeated.”

 http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-wants-google-to-censor-microsoft-com-130728/

 

Top 10 smartest people alive

Top 10 smartest people alive The list includes Hollywood star James Wood and television script writer, Rick Rosner.

Terence Tao Age 37 IQ level 230 Was able to calculate simple arithmetic by age of 2. Youngest ever full professor at 24 at UCLA.

Christopher Hirata Age 30 IQ level 225 Was in Caltech by 14 and working with NASA on projects colonizing Mars by the age of 16

Age 50 IQ level of 210 The Guinness Book of World Records lists him as having the highest confirmed IQ in the world. By the time he was two he was able to speak four languages. By the time he was four he was auditing university courses.

Rick Rosner Age 52 IQ level 192 The television script writer who has worked with Jimmy Kimmel, boasts an unusual resume that includes job titles such as stripper, nude model, roller-skating waiter and bouncer.

Garry Kasparov Age 49 IQ level 190 The former chess champion still holds on to the title the youngest undisputed world chess champion when he won the title at the young age of 22. He retired from the sport in 2005.

James Woods Age 65 IQ level 180 Enrolled in linear algebra in UCLA while in high school and even won a scholarship to MIT, where he started acting and dropped out of college.

Sir Andrew Wiles Age 59 IQ level 170 Proved the world's most difficult match problem, "Fermat's Last Theorem".

Judit Polgar Age 36 IQ level 170 Raised by her father in experiment in education, in an attempt to prove that children can make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a young age. She became the youngest chess grand champion at the age of 15, beating Bobby Fischer's record by a month.

Paul Allen Age 59 IQ level 170 Co-founder of Microsoft.

Stephen W. Hawkins Age 70 IQ level 160 Made groundbreaking research into theoretical physics and explained the universe. -edvantage

What Bill Gates Says About Drug Companies

What Bill Gates Says About Drug Companies

Most of what Bill Gates said to me over the course of two interviews found its way into the cover profile of him I wrote for the most recent issue of Forbes. But one set of ideas didn’t really make it: his unique and thoughtful perspective on the pharmaceuticals industry.

Few outsiders have had as clear a view of the drug business as Gates. Over the past decade, Gates has relied on giants like Merck, Pfizer, and Sanofi-Aventis to provide the vaccines that are a lynchpin of his charitable work. He’s had a long-standing collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline over a malaria vaccine. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recruited its last research head, Tachi Yamada, from Glaxo, where he had headed drug R&D. During his tenure, Yamada helped the Gates Foundation develop a meningitis vaccine from scratch to help people in parts of Africa. Yamada’s replacement, Trevor Mundel, hails from Novartis, where he ran clinical trials – a sign that some industry insiders say means that the Gates Foundation may be heading even further into the development of new vaccines and drugs.

After a conversation with Gates, one wonders if the drug industry has hurt itself by focusing too much on $100,000 cancer drugs and blockbuster pills that can be sold to millions, and not enough on products that are far more cost-effective. And then, of course, there’s the fact that the entire $600 billion pharmaceutical industry has spent the past decade in a research drought, getting comparatively few new medicines to market.

“Fortunately, our vaccine discovery rate has been better than the recent drug discovery rate of pharma,” Gates said. “And, you know, pharma doing well is important for the world, so hopefully their discovery rate will go up.”

Ten or fifteen years ago, nobody in the drug business would have held up vaccines as profit centers. That was the age of Pfizer’s Viagra having the fastest drug launch in history, of the even bigger cholesterol-lowering medicine Lipitor becoming the best-selling drug in history and forcing Pfizer’s $116 billion buyout of partner Warner-Lambert, ushering in a new age of megamergers that experts believe may have squelched innovation in drug company labs.

Says Gates: “If you 15 years ago had said, ‘How important are vaccines to these various businesses?’ They would have said, “You know, our drug businesses are going to do so well. And vaccines are so tough, particularly because of liability issues.’”

But vaccines, Gates argues, “actually have more impact on health than all the new drugs.” And the pharmaceutical businesses didn’t do as well as expected. For Pfizer, for instance, a big bet on a Lipitor follow-up went down in flames when the drug turned out to increase, not decrease, the death rate. But now Pfizer is betting big on a vaccine, called Prevnar, against the pneumococcus bacteria. After Lipitor loses patent protection, Prevnar may well be the company’s top seller.

Gates thinks it is “ironic” that vaccines have done so well, along with AIDS drugs that have been a boon to companies like Gilead, one of the biggest biotechnology companies, and Merck, while heartburn medicines, cholesterol drugs, and antidepressants have failed to pay off.

When it comes to cancer drugs like Avastin and Erbitux, some of the biggest sales successes of the past decade, Gates seems unimpressed. “There’s always this divergence between what’s financially attractive and what has dramatic profit and the number of life years that you really save.” Take for instance, Novartis’ Gleevec, the crown jewel of targeted cancer drugs that can put chronic myelogenous leukemia and gastrointestinal stromal tumors into remission. “Do the math on that versus, says, preventing Parkinson’s or preventing Alzheimer’s. It’s in a different universe.”

The good news, to Gates’ mind, is that right now people are making money in the vaccine business. That means that more research is getting funded, and more innovation is happening.
“The rich world companies do more,” he says, “and that means the Chinese and Indian companies see that and they do more. You know, so it’s a pretty good virtuous cycle right now in terms of focus on vaccines. ”

Part of the drug industry’s problem, though, is that the process of inventing new drugs and vaccines has gotten more complex. Forty years ago, Leo Sternbach, a Roche scientist, could invent whole swaths of anti-anxiety drugs, and Merck vaccine researcher Maurice Hilleman, one of Gates’ heroes, could develop the bulk of the vaccines still given to children today.

“It’s like the breadth of software I got to do at Microsoft,” says Gates. “Things become more specialized and, you know, and more complex. So the idea that one guy does, like, ten different vaccines, including multiple iterations of them. And the combinations of them. He was on a roll. He got Merck into that. He figured out how it worked. He had the guts to go and try things.”

The sad reality: as innovation piles on innovation, doing something new and different only gets harder.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/10/what-bill-gates-says-about-drug-companies-2/2/

Microsoft unveils Windows 8 for tablets

Microsoft unveils Windows 8 for tablets

by Rahul » Fri Jun 03, 2011 8:12 am

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft Corp Windows President Steven Sinofsky previewed a touchscreen version of the operating system that can work on tablets, offering a glimpse of his company's response to Apple Inc's iPad.

Windows 8 resembles Microsoft's software for mobile phones and uses "tiles," rather than icons, to help users navigate between applications, Sinofsky said at AllThingsD's D9 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Microsoft demonstrated Windows 8 on a 10.6-inch touchscreen tablet and said the operating system can also work on desktop computers.

Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker, is rushing to adapt Windows so it can run on devices that compete with the iPad, which dominates the tablet market. The new operating system won't be out until next year, people familiar with the plans said in March.

Still, the company is eager to show it's making progress in developing software that can be used by computer makers and chip suppliers.

"What we set out to do with Windows 8 was really try to reimagine what we could do with a PC," Sinofsky said. "You could sort of say we coloured outside the lines."

He declined to say when the software would be available, except to note it "won't be this fall." Sinofsky said the company would provide additional information on the product at a developer conference later this year.

Computex demonstration
Microsoft also previewed Windows 8 to customers, partners and media at the Computex show in Taipei. Vice President Mike Angiulo ran the system on tablets, notebooks and desktop systems made by Dell Inc, Asustek Computer Inc, and Quanta Computer Inc using chips and technology from ARM Holdings Plc (ARM), Qualcomm Inc, Texas Instruments Inc and Nvidia Corp.

The design of the software is similar to the tile interface on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 mobile-handset software. Like that program, Windows 8's tiles can be automatically updated to display information from apps on the computer's start screen, so a weather app can tell the user that it's forecast to be sunny without requiring them to open the application.

The software also will run on desktop and laptop computers via a touchscreen, mouse or keyboard. And it will run existing Windows applications, the company said.

Windows 8 is the biggest operating system change the company has made since Windows 95, said Julie Larson-Green, a Microsoft vice president who demonstrated the software during Sinofsky's speech.

Intel, ARM
Larson-Green showed the software running on an Intel Corp chip. The operating system also will be the first full version of Windows capable of operating on chips made with technology from ARM Holdings.

Microsoft lags behind Apple in tablets despite promoting earlier versions of the format for at least a decade. None of those tablets ever took off with consumers. Apple, which develops the hardware and software that runs the iPad, introduced its device in 2010.

The global tablet market will almost quadruple this year to 70 million units from 18 million in 2010, according to Jefferies Group Inc. Apple will control about 64 per cent of the 2011 tablet market, dropping to 41 per cent in 2012, when 158 million units will probably be sold, Jefferies estimates.

http://www.fropki.com/microsoft-unveils-windows-for-tablets-vt43993.html