7 replies to this topic

[Nvyseal]

images/news/microsoft.jpgMicrosoft researchers believe that one way of improving its Bing search engine may be in challenging the public to play a game.

The game, not surprisingly, requires users to repeatedly assign keywords to a particular Web page. The game, dubbed "Page Hunt" by Microsoft Research, is located on this Microsoft site.

Users are awarded points for how close their keywords match the actual keywords attached to the page. The original study asked 341 Microsoft employees to play the game, which generated 14,400 labels. The research paper is titled "Page Hunt: Improving Search Engines Using Human Computation Games," and was issued by Raman Chandrasekar and Chris Quirk of Microsoft Research, with Abhishek Gupta of Digital Media LLC and Hao Ma of the Chinese University of Hong Kong listed as co-authors.

PageHunt (requires Silverlight)

[brewin]

Nvyseal, on Jul 28 2009, 01:01 PM, said:

(requires Silverlight)

IT'S A TRAP!

[m.oreilly]

brewin, on Jul 28 2009, 02:30 PM, said:

IT'S A TRAP!

lol, you bet it is...

[scaramonga]

Anything to take over Flash, MS will try lol.......AVOID!

[Nvyseal]

scaramonga, on Jul 28 2009, 08:02 PM, said:

Anything to take over Flash, MS will try lol.......AVOID!

In other news...

Hackers exploit Adobe Flash, Reader flaw

July 27 (UPI) -- Hackers exploiting a newfound flaw in Adobe Flash video player and Acrobat Reader can steal data and take money from bank accounts, online security experts say.

Adobe Systems Inc., the San Jose, Calif., maker of the video player and tool for opening PDF documents, is scrambling to develop an emergency patch by Friday, the company says.

Even if it solves the problem and sends out a security patch, the problem may persist because some users may defer installing the updates, Web and computer security experts fear.

As a result, "we may see a broad-scale explosion of attacks," Purewire Inc. senior researcher Paul Royal tells USA Today.

The security firm says it already found a booby-trapped e-mail sent to a corporate executive.

Another security firm, Finjan Inc., says it found several dozen legitimate Web pages carrying poisoned Flash clips, USA Today says.

The security firms discovered the vulnerability early this month after cybercriminals began e-mailing PDF files with corrupted Flash video clips and hacking into Web sites to implant them, USA Today reports.

The clips, when activated, enable attackers to quickly install malicious programs on the user computers. The programs turn the computers into Internet bots, or Web robots, that steal data, siphon cash from financial accounts, spread spam and trigger promotions to sell fake antivirus programs, the newspaper says.

Some 43 percent of the 1,500 cyberattacks identified by security firm F-Secure PLC the first six months of this year were directed at Acrobat Reader, up from nearly 29 percent last year.

That puts Acrobat Reader ahead of Microsoft Word, targeted in 40 percent of this year's attacks, the Helsinki, Finland, company says.

Continue reading all 178 articles related to this

[brewin]

I despise Flash. I've actually done a bit of development in Silverlight and I liked it. Being able to use C# or any .NET language in Silverlight is a big advantage over Flash. Actionscript is a mess in my opinion.

Still, Silverlight is the lesser of two evils. Hopefully HTML5 will render them both obsolete.

[Nvyseal]

brewin, on Jul 28 2009, 11:48 PM, said:

I've actually done a bit of development in Silverlight and I liked it.

So tell us brewin, how well have you "developed"??

[othman11]

Develop...Brewin? He's gotta get some wheels first!!! The tricycle is gettin a bit old you know.