Wikipedia IS Accurate

Wikipedia sure has been in the news a lot lately, hasn’t it? The latest news is regarding a study of the accuracy of the Wikipedia entries. Despite what the recent scandals would have you believe, a team of expert reviewers found the science entries to be about as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, Wikipedia still is not accurate enough to be used as a fact-checking source at the NY Times, according to this internal memo. I always thought you should check multiple sources, myself…

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Yahoo! announced that its search index now consists of 20.8 billion web pages and images, making it nearly double that of Google. Shocking! Still, we all know that it’s not the size of the index alone that makes a search engine strong, it’s the accuracy of the results. And in this department, Google still delivers the best, most accurate results. However, losing bragging rights to the largest index does take Google down a notch, doesn’t it?

I hear that one of Mac OS X’s most popular features is being duplicated in this latest Firefox extension:  Viamatic foXpose. Click on an icon in the corner of your browser, and all the tabs become small windows into the pages you have open. From there you can navigate around them or close them easily. There’s also a keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + X. This is one extension I will have to check out!

Via CNET: A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. Yes, this was the man who brought about one of the two recent scandals at Wikipedia. The man, Brian Chase, 38, was then fired from his job. I’m sure this is one prank he regrets now! What’s worse is that Wikipedia has since suffered major damage to its image, something that will take a lot longer to repair than the damaged entry. It’s hard to walk that line between open and free and so open that there is no accountability.

This week, the Windows Live Messenger beta begins. Like it was with the Gmail beta, only a handful of users have been given an invite to test the new messenger program. It won’t be until later this month that those users will be given invites to hand out to others. "…this new version has a fresh new look and feel, and lets you do things you’ve never done with Messenger before," said Microsoft in an email to beta testers. Some of the new features in Windows Live Messenger include international PC-to-telephone calls and online drop boxes called "Sharing Folders" for sending files to users that actually store the data on a Microsoft server. One of the new features in Windows Live Messenger is international PC-to-telephone calls. Another new feature are online drop boxes called "Sharing Folders" for sending files to other users. These files are actually stored on a Microsoft server. The new messenger will only be available to Windows XP.

Via Guillaumeb: Yahoo Answers is a new site where people ask each other questions on any topic, and get answers by sharing facts, opinions, and personal experiences. I like the design of the website - very clean and modern-looking. And it’s super easy to use. The only problem I see with it so far (besides what appears to be a small userbase) is that they already seem to need an "adult" category. Especially when questions like these appear on the Answers homepage.

Now that iTunes offers NBC/Universal content, if my DVR dies on me, I never have to miss an episode of "The Office" again. I just love that show. However, I don’t understand why they don’t offer "My Name is Earl" on iTunes. Isn’t that one of the top shows this season?

Creative Zen has just released a new mp3 player, called the Zen Vision, that closely resembles the iPod. It holds 30 gigs of content and comes in 5 colors (white, black, green, blue, and pink). Sound familiar? With support for many video formats, including DivX™ 4 & 55, XviD5, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG4-SP, WMV9 and Motion-JPEG, the Vision can hold 120 hours of movies. Of course it does mp3s too. The icing on the cake is that it also can hold pictures and do picture and movie slideshows. With such similar features, not to mention the look and feel (it even has a white touchpad - it’s vertical, though), the Vision is staged to clearly compete head-on with the iPod. I tend to think that consumers who want an iPod will just get an iPod…but I guess we will wait and see if they go for it. Would you go for it?

Yahoo! has just bought del.icio.us, a startup that enables people to more easily compile and share their favorite content on the web, in other words, a social bookmarking service. Del.icio.us already boasts 300,000 users (myself included), and now with the Yahoo! acquistion, that number will surely grow. Other recent Yahoo! buys include flickr and upcoming.org, an event planning service. It seems as if Yahoo! is positioning itself to be a web 2.0 powerhouse.

Could it get any worse for Sony? After all the problems with the discovery of their DRM rootkits, it now comes out that their patch isn’t secure either!

Via BetaNews: Just one day after jointly announcing a patch to correct a security flaw in the SunnComm MediaMax copy protection included on 27 CDs, Sony BMG and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are urging users not to install it. The update includes a vulnerability similar to the one it attempted to fix. SunnComm’s MediaMax version 5 software does not properly protect a directory it installs, opening the door for a privilege escalation attack. Thus, a restricted user account could replace the executables within the MediaMax directory with malicious code, which would then be executed by an administrator upon inserting a CD.