Here is a piece explaining the goodies of Novell’s Dashboard and Beagle.
Your personal information space (Dashboard and Beagle)
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Very interesting topic, to be sure. It reminds me of the debate taking place in nano technologies at present, whereby the good use’s are evident on the surface. But if you think for just a wee bit, of the state of cookies, spyware, malware, viri, ect., could there be other use’s for this technology? Think Homeland Security, do you think they could use something like this for whatever purpose that they see fit? Would it serve the greater good, or would they use it for music theft detection?
I’m afraid I have more question’s than answers, which leads me to believe that it is indeed a very powerful technology. One that we should watch closely as it develops, because I for one believe they already have too much info on me already.
This kind of evolution of personal computer information query/organization looks like the future in every plataform/OS (Windows, Linux and even Macs…) with user as target… My concern is, this kind of indexing will become valueable to the user, but how this kind of information can/should be backuped? (yeah, I don’t trust computers… even more hard drives and filesystems…) And also, how it can become secure? (looks like caviar to any spyware…)
(sorry for the spelling mistakes… x_X )
I am really concerned about this, because privacy is at stake. Who decides what should be added to the metadata on my disk? And will I have control over it, or will it forever remain associated with other files and such? Because I don’t like to email my maffia boss, and because I use the words “rob the grocery store tommorrow” it will come up in my agenda (for tommorrow) and on my grocery list, as well as in every conversation I have with my friend Rob.
I don’t know, I think it’s just taking space on your screen. I wouldn’t use it but that’s just me. I don’t even use the ones available for Windows.
I’m a lot more excited about Gnome Storage than I am about Beagle or Dashboard. Just because I think natural language processing and information retrieval is superior to psuedo searching via indexing.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure if the Gnome Storage project is dead or alive.
“I am really concerned about this, because privacy is at stake.”
The final frontier of privacy is in your mind. Even that is at stake.
The trick is to make this platform independant. In today’s world of having multiple OS’s on the same network, everything needs to be able to talk and share files.
If all the systems do not use metadata that they other operating systems can access on a network share the metadata becomes meaningless.
I dont’t see what the big deal is. Its not like this information isn’t already on your disks anyway. If for some reason you have sensetive data why would you set the permissions for that data so that anyone, including this indexing tool, can read it. Granted this excludes Windows, but if your that worried about privacy why use Windows.
It’s a tool for helping you collate all the information already present on your system. The data’s already present, and spyware authors can already write programs to collate it if they wanted. At worst, all this would do is make it easier for both of you.
Besides, might this not be a good way of tracking the existance of spyware itself? If it’s using such a mechanism to go trawling through your information, that trawling would itself show up as a pattern of data access which would allow the spy to be detected.
It could use more intelligence. Natural Language Processing and other AI techniques should be use so that it could actually understand the information that have been processed and identify the relationship between pieces of info and their importance.
As for those who are concerned about their privacy, they could identify the owner of the metadata by session. As for spywares, a stronge OS security mechanism to prevent them from being installed in the first place is a lot more important: after all the information is already stored on your computer.
The final frontier of privacy is in your mind. Even that is at stake.
Damn, that was deep.
So I’m not saying full system search is unfeasible. I’m just asking how long it takes to prepare a system for the search, in comparison to how it takes for the system to become obsolete. I’d like to try the results, in any case.
That’s a very sensible comment amidst all the hype that generally goes on around such things. Also keep in mind that I’ve got to have the applications and functionality to be able to store data in the first place. Additionally, to be able to really do this you’ve got to do more than search – you’ve got to link things together, even seemingly unrelated items. It’s a difficult ask.
At the moment, from what I’ve seen I’d be happy with a slightly extended version of Windows search that would also allow me to look through my e-mail primarily as well. Give most people a decent e-mail search and they’ll be happy. That’s not exactly rocket science, and to make this really practical more thought is needed.