Just finished reading about human flesh hunting via slashdot. It is about large groups of people that use the internet to track down and punish individuals that upset them. I’ve seen this stuff over at reddit – and via the /b folks but I did not know it was so wide spread in China. In fact, the article seems to indicate that this wasn’t such a big deal outside China until recently which I think is a mistaken assumption. But it’s a well written article that goes beyond merely reporting on events and taking it further with some interesting observations. What really stood out was the final sentence that includes this, “…because the Internet does not forget, does not forgive and cannot be stopped. Ever.” That may sound like hyperbole, but I think it’s possibly an understatement.
Browsing Posts published on 6/10/2009
A Google blog post yesterday announces their new Google Translator Toolkit. The blog post does a great job of explaining how it works – with a very nice diagram and video thrown in. But if you want a little more info to decide if it is worth the jump or not, here is a little cut and paste from the post.
At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.
For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit’s bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. The Translator Toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our automatic translation system “learns” from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the world’s Internet population.
Nod to TechCrunch
