I use Google talk for instant messaging. It’s pretty good, but the desktop client lacks the ability to chat to groups of people simultaneously. Recently Google released a new ‘experimental’ version of the client, which does support group chat. Great … BUT … it doesn’t support file transfers or voice chat.

What the heck … ? Add a useful feature and take away two other useful features? Why?

Reading an abstract of a talk at Google about cryptography, there are a bunch of interesting parallels with game theory:

We combine several advances in cryptography theory to construct a model of computation in which a third party securely performs computations for a set of parties who do not trust one another. These parties encrypt their inputs to a computation, then circulate the encrypted values. Our third party decrypts them, performs the computation and then issues correctness proofs of the results: we cryptographically “tie its hands” to do the right thing. In addition to this model of provably correct computation, we will discuss other techniques to control the information flow of secret data to and from the party, so even the third party cannot profitably abuse the secret data before or after it knows it during the computation.

Here’s the talk:

Google now indexes 1 trillion unique URLs.

From ReadWriteWeb:

$650 billion: Annual cost of interruptions for knowledge workers in the United States

28% of a worker’s time is spent dealing with interruptions that are neither urgent nor important

6 Hours Per Week: Time lost due to context switching (multi-tasking, pausing, etc)

There’s gold in things that minimise them thar interruptions arr …

Via the ever-excellent Jan Chipchase, lucky phone numbers for sale:

Unless what is deemed to be a lucky number changes over time, the supply of lucky numbers is fixed, so the price should be determined by demand. I wonder how the willingness to pay for luck changes with income? Presumably there is a positive correlation, but perhaps at some point you get rich enough that you figure you don’t need luck any more? Or maybe not, maybe people are always willing to pay for luck as some kind of cosmic insurance?

And how does the price of luck change over the economic cycle? Are people willing to pay more for luck in hard times or are they constained by lower income?

I’m sure there’s a PhD thesis here …