Money Laundering

“…in the UK a thief who steals a vest from a clothes store commits a ‘money laundering’ offence because he has possession of an asset derived from crime. He is technically required to seek consent from law enforcement for his continued possession of the vest if he is to avoid risk of prosecution for ‘money laundering.’…”

I spend far too many hours browsing Wikipedia looking at useless bits of information* like this.

* Yes, it’s Wikipedia. Take it with a pinch of salt …

Google Gears

Gears‘ is a new bit of kit from Google aimed at providing offline website capabilities. A bit of an oxymoron really, but until wireless Internet is ubiquitous (not far off…) there’ll always be times when you just can’t fire up your favourite web application and do some work in the middle of nowhere.

I’m still trying to get my head around the actual long-term implications, and how this will affect the web application market (think Office Live; Google Docs & Spreadsheets, anything 37signals, and millions of others).  It seems that there’s certainly an appetite for programs in the browser, and personal experience would seem to agree with this – I’ve often wanted a form of Google Reader to run whilst offline (sorry, but I’ve yet to find a desktop app that is nearly as straightforwardly useful and usable as Reader), and all my timesheeting is done from a website running on a local webserver.

As it happens, Google Reader is the first piece of ‘software’ to support offline usage, but the law of Sod kicks in: the ‘Offline’ link that appeared before I installed Google Gears has disappeared since restarting Firefox. Bugger.

This isn’t a new or innovative idea – Firefox 3 has long been heralded as being capable of offline web services and there’s some mumbling about Opera in the press release. Still, it’ll be interesting to see what the ‘community’ make of this addition and how it affects the delivery of web applications.

Links – Wed May 09 2007 09:40PM

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