No Panacea

After recently visiting dell.com, I noticed that the titles of products (e.g, Panasonic SC-P960 Home Theatre System) have been converted from vanilla text to images. The images, I speculate, prevent automated programs from automatically reading prices of products that feed into search comparison sites (e.g., pricegrabber). Thus, somewhat limiting direct price comparisons. Dell does include the “Manufacturer Part” on the product page, which could be used to for price comparison.

The use of “image text” in place of regular text has been used to fight spam for a while, but this is a relatively new application.

I’m starting this post with several links of technical videos, podcasts, and books that can be viewed for free online. I hope to expand this list as I pick up more resources on the way.

Internet Protocols and Communication Networks (Windows Media - audio and video, some for download other streaming)
Topics covered: Networking concepts, Routing Protocols (RIP, EIGRP, OSPF, EGP, BGP), Transport Protocols (TCP, UDP), Network Protocol (IPv4, IPv6), Wireless Broadband, etc.

Google Video Lectures (Google Video)
Topics: AJAX, Distributed Systems, Web Security, C++, Java, Python

Security
Handbook of Applied Cryptography (Entire book in PDF)

Google I/O Sessions and Videos
Topics: Web Applications APIs, Mashups, AJAX, Google Gears, Authentication to Google Services

Security Engineering (by Ross Anderson) (Entire book in PDF, audio chapters)