spywareaid says MindRetrieve.exe is Legitimate

MindRetrieve.exe is a legitimate application according to spywareaid.

Thanks for some of you, who are among the hundreds of people who have downloaded MindRetrieve, for updating spywareaid about this.

Actually not only is it not a spyware, MindRetrieve is committed to respect user's privacy. The way we ensure this is by being open source. Anyone can audit the software to see what it is really doing, and should there be anything objectionable, to be able to disabled them or even to fork a new branch.

A life time archive?

One thing that MindRetrieve does differently is there is no limit on how many webpages it archives. That may surprise some people intially as a disk hungry application. But after one year I collected about 120MB of archive. Project this number for 10 years would result in mere 1.2GB. You can buy a flashdrive today and have enough capacity for the next 10 years. There is rising awareness that technology has advanced to a stage that we can record everything we ever read or done, documents, emails, digital video, phone calls, etc, and keep an archive of you entire lifetime. MindRetrieve is designed with this idea in mind.

That said I find MindRetrieve current works best finding webpages you have just recently viewed, perhaps on the same day. Like things that are a few clicks away from a google result but you forgot how you get there. What about thing you've seen 6 months ago? Initially I think MindRetrieve would work like google of your mind. You enter a keyword and the desired result shows up on top. Actual experience is a lot less effective. One issue is you've simply used the wrong keyword. Memory fades. You might try to search for the article about the Vietnamese restaurant you went six months ago in vain. Turns out you didn't go to a Vietnamese restaurant six months ago. It was really an Indian restaurant you are looking for.

Beyond that there is a deep user interface problem for us to solve. Having a TiVo of you life is one thing. Being able to rewind over hundreds of thousands of hours of recording and find the exact one moment is a different thing. Full text search is helpful. But that alone is not the solution.

So I am still adding to my 125MB of web archive. And I believe sooner or later we'll find some interesting ways to explore the memory land.

Blog moved to blogger.com!

Mindretrieve blog has moved to a new location at http://mindretrieve.blogspot.com/!

I have been lazy to repurpose berlios' discussion forum as the MindRetrieve blog. This works out to some extend. But its UI is a bit clumsy and there is no RSS support.

I finally give up and setup an account with blogger instead. I have manually imported the past posting there. From now on please visit the new location!

P.S. The spammer there is fierce! Even before I finish importing past postings they are already adding spam there! Got to update the posting policy.