Sputnik I at 50 years - oh, how the mighty have fallen

You can see it today at Google’s main page, at NASA’s home page and at in their history pages too, and on the front pages of any number of newspapers around the world (including my local paper, the Denver Post - see the bottom right of the image). On this day 50 years ago, [...]

Don’t worry about NSA - your computer’s printer is spying on you….

This little tidbit from Yahoo Tech (first reported in 2005 but evidently not widely known): most color laser printers have embedded patterns of little dots (yellow and impossible to see with the naked eye) that are unique and traceable. They’re printer fingerprints….
These little dots were (supposedly) originally meant to thwart counterfeiters.
But it seems [...]

When titans clash: Google vs. AT&T for America’s Internet future

The Federal Communications Commission recently announced plans to auction off portions of the wireless spectrum in order to raise money for the government. Although supporters of net neutrality and broadband access wanted the spectrum to remain open in order to build a national wireless broadband network, it was generally expected that incumbent telecoms like AT&T [...]

Microsoft again earns the moniker “Micro$haft”

Slashdot’s nightly headlines brought this bit of news from Information Week and Ars Technica to my attention last night: Microsoft submitted an adware patent back in 2006 that will use “context data” from your hard drive to select focused advertising for you to view while you’re surfing, reading your email, working on Word and [...]

Why are we so afraid?

We were afraid long before 9/11.
As so many have observed, fear causes us to trade freedom for security, real or perceived. Fear makes us sheep, a lesson that’s not lost on those who seek to acquire, retain and extend power. Fear causes us to follow not those who’d deliver us from fear or its causes, [...]

iHype and the unHip

Apple wants me to be a Pod Person. Seriously. According to them, I’m the frumpy, square, humorless, uncreative, stuck in biz-mode PC guy in the ads. I’m the one not wearing the coveted white earbuds with a microscopic music player clipped to my collar. And I’m not part of the [...]

Tony Blair whacks the press; the press whacks back: Chill, dudes

In a reversal of the old adage “dance with the one who brought ya,” outgoing British prime minister Tony Blair is taking shots at the press, calling it “a feral beast” — despite admitting that his government paid “inordinate attention” to “courting, assuaging and persuading the media.”
The title of his speech: “Reflections on the Future [...]

Food prices rise as use of corn-based fuel ethanol increases

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO), the combined international cost of food is expected to increase 5% over last year, and the bulk of that cost is due to an expected 13% increase in the price of grains and vegetable oils. And the reason those grains and oils are getting expensive is [...]

Location search and software patents

According to Wired, Jason Galanis, founder of London-based Geomas, has filed a patent infringement case against Verizon for their Superpages.com location search (story here). For those of you who aren’t immediately clear on what “location search” is, it’s any search you run looking for restaurants or hospitals within a certain distance of your zip code. [...]

Journalists: Cover my town. I’ll pay you $191 a year.

For the past several years, I’ve spent $47.75 every three months for a subscription to the local newspaper that claims it covers my community of about 2,300 people. Other than my town’s sports teams, it rarely does. So I dropped it.
So I’m willing to give that quarterly $47.75, or $191 a year, to anyone with [...]

U.S. intelligence gathering: bought and sold

Several months ago Vanity Fair ran an absolutely scathing and incisive expose of SAIC, one of the largest government/military contractors in operation. The author went deep into the ranks of this shadowy, low-key corporation, and came out with a disturbing tale of how career military and intelligence officers go through a “revolving door” from creating [...]

Trading Security For Convenience

I’ve never heard of this guy until today–he’s apparently one of those good-at-everything types that we all hate–and I know this post about using Registered Traveler is mostly meant for fun, but this paragraph irks me nonetheless:
I’m happy to be a member of Gattica. Why? Because I already am, and I would suggest that — [...]

A Tale Of Two Web Media Wars

There were two interesting stories today that involve the confluence between media, people, technology, and the ability of these three to influence each other.

The Battle For Better Broadband

A few days ago in my post celebrating the victories of the Save The Internet coalition, a certain fly in the ointment challenged me on a few points in a way that I felt deserved its own post, rather than a cramped comment in a thread. Here’s what he had to say. My responses below [...]

One Laptop Per Child, now costing 75% more …

I have had an ambivalent attitude to the One Laptop Per Child project ever since Nicholas Negroponte, stumped for an answer on the ultimate purpose of the computer, declared, “… there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home.”
Now it turns out that the laptop won’t, [...]