Archive for May, 2007
Googlephobia
According to the search expert Danny Sullivan, a wave of concern about Google snooping on us all is running around the blogosphere. Writing at Search Engine Land, he surveys some of the fearful comments and then concludes:
So many companies today offline (banks, credit cards, loyalty cards, credit reporting agencies) hold much more information about me [...]
Dell doings
Dell is in the news a lot lately. Having fallen out of first spot for computer manufacturers, the company, under its returned founder Michael Dell, has been making a number of changes. The Dell business model of doing business only on-line or at some mall kiosks is being dropped modified and it has been announced [...]
More about the USB drive as a computer
I have made several posts about putting your computer on a USB drive and my SeniorNet colleague Sol Libes has been giving talks on the subject. One of my favorite newsletters, Tech Support Alert, has an editorial by “Gizmo” Richards on his experience with the USB drive as a portable computer. He writes:
I’m absolutely delighted [...]
Google buys GreenBorder
I have been mentioning “sandbox” programs as one of the new ways that are being used to defend computers against malicious software. One of the best sandboxing programs was GreenBorder but the company has been purchased by Google and their software is no longer available. What Google is going to do with this purchase has [...]
Warning about new security features for Microsoft Office
Office Watch, which keeps a beady eye on Microsoft Office, is warning about some new security stuff for Office 2003 and 2007:
Microsoft has announced two ‘new’ security features for Office 2007 and Office 2003 users. They are claimed to help protect against ‘zero-day’ exploits in Office documents - in other words new security holes that [...]
Big Microsoft is watching you
No sooner had I posted about Google patenting psychological methods of tracking you than I ran across an article about Microsoft doing something similar. New Scientist reports:
If you thought you could protect your privacy on the web by lying about your personal details, think again. In online communities at least, entering fake details such as [...]
The ignorance of politicians
Technology is intimately intertwined into the workings of our society. Many important questions of the nation’s governance involve decisions about technical questions. Yet most of our elected officials have little or no technical knowledge. Sometimes it seems like having a panel of tone-deaf people judging performances of music. For example, the Internet has had, and [...]
English 101
A lot of what I see on the Internet seems to have been written by newly awakened Neanderthals who are just learning how to speak and write or by six-year-olds. In fact, it seems that the Neanderthals may be taking over. Grammatical usage and spelling are becoming so primitive that soon only the Web equivalent [...]
File limitations for flash drives
USB flash drives have become very inexpensive and widely used so I think it’s worth repeating and enlarging on the very first tip that I gave on this blog. Flash drives very often come formatted with the FAT16 (also called just FAT) file system. I have bought even 1 GB drives that are formatted with [...]
Tech support
Anyone who has dealt with tech support very much has probably wondered if the scenario in this Dilbert cartoon was what was going on.