Archive for August, 2009
Arterial traffic on Google Maps
Google is now providing traffic information for side roads as well as major routes. Google LatLong reports:
Commuters have long relied on traffic sites to help them determine their last-minute path around poor traffic on the highway. But if the traffic looks bad on the highways, you’ll probably want to know how it looks on the [...]
Dangerous search terms
A previous post was about McAfee’s list of dangerous celebrity names to search on. McAfee also compiles a general list of dangerous terms to search on. They are dangerous because cybercrooks like to load these sites with malware. The top offender is “screensavers”. A pretty good rule of thumb is to never download a [...]
Search a celebrity name and get a virus
A favorite place for malware writers to foist off their programs is on celebrity related sites. Do a search on a famous movie star and you may get infected. Security firm McAfee does an annual survey of the most dangerous celebrity names to search. This year’s “winner” is Jessica Biel, replacing last year’s top [...]
More evidence against multitasking
Here’s some more evidence to add to previous studies showing that multitasking is not so efficient after all. eWeek reports:
Our increasingly media- and technology-saturated world is leading people to a state of constant multitasking that puts the human cognition system in a disruptive state. So claims an article published in the latest edition of [...]
Bing vs. Google
Microsoft is making a major effort to loosen Google’s grip on the search market, including a sharp-edged (but misleading) advertising campaign. How is this battle shaping up? At Time.com, Farhad Manjoo has some thoughts on the subject.
Via Seattle PI
Searching the Web for feelings
The rapid growth of social sites is leading to interest in a new kind of search- not for facts but for feelings. The New York Times reports:
The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this [...]
Moving accounts to Gmail
One thing that keeps people from changing email accounts is the major hassle of transferring everything from one account to another. The popular Web mail service Gmail from Google tries to make that easy. The site Google Operating System gives some information.
5 email scams
Readers are probably already aware of these scams but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded. MakeUseOf has a post on 5 current types of fraudulent email. They include phony letters from banks and PayPal, the ever-popular Nigerian rip-offs, and notifications of winning lotteries.
The future of the computer operating system
The computer operating systems currently running PCs are based on a model that is years old and goes back to the time when PCs were stand-alone systems. As the Web has become the dominant application for PCs, this out-of-date model is more and more a mismatch to how PCs are actually used. Progress to something [...]
Detox center for Internet addicts
Addiction to the Internet has been recognized as a medical problem for some time. Some of the more serious cases are hooked by online gaming. In an interesting coincidence the first detox center for online addicts has opened just a few miles from Microsoft headquarters in the Seattle area. TechFlash reports:
Are you spending sleepless [...]
How the Internet affects language
A large fraction of the English-speaking population uses the Internet and terms and jargon from the Internet have an effect on the English language. The Sunday New York Times magazine section recently had a column relating how the word “fail” has evolved from a verb to an interjection and is on its way to being [...]
