After I wrote about it so much, it’s odd to me that everyone else has gone so silent on the IPv4/IPv6 transition. Here’s the latest on it. On my side, my router is still the same “venerable” model that doesn’t offer any IPv6 support, but apparently my ISP is moving in that direction, so that …
Continue reading ‘“Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?”’ »
I have a widget on my browser’s home page that shows me what’s going on on several other pages, and Geek Drivel is one of them. Today when I sat down at the computer, I discovered that it apparently didn’t have any posts whatsoever. As I’d had close to two thousand posts the last time …
Here’s a 3D-printing application I really didn’t foresee. It looks interesting, but at those prices, it’s going to be a long time before it catches on. Now, when someone invents a machine that scans your mouth and produces one of these in a few minutes for $10 or less, and puts it in Wal-Mart stores …
Continue reading ‘“3D-printed toothbrush scrubs chompers in 6 seconds”’ »
Remember what I said last year, about how governments will soon find themselves responsible for the mental health of their citizens? Academics have just taken another step toward it.
I’ve often wondered what the future would look like if someone did create a true artificial intelligence, and it was simple enough that anyone could do it once they knew how. I’ve often thought that most of today’s intellectual jobs would just vanish, the way that so many blue-collar jobs did when automation started replacing …
Continue reading ‘“I, for one, welcome our robotic communist jobless future”’ »
It is with great sadness that I have to agree with this article. When I was growing up, we were taught that the US was the greatest nation on Earth. There was even some evidence that objectively supported it — the Manhattan project (and the fact that we were so collectively horrified at the fates …
Continue reading ‘“NSA Prism: Why I’m boycotting US cloud tech – and you should too”’ »
Has anyone mentioned recently that you should use really strong passwords — or how hard it is to come up with them? I use truly random passwords, generated (and kept track of) by LastPass, for most sites; for the ones that need to be remembered, I’ve got a pretty good password-selection algorithm (which I can’t …
Continue reading ‘“A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords”’ »
Bruce Schneier, the well-known security expert (warning: that’s an extremely tongue-in-cheek encryption-geekery fan-site), has a new essay on his (real) site today, and it touches on a subject that I’ve talked about before: how at some point in the near future, technology will make it possible for single individuals or small groups to cause destruction …
In which the villains finally get their come-uppance. Remember the scammers I talked about several times last year? They didn’t stop, I just stopped reporting on them. We’ve been averaging a call from them every couple weeks since then, all from the “Windows Support Department” or “Windows Technical Service Department” (of what company, they never …
Another nail in IPv4’s coffin. And the article’s summary says: […] The U.S. and Canada? Our day of reckoning comes in August 2013. I’ve been working on my communications code library recently, upgrading it to support proxies (which is a real pain in the tail when you don’t have a proper proxy to test things …
Continue reading ‘“Good-bye old Internet: Europe is down to its last IPv4 addresses”’ »