How do you find good software? Industry veteran John Dvorak (no relation to the keyboard layout of the same name 😉 ) says you can’t, barring personal recommendations from other users. There are too many scammers out there. I’m sorry to say that I have to agree. I haven’t gone looking for much software by …
Looking for love is an honorable pursuit, even if it’s “in all the wrong places.” Looking for screen savers… that’s another matter.
Wow… there’s been some debate over whether Google’s response to the whole Chinese hacking episode is just posturing, but more recent news seems to suggest that they’re seriously pissed at the Chinese government. And now comes the news that they’ve added code to show users when an account is accessed from an unexpected geographical area …
Continue reading ‘“Gmail Detects and Warns You If Someone Else Is Using Your Account”’ »
Geek Drivel is suddenly ridiculously popular with would-be blog spammers. I’m told that my primary defenses have blocked more than 400 automated spam messages in the last week, and maybe a dozen have gotten past them — all caught by my secondary defenses, I’m happy to say. I’m not sure what prompted this sudden surge …
It’s a very long article, so I’ve only skimmed the answers that their chosen experts gave, but it’s very odd to me that the answers were so varied. Market share was brought up several times, as an argument for a Mac (or Linux, though that was barely mentioned), but others said that market share matters …
Continue reading ‘“In their words: Experts weigh in on Mac vs. PC security”’ »
Google is taking over the ‘net — in more ways than one. Apparently advertising pays a lot more than we thought.
The title might seem rather yawn-inspiring to anyone who knows about the issue, but I’m not talking metaphorically. They are literally numbered: there was an estimated 625 days of them left on January 7th, representing 10.2% of the possible numbers. Just twelve days later, on the 19th, a second report said that was down to …
I like the hosting company that we use for Oak Circle (and this blog). I’ve been a customer for about ten years, with various websites, and in that time, they’ve consistently improved what they offer, without raising their prices. But with my yearly renewal coming up next month, it was time to decide whether I …
This does look like a problem. Here’s an idea for an easy solution, though. In the address bar, the browser could display both the address (as it does now) and the script name. Unicode is split up into different well-defined sections for different language scripts, so this shouldn’t be very difficult to implement. In the …
Continue reading ‘“How Non-Latin Domain Names Could Be Used to Steal Your Money”’ »
As you can probably see by the fact that I’m posting this, we’ve got Internet access back. Turns out the cable modem had gone bad. So much for blaming it on the snow. You don’t really realize just how dependent you are on the Internet until it’s gone for a day. I couldn’t pay my …