Tech
Posted inTech
Read This If You Posted a Privacy Notice on Facebook in the Last Day or Two
Last night, I noticed that a whole bunch of my Facebook friends posted a “Privacy Notice” to their walls, or stuccoed it to their timelines, or whatever it is you do on Facebook now. The notice reads in part that “any governmental structure” does “NOT have…permission to utilize…profile information nor any of the content contained […]
Posted inTech
This Reminds Me of the Great Calculator Scare of the Late ’70s/Early ’80s
..when everyone was terrified that the new battery-operated calculators we all hauled around in our backpacks and on our wrists would lead to a scary decline in basic math skills that would eventually lead to Russian domination. Anyway, from the Daily Mail: Computer spell checks have created an ‘auto-correct generation’ unable to spell common words […]
Posted inTech
Siri Likes Celebrities More Than Me
Okay, now these iPhone “Siri” ads featuring celebrities are really starting to irritate my tuckus! First there was this extremely annoying commercial featuring Zooey Deschanel. Then there was this Samuel L. Jackson one where he doesn’t even say “motherfucker” once! And here’s the newest: an extremely lethargic John Malkovich asking one word questions to Siri […]
Posted inTech
Legislators Still Have No Idea How the Internet Works
The dumbest proposed law of the week was posted on Gizmodo last night: Did you hear the one about the New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks”? Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, […]
Posted inTech
Why Facebook Isn’t Getting Enough Likes
As Facebook stocks tank, everybody has a theory why: There are a lot of reasons: glitches with the Nasdaq system that slowed early orders, an IPO price that got a last-minute bump, and indications of lackluster demand from institutional investors. But the most important is the underlying concern and growing realization that Facebook just isn’t […]
Posted inMedia
What’s He Building in There?
Sometime this summer, Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh is expected to launch his new site, Circa. Circa is supposed to be a reimagining of news sites for the web. Of course, news has been reimagined for the web dozens of times now, and the most successful reimaginations to date involve aggregating un-reimagined news sources as a […]
Posted inTech
Safe Sexting? There’s An App For That. Kinda.
NYT: According to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project that is due out later this year, 6 percent of adult Americans admit to having sent a “sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude photo or video” using a cellphone. Another 15 percent have received such material. Three percent of teenagers […]
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Here’s Your Robotic Hug, People-Haters
A few of you are still mad at us about this week’s Endorsement Issue, in which we chose a person we liked rather than choosing a person you liked. (Sorry, we momentarily forgot we should only report your opinions, and no one else’s.) So I know what you need… A HUG!! Of course I’m not […]
Posted inBooks
Tor E-Books: DRM Free Starting in July
About five minutes after I finished reading Why I Break DRM on E-Books: A Publishing Exec Speaks Out, I saw that sci-fi author John Scalzi blogged this news: Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen, today announced that by early July 2012, their entire list of e-books will be available […]
Posted inTech
USB Typewriters: CONDEMN OR ALLOW?!?
via Billed as “a groundbreaking advancement in the field of obsolescence!” the USB Typewriter is the perfect computer/old-timey typewriter device for a Mercury employee who wants to get stabbed in the face… by me. OH FINE, they’re kind of beautiful, I guess, and muy romantical, but do you really want to be the person in […]
Posted inTech
If You Use a PC, the FBI Has a Warning for You
The back-story is rather complicated, involving an online scam that got so big the FBI couldn’t shut it down the ordinary way, and it begins about five months ago: Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive […]