The human brain is very good — quite excellent, really — at finding patterns. We delight in puzzles that involve pattern recognition... consider word-search puzzles, the “Where’s Waldo” stuff, and the game Set.
Do you log into web sites from public computers, even though I advised against it four years ago? That post only scratched the surface, really: it just talked about using public computers. These days, most people have their laptops with them, and they connect them to the public wireless networks in the cafés. Most of those networks are unencrypted. That means that you don’t have to enter a key or a password when you access the network. You just select the network name (or let your computer snag it automatically), go to a web page in your browser, and get redirected to some sort of login and/or usage-agreement screen on the network you’ve connected to.
Wow; I haven't gotten one of these in a long time:ATTENTION!A message you recently sent to a 0Spam.com user with the subject "[redacted]" was not delivered because they are using the 0Spam.com anti-spam service. Please click the link below to confirm that this is not spam. When you confirm, this message and all future messages you send will automatically be accepted.I wrote about challenge/response anti-spam systems about three years ago, but probably haven't seen a challenge message in at least two years. I thought people had given up on them.Alas, no.
I have a few notes on home networks, which notes come from recent experience with some network setup issues.Encryption: How to secure one’s network — or whether not to — continues to be a point of debate. I favour some of the arguments for being a “good citizen” and leaving your network open, and then making sure your computers are secure. Still, that works best if you don’t want to communicate between computers within your network, and can just wall each one off.
It’s managed to stay out of the general press, mostly — probably because it’s geeky, it’s hard to explain what it really means, and it’s not likely to affect anything any time soon — but the tech press has been covering the cracking of the HDCP master key. But even PC Mag got it wrong at first, having to correct their article.To see what it does mean, it helps to back up a bit. If you have a TV made in the last few years, look at the back, where all the associated components can plug in. Especially if your TV is high-definition, you’ll have quite a mass of sockets back there.Originally, televisions just got their signals “off the air”, using antennas.
Last week, I talked about Amazon’s email-in service, which lets you send documents to your Kindle by email. The nicest part of it for me is the PDF conversion feature, but you can, in general, sent any personal documents you like, with or without conversion to AZW.The way it works is this:
It’s long been a peeve of mine that some computer programs are programmed to try to sound friendly, cheerful, or just colloquial. It seems out of place to me, forced, overly artificial. I don’t mean that I want all the output from computers to sound like the stilted science-fiction stuff, saying “affirmative” instead of “yes”, and the like. But neither do I ever want to see (or hear) things like “Oops!”, “Hurray!”, nor even “I’m sorry,” coming from my laptop, mobile phone, car, or washing machine.Some examples:It’s common when you’ve finished installing new software on your computer for the installation package to wrap up with a message like, “Congratulations!
Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff have written in Wired magazine that, in their words, “the web is dead.” The web, as opposed to the Internet. Michael Wolff was recently on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, our local public radio station, talking about the article. Here’s Brian Lehrer’s introduction:At its peak around the year 2000, the web accounted for more than 50% of all Internet traffic in the United States.
OAuth — a proposed Open Authentication standard — fills a significant gap in cross-application authentication. It’s common in a world of myriad web-based services for one service you use to want to access another service you use, in order to make things better or easier for you.For example, you might keep contacts in your mail service, and you might want your photo service to see if people you’re in contact with have photos that you might share. We’ve generally done that sort of thing in one of two ways:
AT&T has announced that they will end their unlimited mobile data plan next week. It doesn’t sound like the result will be bad, though: the outgoing unlimited plan is $30 per month. The new plans are $15 per month for 200 megabytes, and $25 per month for 2 gigabytes — both with reasonably priced options to add more if you exceed the limit.This all comes with some meaningless estimates about what you might be able to do with that much data:The lowest-priced data option is called DataPlus and will cost $15 a month.
In Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet Stemwedel asks some questions about peer review — its purpose and its effect — prompted by strong online criticism of a peer-reviewed paper that was published with at least some significant review comments ignored.One particularly interesting statement that Janet makes is in the second sentence of this paragraph:As Bora was the "editor" of the paper rather than an official referee of the paper, it’s not clear whether the journal editors overseeing the fate of this submission actually forwarded Bora’s critiques onto the author, or if they did forward the critiques to the author but indicated that they wouldn’t coun
Around three and a half years ago, I posted an item in my personal blog about public key infrastructure.[1] In it, I mentioned two certificate authorities from which one could get free certificates for personal use: Thawte and CAcert.
A few years ago, I was spending a good bit of my time on context-based services. User context — also called “presence” — is information, which changes over time, about the current state of a user or other thing (it could be a car, say, or a sensor, or a computer system; the presence people call it a “presentity”).
