If you’re a Twitter user, you’ve likely used one or another of the URL shorteners out there. Even if you’re not, you may have run across a shortened URL. The first shortener I encountered, several years ago, was tinyurl.com, but there plenty of them, including bit.ly, tr.im, qoiob.com, tinyarrow.ws, tweak, and many others.

Engineers in the Internet Engineering Task Force, in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and elsewhere have been debating how to handle e-mail-server blocklists in an IPv6 network. Let’s take a look at the problem here.

The following segments were written one per day, as I watched the three days of IBM’s Watson computer play Jeopardy!. I’ll post my notes here now, for the three or four people who haven’t already seen more analyses than they care to think about.

The first day

Interesting.

Watson did very well on its first day. In order to have time to explain things and introduce the concept of Watson, they set it up so that only two games are played over the three days. The first day was for the first round, and the second day (this evening) will have the Double Jeopardy! and Final Jeopardy! rounds.

A week or so ago, New Scientist told us about some new research technology by Toshiba, a system that recognizes fruits and veg at the self-checkout station:

Its system, developed by Susumu Kubota and his team at Toshiba’s research centre in Kawasaki, Japan, uses a webcam, image recognition and machine-learning software to identify loose goods, such as frui

[I’m re-posting this, because the original, from Saturday, seems to have disappeared.]