Technology

Greetings. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Senate immigration reform advocates Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham are proposing a mandatory biometric (e.g. fingerprint-based) National ID Card system, and are attempting to brush away privacy concerns as trivial and irrelevant....

Greetings. In a move of potentially enormous positive importance to hearing-impaired Internet Users, Google's YouTube today announced the deployment of their "auto-captioning" capability across the entire universe of YouTube videos. The rapid expansion on the Internet of uncaptioned video has...

Greetings. Microsoft has now admitted trying to influence EU regulators involved in anti-trust reviews of Google, and asserts that there's nothing wrong with their doing so. But there are numerous flaws in attempting to equate Microsoft's anti-trust woes with Google's...

Greetings. Responses to The Google Buzz Launch -- and the Limits of Downing Dogfood have been numerous and varied. Obviously, these controversies aren't going to vanish anytime soon. Over on an (up to now "invisible") Google account, I've been testing...

Greetings. There's an old Hollywood adage suggesting that most of the time, "any publicity is good publicity." When it comes to the launch of Google Buzz, there's definitely some truth to that saying -- the widely discussed privacy issues associated...

Greetings. A bit over a year ago, I reported here about a commercial firm using JavaScript tricks to pry into the site browsing history of unsuspecting Web users, and I discussed the serious negative implications of such spying. Now comes...

Greetings. Sometimes a seemingly small software update can usher in a whole new world. When Microsoft shortly pushes out a Windows 7 update with the reportedly innocuous title "Update for Microsoft Windows (KB971033)" -- it will be taking your Windows...

Update (2/14/10): Google has already announced two sets of significant changes to Google Buzz in response to concerns such as those that I expressed in the posting below. I'm very pleased by the extremely rapid (all within less than a...

Greetings. For years I've talked about the bizarre conflict between calls to rapidly delete or anonymize data that could be used for abusive tracking of Internet users, vs. calls from other quarters -- mostly in law enforcement -- for extended...

Greetings. I woke up this morning to find my inbox flooded with concerned notes regarding a reported agreement being negotiated between Google and NSA - the National Security Agency ( [1] and [2] ). The general trend of the messages,...

Greetings. I'm about to pose some difficult questions. I won't assert that I know the answers to them all or even suggest that succinct answers are possible. But the questions themselves cut to the heart of some of the most...

Greetings. About a week ago, in Google and the Battle for the Soul of the Internet, I noted that: Even here in the U.S., one of the most common Internet-related questions that I receive is also one of the most...

Greetings. Love it or hate it, we all know that Adobe Flash has become the de facto standard for Web video -- that is, it's now by far the most common mechanism for delivery of streaming (and "steaming") video on...

Greetings. Since Apple's unveiling yesterday of the iPad, one of the more vexing questions has been why such an advanced device lacks any sort of integral camera -- a small front-facing camera would seem a perfect match, and likely wouldn't...

"This will destroy That. The Book will destroy the Edifice."      -- The Archdeacon - Notre Dame de Paris - Victor Hugo (1831) "Google's mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."      -- Google Company Overview...

Greetings. It didn't take very long for Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer to make crystal clear the philosophical differences between his firm and Google. In a fascinating speech to an outstanding bastion of upstanding business practices that I'm sure we all...

Greetings. In FiOS Scamming the Elderly a couple of days ago, I expressed my extreme displeasure at the horrendous (whether legal or not, yet to be determined) sales techniques used to pressure the elderly father of a friend of mine...

Greetings. We know that major telephone/cable/ISP companies have many great people managing them and working for them in various capacities. But when it comes to sales tactics, sometimes it's difficult to come up with sufficiently descriptive terminology that doesn't involve...

Greetings. This one's from the "Fun with Photoshop and Google Images Department": There's a funky old 1972 movie called "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things" -- but we might want to headline a new embarrassment for the FBI by the...

Greetings. Some of the initial dust is starting to settle just a bit in the wake of Google's announced change in China-related operational policies, and it's fascinating to observe the range of reactions. One almost immediate result of my posting...