By Mark O’Neill I am closely monitoring an online conversation today over a Twitter user’s decision to sell his account on eBay. This has raised the following questions – is a Twitter account worth anything financially? Is the guy betraying his “followers” by selling their loyalties and direct private messages to someone else? Thirdly, is […]
By Patrick Biz Contributing Writer, [GAS] A lot of people are saying that Wikipedia is loaded with errors, and for good reason. Wikipedia contributors aren’t forced to verify their sources before posting anything, but if they were, it would greatly improve the quality of the online encyclopedia. Here’s a very good example of such a […]
By Mark O’Neill We’re all guilty of it. We’ve emailed a link of a picture or video to someone, forgetting that they are at work. They receive the link, click on it, and immediately land in hot water with the boss because they are watching a video of a dancing vomiting pig instead of doing […]
By Mark O’Neill In what is being described as the first attack over the internet to cause immediate direct physical harm, hackers have caused an unknown number of epileptic sufferers to suffer seizures by hacking into an epileptic support forum and leaving flashing animation screens. The flashing screens, made with javascript code, would then adversely […]
By Mark O’Neill Digg may get all the relentless fawning but Reddit isn’t that bad either at the end of the day (Mixx is another goodie). I was introduced to Reddit by Kiltak who swears by it. One other Reddit fan has proved that the love is there by creating a mobile version of the […]
By Mark O’Neill Mr William Gates is probably cursing in his Cheerios at the moment. A company called Cemaphore Systems has announced the launch of a new product that will allow Gmail users to completely do away with their Microsoft Exchange servers and run Microsoft Outlook directly from Google servers instead. Called Mailshadow for Google […]
By PatB Contributing Writer, [GAS] I have written here a few times that Comcast was justified in using traffic shaping to protect equal access among all of their customers. Because of the aggressiveness of the bittorrent P2P protocol, neighbors on the shared pipe could have experienced slowdowns. To fix this, Comcast was sending resets on […]
Intel announced this week they are working on a new Wi-Fi solution with a maximum range of 60 miles. Scheduled for release in the second half of 2008, Intel’s Rural Connectivity Platform (RCP) will allow people living in areas unsupported by high-speed infrastructures to get on the net at a speed of up to 6.5 […]
By Mark O’Neill Bad news geeks. A psychiatrist is pushing for internet addiction – “excessive gaming, sexual pre-occupations and e-mail/text messaging” – to be classified as a mental illness which means the most serious cases could warrant medication or even a stay in a hospital, like all those gamers in China. Do you get broadband […]
By Mark O’Neill
Sometimes I don’t know why I bother with all the technophobes of this world.
I’ve been working on the internet exclusively for the past two years now. This makes for some very interesting conversation at dinner parties when someone asks me what I “do”. I’m sure you’ve had the same problem explaining what you do for a job. You have the doctor explaining the latest rectal examination technique, the lawyer bragging about the latest billion dollar lawsuit they’ve just won, the businessman giving you the ups and downs of the NASDAQ…..then they turn to me and I start talking about the unfairness of the new Digg algorithim. Is it me or is everyone fidgeting? Why is that woman looking at her watch? Why is the lawyer holding the butter knife as if he wants to use it as a murder weapon?