Category: Web/Tech
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Is A.I. Killing the World Wide Web?
From The Economist: As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web…
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CTRL-F
Use this command to locate a bit of text in a document.
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It’s About Time
Typepad has finally secured its hypertext transfer protocol. My URL now sports an 's': https. That's reassuring to me and to you, dear reader. Now they need to work on their on-board back-up utility to expedite the back up of huge blogs like mine.
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Henry A. Kissinger on the Threat of Artificial Intelligence
Yes, that Henry A. Kissinger. Not very good, but I don't have time to explain why.
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Texting Their Lives Away?
I am currently reading, among other things, Kevin Mitnick, The Art of Invisibility, Little, Brown & Co., 2017. A treatise on cyber-security, it strikes me as slightly alarmist, but Steve Wozniak recommends it. I don't have to tell you who he is. The following, however, caught my eye and pricked my philosopher's skepticism: A recent…
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Of Hyperlinks and Hyperbole
Mark Zuckerberg ". . . has destroyed the most powerful bridges that perhaps ever existed in the human history, the hyperlinks." Hyperbole to me, but you decide.
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I Used to be a Human Being
Andrew Sullivan recounts the perils of life in the information superhighway's fast lane. But our man certainly is verbose. One would have thought that all that smartphone use and all that manic tweeting and updating would have induced a bit of pithiness into his writing. I love the Internet and use it everyday except when…
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Any Advice re: Firefox Browser Crashes?
Mainly I blog, but today I bleg. I prefer the Firefox browser to Google Chrome, but the former crashes on a regular basis, like every other day. Yes, I have done the obvious things like make sure I am running the latest version. I take it that others have this crash problem. Any suggestions?
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Quirky Spam Filter Warning
A commenter asked me to check if a comment of his had been sent to the spam corral there to languish in cyber-obscurity for all eternity or until the demise of this site, whichever comes first. Sure enough, there it was cheek-by-jowl with other good comments some of them from commenters whose other comments got…
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NRO: One Crappy Website
Not because of content, but because of presentation. The content is fine and in some cases excellent. But if I am reading a piece by Victor Davis Hanson or Kevin D. Williamson I am immediately put off and pissed off by a piece of freaking advertising right in the main body of the text. Not…
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Amazon Pricing and a Book Bleg
I'd like to get my hands on a copy of Maria Reicher, ed., States of Affairs (Ontos Verlag, 2009). I didn't find it in the ASU catalog and so I headed over to Amazon.com where I found a used copy for the entirely reasonable price of $9,999.99 plus $3.99 shipping and handling. I kid you…
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Beware ‘Illegal Use of Software’ E-Mail Scam
I just deleted a suspicious looking e-mail that claimed that I had to appear in court in Costa Mesa re: illegal use of software. I of course did not open the zip file that would have invited a trojan horse or some other piece of malware into my motherboard. One dead giveaway was that while…
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We Were Under CyberAttack Yesterday
Typepad bloggers were subjected to yet further outages yesterday, outages Typepad claims were caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Every outage an outrage to the 'blogsessive.' Let's hope we don't see a repeat of April's fiasco. So I managed to snag only 744 pageviews yesterday. But traffic is overall good. 15 May…
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Future Shock is Upon Us: Reefer Hacked
Holy Crapola!
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Computer Problems Continue
I spent most of yesterday troubleshooting, but no fix yet. But adversity is good, up to a point. I have been forced to learn how to use this iPad Air. And I have learned more than I wanted to know about device drivers. Blogging from the iPad, however, is a royal PITA. Addendum (1/16). Solved…