The Bush and Kerry campaigns are sending out videos as email attachments directly to their supporters: President Bush and Democratic front-runner John Kerry are engaged in a high-tech political showdown that combines the targeting power of direct mail with the glossy appearance of a television commercial. The format is a …
Read More »Science and Technology
NBA – Not Afraid of Innovation
And speaking of the NBA, even if I don’t give a damn about it right now, it is to be commended for being open to technological innovation and willingness to try new things: The NBA itself is stocked with tech-savvy moguls – Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen owns the Portland …
Read More »“$100 billion global cyber catastrophe”
Corporate honchos are very concerned about computer security and the possibility of massive Internet failure in the wake of the latest virus attack: The mi2g Intelligence Unit has learnt that chief executives and board-level decision makers within S&P 500 and FTSE-100 component companies are seriously evaluating the possibility of taking …
Read More »Big Concerns Over Electronic Voting
Experts worry about independent verification of computerized votes: Two leading American experts on computer voting have warned that the forthcoming US presidential election could be more chaotic than the last. They told a Seattle conference that the new systems may be less reliable than those used four years ago. ….About …
Read More »Compatibility vs. Monoculture
With Microsoft controlling 95% of the computer operating system business, has this created a “monoculture” that is ripe for disaster? Surely this latest round of virus troubles emphasizes the vulnerability of the system: Dan Geer lost his job, but gained his audience. The very idea that got the computer security …
Read More »The Grey Album
Illegal Art is doing what they do best, stirring up copyright-related controversy. This time it’s about Danger Mouse’s Grey Album: DJ Danger Mouse’s recent Grey Album, which remixes Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles White Album, has been hailed as a innovative hip-hop triumph. Despite that and the fact …
Read More »FCC Rules “Pure” VoIP Is Not a Telecom Service
And not subject to telecom regulations as a result: The Federal Communications Commission, in a split decision, approved a request from voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider Pulver.com to be immune from the hefty stack of government rules, taxes and requirements that applied to 20th-century telephone networks. “This is in …
Read More »Two Years In the Blogosphere
Hey, I just realized it’s my two-year Blog-o-freaking-versary. In ways it seems an eternity since Marty Thau, Mike Crooker and I started the Tres Producers site in February of 2002 on the dreaded blogspot and started fumbling our way toward blogging ecstasy. I had just finished putting together a book …
Read More »BitTorrent Taking Off
Profile of BitTorrent developer Bram Cohen in the NY Times: AFTER working for a parade of doomed dot-com startups, a young programmer named Bram Cohen finally got tired of failure. “I decided I finally wanted to work on a project that people would actually use, would actually work and would …
Read More »Wow: Intel Merges Fiber Optics and Silicon
In a paper to be published today in the journal Nature, Intel scientists say they have made silicon chips that can switch light like electricity, merging computing and communications: The invention demonstrates for the first time, Intel researchers said, that ultrahigh-speed fiberoptic equipment can be produced at personal computer industry …
Read More »