Special Interest Group on CRAP

Thoughts by Kevin McCurley
Not affiliated with ACM. They have their own crap.

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Entries Tagged as 'The internet'

The facebook privacy problem

May 18th, 2010 ·

The furor over facebook’s privacy problems has recently escalated. There are several parts to this: If you are logged into Facebook but then surf around the web, you will be transmitting personal details from your facebook presence to the other web sites When other people surf the web, they will be transmitting data about their [...]

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Tags: The internet · security

Droid vs Nexus One

February 18th, 2010 ·

For the last few months I have been carrying two smart phones: Motorola Droid on Verizon HTC Nexus One on T-Mobile I’ve been thinking about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two phones, and it’s a close call. The Droid has a few advantages. The physical keyboard is very welcome, but I find myself [...]

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Tags: Inspirations · The internet

Apps, apps, everywhere

January 20th, 2010 ·

Web apps iPhone apps Android apps now Kindle apps Whatever happened to Windows apps?

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Tags: The internet

The mobile computing revolution

January 18th, 2010 ·

During my lifetime, there have been several major paradigm shifts in computing. The personal computer Graphical user interfaces (mouse and windowing) The Internet The World Wide Web Laptops (they started out as computers called “luggables”) 802.11 wireless networking Each of these brought tremendous change to the ways that we think about computing. One of the [...]

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Tags: Inspirations · The internet

Censorship goes both ways

January 12th, 2010 ·

It’s odd that Facebook was blocking post of a link to this. For the humor impaired, this should be recognized as satire.

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Tags: Politics · The internet

Monthly spam from ACM

January 12th, 2010 ·

I went back to look at the spam that is sent out by ACM trying to get me to buy a membership. It turns out that it is sent out on the 11th of each month, right on schedule. I guess that means there is a cron job someplace that is firing off these things. [...]

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Tags: Rants · Research · The internet · Uncategorized

The chaos of data on telephony networks

December 12th, 2009 ·

Just think if the Internet had been designed by the telephone companies: We would have four different internets, with gateways that restricted what could flow through them. You would have to buy your computer from your ISP, and you couldn’t switch ISPs and keep the same computer unless the remainder when you divided the MAC [...]

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Tags: Economics · Rants · The internet · Uncategorized

Ah the irony

December 1st, 2009 ·

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Tags: The internet · security

allofmp3.com rears their ugly head

August 13th, 2009 ·

Today I got a piece of spam sent to the email address that was only used for communication with allofmp3.com. In case you have forgotten, that was a shady music seller who sold MP3 music files by the megabyte, but was eventually shut down through pressure by the US trade representative. The spam had a [...]

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Tags: The internet · security

MORE spam from Cambridge University Press

July 10th, 2009 ·

I got another spam from Cambridge University Press today. Apparently this is their new strategy for success as a tree-murdering paper publisher. They provide an opt-out link at the bottom: http://listserv.cup.org/t/49324/239073/2681/0/ which obviously contains campaign information in it, but apparently they were too incompetent to encode my email address in there because the form asks [...]

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Tags: Economics · Rants · The internet