Special Interest Group on CRAP

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

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Everyone probably gets these emails telling you that you have a long lost uncle who was an official in Africa who left you $21 million, and if you’d just send $1,000 to them then they will wire you the money. They are called 419 scams. About once a year I also get an airmail letter [...]

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When I first signed up for facebook, it was obvious to me that it was a walled garden taken from the same mold as AOL or Prodigy. Facebook allows you to import things to facebook, but they never allow data to escape except to humans. As an example, I’m writing this on my blog, but [...]

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