Communication – Page 6

Daylight savings nonsense

Internet, Politics, Space No Responses »

Mar 102013

To the esteemed dinosaurs in charge of whatever our timekeeping bureaucracies happen to be: stop this nonsense already. We no more need daylight savings time in 2013 than we need coal rationing.

It is an outdated idea, the benefits of which may have been dubious even at the time of its inception, and are almost certainly nonexistent today. But the harm is real: you are subjecting the entire population to a completely unnecessary one-hour jetlag each spring.

Being self-employed and working mostly from my home, I am among the least affected, but I still find this clock-forwarding business just boneheadedly stupid and annoying.

Oh, and while you are at it… would you please get rid of leap seconds, too? Another harmful solution to a nonexistent problem. So what if our clocks are out of whack by a second with respect to the Earth’s rotation? Does it bother anyone?

Oh wait. The organization in charge of leap seconds is the ITU. The same ITU that is busy trying to place the Internet under international regulation, at the bidding of such champions of Internet freedom like China or Russia. No wonder they have little time left in their busy schedule to abolish leap seconds.

Yahoo! and working from home

Internet, Society No Responses »

Feb 272013

yahoo There has been a lot of discussion lately about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban working from home at her company.

Many criticized her decision. Some of them raised some good points about productivity and flexibility, and the ability to accommodate workers such as expectant women.

Others supported her decision, pointing out that at Yahoo! more than at other similar high-tech companies, slackers have abused work at home privileges to such an extent that some barely did any work for Yahoo! at all.

But there is one thing conspicuously missing from this discussion: why should Ms. Mayer concern herself with this issue in the first place? Why is she micromanaging her workforce? Should it not be up to lower-level managers to decide who can work from home and why, how, and when?

Slackware surprise

Computers, Internet No Responses »

Feb 062013

I happen to be using the oldest surviving Linux distribution, Slackware, on my servers. I have been using Slackware for a very long time; in fact, the only other distribution I ever used was the first Linux distribution, SLS (Softlanding Linux System), which was ultimately succeeded by Slackware.

Now I realize that while Slackware is perfect if you actually know what you are doing, it is not the easiest distribution to use. It lacks many of the system management, package installation and dependency resolution tools that users of more recent distributions take for granted.

This is why I was very surprised when I read this morning in PCWorld that in a recent survey conducted by LinuxQuestions.org, Slackware was found to be the most popular desktop Linux distribution. I may have expected to see Slackware fare well on servers, but the desktop? Mind you, I am very pleased to see that Slackware is doing well, even though it appears to have been a somewhat informal survey.

As to servers, Slackware came in as a close second, narrowly beaten by Debian. Even a second place finish is impressive for this venerable distribution.

I just hope that Slackware is here to stay for a long time to come. I would loathe to switch distributions after all these years.

21st century

Aviation, Internet, Personal No Responses »

Jan 292013

I may be sitting on board a decidedly 20th century airplane but I suddenly feel like I arrived in the 21st at last… being able to check my email and post to my blog from 30,000 feet.

Anonymous war declaration

Internet, Politics No Responses »

Jan 262013

Anonymous attacked the Web site of the United States Sentencing Commission, an independent agency of the United States government responsible for articulating federal sentencing guidelines.

The USSC.GOV Web site is down (or rather, there is no DNS service for ussc.gov or www.ussc.gov; I guess that is one way of taking down a corrupted Web site) but I found the defaced content in Google’s cache, including the Anonymous letter in its entirety, as well as the accompanying YouTube video (with surprisingly good production values.)

The letter is a long rant, but I am not altogether unsympathetic to what they have to say. The death of Aaron Swartz was an absolute disgrace. It was also a completely unnecessary demonstration of a justice system gone berserk. And the concerns expressed by Anonymous over disproportional punishments, the presumption of innocence gambled away by plea deals in the face of excessive sentences and unaffordable justice, or criminalization of violations of terms of service are all concerns I share.

What I don’t share is the belief of Anonymous that the perceived criminality of government can be repaired by criminal acts of their own. Their “solution” does not lead to a better society; it leads to anarchy. Then again, weirdly and confusingly, Anonymous appear to understand this when they write, “We understand that due to the actions we take we exclude ourselves from the system within which solutions are found. There are others who serve that purpose, people far more respectable than us, people whose voices emerge from the light, and not the shadows.”

I am more than a bit puzzled by the second half of their message. In this half, they describe a “warhead”, perhaps some cybertool that they are distributing to their followers this way. The instructions are simple: download all components, assemble them, and wait for the moment that hopefully never comes when you get a decryption key.

Ok-kay… well, the components no longer appear to be available (if they ever were) on the listed mirror sites, but that’s not the puzzling part. The puzzling bit is the command line offered that the would be Anonymous supporter presumably had to execute after downloading all the files named Scalia.Warhead1, Kennedy.Warhead1, Thomas.Warhead1, Ginsburg.Warhead1, Breyer.Warhead1, Roberts.Warhead1, Alito.Warhead1, Sotomayor.Warhead1, Kagan.Warhead1:

cat Scalia* Kennedy* Thomas* Ginsburg* Breyer* Roberts* Alito* Sotomayor* Kagan* >
    Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.aes256 && rm -rf /

In plain English: assemble all the parts into a file named Warhead-US-DOJ-LEA-2013.aes256. If successful, wipe out your entire hard drive.

Say what? Yes, wipe out your entire hard drive. That’s what rm -rf / does on a UNIX system.

That is, that’s what rm -rf / does on a UNIX system if a) you are logged in as root, and b) you are dumb enough to execute it.

So what exactly are Anonymous trying to pull here? Do they think American investigators are so dumb that they would follow these instructions without question, but their own followers are smarter? Is it a kind of an intelligence test to prevent stupid people from joining Anonymous? Or has the Anonymous letter itself been hacked?

Comprehension

Internet, MUD, Society No Responses »

Jan 172013

Many years ago, I created a form where players can sign up to play MUD2. To keep things relatively uncomplicated, I just created two fields for the player’s name: one labeled “Last Name” and the other, “First Name and Initials”. To me it was self-evident that if I encountered a form like this, I’d enter “Toth” and “Viktor T.”, respectively, into these fields.

But soon I found out that I was wrong. I got one signup after another like “Doe”, “John JD”. Or “Doe”, “John, JAD” if the delinquient’s middle name happened to start with an A.

What’s wrong with my form, I asked? Perhaps it’s my English? I quickly Googled “First name and initials” and found a great many hits. It was clear from the context that none of them asked for all your initials, only the initials of any additional given names that you might have, just like I did. Yet registrations in the form of Doe, John JD kept on coming. Do these people write “John JD” on passport and other official forms, too, when they are requested to enter their “Middle name and initials”?

Just to be absolutely clear, though, I added an asterisk to the field and a note: “*In case there’s a misunderstanding, this means any EXTRA initials you might have. If you’re called John A. Doe, put John A. in this field, not John JAD. And if you’re John Doe, well, that means that you have no initials to put here next to your first name!”

It didn’t help. To this date, I continue getting registrations in the form of Doe, John JD.

Nowadays, this is more amusing than annoying. I needed to know the name and country of residence of players when we charged for MUD2, for tax purposes (among other things, I was obliged to collect the Goods and Services Tax from Canadian players.) But now that the game is free, it really doesn’t matter anymore what your name is. So long as you supply a valid e-mail address, I have a means to contact you if I must (which means almost never. And no, I don’t collect and sell e-mail addresses.) But perhaps it does illustrate why I always found programming so much easier than dealing with people.

Cell phone battery weirdness

Communication, Technology No Responses »

Jan 122013

One of the reasons why I was eager to ditch my “old” (barely over two years) Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 smartphone is that its battery started to misbehave. Or at least I assumed it was the battery: under heavy load (e.g., recording video) the phone shut down prematurely. I bought an off-market replacement battery that seemed to solve the problem for a while but eventually that battery, too, started to show the same symptoms.

Now that the X10 is no longer a “mission critical” device, I feel free to experiment with it. Once I was done rooting the phone, I was able to initiate calibration of its battery (really, just deleting the battery history file). After repeatedly discharging, calibrating and recharging the battery, I tried a simple test: to see how long the battery lasts under a minimal load (valid “in service” SIM card, no real use other than occasionally getting a GPS lock and checking the battery voltage.)

What happened was astonishing. Previously, the longest time I was able to keep this phone running was a tad over two days. But now? A record FIVE days and 24 minutes. Frankly, I wouldn’t believe it if I had not seen it with my own eyes.

Now I am curious. How long will it take to recharge the phone? Will it give the battery a full charge? Will it still shut down prematurely afterwards if I start recording video?

I am also wondering… a voltage drop is not an uncommon symptom for an aging Li-polymer battery. But I should also see diminished battery capacity. A smartphone running for five days… that does not sound diminished to me! Could it be that the problem is with the phone itself, its power regulating circuitry? How can one tell without purchasing an expensive battery, preferably not from an off-market Hong Kong reseller?

Aaron Swartz, dead at 26

Computer Security, Internet, Science 1 Response »

Jan 122013

Computer pioneer Alan Turing, dead for more than half a century, is still in the news these days. The debate is over whether or not he should be posthumously pardoned for something that should never have been a crime in the first place, his homosexuality. The British government already apologized for a prosecution that drove Turing into suicide.

I was reminded of the tragic end of Turing’s life as I am reading about the death of another computer pioneer, Aaron Swartz. His name may not have been a household name, but his contributions were significant: he co-created the RSS specifications and co-founded Reddit, among other things. And, like Turing, he killed himself, possibly as a result of government prosecution. In the case of Swartz, it was not his sexual orientation but his belief that information, in particular scholarly information should be freely accessible to all that brought him into conflict with authorities; specifically, his decision to download some four million journal articles from JSTOR.

Ironically, it was only a few days ago that JSTOR opened up their archives to limited public access. And the trend in academic publishing for years has been in the direction of free and open access to all scientific information.

Perhaps one day, the United States government will also find itself in the position of having to apologize for a prosecution that, far from protecting the public’s interests, instead deprived the public of the contributions that Mr. Swartz will now never have a chance to make.

Google and privacy

Internet No Responses »

Jan 112013

Message to Google: please do NOT start uploading photos from my phone to Google+ without first asking for my bleeping permission. I don’t care if only I see the pictures. I don’t want you to upload crap from my phone without asking, is that clear?

SIM card and rooting fun

Canada, Communication 1 Response »

Jan 072013

SIM_Card I am supposed to be a geek but I guess I also have some chicken genes, since I never felt a particularly great urge to risk bricking my smartphone just for the sake of being able to run geeky apps on it that require root permission.

This all changed now that I actually have a spare smartphone, having accepted an early upgrade offer from Rogers. This spare, a SONY Xperia X10, served me faithfully for over two years. It is still a pretty decent phone, but I admit I like our new Samsung phones better.

So what does a cowardly geek do with a spare smartphone? Why, exactly what he did not dare to do while that smartphone was still in service. First, he tries to root it… which turned out to be a relatively easy process, although there were some tripping points like making sure that you enable USB debugging.

But while rooting the phone did let me do some fun things with it, the phone was still locked to the Rogers network. So I decided to take the plunge and purchase an unlock code for the grand total of about eight bucks from cellunlocker.net. (I picked this unlock provider after doing a bit of research; they seemed cheap yet reliable.) It took a bit longer than promised to get the unlock code (almost a full day instead of a few hours) but it worked as advertised.

So how do you test if the phone is unlocked? Well, it says that it is unlocked, but is it? My wife’s Samsung phone says it’s unlocked, too, but it rejects non-Rogers SIM cards. How do I know? I actually have two non-Rogers SIM cards, a non-registered one from a data stick I used to use in Hungary, and a registered and valid SIM card from my TELUS data stick. I shoved this one into the X10 and presto… it works! In fact, much to my surprise, it seems to work as a phone, too, although I am loathe to try to make calls with it, as I have no idea how much TELUS would charge for a voice call on what is supposedly a data only plan.

So what will I do the next time I travel overseas? Take this X10 with me to use with a local provider’s SIM? Or perhaps unlock my new Samsung phone? Sounds like a plan… maybe I’ll have the courage to do so this time. For what it’s worth, I did order a cheap micro-SIM cutter and a set of adapters that will help me cut down a regular SIM card to the size the Samsung phone accepts, yet still use that SIM card in other phones.

It will be fun.

Facebook likes

Internet, Personal No Responses »

Dec 202012

facebook_like_button_big I use a simple WordPress plugin, called “Simple Facebook Connect”, to automatically post my blog posts to Facebook. The plugin also provides a Like button for my posts. Recently, I noticed that a number of my posts acquired a fair number of Likes from apparent strangers.

Today, it became clear to me that the plugin is cheating. After exchanging a series of comments on Facebook in response to one of my blog posts, I noticed that every time a comment was added, the number of Likes went up by one. So no, I am not nearly as popular as I previously thought.

Oh well. Blogs are meant to be written, not read.

Spam from Facebook friends

Computer Security, Internet No Responses »

Dec 112012

Thank you, Facebook. Now I am getting garbage that is apparently coming from some of my Facebook friends, all because (no doubt in your eagerness to please your corporate sponsors and push your sinking share price up a little) you happened to leave open a gaping security hole allowing spammers to “scrape” friend lists and e-mail addresses.

Worse yet, it is possible that the same spammers are sending garbage to others in my name. And while I may know not to click on an unsolicited link even if it appears to come from a good friend, colleague, or close relative, others may not be so cautious.

One of these days, I’ll find myself a spammer and slowly strangle him.

PayPal is now evil

Commerce, Internet, Legal 2 Responses »

Oct 292012

I use PayPal a lot. I initially started using the service for eBay purchases, but since, I’ve used it to sell calculators, to receive payments from advertisers, even to send money to family. I generally like PayPal. Indeed, I always considered them one of the “good guys”. After all, isn’t it PayPal’s very founder, Elon Musk, who seems to have single-handedly established the era of commercial spaceflight with his SpaceX venture?

But now PayPal is notifying me of a policy update. A policy update that is specifically designed to prevent users from using the court system. Yes, you can opt out, but you can only do so in a manner that is made intentionally difficult:

“You can choose to reject this Agreement to Arbitrate (“opt out”) by mailing us a written opt-out notice (“Opt-Out Notice”). For new PayPal users, the Opt-Out Notice must be postmarked no later than 30 Days after the date you accept the User Agreement for the first time. If you are already a current PayPal user and previously accepted the User Agreement prior to the introduction of this Agreement to Arbitrate, the Opt-Out Notice must be postmarked no later than December 1, 2012. You must mail the Opt-Out Notice to PayPal, Inc., Attn: Litigation Department, 2211 North First Street, San Jose, CA 95131. “

Yes, you need to use snail mail. Yes, the world’s leading digital payments company apparently lacks the ability to process an opt-out request electronically.

Of course what it really is about is that they are counting on you and me not making the effort to put a stamp on an envelope.

Which indeed I won’t. I never tried to sue PayPal in the past, nor do I have plans to do so in the future. And I will still use their services.

But, I no longer consider them one of the “good guys”.

A microwave with a twist

Hungary, Internet No Responses »

Sep 122012

Seen on a Hungarian auction site, here is a used but functioning Whirlpool microwave oven, for the modest price of HUF 8,500 (about 40 bucks):

The picture looked a little weird, but I wasn’t paying it much attention until I read the first few buyers’ questions and the answers:

Dear Gaborka460! Do you happen to have a full-size mirror? Greetings, – Marci502
Dear Marci502! I don’t understand exactly, what do a full-size mirror and a microwave have in common? – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! :D:D Full-size mirror – the front of the microwave served as a mirror! :) – Police198
Dear Police198! I am really sorry, you are right, the reflection was a mistake by the person who took the picture. – Gaborka460

Person? Wait a cotton-picking minute, let’s look at it a bit more closely:

Yikes. That’s not some freakish, malformed turkey. It is a human alright. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.

And the comments continued relentlessly. Here are some of the best questions and answers:

Dear Gaborka460! Your microwave is now famous! :) – Police198
Dear Police198! Weeell, I really didn’t mean it. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Is the person squatting inside just an illustration or does he come with the microwave? Thanks in advance for your answer. Greetings, – Setfly
Dear Setfly! The squattttting person is just an unfortunate, accidental image confusion. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Can we have this with a front panel depicting a female??? If so, does that change the price? – cukormeister
Dear cukormeister! Unfortunately not! Is this really important? – And then the darkness. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Would you please provide exact measurements as it is difficult to decide just by the picture alone if the male figure is hiding inside the microwave or just a reflection? And does the male thong come with the winning bid? Thanks: – retrobudai
Dear retrobudai! Is this really important? – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! A gym pass in exchange for the microwave. – gyuribacsi87
Dear Gaborka460! How much for the briefs+slippers, I offer a razor in exchange! – gyuribacsi87
Dear gyuribacsi87! I really don’t want to be vulgar! – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Forgive me, but do I see this right, is it really a broiled chicken in clogs sitting in the microwave? – NVShop
Dear NVShop! The picture is really bad, the question, dumb! – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! No, of course it’s not a bad picture, quite the contrary. It made many people smile today. It’s my heartfelt wish that this famous microwave soon be sold. – BudaiBrigi
Dear Gaborka460! 50,000 is my last offer. – seftelo1
Dear seftelo1! I don’t really understand?! My asking price is 8,500 for the microwave. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Sorry, you’re right. My mistake. Forgive my miserliness. I’ll give you 100,000 if we can hire you as a product photographer. – seftelo1
Dear Gaborka460! Nearly 150,000 views, that’s something:-) – Sikiferrari
Dear Sikiferrari! Weeeell; This is how to advertise! And it’s not even my expertise, and I didn’t mean to. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Now that the microwave has sold, I’d like to know what you ask for the garden gnome in the swimming trunks that was inside? – RGgabor
Dear RGgabor! Asshole – Gaborka460

Even with this last comment, one has to admire the remarkable restraint of the seller, Gaborka460, and the overall civility of the discussion. Some of it may be due to vatera.hu’s commenting system or their moderators, of course. Still… it gave me a good laugh today. And the broiled chicken in clogs is well on its way towards becoming the newest Hungarian Internet meme.

Kafkaesque

Books, Internet, Society No Responses »

Sep 082012

Here is a scary story: after a university professor referred jokingly to two absentee students as “spooks”, he became the subject of allegations of racism despite being well-known for his previous work on civil rights and racial equality. It so happened that the two missing students were African American, a fact of which the professor was unaware.

This Kafkaesque nightmare was the inspiration of a novel, “The Human Stain”, by author Philip Roth. Yet the novel itself became part of a Kafkaesque story on Wikipedia recently. That is because the Wikipedia entry falsely stated that the novel’s inspiration was a New York writer. When Roth asked for the article to be corrected, he was told by a Wikipedia administrator that “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.”

Wikipedia’s goals to have facts backed by sources and to not contain original research are laudable. But sometimes, they go a tad too far (to say the least), a situation I ran into myself when contributing minor edits to entries about certain television series. Original research is one thing, but when prima facie evidence that is available for all to check contradicts a “secondary source”, shouldn’t it be obvious that the secondary source is simply wrong?

The story does have a happy ending, though. Now that Roth published an open letter in The New Yorker, the letter itself qualifies as a “secondary source”, and the Wikipedia entry is now updated. But if anything, this resolution just adds to the Kafkaesque surrealism of the story.

Samsung security breach

Computer Security, Internet No Responses »

Sep 072012

So recently, I got a nice new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S II.

When I set it up, I realized that Samsung chose to replace the built-in Google e-mail application with their own. This was a bit of a disappointment as the Samsung version seemed a tad less flexible and less configurable than the (also pedestrian) Google program, so I opted for the open-source K-9 Mail instead, which works very well indeed.

Today, I noticed that all of a sudden, my server is showing IMAP logins using my user ID from a strange IP address, occurring like clockwork, every five minutes. The IP address belongs to Samsung in Germany, Frankfurt to be precise. This was odd because my phone was actually connected to my home Wi-Fi, so there was no reason for it to go through a distant proxy server. Suspecting that something was afoul, I turned the phone off. The IMAP logins from the German IP address continued.

At this point, I immediately changed all relevant passwords. The login attempts (no longer successful) continued for a while, then stopped.

But what was this? A bit of research showed that the IP addresses are characteristic of Samsung’s “Social Hub” program. Apparently when I entered my login credentials using the Samsung version of the basic e-mail app, it passed on that information to Samsung’s Social Hub servers. So without my knowledge and my approval, my password to my personal account on my Linux server was sent to, and stored on, a server in a foreign country. (And no, I don’t want to hear that I actually gave my approval by clicking the Accept button on a 50-paragraph unreadable user agreement when I started using my phone. This kind of potential security breach must require up-front notification of the user and explicit approval.)

I have since kind of confirmed it by noting that Social Hub indeed shows my e-mail account as being registered, even though I deleted my login credentials days ago from the Samsung e-mail app proper. Worse yet, it seems impossible to delete this account from Social Hub; when I try, I just get a “Loading…” screen that stays on forever.

I still like this phone, but my opinion of Samsung just sank several notches all at once. A high technology company should be much more conscious of its users’ security needs and much more proactive in protecting them. Indeed it leaves me wondering if, perhaps, it might have been possible for a smart hacker to use social engineering and trick Samsung into revealing this information… which Samsung should never have obtained without my explicit permission in the first place.

The strange case of Julian Assange

Internet, Legal, Politics No Responses »

Aug 202012

I tend to sympathize with Julian Assange and Wikileaks. That said, the facts may not necessarily be on Mr. Assange’s side, according to an excellent New Statesman article. In particular, the article asserts that he is less likely to be extradited to the United States from Sweden than from the United Kingdom. The author also makes a very good point about Ecuador’s presumed commitment to freedom of the press: the country is about to extradite a blogger who sought asylum there in 2008, Alexander Barankov to, of all places, Belarus, where he may face the death penalty. I also wonder if we are going to see Wikileaks publish Ecuadorian secret documents now. My guess is… not anytime soon.

The inviolability of embassy grounds

Internet, Legal, Politics 1 Response »

Aug 162012

In the fall of 1956, after Soviet forces crushed Hungary’s anti-Communist revolution, cardinal József Mindszenty sought refuge inside the American embassy in Budapest, where he remained for the next 15 years.

Not even the Communists claimed the right to withdraw the diplomatic status of those embassy grounds or threatened to storm the embassy to arrest Mindszenty.

I am not particularly impressed by Julian Assange’s narcissism, nor by the latest shenanigans of Wikileaks, including the production of a fake newspaper editorial. But the notion that the United Kingdom might use force to remove Mr. Assange from Ecuadorian embassy grounds is just unthinkable. If this threat was meant to impress and intimidate, well, it didn’t seem to work very well, did it? If they were serious about it, I think Mr. Cameron might need to have his head examined.

IMAP miseries

Computers, Internet, Programming 1 Response »

Aug 062012

Today, I spent an inordinate amount of time messing with IMAP.

IMAP is a protocol that allows e-mail clients to access e-mail stored on a server. Unlike the more popular POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3), IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) allows the messages to stay on the server, and allows clients to establish a folder structure on the server.

This makes it possible, in principle, to access the same mailboxes from multiple client devices like a desktop computer, a smartphone, or a tablet.

Don’t we already have this with any Webmail provider, such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or the new Outlook.com? Well, yes, but… with all these services, your mail actually physically resides on computers that do not belong to you. I’d be less concerned about this were it not for a case that happened just the other day, a hacker using social engineering to gain access to a journalist’s iCloud account and through that account, everything else (including the journalist’s phone, laptop, and other accounts.)

If Apple can fall victim to social engineering, so can Google or Microsoft. So for this reason alone, I prefer to keep my e-mail on servers that I physically own. But I still like the convenience of accessing my e-mail from anywhere without having to copy bulky mail files or worry about synchronizing them.

This is where IMAP comes in. Except that it turned out to be a much more difficult task than I anticipated.

The basic setup is easy… enable IMAP and go. But then… the University of Washington IMAP server that is included with Slackware Linux has some quirky settings (such as showing all my folders on the server, not just my mail folders) that can only be corrected by recompiling. It took a while before I realized this, and therefore I wasted a lot of time with bugs in the various Android IMAP clients I tried, bugs that just went away once I recompiled the IMAP server. Outlook (which I plan on continuing to use on my main desktop computer) has its own quirks, not the least of which is the insanely difficult nature of seemingly trivial tasks, such as relocating built-in folders like the junk e-mail folder.

In the end, I won. There are still some quirks to be worked out, but I can now access my e-mail from Outlook, the Web (with Squirrelmail) and from my Android phone and tablet just fine. Still, it was a much harder battle than it should have been. I honestly expected this technology to be more mature in the year 2012.

Wikileaks or Wikihoax?

Internet, Legal, Politics No Responses »

Aug 052012

Julian Assange might be a weird fellow, but until now, I had no reason to distrust Wikileaks.

But that was before Wikileaks concocted up a fake New York Times article, combined with a spoofed PAYPAL official blog site to back it up.

Now I regret having sent them money once. My respect for them was based on their perceived moral authority, taking considerably risks for the sake of public transparency. But apparently, their high moral standards apply only to others, not to themselves.

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