Facebook continues to be the most popular social network, and has basically become as ubiquitous as telephones and televisions once were, almost as if a basic utility. Some actually find it strange when they find someone who isn’t on Facebook. But all that’s pretty obvious. What might not be as immediately obvious is just how …
VPN, or a Virtual Private Network, connects computers and other devices using an encrypted connection. This means that all data travelling through such a network is unreadable to anyone who might intercept the data stream, making it as private as it would be if all of the connected devices resided within the walls of a …
Google Chrome is currently the most popular web browser in the world. It has a simple and intuitive user interface that made it stand out, and it works pretty well out of the box. Most people probably don’t delve into its settings or explore its features beyond superficial day to day use, but it’s actually …
It seems as though the more daily life becomes inter-connected with the Internet, the more that our personal information is available to just about anyone who wants it. Forget about National Security Agency conspiracy theories, the real danger to keeping our private lives to ourselves are the various commercial data collection warehouses that exist throughout …
In a previous article on privacy we’ve established what it is, how does digitally networking our world affect it, and in a nutshell, why should we care. We established that the best way to ensure your privacy is through technological means, and in this article I offer an overview of what such technologies are. What …
Language is something we take for granted, but when I start thinking about it it's a challenge just getting to define it, not to mention the very definition of language depends on language and the intricate relationship it has with our thinking and perception of reality. Language is actually a very dangerous tool. It is …
Let’s get one thing straight. Geeks were always cool, the masses just had to realize it! And that’s so not coming from a geeky author, I swear! But seriously, that geeks are kind of cool, to the point of non-geeky people wanting to become geeks and accepted by other geeks, isn’t exactly big news anymore. …
There were quite a few words on the death of Linux on the desktop lately, but people have been saying that for a long time now. Even I talked about it at one point. In some ways Linux is dead, if you judge a liveliness of a platform by how much relevance it has to …
Here’s a yet another seemingly far fetched piece by yours truly, talking about such things as choosing between the potential destruction of all humanity and evolving endlessly into a god like race. Intrigued? I’m obviously not the only one to think in such dramatic and marginal terms. In addition to the hordes of nerds entertaining …
I’m going to do the unthinkable. I am going to actually defend the practice that many consider “anti-competitive”, the practice of so called “vendor lock-in” often employed by technology companies such as Apple and Microsoft. In a nutshell the practice of lock-in involves building pieces of technology that work only in certain predefined circumstances and …