I am wondering if we are going to have to continue to memorize more and more. I can count at least 8 different passwords I need for my job. Then there are the usernames, passwords and PINs for all sorts of websites… financial institutions, utility companies, newspaper registrations, weblogs, etc., none of which seem to […]
This weekend’s Times article on spam is worth a look, if only to discover that the Federal Trade Commission’s point person on the matter is named Orson Swindle. One of their conversations includes a decidely libertarian take on the matter from Release 1.0 editor Esther Dyson:
Spam is not just one thing. And I don’t want […]
BBC Online has an upbeat and interesting article on Minitel, France’s telephone-based pre-cursor to the Internet. I have to admit that I had assumed the system was an archaic relic doomed to demise at the hands of a graphics-interfaced Web. But the article suggests that while phone-access has dropped dramatically the system itself remains popular […]
The New York Times has an interesting article on South Korea’s broadband success story. As much as the high rate of broadband household connections attests to the success of their semi-interventionist government policy, it’s also an indictment of the semi-non-interventionism of American de-regulation, in particular the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which offered competition in spots, […]
Astonishing news (see here or here) that Apple’s new online music store has sold over 1 million songs already. This, despite the relatively small percentage of personal computer users owning Macs and even fewer with broadband and Mac OS X, much less a nifty iPod to play the tunes on.
Even though the record industry probably […]
I just joined Netflix and have noticed a feature they have on there to automatically recommend films for you based on your ratings of films you’ve seen. It’s a feature similar to Amazon.com’s “You may also be interested in” recommendations, only Amazon seems to look at customers buying more than one item and correlates them, […]
The Economist has an article on why mobile-phone text messaging just hasn’t caught on in the US like it has in Europe or Asia. Basically it boils down to costs and alternatives: in the US landline phone calls are cheap and free above a certain fixed charge, so the main raison d’etre of texting is […]