Category Archives: Internet

Google AdWords is staffed by poorly trained monkeys

Back when I was doing my week-long Shave a Redhead for Israel fundraiser, Google’s search index was taking an unusually long time to index the fundraiser page. This was a problem because I was publicizing the fundraiser and telling people they could find it easily by searching for “Shave a Redhead for Israel”, but they… Read More: Google AdWords is staffed by poorly trained monkeys »

Astroturf for (or against?) Obama

An interesting comment showed up a few hours ago on an earlier blog posting of mine about Barack Obama: “Just wanted to say that I am eployed at a large Pharmaceutical company in Clayton NC and I support Barack Obama with all my heart. I would love for all my friends and colleagues to re-elect… Read More: Astroturf for (or against?) Obama »

The wrong way to be a good samaritan

You’ve probably heard by now (the party line from Gawker, an a much more comprehensive analysis from Forbes) that a huge database of Gawker Media usernames and (poorly) encrypted passwords was recently stolen, and that the thieves published the stolen data for anyone in the world to download, and that the thieves managed to crack… Read More: The wrong way to be a good samaritan »

National Grid gets 66.666% confused with 99.999%

You’ve probably heard the expression “five nine reliability,” which is shorthand for saying that a product, Web site, service, application, or whatever is fully functional 99.999% of the time, the equivalent of less than six minutes of downtime per year. Most Web sites don’t need to achieve that level of reliability. However, when you’re in… Read More: National Grid gets 66.666% confused with 99.999% »