Comics added to aggregator
By popular demand, I’ve added Mallard Fillmore, Prickly City, Broom Hilda, Calvin and Hobbes, Beetle Bailey, and The Born Loser to the comics aggregator. As always, feel free to show your appreciation. 🙂
Category Archives: Computers
1and1, the saga continues
I have written previously about the awful technological failures and terrible service I have received since transferring my domains to 1and1. There’s more to the story. Here’s today’s update… Executive summary In our last episode, I was trying to reconfigure my 1and1 domains to use DNS servers I set up myself. I was able to… Read More »
Another reason why you should not use 1and1
Yesterday, I went to the 1and1 web site and updated the DNS servers for three of the domains I administer. This morning, when I went to confirm that the changes had propagated successfully, I discovered that they had for only one of the three domains. On my 1and1 dashboard, the other two domains were reporting,… Read More »
Why you should not use 1and1 to register your domains
I was recently looking for a domain registrar to which to transfer my domains from Go Daddy (the whole SOPA-supporting, misogynistic-ads-running, whole-day-outage-allowing thing just wasn’t doing it for me anymore), and several friends recommended 1and1, so I went ahead and transferred my domains to them several days ago. Boy, was that a mistake.
Amend the ECPA to protect email privacy!
The privacy of our email is protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986, which requires law-enforcement officials to obtain a warrant to intercept and read private email. However, the law has a critical flaw: it does not require a warrant for emails “left on servers” for more than 180 days. This made… Read More »
Have you enabled do-not-track?
For a while now, the web browser vendors and major purveyors of targeted internet advertising have been working on a proposal for allowing users to prevent web sites from tracking their online activity and using it to “customize their web browsing experience,” a.k.a., displaying targeted advertisements which are, theoretically, tailored to the person viewing them.… Read More »
BBYO management: incompetent or merely stupid?
Earlier this year, my wife and two of my daughters attended CELEBR-8 U, a conference for middle school and high school girls organized by Moving Traditions, a wonderful organization for which our family has a great deal of fondness and respect. One of the co-sponsors of the conference was BBYO. Unbeknownst to us, Moving Traditions… Read More »
PayPal adding mandatory arbitration to user agreement, but you can (and should!) opt out
UPDATE: The Consumerist has posted a template you can use for your opt-out letter. Furthermore, the Consumerist article says that eBay just did the same thing as PayPal, and you need to send a letter to opt out of that one as well. There’s a link in the article to a template for the eBay… Read More »
Pulseaudio: switch to headset automatically when it’s plugged in / docked
I recently wiped Windows 7 from my ThinkPad and replaced it with Linux (Fedora 17). One of the (few) things I missed about Windows was the fact that when I docked my laptop, it automatically switched from the laptop’s internal speakers and microphone to the USB headset plugged into my dock. Pulseaudio doesn’t seem to,… Read More »
How to misread statistics, ArsTechnica edition
A recent security breach exposed the plaintext usernames and passwords of almost 100,000 members of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The usernames and passwords were discovered by a researcher in 100GB of log files inadvertently left open to the public on an IEEE FTP server. Leaving aside for the moment how incredible… Read More »