technology

On Aaron Swartz

January 20, 2013

Aaron Swartz’s sad death is one of the great losses to the tech community. The first time I heard about Aaron Swartz was when I was looking for an RSS feed to Paul Graham’s essays. Because he had a static site, he had pointed an RSS link to one on Swartz’s site, which Swartz had […]

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The Google Reader Update

November 3, 2011

Many fans of Google Reader (the online RSS client) are up in arms over the recent changes. In my opinion, the outrage is a little overblown. First off, if you are reading this on a desktop, you already have a large monitor and the reduction in reading area is negligible. Plus you can hide the […]

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Wikipedia and the Centralization of Information

October 25, 2011

A friend on Google+ shared a link to this post about Wikipedia by Noam Cohen: what has been lost to Wikipedia because of stickling rules of citation and verification. If Wikipedia purports to collect the “sum of all human knowledge,” in the words of one of its founders, Jimmy Wales, that, by definition, means more […]

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Steve Jobs, The Visionary, Is No More

October 5, 2011

The greatest visionary in modern times has passed away. It is a sad day for the technology world. I was shocked to hear the news and I pray for his family and near ones.

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The Amazon Silk Browser — Privacy and the Technology

September 30, 2011

So, one of the new pieces with Amazon’s tablet is the “cloud‐accelerated split browser” named Amazon Silk. According to the FAQ on the Amazon site, this is what is supposed to happen when you use an Amazon Silk browser in Kindle Fire: With Amazon Silk, most of the heavy‐lifting is shifted from the processor on […]

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The Key Management Problems With Public Key Cryptography

September 27, 2011

Sometime back, I had drawn a diagram to explain public key cryptography, but it is not complete. As Eric Lippert explains here, there are four management problems with them. To paraphrase him, If the sender does not keep their private key secret, then the saboteur can send a false message that seems to be coming […]

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The First Sale Doctrine

September 20, 2011

One benefit of the Netflix spin‐off of the DVD‐rental only Qwikster company is that I learnt about the First Sale Doctrine. In short, it means that once you purchase a copyrighted material, you don’t have to ask the original copyright owner for permission to do what you want with the content, such as selling it […]

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How to Maliciously Hack Anything

September 15, 2011

The Microsoft Security Center has this excellent article listing their “10 Immutable Laws of Security” (read it thoroughly): If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore If […]

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Learned Helplessness

August 5, 2011

Anne writes: (added emphasis mine) I’m glad to help anybody who has a problem, but I’d also like you to listen to what I explain to you and remember it. I can’t remember how often I tried to explain to someone at an old job what the difference between the internet and the intranet was, […]

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What the Lack of Outrage Over Chrome Automatic Updates Means

May 25, 2011

Coding Horror had a post two days ago on the frequent updates of Google Chrome. What I find amusing is that it refers to Version 11 as the most recent version. I just checked my version and I am using Version 12 (albeit on the beta channel), so it won’t be long before that changes. […]

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