Stoss Blog

The US Federal Trade Commission recently released a report about how online/virtual ‘worlds’ protect underage children from harmful or explicit images. They investigated the mechanisms these companies put in place to ensure that children 13 and under did not access “things they shouldn’t.”
Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more [...]

WARNING: Geeks only. (Persistent Link on the left hand side)
I have been doing an excessive amount of coding lately, for both work and for personal things and I found that I use the same handful of JAVA methods in sequence to perform many tasks. Specifically around persisting/converting data.
So in an effort to make my life [...]

Recently the file sharing site Mininova decided to stop hosting any torrent that was not sent in from a registered user with rights to the material that was being posted. It was if a million file sharers suddenly screamed and then were silenced…
With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I wonder [...]

The beta of Google Wave has started, and I begged and grovelled for an invite and a friend was gracious enough to send one over. Here are my first thoughts.
Google Wave will change virtual communication. It won’t be over night, and it won’t be accepted by all, but then again Facebook was founded in 2004 and [...]

Regarding the recent news of the e-mail phishing scam on Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail (and presumably others) my blood has been absolutely boiling over the horribly inaccurate, sensationalistic comments that are being published in all sorts of reputable newpapers!
First lets be clear:  These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they are [...]

I hate “Top” lists. I do. All of them. I’ve hated them since before Letterman tried to make them his own, and I hate them even more now when webpages take 10 links to show 10 pictures of the top 10 potentially homophobic animated characters as judged by someone with the television knowledge of my [...]

It was recently announced that 1 month ago perennial Stoss Blog antagonist Twitter had a security breach when a high ranking executive’s account was accessed by a “hacker”. The hacker correctly guessed the users’s secret security questions to gain access to the account then surfed through corporate data and released it to well known techie [...]

A few more day-to-day pictures:

The above comic was sent to me after my blog posts on Mr. Keen’s book about Internet media destroying society. The big-nosed guy on the right makes an interesting point, there will always be a need for writers no matter where we read our news.
Interestingly enough, does anyone else notice the [...]

The other night I came home to no Internet. It appeared I could not get an IP address from my ISP. (un-geekly written: Internet had a booboo). I wanted to call the provider to tell them I was down, to make sure they were investigating, however I realized to do this I needed access to [...]

What do a typewriter and Germany have to do with Twitter?
In fact quite a bit, but let’s step back for a second. How many times have you felt like you were wasting time? Seemed like you were doing something insignificant? Your actions have no relevance to your future goals?
In this season on “How I Met [...]