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 [...]

As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.
There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I mentioned briefly in my last post about the Swine Flu. And today I read that Air Transat and other airlines have suspended flights! Has this world gone mad?!
This picture was in the UK morning paper. Notice that the only place that has any deaths in it is Mexico? Yes, the US A just confirmed [...]

Chapter 3 – 5:
We join the book with a new hypothesis from Mr Keen. Because some people lie on the Internet, we cannot be sure if anything is truth and therefore it is all invalid.  Solid idea. Applying this to elsewhere in the world: Because airplanes crash no one should fly, because some people kill [...]

Many of you have probably heard about the young girl Tori from Woodstock, Ontario who has recently been kidnapped. I feel so sorry for the parents and family of this child. She has been missing more than a week and I am sure none of you reading this, nor I writing it, can imagine the [...]

Sometimes I get to work before anyone else, not because I am overly keen, but I live an 8 minute walk away… Pretty hard to blame traffic.
When I do this I do not turn on the 57 fluorescent lights that line our ceiling so I can sit at my desk in the very back of [...]