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In a long overdue move, the SEC is suspending trading in stocks that are the subject of spam and dump schemes. Hopefully this will reduce the level of stock spam, and of course prevent some gullible people from getting fleeced. The SEC probably should have started doing this as soon as people started publishing studies [...]

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Is it just me, or could I see Mark Frauenfelder being a regular guest on Colbert, featuring other cool projects from Make magazine? Great interview.

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Today, Paul Boutin has a piece in Slate explaining how easy it is to back up your data using a Maxtor external hard drive. Here’s the case in favor of it:

My solution: Maxtor’s OneTouch III Turbo Edition, which comes with a minimum of 1 terabyte—1,000 gigabytes—of storage. OK, it costs $500, but if [...]

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Microsoft has cynically chosen to support the Association of American Publishers’ wrongheaded and self-destructive lawsuit against Google for scanning and indexing the content of books for search purposes. Tim O’Reilly explains just how stupid the AAP lawsuit is, and why Microsoft is wrong for supporting it.

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The incredibly hyped Red campaign (promoted on Oprah, and touted by Bono) is not raising enough money to even cover the costs of promoting the campaign. So why run such a campaign rather than just giving the money spent on promotion to AIDS-related charities? Because the real purpose is signaling. The companies involved are [...]

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Dale Dougherty at O’Reilly asked a number of Internet luminaries whether we’re winning the war on email spam, and if not, how we can win it. I wasn’t asked, probably because I’m not a luminary, but that’s OK, I’m going to give my opinion anyway.

To me, there are two struggles against spam. One is the [...]

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I was having lunch with a friend last week and he mentioned to me that 40% of Adobe’s new Lightroom product is written in Lua, which I had previously heard of because it’s the language used to write World of Warcraft addons. Lua is a scripting language that was designed to extend applications. It’s interesting [...]

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David Robinson at Freedom to Tinker makes a profound observation about what the EssJay affair that involved Wikipedia and The New Yorker teaches us. The professional fact checkers at The New Yorker were fooled just as completely by Ryan Jordan as the editors at Wikipedia were. His argument is that The New Yorker still provides [...]

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It doesn’t matter which language you program in, this application of Curly’s law to software development is darn good advice.

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Tony Lagouranis is a former US Army soldier who enlisted as an interrogator prior to the invasion of Iraq so that he could learn Arabic. His story is published in the Chicago Reader. He explains how he tortured prisoners who he was interrogating, under the direct orders of his superiors. Just one more account for [...]

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