Category Archives: Technology and Society

More Old Fogie Discussion

There’s a long discussion over at Slashdot about the whether not email is for old f@rts.

A lot of good points over there, the most salient of which is that it’s not so much a generational thing as a “having a life” thing. Young people have a lot more free time to jabber at each other on IM, but for serious work-related discussions, email will remain essential for a long time (though I’m pushing clients to establish internal corporate blogs for a lot of this kind of discussion, to avoid spam issues, and provide better archiving and organization of topics). Also, with Facebook or other social networking sites, you’re limiting yourself to other Facebook members.

[Update in the afternoon]

Speaking of Facebook, as someone who has signed up, but not figured out why, what is a “friend” in Spacebook terms? What are the implications of it?

Good News On Phishing?

I’ve seen a spate of phishing attempts in my email lately, for institutions such as “Pacific Capital BanCorp,” with a fake URL to gather in my data (assuming that I have an account there). I’ll get half a dozen in a row, each with a different domain, such as “2dfe.com.” Does this mean that they’re having to create new domains and sites quickly before groups like Anti-phishing.org shut them down? I know that I report them the minute I see them. Of course, it’s harder to deal with the ones in China, which apparently just took over first place in this kind of thing from the US, according to Anti-phishing.org

By the way, it sure would be nice if Thunderbird had a feature for forwarding a group of emails to a single address, rather than having to do them individually.

[Update a minute or so later]

Hmmm…actually there is. If you highlight a block of messages, and hit “Forward,” it attaches them all to the forwarded message. Cool.

Beam Weapons

That wasn’t the headline that I would have used. I thought when I was about to read this story that they were using the lasers to simply find the IEDs. No, they’re using lasers to destroy IEDs remotely. I think they’re approaching the capability to put them on the frickin’ heads of the sharks.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of twenty-first-century warfare, Alan Boyle has an interesting piece on the new age of battlebots.