Earlier this month, Apple announced changes to its iOS Program License for app developers. This move happened “suddenly” and was “surprising” to the tech community. Some e-news sites speculated that Apple was bowing to FTC pressure; this spring, the agency launched a probe into whether Apple’s ban on third-party app development tools constituted an impermissible […]

Tweeting has become a foundational Internet technology.  It’s not even dependent on the World Wide Web — people can send and receive tweets without having to visit twitter.com.  And the act of tweeting isn’t even unique to Twitter — many other Internet platforms are seeking to compete by allowing people to “emote” an update to […]

I saw these two stories today — or is it one story? From Slashdot: “Turnkey CPU upgrades aren’t just for mainframes anymore. According to Engadget, OEMs (including Gateway) are selling computers with the Intel Pentium G6951, which can have extra cache and hyper-threading enabled through a $50 software unlock called Intel Upgrade Service.” Also from […]

Lately I’ve been interested in both cybersecurity and human computing.  The former increasingly relies on PATRIOT-missile-style automated defenses against attacks as cyberattacks happen, and ideally are repelled, in mere nanoseconds.  The latter involves taking tasks normally mundane enough for computers and turning them over to people to do — in ways that enable to tasker […]

Not exactly an Internet topic, I know, but I was struck by the Daily Dish’s call out to a post by Karl Smith: Most people are afraid of death in a way that they are not afraid of non-existence. Thinking about the world just after your death tends to be at minimum unnerving. Thinking about […]