I usually don’t post articles about current affairs. However, a recent series of events has inspired me to write about this. Towards the end of January, the president of our company – iScan Online, Inc., was complaining that our service was experiencing major slowdowns. I investigated the issue, but I couldn’t find anything wrong with our production environment. We were stumped. One evening I also noticed a slowdown while using our service from my house. I realized that the one thing in common between me and our president was that we both had FiOS internet service from Verizon… In case you missed it : Internet Service Providers are limiting access/speed to targeted services. Conspiracy theorists say they’re targeted based on competition (Verizon offers cable in certain parts of the country). Also could be because streaming/downloading heavy stuff places heavy lag and they’re trying to discourage the heavy users…putting caps on your bandwidth. Generally your home internet will be faster during the day because most people are at work and not bogging things down. At night when everyone gets home though, it is usually slower. The Net Neutrality thing that passed a while back means that ISP’s can legally limit speeds for whatever reason…opening the door for misuse of that power. Read...

Remarkable how far we’ve come in 30 years! How sad that people worked on such projects for free and didn’t think to monetize it at...

Her: Love In The Modern Age, chronicling reactions to Spike Jonze’s Oscar-nominated film, Her. The documentary, directed by Lance Bangs, features stories and reflections from writers, musicians, actors and contemporary culture experts, including Olivia Wilde, James Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis, on the film Her, and their thoughts on love in the modern age. http://www.herthemovie.com/ Really enjoyed this movie. Given my background, I honestly thought it could be an option for life,...

What is the Music Timeline? The Music Timeline shows genres of music waxing and waning, based on how many Google Play Music users have an artist or album in their music library, and other data (such as album release dates). Each stripe on the graph represents a genre; the thickness of the stripe tells you roughly the popularity of music released in a given year in that genre. (For example, the “jazz” stripe is thick in the 1950s since many users’ libraries contain jazz albums released in the ’50s.) Click on the stripes to zoom into more specialized genres. Check it...

This articulates so well how social networks artificially fill a gap for those who are less socially inclined… The Innovation of Loneliness from Shimi Cohen on...

The Ha.cker Man.ifesto by +++The Mentor+++ Written January 8, 1986 Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”… Damn kids. They’re all alike. But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world… Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me… Damn underachiever. They’re all alike. I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…” Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike. I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me… Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I’m a smart ass.. Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here… Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike. And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found. “This is it… this is where I belong…” I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all… Damn kid. Tying...