When we say “Facebook IS the Internet to many people” we really mean “Many Facebook users don’t fully understand what the Internet is.” Throwing Internet jargon at them will just make them freeze up and ignore you, or get deeply confused. So imagine what targets of hacking attempts might think when they receive this notification from Facebook: Please Secure… Read More

 It is a truth universally acknowledged, in the enlightened liberal semi-socialist California circles in which I often move, that Uber is evil. It is accepted as axiomatic that they exploit their drivers; they brazenly reject the rule of democratic law, while simultaneously kowtowing to authoritarian China; they use vicious and/or deceitful tactics; and they ignore the needs of the disabled. Read More

 In the brave new enterprise world, organizations will be awash in big data, and it’s against this backdrop that Dell bought EMC this week for the astonishing sum of $67 billion. All of this data needs to be stored somewhere and that’s where EMC comes in. Dell already has been selling storage of course. In fact, it bought EqualLogic in 2007 for $1.4 billion, which seemed like a… Read More

 Ray Kurzweil’s predictions of the Singularity annoy me sufficiently that I once sat down to write a TechCrunch column attacking them. A brief primer: Singularity theory argues that our exponential technological growth will, several decades hence, culminate in an unimaginable transcendence that redefines humanity, sentience, and/or reality. It is also known as the Rapture of the Nerds Read More

 I do not want your stupid app I will not use this siloed crap. I do not like them, Sam-I-am. I do not want this mobile spam! Read More

 And lo, on the day of the ninth release, the Lord Cook did cry ‘havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of flamewars, and permitted ad blockers in iOS; and there was much rejoicing, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth, because freaking everyone had a strong opinion on the subject. Who would have thought that the chattering classes had so much passion in them? Read More

 In 1913, in what is now an affluent suburb of Cairo, Egypt, an American engineer named Frank Shuman built the world’s first solar thermal power station, which pumped 100 gallons/second of Nile water into nearby cotton fields. He later declared in the New York Times: “After our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the… Read More

 The Dislike button has long been the most requested feature from Facebook users. So when Mark Zuckerberg today said in a public Q&A that the company was working on a way to show empathy for victims of tragedies and other things that are inappropriate to Like, news outlets around the world sprung into action saying the masses would soon get their wish. But don’t hold your breath for… Read More

 I’ve been doing a lot of recruiting lately. My employers HappyFunCorp are in the midst of another growth spurt. One of my most illuminating questions is: “What’s your strategy for keeping up-to-date with the Cambrian explosion of technical frameworks, languages, databases, templating systems, and so forth?” Everyone has a strategy — but nobody seems to feel… Read More

 The iPad wasn’t versatile enough for business. The iPhone camera wasn’t sharp enough for photographers. And none of Apple’s products were fast enough for diehard gamers. Until today. The resounding theme of Apple’s big press event was that it got serious about making its mainstream products powerful enough for professionals. Read More

 Larry, Sergey, and Eric are burners. So are Zuck, Dustin Moskovitz, and the Winklevii; so are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Shervin Pishevar. Every year thousands of techies flock to ephemeral Black Rock City, Nevada’s 10th largest urban area during the week it exists. So many imagine Burning Man as a kind of summer camp for the tech industry. They could hardly be more wrong. Read More

 There are a myriad of problems with the password in the modern computing context. We are no longer signing onto a single mainframe. We have multiple applications in use across various platforms. That means we are forced to remember far too many passwords. This causes people to use silly ones like 1234 or the same password across multiple sites, not even attempting to be secure. Think… Read More