The New Yorker has a fascinating article on the history of electronic spam. They cover the origins of spam, how it has evolved over the years, as well as the somewhat futile attempts to try and eradicate it.
In the spring of 1978, an energetic marketing man named Gary Thuerk wanted to let people in [...]
I’ve always found it odd that Google Reader has no search functionality. With search being Google’s bread and butter it is beyond me why their feed reader doesn’t have even the most basic search capability.
After looking for a solution, the best I could come up with is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox. It’s options [...]
The first thing you realise when you use SeeqPod is so many people leave their files completely unsecured. This is great if you are doing the searching but not so great if you’re the one who has left the door open, especially if you have some sensitive documents lying about.
As for the service itself, [...]
Microsoft’s been in a punchy mood of late. First there was the news that they were releasing their own analytics package, then they acquired AdECN (an advertising exchange platform), and now they have pulled off a coup at Digg, and will be serving contextual ads for the social news monolith.
What I found the most [...]
YouTube has added a very basic customization feature to its service. With only one style of background and nine color schemes to choose from it’s hardly something to get excited about.
At the moment this feature only allows you to display videos from your favourites or a custom playlist. You should be able to get [...]
Wired has an interesting article exploring the mechanics of the software that the FBI used to track down a 15 year old student who made bomb threats against his school.
The software is described as a “computer and internet protocol address verifier” or CIPAV for short. If you go through the list of data [...]
10 years after the first Alexa toolbar hit the Internet, a new Firefox compatible version has been released, named Sparky.
Some of the features include:
Sparkline - A very small condensed traffic history graph. Gives you a quick view to show whether the site is moving up or down.
Rank - Shows the traffic rank of the [...]
Checking redirects isn’t simply a matter of seeing if you land on the right page. To be safe, you should check the HTTP header and make sure that it returns a 301 Moved Permanently status code. If you aren’t getting a 301 code then there is either something wrong with the redirect, or you’ve [...]
It’s still a week till the official release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series, and it has already found it’s way on to all the usual filesharing sites - PirateBay, Rapidshare, etc. This is bad news for people who are waiting to buy a copy. They are [...]
Dave Davis from RedFly Marketing has created a neat extension for Firefox called Google Global. It allows you to quickly switch to search results from a different country without changing URL’s or manually appending search strings.
If you’re like me and are constantly checking search results from different countries then this plugin will come in [...]
