Snowden and the NSA reflect a millennial climate change

mt_snowdonSnowdon (not Snowden) is the name of the tallest mountain in Wales and while by Swiss or Colorado standards it may not seem like much the weather on Snowdon is unpredictable and has taken many lives. I climbed Snowdon as a schoolboy with my class and that day on the mountain another school group was lost in a blizzard and some boys died. This is what first came to mind when I heard about National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaking documents and fleeing to Hong Kong. Like his namesake mountain, this Snowden is trouble for those who are overconfident or unwary.

I’ve written about this general topic many times over the years and doing a […]

By |June 18th, 2013|2013, Breaking News, Computing, Government, Internet, Politics, Privacy and Security, Technology|84 Comments
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If it’s Ethernet versus Godzilla, then Godzilla is DOCSIS

Two weeks ago I was at the Computer History Museum to help observe the 40th anniversary of Ethernet. It was literally 40 years to the day since Bob Metcalfe drew his first sketches of what became the world’s dominant OSI Level 2 network technology. It was a fun and festive day that ended, believe it or not, with dancing. But some of the celebration didn’t make sense to me. Or, rather, it seemed to me that important parts of the discussion were missing.

When, for example, did 802.11 WiFi become a part of 802.3 Ethernet? That claim was made over and over during the day and helped power the argument that Ethernet is today a $100 billion business. Yeah, right.

Parts of that argument are true. […]

By |June 17th, 2013|2013, Internet, Technology|11 Comments
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Better late than never

exhaustionI’m back!

The process of switching I, Cringely from Media Temple to WP Engine, which was supposed to take a few hours, ended up taking more than a week!

Poor Jennie had to do the hard work, schlepping over thousands of files from a server that continually crashed. There may be an easier way to do it but we don’t know that way. Then WP Engine ran a security upgrade in the middle of our transition, freezing us out of the system because we were neither here nor there. My nemesis CloudFlare didn’t want to give up the DNS and when we finally got it switched it for some reason took two days to propagate.

But enough of […]

By |June 17th, 2013|2013, Internet|14 Comments
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Where’s Bob? Changing WordPress hosts.

WomenAtWorkIn case you’ve been wondering what’s up with this blog, we’re in the midst of moving it from one host to another. Truth be told, Jennie is in the midst of moving it. This will be my last post from Media Temple. My next post (a real one — it’s already written) should come later tonight from WP Engine.

When I left PBS at the end of 2008, Media Temple was state of the art, but that was then. After five years on essentially the same server platform with only a couple memory increases along the way, things were getting a little brittle as many of you have noticed. The hardware is old, some of the software […]

By |June 6th, 2013|2013, Internet|41 Comments
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The nose knows

pew!We call it The Red Devil — a 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee V-8 I bought online earlier this year mainly to pull a trailer filled with airplane parts. But perhaps we should have named it Stinky, because that’s what this column is all about. When buying something on the Internet, how can you make sure it doesn’t smell terrible?

You can’t.

I should have known. The price was too low, the pictures too good, but the seller had sold hundreds of cars online and boasted a 100 percent satisfaction rating. So did I, but my 82 transactions had taken 13 years to accumulate.

When the car arrived it looked great but it smalled like a thousand mice had been camping […]

By |May 24th, 2013|2013, Family, Internet, Science|55 Comments
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