The Federal Communications Commission or the FCC is a part of the federal government. Its right there as the first word in their title – “Federal”. The government does a lot of things, some we like and others we don’t like so much. But overall, we pretty much have a system in place where the taxes that are collected by the government pay for their programs. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is our system for the moment.
This is an entirely new kind of technology for anyone to offer and it will take some skilled marketing and deployment experts to make it a success. If the service is too expensive for customers, they will not see the value. But the costs of hardware, internet access and support will have to be absorbed somehow. If the advertising revenue alone can do that, Google TV may explode onto the cultural landscape like nothing ever before. But there are a lot of questions to be answered before that can happen. But with this kind of potent partnership and the visionary leadership of Google, we can be assured that the Google TV revolution is coming and it will not something to be ignored
The term “Big Brother” comes from a futuristic novel by George Orwell named 1984 which envisioned a future where the government would have monitors everywhere that allowed them to watch every movement in society. When Orwell wrote that novel and the year 1984 was the future, that was a ridiculous and scary proposition. But technology has moved along tremendously since then. Between increased security monitoring to fight terrorism and the good and bad uses of GPS technology, more than one doomsayer has been calling for a 1984 situation in our modern technological world.
There are very few businesses any more that do not depend heavily on their computer systems. From a dentist’s office to a large multinational oil company or bank, computers are the backbone of the company. In many cases, many computers are networked together into a complex infrastructure that includes dozens of PCs that interact with very powerful midrange or mainframe computers. From Human Resources to Accounts Receivable to Customer Service to the retail front end, if the computer system in a company goes down, that is a genuine disaster for any company.
Some in the internet world will see The P2P Cyber Protection and Informed User Act as a restriction of privacy and the first step to shut down the freedom of the internet. But freedom must be linked with responsibility. The law only requires that if you are going to put the files and the network resources of a computer system at risk, the least you should be required to do is alert them of the risk. This law simply makes that alerting mandatory.
Flying cars? Clones? Colonies on the moon? Other geeks and science fiction fans look for ward to these futures with stars in their eyes, but we work in tech gadgets. So our ambitions are going to be a little closer to home, a little more realistic, and a whole lot more practical. Here’s the [...]
Once upon the 20th century, we had the phreakers. Phreakers were phone hackers; they’d use various equipment and techniques to rig the public phone system, getting free calls, snooping on private calls, even running their own private network, and generally abusing the telephone system for naughty stuff. Then along came the computer age proper, and [...]
Now that “cloud” computing is here, everybody is heaving a sigh of relief that they don’t have to buy, download, or install as much software. We’ll always need some, but isn’t it becoming a nice bonus that you can offload a lot of tasks to the platform of the Internet itself, and use them just [...]
It must be tough to be Yahoo! They’re trying harder because they’re always number two – and constantly having to fight to keep from being bought out by Microsoft. That’s when they’re not trying to keep from being dismantled from the inside by billionaire investor and self-proclaimed fanatic Carl Icahn. And of course, the rest [...]
What with the concern over the proposed Internet filtering policy that is supposed to be put into place here in Australia, we thought this would be a good time to bring this subject up. Our point here is not to enable people to commit crimes, nor to say that they should commit crimes. Our [...]
