Monthly Archives: October 2008

An End to Profanity

By Jeremy Wagstaff We all want to encourage our grandparents, children, and others of a sensitive disposition, to venture online. But not if they end up on a video-sharing web-site like YouTube, where the comments appear to have all been written by people in extreme emotional pain, or a Facebook group, where robust language is… Read More »

Why You Should Pay for Your Email

Screenshot from Search Engine Journal. (update Dec 2011: Aliencamel is now more, unfortunately, and Fastmail has been sold to Opera.) Using free email accounts like Gmail is commonplace, but not without risk. As Loren Baker, an editor at SearchEngine Journal, found to his cost, when Google disabled his account without warning. (At the time of… Read More »

Should Journalists Pay for Information?

A tricky one, this, and easy to get on one’s high horse but not analyse one’s own self interest.  Robert Boynton here does a good job of exploring this in more detail, concluding: As professional skeptics, though, we should be suspicious of the knee-jerk way in which journalists invoke the “no money for information” rule.… Read More »

Serial Number Killers

I’ve been mulling the issue of registering and activating software of late, and while I feel users generally are less averse to the process of having to enter a serial number or activating a program before they can use it than before, I think there’s still a lot of frustration out there. And I know… Read More »

How to Set Vacation Email Messages

I’ve written elsewhere of the hazard of setting a blanket auto-respond email message in Microsoft Outlook. Many programs and services have ways for you to tweak these settings so that only your contacts—those people in your address book—receive these messages. (This does not remove the chances of revealing information you don’t want to bad guys,… Read More »