Tag Archives: New York City

WSJ.com – Russian Sites Sell Song Downloads For Pennies, But Are They Legal?

Good piece today on WSJ.com by Vauhini Vara about the legality Russian MP3 download sites like allofmp3.com: Russian Sites Sell Song Downloads For Pennies, But Are They Legal? (subscription only). Vauhini quotes lawyers as saying “buying music from the sites is as illegal as downloading it for free over a file-swapping network. “It doesn’t matter if… Read More »

Flash, Floating Ads And Hijacking Your Webcam

I haven’t had time to look at this closely, and humble apologies if this is old hat, but can pop-up ads hijack users’ web-cams and microphones? I was surfing at a website called This Is London, when on one page a pop-up Flash ad appeared for Starbucks. I was using Mozilla Firefox 0.7 and it… Read More »

Well-Meaning Pressure Group Or Sleazy Promotional Gimmick?

Maybe I’m getting too wary, but when I received a press release from something called the Internet Security Foundation, I wasn’t convinced. And I’m still not. The email was provocative enough: The headline ran “Microsoft’s Policy Leaves Millions Open to Identity Theft; Internet Security Foundation Releases Free Protection Tool”. An explanation followed that users were… Read More »

The Price Of Sleep: 70 Cents A Minute

I know it makes commercial sense, but it’s still galling to realise that in our fast urban world, we are getting used to paying for everything. First it was bottled water, then bottled air, now it’s sleep. New York’s MetroNaps is getting quite a bit of coverage of late — in Wired, the NYT, the… Read More »

Enter Kinja, The New Blog Directory

Here’s another blog directory, going live today (it’s just a graphic at the time of writing this). Is it going to be different, or is it hype? The New York Times today says Kinja, “automatically compiles digests of blogs covering subject areas like politics and baseball. Short excerpts from the blogs are included, with links… Read More »