Tag Archives: Social Issues

The New Cliche: “It’s the Wikipedia of…”

You know something has arrived when it’s used to describe a phenomenon. Or what people hope will be a phenomenon. Here’s a sampling: Laptops This from Nicholas Negroponte, describing his $100 laptop for the developing world (via Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth): “It’s the Wikipedia equivalent (of hardware),” he said, describing the spirit of the… Read More »

The Poor Get Their Motorolas

I’m intrigued by this program to offer cheap handsets for the poor (from The Register), but I have my doubts. The Register says Motorola has been selected by the GSM Association (GSMA) to supply the handsets for its programme to provide mobile telephony to people in developing countries. Motorola will commence delivery of these phones in… Read More »

Killing The XP Crash Message

Nothing new here, but I figured worth passing a tip from Annoyances.org for those of you who want to stop Windows XP from asking if you want to send a report to Microsoft whenever a program crashes. Annoyances.org offers the following: * Open System in the Control Panel (or right-click on the My Computer icon… Read More »

Porn Sites Aren’t Just About Sleaze Anymore

In case you needed a reason not to surf for porn, here’s one: Nearly all porn sites install some sort of spyware or adware on visitors’ computers, according to a survey released today by Eblocs.com, an anti-spyware vendor. The study “entailed visiting 100 porn sites and running multiple anti-spyware software programs… to identify any Spyware contaminating… Read More »

Using Bluetooth To Disable Camera Phones

Here’s a possible solution to the problem of camera-phone voyeurs. Lee Choo Kiong of Singapore’s AsiaOne reports (thanks ITJournoAsia, subscription required) on three Temasek Polytechnic students who have come up with software that will disable camera functions on some cellphones, using Bluetooth. What I think happens is that software is loaded into the cellphone (presumably… Read More »