A glimpse into Indonesia’s high-tech war on terrorism, crime and corruption, revealed in today’s Media Indonesia Online’s story (in Bahasa Indonesia) of the president’s visit to the airport immigration office at Jakarta Airport, where embarrassed officials try to access their database of those 5,000–odd people banned from leaving or entering the country. The files are… Read More »
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 »
Here’s some good news about spam: Unsubscribe really works. At least, that’s according to anti-spam product manufacturer Lashback which according to thespamweblog says in a recent study that ”85% or more of unsubscribe links actually work”. But does this mean, as Anne Mitchell of spamweblog puts it, that ”given that eight-five percent or more of the links… Read More »
With all this gadgetry, you’d think that plagiarism was a thing of the past. OK, it wasn’t plagiarism, more like fiction, but the point is the same: Watching Shattered Glass, the movie about fabulating New Republic ‘journalist’ Stephen Glass, the other night, I couldn’t help wondering why no one had picked up on his lies… Read More »
Did software, deliberately programmed by the CIA to fail, hasten the end of the Soviet Union? The Washington Post reports (registration required) that “President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion… Read More »