Here's an interesting article about "adtech" -- those automated algorithms that companies like Google and Facebook use to spy on you and serve up advertisements that they think you will respond to. The major upshots are:

• Adtech is at best wildly ineffective, and at worst actively damaging, for brands that are trying to advertise.
• The core precepts ( Read more... )

For the past week or two, Chrome has become surprisingly unstable -- it's been crashing on me about once a day. Weirdly, it is usually when I'm not using it that it crashes: typically, I wake my computer from idle and find that Chrome has gone splat.

Anybody else seeing anything like this? I'm mystified about where the problem is.

(And man, it is ( Read more... )

[Trying out posting from DreamWidth. Let's see if everything is configured right.]

Just saw Rogue One.  Capsule Summary: not an epic for the ages, but a solidly good Star Wars movie, a good prequel with fine depth of appropriate detail.  While feeling like the main saga, this one has the freedom to be a more honest (and dark) war movie, which makes ( Read more... )

[I'm mostly just posting links over in Facebook, but my more technical friends tend to be over here.]

Here is a really excellent collection of ideas about how to fight the Fake News problem -- the way that services like Facebook and Google have been used as propaganda tools by the people (on all sides) who are muddying truth by propagating ( Read more... )

... and all I can think is, "Oh, look -- they've reinvented Clippy".

It says something about the way I'm connected to the Internet that, when I get a Facebook PM during the workday:

• The phone in my pocket gives a distinctive "bing", which tells me it's Facebook;
• I glance at my watch, and about a second later it vibrates and shows me the beginning of the message, so I can see who it's from and how much I care;
• If ( Read more... )

I would be exasperated by this one, if I didn't expect this kind of idiocy by now ( Read more... )

Home from SCA 50 Year (I did a quick, 4-day trip for the first half of it), catching up on email, and just got to this little oddness, which starts with:On Monday (June 20th, 2016), Francisco Partners and Elliott Management announced they have signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Dell Software Group. This transaction includes Dell’s Systems ( Read more... )

One of the odd side-effects of having owned and used my own domain for a *long* time now is that I wind up with an interesting and sometimes annoying view into the world of Spam. I've had waks.org for well over 20 years, and I used it as my primary email for much of that, as did Jane ( Read more... )

[Context: Windows 7 ( Read more... )