Just got the latest Comcast TOS patch with my bill (an adhesion contract officially titled, “Notice From Comcast Regarding Changes To Your Comcast Agreement For Residential Service” (try saying that three times fast)), stuffed inside of a cheerful note about their commitment to happy cheerful customers. What it actually entails is left ( Read more... )

So, apparently I’m not the only one to notice the mid-level marketing types in IT having a big collective nut lately about “Cloud Computing”. This week even the Wall Street Journal ragged about this nonsense on the front page. For those who don’t spend their time around mid-level IT marketing types, cloud computing is… well, nobody who uses this ( Read more... )

I once said that this blog would eventually reach a point where any possible entry could be expressed as a sum of references to previous entries. In this case, it’s this one, this one and this one.

I have maintained that a point will be reached where plain old ordinary Web sites will be forced to turn on SSL encryption by default, or otherwise ( Read more... )

I’ve been using Paypal as the payment-handling service for my trance vibe project, and overall it’s not too bad. I can even print my own postage for domestic shipments, sticky on a label and not have to drive to the post office to send out an order anymore. But there are a few things about it that are really broken.
( Read the rest of this entry » )

Error messages, people. Error messages. When an “error” occurs, it should be accompanied by an “error message”, which informs the user a) that an error did occur; b) what that error was. It does not even necessarily have to be understandable to mere mortals (although this would be really nice), because understanding it is the job of your IT Guy and ( Read more... )

So, Friday morning I’m doing some prep for our Cape Cod camping trip online, and I notice a Comcast truck parked in front of the neighbor’s house, and the Comcast guy putting a ladder up against the telephone pole. I go to take a leak, and when I get back, the truck is gone, and hmm, the Intarweb (and TV, for that matter) don’t work no more. This ( Read more... )

So yeah, that particular work project just keeps getting better. Today I got this in my email from the manufacturer of a critical component, reaffirming my personal “If it’s not in-stock on Digikey, I do not specify it in my design” policy.

[...] The is on
hold. There are no technical reasons but it has been decided that it will be turned
on again ( Read more... )

Via LJ::pervygeekfancy

Geek dating site opens, accepts most comers, including all gay/bi/lez/mixed/poly preferences which are somewhat heavily represented in geekdom. Bank of America(R) signs on as merchant account support. Bank of America(R) isn’t cool with poly. Poly users get their profiles kicked off the dating site with a polite, but ( Read more... )

So, for those (if any) who found several pages of visible Viagra links at the end of the last few posts, my apologies. A vulnerability in the version of Wordpress I was running allowed a machine at keymachine.de [87.118.124.3] to directly inject spam links into posts using the attach/edit features. (This site is apparently a regular offender.) I ( Read more... )

In Part 1, we explored evidence supporting the conclusion that Comcast's well-known policy of blocking / interfering with p2p file transfers (notably BitTorrent protocol) extends to several other legitimate moderate- to high-bandwidth activities, including collaboration via Lotus Notes, remote desktop applications, FTP, and even sending emails with ( Read more... )