Technology Talk

Apparently, it’s not that difficult to make $2-3 million through identity theft. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly received at least one email claiming to be from some wealthy Nigerian (or other foreign country) and offering you a sum of several millions of dollars if you’d only help them get the money out of the country. To do that, you must send them your bank information.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of “opportunists” out there who give up their info in exchange for this possibility of wealth. These gullible saps soon become the victims of identity theft. Read the rest

Did you know there was a grace period for sampling domain names before you buy? I didn’t until I read this article by Anick Jesdanun on Entrepreneurs Profiting from Free Domains.

I’m a bit of a domain junkie, in that I’ve purchased somewhere around 90 domain names, though I haven’t gotten into the domain resellers business yet. Admittedly, I have grand plans for all of them - if I ever get around to building the sites and writing the content. Read the rest

About a month ago, Steve Jobs made headlines by publishing his thoughts on music memo. In it, he argued for selling content that was free from digital rights management (DRM) - technology that restricts users from using digital content as they’d like under the guise of preventing copyright infringement.

I like Apple, but I’m not a raving fan who believes they can do no wrong, like some. I love my iPod Nano, and have considered purchasing an iBook in the past… but I never felt like they are a company that can do not wrong - especially when they sued bloggers (and lost). Read the rest

BitTorrent was founded in 2004 as an alternative to the peer-to-peer networks like Napster, Kazaa and others. I quickly made the switch to download and, when given the option, still prefer it to current alternatives.

While BitTorrent is still a P2P distribution network, it works differently from the others. For most P2P, a file (mp3, video, pdf, etc) sits on a server in cyberspace. You connect to that computer, request the file, and download it from that computer. Read the rest

A few months ago, Stephen Colbert pointed out how easy it was to add incorrect information to Wikipedia. He used the elephant population as an example, and within minutes of mentioning it, his fan base had added an incorrect “fact” - that “The number of elephants has tripled in the last 6 months” to Wikipedia’s entry on elephants.

Fortunately, Wikipedia’s community of editors were on top of the situation and quickly stopped all editing of the elephant page for a few days until interest in the story died down. Read the rest