Catshanghai

I’ve just been perusing the IBO’s (International Baccalaureate Organisation) forums for news about the IT ethics course I teach. I am a little concerned that this academic community is so dismissive of Wikipedia as a source of information. Therefore, I wrote this post in defense of Wikipedia that I have quoted below: I am writing [...]

Critics are going to use these stories to argue that modern technology is being used by teenagers to accelerate society’s moral decline. Story 1: Bogus Craigslist Ad Leads to Destruction of a House Craigslist is a free and popular Internet classified advertising service that was recently abused by a tenant who posted a fake ad [...]

The Internet may seem like a paradise for free speech, but the recent spate of online harassment and death threats targeted at blogger Kathy Sierra has generated some intense soul searching and discussion among the neterati about the action that should be taken, if any to keep the Internet free of such abuse. Tim O’Reilly [...]

The BBC is going to suspend its Jam edcuation platform after complaints to the European Commission that the service is having an adverse effect on small software suppliers. Dominic Savage of the British Edcuation Software Association expressed the industry’s concern that the BBC was duplicating their activity. Jam was providing Internet learning resources to support [...]

I have just come across this article on the New York Times Reader about Google privacy issues that I blogged about on Sunday. Here is my response that was written using the reader’s annotation tool. It would be good if you could post annotations straight to blogs, but that feature is not yet supported. Google [...]

Podcasts or netcasts are wonderful and are totally free. If you download enough of them, it becomes like having your own personal talk radio station. I subscribe to a whole slew of RSS feeds pushing audio and video downloads into my computer that keep me informed about the world of technology and the world in [...]

I have just heard about Diigo, which is another bookmarking, tagging and annotation tool. It has more functionality than stickis, but the interface is not as good so the elegant pop-up overlays do not appear when you visit a tagged page. Diigo does a little more than stickis by offering automatic clip captures, but overall [...]

This story shows just how much the UK has changed since I left in 2004. Before the UK was behind the US in terms of broadband penetration and the percentage of advertising being spent online. By 2005 this had changed, because 8 percent of British advertising revenue was spent online compared with 4.6 percent in [...]

This BBC story suggests cites a UN report that warns that many web users are at risk of identity theft because they are reusing passwords for many different login accounts. The trouble for casual users is that you need to think like a cryptographer to create multiple complex passwords that are impossible to crack and [...]

This weekend I have been busy customising firefox by installing extensions, effectively turning it into a stripped down version of an operating system. Three quarters of my computer needs can now be accessed directly from the browser. Here is a list of extensions I added: Performancing for writing blog entries Fotofox for viewing and uploading [...]