Dealing with the death of a parent is sad and complicated enough without having to deal with bills from a student loan servicer. But as Axton Betz-Hamilton helped her widowed father deal with the death of her mom Pamela, she found herself lost in red tape trying to beat back [Keep reading]
Hey website builders – stop stealing my expensive bandwidth! Video autoplay is a terrible idea (I’m looking at you, ESPN.com). And according to AdWeek, it might be coming to your Facebook walls. Auto-play video a terrible user experience. It’s annoying. It bothers co-workers. It feels a little like a hacker [Keep reading]
When Boeing builds an airplane, several parts are constructed separately — the engines, the fuselage, the landing gear. While these parts go through manufacturers’ testing, when they are finally assembled into a completed aircraft, Boeing flies the thing to make sure it’s airworthy. (Airbus does this too) It sure sounds [Keep reading]
Apple is messing with Lawrence Lessig’s ability to comment online, and I’m guessing that’s not going to end well. “Is talking about legal rights the new porn?” he wrote on his blog. As they say, them’s fighting words. “When did it become inappropriate to inform people about legally protected rights [Keep reading]
Americans pay more and get less for high-speed Internet than almost any developed nation in the world, a study has found. Just like last year. The New America Foundation is now making an annual habit of taunting American consumers with research that shows Koreans, Germans, the French, etc., all get [Keep reading]
The National Security Agency’s website was unavailable for users on Friday afternoon. Twitter accounts associated with the loosely-affiliated hacker group known as Anonymous called attention to the outage moments after the site went down, but there was no way to immediate identify a cause for its unavailability. The website DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com [Keep reading]
“I work with Microsoft” the surprise caller says. “And your computer has a problem.” So begins the Microsoft tech support phone scam. In a high-tech world, the low-tech crime of simply calling innocent people and tricking them into sending money is remarkably effective. It is always important to remember that, [Keep reading]
Grandma and Grandpa are sexting? Yup, says a new survey of 50- to 75-year-olds conducted by security firm McAfee. The research suggests older social media and smartphone users are also oversharing at an alarming rate, putting them at greater risk for identity theft. More than half of older Net users have shared [Keep reading]
Much of the criticism around HealthCare.gov has focused on the initial decision to force visitors to complete an application before they could see health care plan pricing. Critics say so-called “anonymous shopping” was killed late in the design process for political reasons. A completed application is required to determine each [Keep reading]
The troubles with the Obamacare website offer this side benefit: consumers are learning a lot about the debate between “waterfall vs. agile” software development. During the next several weeks, we’ll probably learn about Brooks’ Law, too. I wish we were learning the word “pretotype.” And perhaps, we’ll learn about The [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan