By Mark O’Neill A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that more Americans would prefer to give up the television than lose their internet connection by a margin of 45% to 43%. It also found that losing their internet connection for a sustained period of time would make people […]
By Mark O’Neill When the cost of bandwidth is virtually next to nothing these days, couples who find themselves apart are using Skype to recreate that “at home” feeling. It even has a name – Ambient Skype. Basically you leave the app constantly running on your computer as background noise. Since Skype-to-Skype calls are free, […]
By Mark O’Neill I live in a pretty neat place. My girlfriend and I live in a small apartment which is connected to her parents house. Our apartment and their house is completely connected by a network that runs our internet, telephones and satellite TV. When I first moved here years ago, I thought that […]
By Mark O’Neill
On Sunday evening, I received the most nerve-wracking instant message of my life, even though I knew right from the start that it was a fake. I decided to write this article in case you get hit by this online scam too. Being computer-based creatures, I figured some of the GAS readership were high risk targets.
When it happened, I was sitting where I always sit – in front of the computer, chatting via IM, and researching some possible blog stories. It was then that a new IM window popped up with the following message :
I am hitman. I been paid lot of money to kill you by good friend of yours. They waiting f0r your funerael announcement. What I want too know is how much youre life is worth?
Now I would be lying if I said that by this point my heart wasn’t threatening to explode and my hands weren’t shaking. But I knew that this was what the FBI was warning everyone not to fall for so I decided to call this joker’s bluff. I was first tempted to correct his grammar (I AM a writer after all) but I decided to get right to it.
By Ilya Kochanov Contributing Writer, [GAS] According to some doctors with big weird eyebrows and some kind of doctorate, excessive internet usage might soon be classified as an actual mental disease. Never mind the fact that people, such as myself, earn money by going online. Or that corporations, banks, and schools rely heavily on the […]
By Mark O’Neill Wikipedia has always been my number one reference source (where else can you find out everything you need to know about Eric Cartman?) but it is an absolute bitch when it comes to printing off articles. First you have to find a way to remove all the images (up to now I […]
There is a reason for information security and best practices. Ignoring things like setting strong passwords and having an account lockout policy will have perilous consequences. Just ask the 10,000 applicants to Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who had their personal information, including their social security numbers, uploaded to Bit Torrent. That data […]
By Mark O’Neill Despite the proliferation of file storage sites on the internet such as Dropbox, I am still a bit of an old fashioned geek at heart and I always end up emailing big files to people by zipping them first. But old-fashioned as I am, I am also paranoid, so I always encrypt […]
By Mark O’Neill It seems that American teenagers these days are terrified of logging onto Facebook and finding one thing. Nope, it’s not finding out that they’ve been slaughtered by a ten year old at Scrabulous but instead finding out that that Dad has sent them a friend request! Oh shock! Horror! How will you […]
By Mark O’Neill Serge Nicaudie asks : I have a Blackberry and one thing I would love is the ability to speak into it and it would write an email for me. Like a dictation machine. I also want to use it for quick notes to remind myself about stuff. Can you see if there […]