BRUCEB NEWS
The Dangers Of Location Tracking
Having government and big companies track our locations is a horrific invasion of privacy. We can be sure that big companies will be careless with private information about us, allowing it to be misused by bad actors. The government will almost certainly weaponize it...
CRACKING CDs WITH MAGIC MARKERS
The recording industry is going to elaborate lengths to create music CDs that are copy-protected - to prevent you from copying, or "burning," music onto recordable CDs, onto a...
VIRUSES REAL AND IMAGINARY
REAL: A particularly nasty new virus named "Klez" is making the rounds by e-mail. It has the usual characteristics: it arrives in a randomly-generated message from someone you...
EXTRAORDINARY DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY
"Personal video recorders" (PVRs) are the hot new item in the television industry. Tivo and Sonicblue Replay are the market leaders. These boxes act like a super VCR. They record...
SCANNER TUTORIAL
PC Magazine has an article about scanning that answers a lot of basic questions about digital images, scanning resolutions, and what to do with some of the scanner controls -...
COPY PROTECTED CDS CAN CRASH COMPUTERS
More copy protected CDs are hitting the market - especially in Europe, but clearly the US is next. They corrupt the CD in ways that make many of them unplayable in a computer or...
INTERNET PRIVACY AND APATHY
In March Yahoo changed its marketing policy. With no warning, it suddenly granted itself the right to send advertising spam, postal mail, and telemarketing phone calls to tens of...
KAZAA LITE
Kazaa has taken over as the best music sharing program - most users, best selection, best interface. But Kazaa has been rightfully attacked for including other "spyware" programs...
STAR WARS REVIEWS
Pick your flavor of early reviews of Attack of the Clones. On one side: a very favorable review from BBC News. Sample: "This is quite possibly the best Star Wars of the series....
STATES BAIL OUT ON MODULAR WINDOWS DEMO
The states in the Microsoft trial screwed up in a big way yesterday. The lawyers blew it, and the states may have blown a hole in their case. The states have been insisting that...
ROBERT HEINLEIN AND THE RECORDING INDUSTRY
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the...
BACKUP SOFTWARE
Stomp Software is a new name to me. They've partnered with Veritas (well-known at the enterprise level) to produce BackupMyPC, the latest iteration of Veritas Backup Exec. It's...
HIGH-TECH HOAX
I love stories about gullible people duped by magic tricks. It makes me feel proud to be a skeptic. A Florida newspaper is running a series about Madison Priest, a good ol' boy...
MICROSOFT AND MONEY
Microsoft acknowledges what analysts have also been pointing out - that its growth will start to slow over the next few years. But Microsoft's cash on hand is starting to raise...
THE DEATH OF INTERNET RADIO
The death of Internet radio is three weeks away. No fooling. The recording industry collaborated with the media conglomerates that own virtually all conventional radio stations...
THE AOL-TIME WARNER BLACK HOLE
Last week, AOL Time Warner announced that it was writing off $54 billion of its net worth as being completely unsaleable and without any value whatsoever. This embarrassing loss...