Practical Technology

I’ve been using Google Music since it was in beta. At first, it didn’t interest me that much. Yet another way to save my music to the cloud? How much good really was that? Well, after using it for several months, and now that Google Music is open for everyone in the US to use, [...]

[Read more →]

This has not been a good month for the Internet’s core address system: the Domain Name System (DNS). First, there was a man-in-the-middle attack on numerous Web site users caused by a Turkish cracker. Now, according to Microsoft, many of its online services were disabled by a DNS failure. At first, some people thought this [...]

[Read more →]

On Sept. 11, the first thing I did after staring at a jetliner taking out the second tower of the World Trade Center on CNN was pray. The second thing I did was to try to reach my friends and family who live in lower Manhattan: Me and about a million other people. The phone [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve been using cryptic passwords since I cut my computing teeth on an IBM 370. I never liked using passwords like xkcd1234EMC2. They may have been more “secure,” but they were hellish to remember. I still use them today, but the brilliant Internet cartoon xkcd by Randall Munroe has just shown me that I, and [...]

[Read more →]

Besides search and social networking, Google keeps getting deeper and deeper into the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market. While Google hasn’t opened the doors for anyone in the world to use Google Voice yet, Google has just made it possible for Google Talk users to call land-line and mobile phones around the world. In [...]

[Read more →]