Practical Technology

On June 6, many Web sites and Internet providers will start supporting Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the next generation Internet protocol, as part of their regular service. But, don’t get into a panic; most users won’t have a thing to worry about. To get you up to speed, IPv4, and now IPv6, are the [...]

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Recently, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed a $25,000 fine against Google for “deliberately impeded and delayed” an ongoing investigation into whether it breached federal laws over its street-mapping service that peeked in on open, unencrypted, Wi-Fi access points (AP). Read that again, Google wasn’t fined for collecting and storing data from unencrypted wireless [...]

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I’ve been a happy user of Google Plus since its early days.. Now, with its recently revised interface and functionality, Google+ is indeed a bit simpler and more beautiful, but… it still have some blemishes. Such as, what the heck is that large swatch of white space anyway? Bur more about that later. First, the [...]

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We now know a little more about the Netscape patents that Microsoft bought from AOL. It’s believed that the patents that Microsoft either bought outright or acquired a license for over a billion bucks include: Patent No. 5657390, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which has since been transformed into Transport Layer Security (TLS). SSL/TLS sets up [...]

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I have little love for the new generation of desktop interfaces, such as Windows 8 Metro. They use a smartphone/tablet like metaphor in which each application takes up the entire screen. So, why did I buy all these 20-inch and larger displays? Google, in the latest developer release of its Linux and cloud-based Chrome OS, [...]

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