New York Times technology correspondent
Former Newsweek technology writer
Author, Gearheads
Humongous Brad Stone, porn star
Chairman of Families Worldwide
Garden landscape equipment firm
Member, Sly and the Family Stone
Jennifer Granick, Executive Director Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society
Loki the Schnoodle, hedonist and layabout
Mr. Boodles, neighborhood security
You are currently browsing the Brad’s Sketchpad weblog archives for January, 2007.
Unmasking Fake Steve, from the August 6th New York Times.
Web Site for Teenagers Has X-Rated Link, from the July 11 New York Times.
The Mystery of the Missing Car, from the August 2006 issue of Wired magazine.
Netflix Guilt, from the July 12th Plain Text on Newsweek.com.
You can buy stolen credit cards, spammable email addresses and key-stroke loggers online. So why not the very foundation of all those Internet attacks - the vulnerabilities in software programs like Windows and Internet Explorer? In today’s Times, on the day of Microsoft’s Windows Vista release, I write about this potentially dangerous emerging marketplace.
They make it completely impossible to read online, and they are dancing for no perceptible reason. The various illustrated characters (including those two-stepping cowboys) in the maddeningly omnipresent ads from LowerMyBills.com were driving me a little nuts. I was also curious about the company’s business model and how it was able to wallpaper the Web with its ads. I write about the company in today’s paper.
Yesterday, I wrote about the newest generation of set-top TV boxes from cable and satellite companies beginning to get a little worried about oncoming competition. Cross your fingers that we will soon have some choices for the most important piece of technology in the home.
When I joined the New York Times in November, I told one of the paper’s IT guys that I would be forwarding my work email to Gmail. He rolled his eyes and sighed wearily, as if he had heard that many times before. “Employees are not supposed to do that,” he said.
That moment inspired my story today: Firms Fret As Office E-mail Jumps Security Walls. Web email services like Gmail have gotten so good they are simply better than what many companies, concerned primarily with security, can provide to their employees.
140,000 geeks; 2,700 exhibiting companies; cab lines a mile long. I’m off to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which Damon Darlin and I write about on the front page of today’s newspaper.
Stickam.com looks alot like MySpace, with one big difference: users can communicate on their home pages via live Web cameras. It sounds harmless, but live Web video, for reasons perhaps known only to sociologists, seems to bring out the worst in people. In Tuesday’s paper, I wrote about stickam and other video sites stretching some online boundaries.