Category: Notes From The Electronic Cottage

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
The Electronic Cottage will be marking ten years on the WERU airwaves in January, 2010. Between now and then, we’ll be re-broadcasting a program from each of those ten years to see how much technology and its impact on our lives have changed – and, in some cases, how much they’ve remained the same.
Today, we go back to the year 2000 for a discussion of just what the terms “bits” and “bytes” refer to.

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
Today, a few catch up items. Google wants you to vote on which “big ideas” will most help the most people in the world. Check out www.project10tothe100.com.

Meanwhile, phishing attacks have hit a new high in 2009, and people still seem to be biting, to their everlasting regret. We all know not to click on sites in emails that are supposedly from your bank or credit card company – they’re not – but some folks do it anyway. And spam continues to take up about 90% of the email bandwidth on the Internet. Why? Because it works.

Some folks seem to think they’ll get rich on cock-eyed schemes and as long they continue to bite, we’ll all continue to have spam-filled mailboxes.

Here’s the story.

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Phone calls these days travel many different ways – through regular old land lines, through wireless connections using cell phones, and increasingly, over the Internet. But what will these new alternatives mean for people who don’t have cell phones or high speed internet connections? What will happen to “safety net” features in the old phone system such as universal access and even public pay phones? We don’t know yet but the day is coming fast when we’ll have to decide.

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

When the Obama administration took office, the new Secretary of Homeland Security said she would review the regulations that allow a border agent to search anything you are carrying, including your laptop, cell phone, digital camera, etc. “absent individual suspicion,” i.e., for any reason or no reason at all. True to her word, she issued new policy directives in August of 2009. The sort version: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
Topic: HDTV

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Thought you had cookies on your computer under control? Think again – here come Flash cookies. Here are links to information that tells you more about how they work and how to control them on your computer.

The paper by researchers at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law (Note – to download the paper you may have to register for a free SSRN account.) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1446862

To get the new Firefox broswer “Better Privacy:”
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623

Site for “Ccleaner,” which works on Windows machines:
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Link to download “Flush,” which works on Macintoshes:
http://machacks.tv/2009/01/27/flushapp-flash-cookie-removal-tool-for-os-x/

To find the Flash cookie files on your own hard drive:
Windows: Look for files with an ³.SOL² extension, within each user¹s Application Data directory, under Macromedia\FlashPlayer\#SharedObjects.
Mac OS X: ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/FlashPlayer/##SharedObjectgs and ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/FlashPlayer/macromedia.com/Support/flashpla
yer/sys

For a more full report on Flash cookies, see http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you-deleted-your-cookies-think-again/

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

These are the web sites mentioned in today¹s ³best of² sites program.

Best Free Reference Web Sites 2008 according to the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association:
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/sections/mars/marspubs/marsbestfreewe
bsites/MarsBestFree2008.cfm

From the same organization, combined lists from 1999-2008:
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/sections/mars/marspubs/marsbestindex.
cfm

From the Telegraph, a UK newspaer:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3356874/The-101-most-useful-websites.h
tml

101 websites for writers:
http://writersdigest.com/article/101-websites-2009.

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
We’ve all heard the expression “famous last words,” and often those famous last words have turned out to be spectacularly wrong. There are quite a few examples in the history of media technology and we’ll revisit a few of them in this program.