Censoring Iranians: different intentions, same results

As I had noted before, average internet user in Iran faces a good amount of censorship. Some of it comes from internal agencies in Iran who”judge” what is appropriate and what is inappropriate  for Iranians. And sometimes it is the websites and companies deciding that Iranians should not have the privilege of accessing certain information of software. […]

Continue reading

Internet Privacy: fact or fiction?

Reading a news article on Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) being forced to take down University Toolkit for violation of GPL license, I started to think how deep our privacy is being violated. As Brian Kerb of Washington post describes in his article, the University Toolkit is essentially a monitoring software, just identifying people […]

Continue reading

BoingBoing on Drunk Astronauts

My favorite website, BoingBoing, has made a big mistake by naming Homer Simpson “Drunk Astronaut Pioneer”. That is a big mistake, since the pioneer of them all is nobody except Captain Archibald Haddock. In the Explorers on the Moon (On a marché sur la Lune) book of series The Adventures of Tintin, Captain Haddock sneaks […]

Continue reading

diggy night

I can’t resist writing it. Takes 5 minutes of my qualifier exam time, but is worth it. A digg user posted an item about a HD-DVD code, and the fact it was taken down because of a takedown notice. Digg removed that. People noticed that and informed each other of Digg’s removing the dugg story. […]

Continue reading

bug or feature?

I just figured out that our web portal Galaxy, a uPortal in fact, and also our courseware WebCT both only use first eight characters of our passwords! This is interesting, since when choosing a password we are “forced” to use a password between 8 and 20, containing special characters and numbers. Is it only me […]

Continue reading