Showing 1 - 8 of 8
Always check your sources
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/09/2021
» At the dawning of the internet age the aim was to provide a platform to share information, initially between higher education facilities. It was a golden age of what was essentially a library of information shared across the United States and later the world. The early fact checkers were academics interested in facts, data and a robust discussion.
In 2020, China heads into 1984
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/10/2019
» China will have 626 million CCTVs installed by 2020. That's close to one for every two people in the country. By the end of 2019, any application for Internet access will require first having your face scanned. In 2020, if you want to surf the web you will first have to pass a facial recognition process. If you are recognised and your social score is high enough you will be able to connect. This directive comes from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Technology.
VPNs outlawed in Russia
Life, James Hein, Published on 08/11/2017
» By the time you read this a new law in Russia will have banned the use or provision of virtual private networks (VPNs). ISPs will be required to block websites that offer VPNs and similar proxy services, currently used by millions of Russians to bypass state-imposed internet censorship. President Putin justified this draconian step as a measure to prevent the spread of extremism online. Its real purpose is to restrict the population to information approved by Russian regulator Roskomnadzor, being the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, or more simply censorship.
The road ahead
Life, James Hein, Published on 04/01/2017
» So it's time for 2017 predictions. For a start, I see this being a better year overall as far as technological improvements go. I base this on the possible freeing-up of resources under a Trump-led US, but that of course all remains to be seen.
Buyer's market for smartphones
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/11/2014
» With the Western markets saturated, the pattern for smartphone sales is starting to change. It is a very good time to be the buyer as competition is fierce for those upgrading and for the tiny minority who don't yet have a model from the upper end of the market. Last month, LG was the only major retailer who had a positive number in their earnings statement. By comparison Samsung, HTC and Sony did not do so well. Elsewhere, like in China and India, the markets are expanding and people are starting to update from a regular phone to the smarter variety, but in the lower price range.
Connectivity ain't what it used to be
Life, James Hein, Published on 09/07/2014
» I have seen a few stories in the last month of so which indicate that our global connectivity is being stretched to its limits in some areas. Network dropouts are increasing and lasting longer. A simple DNS mistake recently took Virgin Media off the network for a while, annoying their Twitterati and other customers. Expectations these days are that people will be notified instantly if there is a problem and Virgin fielded complaints that their website hadn’t been updated indicating an outage within 10 minutes of it occurring. Hackers are finding more gaps to exploit and every other day a person’s supposedly secure information gets into the hands of some unknown group. To some extent it comes down to infrastructure.
Resistance to change is futile, but persists
Database, James Hein, Published on 17/11/2010
» Have you ever noticed how governments, MPs, public servants and large, old organisations are very slow to adopt new technologies and embrace change?
Microsoft developer troubleshooting woes
Database, James Hein, Published on 14/04/2010
» I don't believe that Microsoft understands developers and development environments. I was working my way through a training course on Visual Studio 2008. The course itself, from Total Training, was not too bad. The product covered both Visual Basic and C# programming languages in their examples. One plus for .NET apart from the syntax differences is that the coding was quite similar when it came to the .NET functions.