It’s interesting that I read two things about buying Twitter publicity today: John C Dvorak’s experiment for PC Magazine and an interview with my classmate and friend Ken. The idea is that people buy Twitter followers to make themselves look bigger than they are, whether they’re celebrities trying to make themselves look like they’re on their way up rather than down, or, like the scam my friend discovered, indie book authors trying to build a following.
john c dvorak
No, it doesn’t take a “serious hacker” to crack wi-fi through WPS
John C Dvorak is raving in PC Magazine about Netgear wireless routers and range extenders and how easy WPS makes it to set them up–and providing some very seriously flawed security advice along the way.
“Note that WPS is crackable by serious hackers using brute-force attack, but any SOHO user not dealing with government secrets should be fine.”
Dvorak: The future of retail is search
This week in PC Magazine, John C Dvorak said the future of retail is search. He’s right.
Dvorak is wrong about the cyber war
So John C Dvorak (I’ll call him John Dvorak because he hates it–John Dvorak John Dvorak John Dvorak) says that cyber warfare, like Y2K, is a bunch of hooey.
I lived through Y2K, and I’m fighting the cyber war. He’s wrong on both counts.
Windows 8 won’t fail just because nobody likes Windows upgrades
John C Dvorak wrote today about the great upgrade upheaval, and argued that Windows 8 is doomed to fail because it’s just going to be too hard to upgrade, and nobody likes Windows upgrades anyway.
I agree on the first point but not the second.
The CP/M-DOS forensics don’t prove much
I saw the headline on Slashdot: Forensic evidence trying to prove whether MS-DOS contained code lifted from CP/M. That got my attention, as the connection between MS-DOS and its predecessor, CP/M, is one of the great unsolved mysteries of computing.
Unfortunately, the forensic evidence doesn’t prove a lot.
Don’t call the war on hackers unwinnable
John C Dvorak asks what war we’re waging on hackers. While war may not be the best choice of words, because it’s not exactly a conventional war, there’s no question there’s something going on, and we’re not winning it right now.
The latest salvo is that someone in China is building a botnet using Macintoshes.
Securing wi-fi isn’t about price gouging
The so-called wi-fi golden era is over, and apparently being glad about it makes me an absolutist.
But John C. Dvorak is wrong. This isn’t about making people pay for Internet access. It’s pure security. Toilets and drinking fountains are free because the majority of people don’t abuse them. The Internet can’t be wide open and free like a public restroom because when it was totally wide open and free in the 1990s, too many people abused it.
An ode to Word macros
Last week, John C Dvorak wrote about technical duds. And it’s unfortunate about what happened to Word macros, because at times they can be extremely useful, and not terribly difficult to use, either.
Here’s my favorite macro–a method to join single lines. You’ll wonder why it never became a standard feature in Word. You won’t use it often, but when you need it, you need it badly.