Everyone Be Afraid! Predators Move To Game Consoles
There's a neat little rule in press coverage: three stories makes a "trend" even if there's not much more to it. This works particularly well on stories where you're trying to scare people into...
View ArticleDon't You Feel Safer Now That Google Added A Link To Its Privacy Policy?
One of the more idiotic accusations thrown at Google of late was this idea that it was somehow a problem that it didn't link directly to its privacy policy from its home page. It had a privacy policy....
View ArticleFuel Cell Hype Back Again
Every few years the press gets excited about the potential for fuel cell-powered laptops. And then the concept goes away. We wrote about in 2003, explaining why it wasn't a big deal, and again in...
View ArticleWoman "Murdered For Facebook Status" -- Or Because Her Estranged Husband Was...
"Wife murdered for Facebook status," screams the headline on the BBC News site. "A man murdered his estranged wife after becoming 'enraged' when she changed her marital status on Facebook to...
View ArticleIs eBay Warming Up The Skype Billion-Dollar Buyout Plan?
Back in 2005, we marveled at the success that Skype backers had in talking up the price of the company, eventually suckering convincing eBay to put together a $4 billion deal for it. This was what we...
View ArticleApparently, Cybercrime Isn't Actually A Trillion-Dollar Business
While online scams and cybercrime are growing, the claim made recently that cybercrime is a trillion-dollar business simply isn't true, says The Register. As Gary Stiennon points out, if it were, it...
View ArticleLatest Unsubstantiated Claim: Twitter Makes You Immoral
What is it with these bizarre exaggerated claims about the "harms" associated with modern social networking tools? There was just a totally exaggerated report claiming that social networking was...
View ArticleIsraeli Claims Patent Over Adding .com To The End Of The Address Bar
TechCrunch points us to a story about an Israeli company by the name of Netex who is claiming a patent over "www.addressing." What's that? Well, apparently it's the process of simply adding a ".com"...
View ArticleCaptain Cyborg Has A Virus-Infected Sidekick... But Nothing Can Stop A PR...
About a decade ago, if you followed the technology space, you might recall a series of articles about a professor at the University of Reading, named Kevin Warwick, who made himself famous by...
View ArticleNewspaper Publishes Totally Made Up List Of 'Disorders' Associated With Text...
As the anonymous person who submitted this story noted, this appears to be a respectable Australian news publication, presenting a list of totally made up "texting disorders" put together by a...
View ArticleSchneier Picks Apart Cyberwar Hype
For some time now, we've been pointing out how the new claims of cyberwar threats from politicians and defense contractors was massively overhyped. We keep getting comments on those posts along the...
View ArticleCyberwar Hype Leaps To The UK, While Electric Grid Expert Calls Claims Of...
We've been covering all the hyped up claims of cyberwar, often made by law enforcement officials or defense contractors who clearly benefit from keeping people fearful. However, evidence of such...
View ArticleSorry, Net Neutrality Simply Was Not An Important Issue In This Year's Election
This one is just amusing. Scott Cleland, who works for the big broadband companies as a professional propagandist, and has a long history of making absolutely ridiculous claims in order to support...
View ArticleFBI Celebrates That It Prevented FBI's Own Bomb Plot
With all of the new security procedures we keep hearing about, it's important for the government to keep convincing us that we're under a very real immediate threat that could put us at risk at any...
View ArticlePiracy Is Over Like The Web Is Dead
Attention everyone. If I could have all of your eyes looking forward please, I have an announcement to make: the pirating of music on the internet has officially ended. So says Wired's Paul...
View ArticleBSA 2010 Piracy Report: It's Back And It's Just As Wrong As Before
Every May, the BSA puts out its "Bogus Stats Again" report claiming to analyze the "software piracy" issue. And, every year we and many other blogs and reporters debunk the study as being so...
View ArticleData Shows: Removing 'Rogue Sites' From Search Won't Make Much Of A Difference
The legacy entertainment industry absolutely loves to blame Google for its problems. As I've noted in the past, it's mostly a correlation-not-causation error. That is, they see their own difficulty in...
View ArticleCybersecurity Bill Backers Insist This Isn't SOPA... But Is It Needed?
Lots of folks have been waiting on the Senate's version of the cybersecurity bill that's been talked about for a while, and what's clear from the details and the press release put out by the Senate...
View ArticleIf Phishing Email Can Kill NY Power Grid, Lack Of Cybersecurity Legislation...
We've been talking about the faux urgency to pass some cybersecurity legislation coming from the federal government, with plenty of fear mongering from politicians who never seem to want to point out...
View ArticleThe Stats Used To Support Cybercrime 'Threats' Just As Bogus As Hollywood's...
While the latest attempt to pass a cybersecurity bill may be on ice for now, it'll be back... and with it there will be a lot more hyperbole about how urgent this is because of various massive...
View Article
