This is my biggest problem with the MPAA.

“Saw 3D,” which hit theaters last week, earned the designation for innumerable scenes of violence, torture and depravity; “The King’s Speech,” which will be released at Thanksgiving, got it for one brief scene where the future king of England, encouraged by his therapist, utters a volley of swear words to cure his stutter. To call the decision crazy and unhinged would be to let the MPAA off too lightly. Its ratings decisions, which frown on almost any sort of sex, frontal nudity or bad language but have allowed increasing amounts of violence over the years, are horribly out of touch Read more…

$1000/day for half of all tweets

And then there’s Twitter, which jealously guards access to its full stream of tweets (roughly 1,000 per second, these days). As of now, however, it’s signed a deal with Gnip whereby you can get a randomly-selected 50% of those tweets for $360,000 a year, which works out at $30,000 a month. You’re not allowed to republish them, but that’s OK—the people willing to spend that kind of money are likely to be high-frequency trading shops who want to keep the data as private as possible in any case. via blogs.reuters.com I had to look up what a high-frequency trading shop Read more…

When a site constantly asks me to change my password doesn’t that make me *less* secure, since it almost guarantees I have to write it down?

Update on this from my brother-in-law, a security expert. No, because Russian hackers do not have access to your post-it notes, and they are the most likely potential thieves. However, changing your password regularly does nothing, because they are harvesting them via keyloggers. The most important thing you can do is run Firefox with the No-Script plugin, to prevent the keyloggers from being installed in the first place.