Category: Social issues

  • Public-Key cryptography ready to shatter?

    Public-Key Cryptography is a very common technique used to protect sensitive information by encoding it in such a way that decoding relies on the extreme difficulty of some mathematics techniques (like finding the root factors of a prime integer). Today, a large part of our security is relying on this (including most of the secure…

  • Top quality free fonts

    Plenty of web sites try to attract you with free fonts (or other free items) and fail to deliver this. If you are lucky you will find a couple of ugly (but still free) fonts. Now, it is quite exceptional to find true top-quality fonts on the web. Vitaly Friedman just did this on his…

  • Ted Stevens isn’t the less tech savvy Senator

    Alaska senator Ted Stevens has become the epitome of I-have-no-clue-about-technology US Senators after his describing Internet as “series of tubes” (and don’t dare sentence them to ignominy if you’re -like me- from France, a country where President Jacques Chirac failed to remember a few years ago the name of this little rodent we use with…

  • Happy Birthday SpamAnti.net!

    Happy Birthday SpamAnti.net!

    Yes! It has already been 10 years since the inception of SpamAnti.net. It started on Compuserve then migrated to various hosting solutions. The name changed several times (from Spam Anti to Spam.Anti to SpamAnti! to SpamAnti.net), but I kept the same will to find easy practical solutions to the permanent flooding of our mail boxes…

  • Exploding batteries kill Sony profits

    The last figures have now been published: Sony finished counting the beans after several months of news of exploding laptop PC batteries and of worldwide product recalls. instead of 130 billion yens, they forecast to dive into a loss of about 50 billion yens. It is left to be seen what impact it will have…

  • AllOfMp3.com has trouble with online payments

    AllOfMp3.com, the MP3 music web site publishing from the territory of Russia is in real trouble. Probably really pissed of by the very low prices found there and because AllOfMp3 does not include Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the downloaded MP3 files (some of the copyright holders even tell that the sale is completely illegal…

  • YouTube wipes 30000 out

    Even if it may not really be linked to the Google buyout, YouTube announced that it had removed nearly 30000 videos from its web site after the request of Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) who detected infractions about the copyrights they manage. You had to admit that a significant part…

  • Eating for Arousal

    VillageVoice has a long paper about what food is really aphrodisiac. Is it for real?

  • Copy-cats don’t make a business

    A company named Genetic Savings & Clone, based in California, was created to sell expensive pet clones: Clone your cat for 32,000$ and more. Unfortunately, in the 6 years of its life, the company could sell only 2 animals. They went bankrupt. Finally, not everybody is dumb enough to buy a cat of that price…