I usually don’t post articles about current affairs. However, a recent series of events has inspired me to write about this. Towards the end of January, the president of our company – iScan Online, Inc., was complaining that our service was experiencing major slowdowns. I investigated the issue, but I couldn’t find anything wrong with our production environment. We were stumped. One evening I also noticed a slowdown while using our service from my house. I realized that the one thing in common between me and our president was that we both had FiOS internet service from Verizon… In case you missed it : Internet Service Providers are limiting access/speed to targeted services. Conspiracy theorists say they’re targeted based on competition (Verizon offers cable in certain parts of the country). Also could be because streaming/downloading heavy stuff places heavy lag and they’re trying to discourage the heavy users…putting caps on your bandwidth. Generally your home internet will be faster during the day because most people are at work and not bogging things down. At night when everyone gets home though, it is usually slower. The Net Neutrality thing that passed a while back means that ISP’s can legally limit speeds for whatever reason…opening the door for misuse of that power. Read...

Remember that website with the college courses fo free? Well two of the classes I signed up for started yesterday. Human Computer Interaction – Stanford University Doing this one for completion points…or really to see if it’s a good enough introduction to send new employees to. I’m bringing in an instructor to give the training I went to a few years back…even recruited some developers and business analysts to come as well. That’s being held next week. Building my army of UX Evangelists! Introduction to Logic – Stanford University This one is reeeeeallly fun! It makes you really use your brain! Here’s an example of exercises from the class : I write them on my whiteboard and pretend I’m a teacher, lol. Brain Power! They just added 72 new courses and I signed up for 2 more : Know Thyself – University of Virginia An investigation of the nature and limits of self-knowledge from the viewpoints of philosophy, psychoanalysis, experimental psychology, neuroscience, aesthetics, and Buddhism.  Readings are drawn from classical Western, non-Western, and contemporary sources. Leading Strategic Innovation in Organizations – Vanderbilt...

The coming changes to Google’s privacy settings were announced a while ago, but they’ll betaking effect tomorrow, so it’s worth a reminder. The new settings will allow Google to share your data between apps, something it never did before. This means that your web-browsing history may start influencing the ads you see in Gmail, or that the items on your Calendar might start influncing the ads you see on Google Maps. There’s nothing you can really do to stop this, but you can, however, limit the information shared if you remove your Google web history today, before it starts getting shared around tomorrow. Fortunately, removing your Google web history couldn’t be easier. Here’s how you do it: Log into your Google Account. Navigate  to google.com/history Click Remove all web history How To Delete Google Web History Before Policy Change |...

Gmail is implementing new subtle, but useful changes! +1 for team User...

Microsoft’s latest attempt to purchase Yahoo is gaining momentum again. According to The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is working with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Silver Lake Partners, a private equity firm, to put together a bid to purchase Yahoo. Microsoft Bid for Yahoo Building Momentum [REPORT]. Very interesting!  Whether or not they they will roll up their email systems remains to be...

TechCrunch is on the precipice. As soon as tomorrow, Mike may be thrown out of the company he founded. Or he may not. No one knows. And if he is, he will be replaced by — well, again, no one knows. No one knows much of anything. Certainly no one at TechCrunch. This site is about to change forever and we’re in the total fucking dark. I’ve been able to piece together little bits of information here and there, and it’s not looking good. Hence, this post. TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over | TechCrunch Not particularly surprised by this. Tech news is not exempt from the perils of big media takeovers. I’m actually surprised they lasted this long. Nothing good can come from AOL…   Still though, RIP for what you once were, a really cool place for start up news, bleeding edge tech discoveries and other things of that nature.  ...