Having announced that it will alter it’s TOS across all products to create a mono-culture, a.k.a. Walled Garden, Google is preparing to upset and worry a LOT of people. These days, it’s hard to even believe that there are options for good search engines out there other than Google.

Behold. Something else. Is it any good? It’s put through some simple paces…

Based on recent observations, scientists have concluded that the observable Universe might not exist.

Have a nice day wrapping your head around that.

“Put it on my tab,” say your name, walk out with merchandise never having a hand in your pocket, on cash or on a pen to sign your name. You’re living the life, right? Actually, yeah – that kind of in and out at a restaurant, bakery, book store or music shop would make your life cooler than The Italian Job! I’ve kept my eye on Square Up despite the little hiccups and it’s paid off.

Flooding in Thailand has caused Western Digital to suspend manufacturing and Chinese hard drive makers like Seagate have also been affected with some of their components come from water logged Thailand.

A few days ago, my computer began opening a folder called Common when Windows XP starts. I feared the worst, but it’s mostly nothing. Making it stop is as simple and harmless as changing the name of the folder or deleting the folder. Why it comes up is of possible interest….

In an old game, Shadowrun, IC were virtual reality Intrusion Countermeasures players used to fend off hacks and attacks. No one said at the time, Ha! I’m a Mac, you can’t touch me. But that’s what tons of users are doing in real life today and there’s bad news dumping by the metric ton out the pipes about MacHacks.

It’s absolutely brilliant. After having been caught storing cell phone location data in an unprotected database, Apple just flatly denied everything and go on to unapologetically contradict their own denial. They certainly don’t charm their accusers either: “Users are confused.” I mean, it’s really absolutely amazing that they published this Q&A! This is exactly what John Cleese would do in a response meant to irritate someone.

But, it should be said, we love you in spite of yourselves… There’s a website I recommended a long time ago called Hunch.com and it serves up thousands of simple questions for you to answer. The process isn’t as exciting as a kitten picture of the day, but the results of the information the site gathers can be pretty interesting – recently: The rematch of Mac vs. PC people based on their answers to Hunch.com’s questions about almost everything!

Infographics are one of my favorite things. After women, of course…

Yes, HAS BEEN all this time. New iPhones, it’s just discovered, have a little, tiny SQLite database file tracking your Lat. and Long. and Altitude almost constantly. The IT Forensics community has known about this a long time but thought nothing of it – they thought we all knew. It seems that even Uber geeks, however, didn’t know; and they’re ringing the alarm on Apple.

MPEG LA is attacking VP8, “we have no dog in this fight.” They stand to lose over 1,700 patents slowly and surly if the free VP8 goes mainstream. They do indeed have over 1,700 dogs in this fight.