All software contain bugs. All complex software contain numerous bugs. Some of those bugs are security holes. When you hear that a software vendor has found and fixed a security problem that means that somehow that specific bug came up on someone’s radar. People who find these holes for a living, and there are quite...

Bitcoin press has gone through the roof in the last few weeks. So has the exchange rate between traditional currencies and bitcoins - a fact that has seen as many different explanations as I’ve seen people wrapping their heads around the Bitcoin concept and writing about it. One of the explanations is that there’s a...

As I’m writing this, I have 20 tabs open in my web browser. Of those, the five latest are newly opened and temporary part of things I’m currently researching. 15 tabs are fixed, they’re always the same. Those tabs contain the websites I visit everyday, my most important windows into the Internet. Controlling one of...

A report from the World Bank is making rounds in media today. While portraying catastrophic scenarios, it contains no new actual research and is simply extrapolating statistical possibilities. Unfortunately the media headlines aren’t really reflecting the content - not unusual regardless of the topic. However, it...

An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and...

In the spring of 2008 I sat in the audience at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, watching Clay Shirky on stage. His talk about the cognitive heat sink, on how television had disrupted humanity from spending large parts of our time on being creative, on producing things we wanted to produce, to being simple receivers of...

Följande text skrev jag den 5e september 2003 för eventuell publikation i en svensk tidning. Såvitt jag kommer ihåg skedde aldrig det, och eftersom jag nyligen oväntat stötte på den på en gammal del av hårddisken återpublicerar jag den här nu. Man kan tycka att den är väldigt aktuell med tanke på att straffskatten...

Swedish news papers are launching digital versions on Apple’s iPad - and seem to be somewhat surprised that they’re now going to have to comply with a set of rules that are very different from what they’re usually operating under. Spotify’s music library reflects a specific set of values, morality and legal system...

A few months ago I had to give up using my Mac Mini as my primary personal computer. I couldn’t put my finger on when, but looking back I realized it had gotten slower and slower to use since the day of purchase, and while I could understand that having two users logged on all the time while running a few services...

Idag lät Sydsvenskan ungdomar bedöma valaffischer - vilket en del verkar förlöjliga eftersom ungdomspanelen så tydligt uttrycker helt andra åsikter än de politiskt rationella i sina val. Ungdomarna har dock så klart rätt, det är precis så irrationellt - emotionellt - vi bedömer den typen av korta budskap. Eftersom...

Häromdagen råkade ett svenskt par ut för att någon kopierade ett fotografiskt verk de skapat och använde utan korrekt licens. När rättighetsinnehavarna, paret ifråga, kontaktade polisen fick de till svar att det inte är brottsligt att använda andras bilder på Internet. Intressant. Även om fotografier har en egen...

Apple might like to polish their user interfaces, but sometimes the logic underneath is … less polished. I’ve had to transfer large amounts of data from one external USB disk to another today. Running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac Mini. Guess which one of the following graphs show the faster method?...