Shortened URLs are long web addresses that are compacted for the sake of brevity. They are very popular with users of Twitter, where the total…
The OPLIN 4cast Posts
OPLIN 4cast #456: Password (in)sanity
Posted in 4cast
Passwords, passwords, when are we ever going to quit talking about passwords? Perhaps sooner than you might think. The huge hack of the Ashley Madison…
Last month, The Atlantic published an extensive article (linked below) about problems Wikipedia was having with supposedly volunteer editors posting things on Wikipedia for financial…
OPLIN 4cast #454: Arduino and the IoT
Posted in 4cast
It has been a little over two years since we speculated that Arduino boards might become a common component of library Maker Spaces. As we…
About a month ago, Intel Corporation and Micron Technology, Inc. announced a “breakthrough in memory technology.” 3D XPoint™ is said to be the largest advance…
OPLIN 4cast #452: Should we block ads?
Posted in 4cast
Since the 1930s, people have said, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” and this certainly applies to “free” information on the Internet.…
OPLIN 4cast #451: Bracing for 5G
Posted in 4cast
We are about to hear a lot of hype and hoopla about 5G wireless. If the rollout of 4G is any indication, wireless carriers will…
As we all know, the Internet contains a lot of bleak and nasty stuff, and some of the bleakest and nastiest is child pornography. For…
About eleven months ago, we devoted a 4cast post to Tor, leading off with a Boing Boing article by Alison Macrina about libraries in Massachusetts…
OPLIN 4cast #448: Pro-am cybersecurity
Posted in 4cast
Last week, while this blog was scaring you with tales of hackers-for-hire, the Google folks were presenting some interesting security practices research [pdf] at the…