Technology Futures

Those digital photo frames that are becoming popular hold more than pictures. Millions of them apparently come pre-loaded with a potent virus designed to thwart computer anti-virus programs. The virus is spread from the frame to a computer when the frame is plugged into a USB port.

The virus is difficult to remove, and the article recommends plugging a suspect picture frame into a Linux or Macintosh first to see what is stored in the frame memory (and then deleting it).

If you live in Paris and have the new 100 megabit fiber to the home service, it only takes about ten minutes to download a high quality version of a one hour TV show. Here in the U.S., the FCC has announced that more than 95% of the U.S. has broadband. The FCC defines "broadband" as "anything faster than 256 kilobits, or about 400 times slower than the current Parisian definition of broadband.

I continue to be amazed that we seem to be abandoning the phone, which continues to be highly reliable, in favor of email, which is much less reliable.

Twice in the past couple of weeks two different people commented that I had been "out of touch." In both cases, they had sent me email. For different reasons, both emails had gone astray, and they assumed I was ignoring them. But I just had not received the emails. In one case, the email was delivered several days late--no apparent reason--it just happened. In another case, the email was sent to an account that I do not check daily.

But neither individual thought to pick up the phone and call, and I've seen this happen enough that it seems to be a trend. All sorts of things can happen to email--it can be filtered as spam, we can delete it accidentally when trying to select multiple messages, it can be discarded by a server if an attachment that is too large. The sender can have a typo in the address that sends it to the wrong person, as just a few examples.

Some of my colleagues and I find text messages useful to verify the availability of someone. Text messages are unobtrusive and represent a completely different communications channel that works well most of the time.

It is strange that in a time of so many communications options, we still have trouble communicating.

Now rumors are circulating that Yahoo! may partner with Google to avoid the likely ignominious end of the company via a Microsoft acquisition.

Google has already started preparing for an anti-trust challenge if Microsoft is successful, so it is hard to see how Google could argue that hitching Yahoo! to behemoth Microsoft is bad but hitching Yahoo! to gargantuan Google is good.

Whatever the outcome may be, it sounds like users of free services are in for less choice and more ads. The alternative is to simply stop using "free" services and pay for things like personal email accounts, which cost a pittance these days. It is easy to find email accounts for under $100 per year, and those accounts come with a wide range of features and services that are not always available with the free services, and are ad-free--well worth the money to some.