internet (Page 14)

Even if you didn’t put it there! – How bad can things get? A computer virus can place porn on your computer without your knowing it, and if the police search your computer, as happened to a couple recently, they could arrest you for having child pornography.

This could be done by someone looking for a place to “stash” nasty photos (where he can retrieve them later) or by someone playing a particularly unpleasant joke. Security expert Jeremiah Grossman says, “Just because it’s there doesn’t mean the person intended for it to be there, whatever it is, child porn included.”
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And who invented the slash? – Tired of having to always type in “forward slash, forward slash” when you visit a website? Well, the scientist who created those slashes as part of web addresses now regrets that he did it that way. And to protect yourself from computer viruses, you may soon have ants in your computer.

BBC News reports that Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web 30 years ago, admits that the // in a web address were actually “unnecessary” and he could easily have designed URLs without them, but “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” BBC quotes him as saying that he had no idea that the forward slashes in every web address would cause “so much hassle.”
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If your internet connection slows down, you usually blame your system or your server. But it could also be the weather: The internet may slow down when the weather is cold.

In Wired.com, Cliff Kuang asked some engineers about this, and they replied that temperature could affect the conductivity of the copper wires in the system, since the electrical conductivity of a metal falls as the temperature rises, meaning that cold weather would slow things down (it turns out that most of the world’s cable is made out of copper). But Kuang quotes engineer Doug Webster as saying that “the infrastructure is engineered to counter those effects.”
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It was about corn syrup! – It’s evil corn again: On Saturday, August 15 Whitley Strieber posted an article tohis Facebook account from the Washington Post about a study that showed that high fructose corn syrup contains mercury.

Facebook blockedaccess to the Washington Post article, claiming that it wasabusive. Whitley’s post asked the question: “Could this be why we Americans seem so easy to fool? Have we been dumbed down by this?” This was followed by the linkto the article that offended Facebook.
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