About Chris Pollette

Chris Pollette

Chris Pollette's interest in technology goes back some time, and he has the hardware to prove it; he's the proud owner of an Atari 2600, a Commodore Amiga 1000 and a Coleco Telstar. He's even got a slide rule around here somewhere. Chris is a former newspaper reporter and editor, and has a bachelor's degree in English from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn. He currently edits HowStuffWorks.com’s Computer and Electronics channels and co-hosts the “TechStuff” podcast with senior writer Jonathan Strickland.

Most Recent: Chris Pollette Postings

Unfriending — What does it mean?

by Chris Pollette

November 20, 2009
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One of the stories that gets lots of press this time of the year is what word the dictionary publishers have chosen to be the Word of the Year. This year, the New Oxford American Dictionary featured “unfriend” as the word of the year. Jon Gordon of American Public Media’s Future Tense interviewed Ammon Shea, consulting editor with the Oxford University Press, on why his company made the decision to include “unfriend.”

The word is a verb, and means to remove a person from your list of contacts on social media networks. In a lot of cases, these folks have been referred to as “friends,” though depending on the network, you may or may not have a deep enough relationship with them to be actual friends with them.

Actually, just a couple of days later in Future Tense, some people said they use “defriend” instead. Shea said the publisher chose “unfriend” because the editors found it to be more common.

by Chris Pollette

November 18, 2009
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T-Mobile is the fourth-biggest wireless phone provider in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Recently, however, the company is suffering a string of public relations fiascoes. In the United States, there was the situation in which Sidekick phone users found that their information went missing — it didn’t matter to a lot of people that the hardware on which the data was stored wasn’t owned by T-Mobile, it just mattered that their Sidekicks were T-Mobile phones.

Then the wireless carrier’s network went out. Earlier this month, as Ina Fried wrote, lots of people (myself included) found themselves unable to make calls on their T-Mobile phones on November 3 because of a network outage.

Now from the United Kingdom comes news that a T-Mobile employee allegedly sold personal information on thousands of customers to third parties, according to the BBC and the Guardian. Richard Wray of the Guardian said the data breach was the biggest of its kind to date…

by Chris Pollette

November 17, 2009
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There’s been a lot of business talk going on this past week. HP acquired 3Com. Intel paid a massive settlement to AMD. Google bought VoIP company Gizmo5. And it’s apparently not over. MySpace is in the process of acquiring Imeem. Peter Kafka at AllThingsD wrote that he’s confirmed the story, which was originally reported by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch.

by Chris Pollette

November 13, 2009
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Yet again, Facebook appears to be at the heart of a scandal. Except, this time the scandal isn’t so — well, scandalous. My friend Sarah shared this story with me this morning. It appears that Principal Thomas Murray at Danvers High School in Massachusetts objects to students saying “meep” in school. According to the Associated Press, students were using Facebook to coordinate a major disruption.

So the school sent out an automated call that told parents about the ban on meeping. Theoretically, that should be it. But GeekDad’s Matt Blum thinks that with other technological means, the kids will still find a way to meep. They’ll text message one another and coordinate that way.

Sarah Netter at ABC also wrote about the meeping. The word can mean whatever the speaker wants, according to her research at the Urban Dictionary. She also quoted Syracuse University professor Bob Thompson, who said he’d heard students meeping a year ago as they watched a TV show in class.

by Chris Pollette

November 11, 2009
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Earlier this week, we released the TechStuff podcast Jonathan and I recorded about the hackintosh. As you already know, Apple’s Macintosh is a closed system — they produce the hardware and the software both. It makes for an elegant solution, because in general the machines and operating system are tailored to each other and work well together.

One downside of this is that Apple charges a premium for its computers. So if you like OS X and want to run it on your desktop, you have to buy a Macintosh computer. If you don’t mind, it works out; Apple hasn’t released a lot of underpowered machines lately. But if you’re on a budget, you just might be buying a PC. Also, if you prefer netbooks, you’re also out of luck, since Apple’s stance on the issue is that the company can’t make a netbook of the quality that Apple can get behind.

by Chris Pollette

November 10, 2009
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Now that eBay has reached a settlement with Joltid over the Global Index Software peer-to-peer technology that powers Skype, Skype won’t need VoIP provider Gizmo5 to fall back on. And that’s lucky, since according to the rumor mill, Gizmo5 now belongs to Google, for the tidy sum of $30 million. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch broke the story yesterday.

by Chris Pollette

November 6, 2009
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A California company called BlueBeat has been selling MP3 tracks for 25 cents each and streaming them for free. Online music retail is pretty much old news, though the price point is low enough to attract attention. But as Macworld’s Jonathan Seff wrote, the site is also selling the Beatles’ catalog — without a license. Seff pointed out that the site’s terms of use say that if users feel that the music posted to the site has been uploaded in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, then they can contact the people running the site to have it removed.

There’s also a warning, Seff said, that false accusations can be penalized under the DMCA.

Well, apparently EMI, the company that owns the rights to the Beatles’ catalog, filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement and had a temporary restraining order granted to stop the site from continuing its business.

by Chris Pollette

November 5, 2009
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Privacy in the digital age is a matter of some concern. One of the things about electronic files is that they’re easy to duplicate and transfer. And lots of companies are storing lots of personal information. After all, they’re using it to market goods and services to you. It’s big business.

That’s why Google’s recent move toward transparency is a big deal. Miguel Helft wrote an article in The New York Times about it. The announcement came at a privacy conference in Spain earlier today. Google will be offering a new service (how many times have I written that in blog posts this year?) called Google Dashboard. All of the information you’ve supplied in your various Google service accounts will be listed there, including Gmail, Picasa, Checkout, Reader and others.

Actually, as Helft pointed out, Google Dashboard isn’t all that revolutionary, because that information was available to the user through the account settings pages on the individual services.

by Chris Pollette

November 4, 2009
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Microprocessor manufacturer Intel has been fielding legal complaints against it in Europe and Asia for a while now, but this morning New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a lawsuit against the company for anti-competitive practices.

According to Ashlee Vance’s article in The New York Times, the state claims that Intel has been using its position in the microprocessor marketplace to strong-arm Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) out of the way, which violates both state and national law.

by Chris Pollette

October 30, 2009
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My friend Rob pointed this story out to me the other day, but today was the day that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (that’s ICANN) agreed to go ahead with the Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process Friday morning, allowing non-Roman characters to be used in top-level domain names.