#Technology and the Internet

[pc98-rom]

[prokopetz]

I was exactly the right age at exactly the right transitional period in history to have been an unsupervised preteen on dial-up BBSes, Usenet, IRC, and first-generation web forums, more or less in that order, so all things considered I think I'm doing pretty well.

[spongebobssquarepants]

[yodaprod]

Burger King Internet corner, New York (1998)

[political-us]

[thisischeri]

instagram: cheri.png

[meanya]

I saw a post before about how hackers are now feeding Google false phone numbers for major companies so that the AI Overview will suggest scam phone numbers, but in case you haven't heard,

PLEASE don't call ANY phone number recommended by AI Overview

unless you can follow a link back to the OFFICIAL website and verify that that number comes from the OFFICIAL domain.

My friend just got scammed by calling a phone number that was SUPPOSED to be a number for Microsoft tech support according to the AI Overview

It was not, in fact, Microsoft. It was a scammer. Don't fall victim to these scams. Don't trust AI generated phone numbers ever.

[ahb-writes]

(from The Mitchells vs. the Machines, 2021)

[fynnigano]

inside every man are two wolves and one of them is a tech geek

[pc98-rom]

Gus, 2007

[pixxietart]

[prokopetz]

I kind of love it when websites both display relative timestamps for an unreasonably long span of time before switching to absolute timestamps and use unreasonable units for the span in question. "This post was made 37 weeks ago" under what conceivable circumstance is this a useful way to communicate that?

[digitalismmm]

Landfill

[yodaprod]

Learn Windows 95 VHS (1997)

[longreads]

If 😂 was a word, would that make emoji a language?

NEW on Longreads today: An excerpt from Keith Houston’s new book, FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY: A NATURAL HISTORY OF EMOJI, which tells the entire history of emoji so far. 

In 2015, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary named 😂 the Word of the Year. In this excerpt, “The Emoji Tongue,” Houston explores language, the rapidly changing ways we communicate around the world, and these colorful disruptors we know today as emoji.

Just as the same sequence of letters can mean different things in different languages, some emoji mean different things in different cultural contexts. In Japan, for instance, 🙏 means “thank you” and not “praying” or “high five” as it does in other places. The Japanese words for “poo” and “luck” sound similar, and so 💩has connotations of serendipity that do not travel well.

Read the chapter, “The Emoji Tongue,” on Longreads.

[thisischeri]

instagram: cheri.png