Posts filed under “technology”

Aw man. I got hacked (or something) and an obviously spam message got posted in my twitter feed. Of course, I’ve had my account suspended, pending investigation. I should be back up within a month, according to twitter. I don’t know whether the error is twitter’s or mine, but needless to say every place where I used the same password as for twitter has been changed, just in case. All in all, not as painful as it might have been, I guess!

Having apparently abandoned former principles of simplicity and unintrusiveness, Google now punishes account holders by sticking coloured icons next to every Google search result and, worse, animating them on a mouse-over of the result. Obnoxious! There currently seems to be no setting to remove these that I could find, but I figured a way to use AdBlock to hide them away.

Read this old, unsurprising report in New Scientist. From the article:

Automated trading …has come to account for more than half of trades in many markets around the globe. …Because of the finite speed of light, trading speed depends on where you are sitting. …“The basic insight,” says Wissner-Gross, “is that the optimal location lets the trader exploit fluctuations equally on both exchanges.” …“This shows that the technological arms race to extract every penny from high-frequency mechanical arbitrage will soon reach its ultimate limits,” says physicist and hedge-fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

If this is how money and the free markets work now, I’m pretty sure we no longer know what words mean.