This article is based on rumor, granted, but why would Starbucks otherwise be covering up their wall outlets?

I remember back in the day, just being able to find a power outlet in a coffee shop was like finding gold. Today it’s pretty accepted. But sitting there all day and using Starbuck’s power to charge all your portable devices? C’mon: There’s going to be backlash, people!

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It blows me away, but just under 50 percent of the Windows users on the Internet are still using Windows XP. Golly!

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That yellow warning atop the Google search page is real. Pay heed to it. Seeing the warning means that your computer is infected with a virus, one that redirects your Google searches through a proxy server. That means the results you see are tainted, often leading to other sites that further cause you woe. Be careful out there!

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When she inquired about a $4.19 charge on her bill, a Verizon customer was told to hire a lawyer and get a subpoena to discover what the charge was about. This episode ends well.

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Is your Hotmail password ilovecats? If so, you should change it. Not because its a weak, common password, but because Hotmail has decided to boost password security. As such, they’re not letting users assign passwords like 123456 and password and, of course, ilovecats.

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The grandaddy of them all, BYTE magazine has made a return to the world — the digital world.

Once upon a time, back when computer users were hobbyists and magazines were the way they learned about new stuff, BYTE was the king. There were other magazines as well, lots of them.

Most of the magazines were specific to your computer: PC World, PC Computing, PC Magazine for the PC; Nibble, InCider, SoftTalk for the Apple II; MacWorld and MacUser for the Macintosh; Compute! for just about everything else.

There were also computer news magazines like InfoWorld, nerd-specific magazines like Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Oh, and some magazines like Computer Shopper that occasionally were as thick as a phone book. I’m not kidding.

Anyway. BYTE is supposedly back.

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See a car wreck? an ‘accident’? Odds are 1:4 that that mishap was caused by an electronic gizmo.

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Facebook falters? Tell me it isn’t so!

First you have news that Facebook’s rapid-rise use of MySQL is straining the site; the servers are overloaded and it’s only a matter of time before they come crashing down.

Or perhaps not, because:

Second, Google is taking on Facebook in the social networking arena. This competition is something Google is good at. Remember Yahoo? Remember WebCrawler? Remember all the other search engines of 12 years ago? How about Yahoo Mail and Hotmail?

Google has a history of taking on established players and knocking their teeth in. The Google+ social network may just be the thing to knock Facebook off the top.

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In the It’s About Frickin’ Time category, ISPs are now going to be fighting those scumbags who illegally download films, music, and other media. I. Am. Thrilled.

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Here is an interview done by Alan Weinkrantz back at the NYC Book Expo back in May.

You can visit Alan’s site at: http://www.alanweinkrantz.com/