Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing.net writes:

Theresa May says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read" -- and no doubt many in her party will agree with her, politically. But if they understood the technology, they would be shocked to their boots.

Perhaps we should no longer assume that politicians 'do not understand the internet' and assume they are asking for changes in the full understanding that they don't achieve the goal for which they're introduced.

As long as the situation that's being created is more favourable for them than the current one it's a net benefit.

Short-term politics is the biggest threat to UK society at the moment and the current government is particularly good at it.

#security

Amazon Go, shopping without checkouts:

Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required. We created the world’s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line. With our Just Walk Out Shopping experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go!

With the amount of recorded prior art they will find it difficult to pantent the Just Walk Out technology  ;-)

#link #technology

I think we have stumbled upon the reason why there are no new Macs. Apple was wasting resources on the car.

Apple Inc. has drastically scaled back its automotive ambitions, leading to hundreds of job cuts and a new direction that, for now, no longer includes building its own car, according to people familiar with the project.

[..]

Zadesky handed the reins to his boss, Dan Riccio, adding to responsibilities that already included engineering annual iPhone, iPad, and Mac refreshes.

Source: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit - Bloomberg

#link #technology

Dropbox was using a sql attack on the tcc database to circumvent Apple’s authorization policy

Another issue like this and a lot of people will switch to iCloud Drive.

#link #technology

The UK government had setup the Independent Commision on Freedom of Information with an eye to review the Freedom Of Information Act:

Last year, the government set up a commission to review the law, composed mostly of people who had expressed scepticism or concern about the scope of the FOIA, and with a clear brief to add restrictions to its workings.

Not my definition of independent.

#aside #technology

Apple blogger John Gruber started off a new debate about these issues recently, when he noted that a 537-word text post on the website iMore.com weighed in at 14 megabytes. (Fourteen megabytes of text should correspond to about 7m words, or about 10 times the combined length of the Old and New Testaments.)

Gruber blamed iMore.com, but really it’s not the website’s fault, since to a very large degree the owner of the website you’re visiting doesn’t actually control what you see, when you see it, how you see it, or even whether you see it. Instead, there are dozens of links in the advertising-technology chain, and every single one of them is optimising for financial value, rather than low-bandwidth user experience. Many pages, if you’re on a slow connection, simply time out; they never load at all.

When you are a website owner, you are responsible for all the content on your site. If you don't have any control over the ads, then that's a process issue that should be addressed.

Why not band together with a few large sites and create a standardised ad submission and review system that advertisers can integrate into their content tools and websites can set criteria about ads on their sites.

Maybe the bigger problem is that those websites cannot afford to reject ads.

#link #web

Schneier explained how, initially, NSA Director General Keith Alexander claimed in 2013 that he had disrupted 54 terrorists plots. A few months later, this was revised down to 13, and then to "one or two." Eventually, the only success that the NSA could point to was the prevention of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group.

Doesn't sound like a worthy trade-off.

#link #technology

Today’s experience of trying to watch the formula 1 race at Silverstone was a frustration of modern technology and drm issues:

#technology

Rupert Murdoch will today face the humiliation of the Commons issuing a unanimous all-party call for his scandal-ridden News Corporation to withdraw its £8bn bid for BSkyB, the great commercial prize he has been pursuing to cement his dominance of the British media landscape.

In an extraordinary volte-face, David Cameron will disown the media tycoon by leading his party through the lobbies to urge him to drop the bid. Murdoch can defy parliament and press ahead with the bid, prompting a Competition Commission inquiry, but he risks finding himself ostracised by a political class that once scrambled to bend to his wishes.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with MPs no longer wishing to be associated with a news organisation that might give them certain favours. I still have yet to find a convincing argument on BSkyB being related to the phone hacking scandal. Until then there must be other, presently unknown, reasons for this change in direction.

via The Guardian.

#technology

Interesting article on personal support via impersonal website:

via How to meet interesting people (with Olark) « Borski.

#technology #web

Facebook's users are not connecting directly with each other. They are speaking to Mr. Zuckerberg, who first writes down and files away everything said, and then maybe relays it to the intended destination, if it suits him.

Mark Zuckerberg is TIME Magazine's Person of the Year? Where's the "dislike" button?

#technology

I'd post the other two examples, but I wouldn't want to take all the fun out of reading the manual.

Source: stackoverflow.com

#technology

Dear sir/madam,
I am writing you to complain about the new ministry of sound website and the lack of data protection with regards to your users.

Earlier today I received an email notification about the new MoS website. The email also notified me that a new password was issued to use on the website. These are two characteristics of a phishing mail - in this case launching a new website and sending out new passwords, they could easily have been sent from a malicious source wanting me to login to their MoS-lookalike website and take my credit card details. You shouldn't send out a new password unless someone requests it on your website, because email can be forged. You also sent out my password in plain text email rather than on a secure part of your website. Anyone can read it and login to my account and purchase orders.

Also to my surprise while investigating the source of the mail, several of the links point to a http://www.c-f-1.com/ domain (update: this domain name no longer exists!), the name doesn't help to improve the trust in your email. To my astonishment the link led to a webpage with the html email, again with my password in plain sight. Have a look (link removed), I changed my password already. Let's wait for Google to index it so that anyone can search for my account information. They already found other newsletters.

Finally, I used mosdownload.com to buy my mp3s online. This site no longer works as an error comes up when it tries to redirect, due to a configuration error. My order history is gone, most of my profile is gone.

I'm very disappointed with your lack of security and care for your customers and unfortunately have come to the conclusion that I won't be using your service again, and I will recommend my friends and family to do the same, due to these trust issues.

#technology #web

Just been reading Gizmo's article on disabling Google's text advertisements. I'm realizing it has come this far: people have been increasingly annoyed by advertising on their favourite websites. N now even Google's textads are targeted because a small percentage puts the ads on the page people have become annoyed. So they disable the ads. That's their right.

However that leaves millions of bloggers without a possible revenue stream to support their writing so I am thinking what it can be replaced with. I've no idea. Personally I wouldn't donate to a website because I liked a certain article, donationware works best for 'tools'. I don't think I can get paid for putting legitimate search results underneath a post, which would be a benefit to readers, which is a shame. Subscription services go against the nature of the web (hiding content from public). I wouldn't buy a mug just because i read a website. Maybe that means that it's just too hard for an individual to recoup their costs?

That said, the majority of people will not have Adsense blocked. And I think the majority of bloggers don't blog for money, but because they like to discuss.

Credit: Photo by mwagner01

#technology

Acquiring feedback on web projects can be harder than you'd think, especially when you're working on internal projects that don't get discussed on outside your organization. By making feedback a fun, easy and rewarding thing to do more people might be encouraged to help us and put in the effort.

I'm sure some of you are in a similar situation: you launch a project and silence follows. Trivial problems might emerge but a there's no general response to the long hours you put in. That makes it much harder to evaluate the project and set a schedule for future developments.

To help with this we've created a UserVoice page. Let's describe it as a digg-like FAQ. People are encouraged to leave a message, can vote on feedback they find important, and always have the full picture of what the development is focused on. Developers act on the consensus and theoretically will work on solving the most urgent issues.

Of course this model will work best when both users and developers care enough to communicate. So Uservoice is engineered to make it trivial to leave a message. It can be easily integrated into an existing site. Some functionality requires a user account, which is a stumbling block. But you can leave feedback without it, which is a bonus. Oh and it doesn't integrate with any bug trackers which is a shame.

Will it work and will there be enough participation? Ask me again in 6 months time. I'm not sure how to make it any easier though.

#technology

I'd like to start recommending webservices  and software that I use frequently. Any product recommended has been evaluated for at least several weeks. In today's recommended we feature Instapaper. (Recommendation articles are personal opinions with no benefit for the author)

What does Instapaper do? Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.

We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

http://www.instapaper.com/

#technology #web

Should simple software be free:

During the chat, the entire MacBreak Weekly crew discussed the danger to the music industry that comes from younger listeners having a built-in expectation that music should be free.

On this episode I believe [Leo Laporte] has inadvertently helped to perpetuate the same kind of thinking about software that the panel had just finished expressing concern about with regard to music: the idea that the hard-earned fruits of somebody’s creative labor should be free.

http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/481/it-should-be-free

#technology

Mike Davies works as a web developer for Yahoo Europe and has some insightful comments on the Internet Explorer rendering switch (see source).

When a user upgrades from IE7 to IE8, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. When a user upgrades from IE8 to IE9, they will be upgrading from IE7 to IE7. Notice the trend. [...]
Effectively, with this meta tag proposal, Microsoft have either absolutely guaranteed that they will remain the dominant browser on the web, or it has sown the seeds for its ultimate destruction. If it's dominant IE7 will be the instrument to hold back all standards compliant progress, just like IE6 before it.

Source [isolani.co.uk]

I can only agree. It seems to me the switch will result in better fitting websites, but not by using more standards. But I noticed this at the whole Eolas patent debacle: the IE team doesn't take enough responsibility regarding standards. Even though the code was fine they wanted developers to implement a javascript workaround for their own workaround solution in all their pages with embedded content. They didn't want to (or couldn't) pay Eolas so people now have to click to start embedded media. Even though it's a browser issue.

And the same happens in this case: if the browser vendor took its responsibility and improved its implementation, the whole issue  wouldn't exist for webdevelopers' if their sites written to standards (and valid) don't display properly. So the whole "the users have to be protected from broken pages" card is a smoke screen in my opinion.

Just be frank then: corporate partners costcutting is more important to Microsoft than the freedom of the web.

#technology

All you need now is a mirror to see your own shirt:

This Wi-Fi Detector Shirt will detect Wi-Fi hot spots around you and will show you a signal each time it detects a working Wi-Fi spot.The Wi-Fi shirt will even show you the signal strength of the Wi-Fi hot spot around you and will animate the signal dynamically.

Source: Sizelopedia via Cybernetnews

#technology

Oliver Rist brings us the latest rant on Leopard not being as rock-solid as Tiger. His informative article *cough* starts like this:

I'm not sure what ticks me off more about Leoptard (I can't take credit for that nickname—some Brit coined it): the fact that so many of the semi-important changes don't work, the fact that Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest, or that the annoying, scruffy Live Free or Die Hard actor infecting my TV (and our Web site, by the way) is pretending that Leopard is better than Vista.

Lesson 1: Any article that starts with a sentence like that is not journalism. I thought better of pcmag.com! Well not anymore. Between that and the sidebar enty "Why social networking stinks" pcmag just lost a lot of credit in my book. No thanks Oliver Ristard.

Thanks to the Donationcoder thread (yeah I am the user justice, I'm not ripping off other people's posts)

#technology