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I love Path’s homepage:
But that doesn’t make me less concerned about their lack of respect for user privacy.
David Jacobs, a fellow with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, noted that, once again, an Internet company showed a lack of understanding about the consequences of taking data.
Lawyers I spoke with said that my address book — which contains my reporting sources at companies and in government — is protected under the First Amendment. On Path’s servers, it is frightfully open for anyone to see and use, because the company did not encrypt the data.
Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at Cisco, says start-ups often do not build apps with security in mind: “Attackers are like electricity; they like to follow the track of least resistance.†…
It seems the management philosophy of “ask for forgiveness, not permission†is becoming the “industry best practice.†And based on the response to Mr. Morin, tech executives are even lauded for it.
Posted in Technology, The Interwebs |
TiVo’s latest round of HD UI updates are quite nice, though I still don’t understand why half the system operates on the old SD menus years after the HD interface was released. Anyone know the story? I’m really curious.
Posted in Miscellany |
One of my goals this year was to support the Mozilla Foundation by switching back to Firefox. I believe that the future of a free and open internet depends on a diversity of tools, software, etc – Firefox and WordPress are two great examples of that.
So I switched to Firefox and ditched Chrome for a month, and it turns out at Firefox is as big a memory hog as people say. My Macbook, which I’ll admit is due for replacement, slowed to a crawl every day. A month later, I’m back on Chrome. Sorry, Mozilla.
Posted in Business, Technology, The Interwebs |
I’m a sucker for explorations of language, so this Economist column made me happy:
In the upper reaches of the British establishment, euphemism is a fine art, one that new arrivals need to master quickly. “Other Whitehall agencies†or “our friends over the river†means the intelligence services (American spooks often say they “work for the governmentâ€). A civil servant warning a minister that a decision would be “courageous†is saying that it will be career-cripplingly unpopular. “Adventurous†is even worse: it means mad and unworkable. A “frank discussion†is a row, while a “robust exchange of views†is a full-scale shouting match. (These kind of euphemisms are also common in Japanese, where the reply maemuki ni kento sasete itadakimasu—I will examine it in a forward-looking manner—means something on the lines of “This idea is so stupid that I am cross you are even asking me and will certainly ignore it.â€)
Euphemism is so ingrained in British speech that foreigners, even those who speak fluent English, may miss the signals contained in such bland remarks as “incidentally†(which means, “I am now telling you the purpose of this discussionâ€); and “with the greatest respect†(“You are mistaken and sillyâ€). This sort of code allows the speaker to express anger, contempt or outright disagreement without making the emotional investment needed to do so directly. Some find that cowardly.
Posted in The World | Tagged language |
If you’ve been on Facebook/Twitter/The Internet lately, you’ve likely seen this graphic, which purports to make it easy to understand why the US is in fiscal trouble. Of course, that graphic doesn’t tell the whole story, and is, quite frankly, idiotic. But I’ll continue the metaphor since people love thinking this is so simple.
A dozen years ago, your accountant, Bill Clinton, had some good news for you: “You’ve got about $56,000 in debt. But if you keep bringing money in like this, you don’t have to put any more debt on those credit cards and can finally pay down the debt that your old accountant, Ronald Reagan, encouraged you to run up.” Continue reading →
Posted in Economics, Government |
Posted in Business, Economics, The World |
Stories like this make me want to move forward with Shop Conscious, a pet project I’ve been mulling for 2 years now:
According to reports, dozens of workers at a Chinese factory that assembles Xbox 360 consoles threatened to jump off a dormitory roof. The rooftop protest began on Jan 2, following plans to close the Xbox assembly line, with workers saying that Foxconn reneged on a promise to compensate anyone wanting to leave.
While an incident of this scale is unusual, suicides at Foxconn factories are far from unheard of. A suicide cluster in 2010 saw 14 deaths, with workers throwing themselves from the tops of the company’s buildings. Last year employees were asked to sign a ‘no suicide’ pact in response to the rise in suicides, and the company unveiled plans to install safety nets around its buildings, to keep workers from jumping to their deaths.
Does your spending match your values?
Posted in Business, The World |
When my mom is an early adopter of something, I tend to think it’s important. She’s been raving about Pinterest for many months now and as of this writing has pinned 1,990 items on the site. (Here she is, if you’re curious). My sister and a few other friends – mostly women – are also in love with Pinterest. It’s giving them a spot to record and remember the creativity of others to inspire more creativity in their own lives, which I think is awesome.
But my sister tells me that Pinterest has a problem, and it seems to me that it’s going to be a fairly tough one to solve. Now that the site is gaining users more quickly, their tastes are diverging just as quickly, severely reducing the relevancy of common pages like Women’s Apparel, which my sister claims is now full of ugly, unfashionable clothes. For a site built on collecting peoples’ tastes, this seems to me to be a major scaling problem. Continue reading →
Posted in Technology, The Interwebs, User Experience |
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. That’s pretty much a guarantee that I’ll forget about them before the end of January. But I am a very aggressive goal-setter, so I tend to pick a Big Theme for the year and develop a set of goals surrounding that theme.
The past two years have felt a bit stagnant for a mixture of reasons, only some of which have been in my control. So 2012′s theme is Make It Count, and I spent the last two months of 2011 preparing to hit the ground running. Continue reading →
Posted in Life |
Like many of my peers, I buy a lot of domain names. As I’ve launched products and sites over the years, finding an available domain is a challenge, and becomes more challenging every year. So when I am thinking about a new project, I’ll usually invest in a few domain names early on, ready and waiting in case I decide to bring the idea to life.
In other words, I’m a domain junkie. I’ve purchased hundreds of domains, and for years GoDaddy has been my go-to dealer for my domain habit. I’d heard the stories about their sexy ads, their founder’s questionable lifestyle and political beliefs, and most recently, their support of SOPA and PIPA, two bills that I believe will contribute to the demise of innovation and the remix culture I value so highly.
So, in keeping with my desire to match my spending with my beliefs, I have been using Hover.com to register domains. Tucows, the owner of the Hover service, actively opposes restrictions on the Internet such as SOPA and PIPA. Plus, it’s SO much easier to use than GoDaddy and doesn’t annoy me with ads, emails, and phone calls.
The link above is a referral, but Hover has not asked me to write this post or compensated me in any way.
Posted in Business |
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