Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
“I Fear the Day That Technology Will Surpass Our Human Interaction”
I fear the day that technology gives us the ability to instantly check our facts, but people blithely pass along falsehoods or made-up quotations without taking 30 seconds to verify whether they’re true or not.
Very cool animation of a MUCH closer moon. And if you’re in the mood for some scientific analysis, there’s that too!
Worth considering: Even if you protect your critical servers adequately, if you share that data with “less critical” systems, you need to protect them too.
Tough choices: Users want to watch media from the entertainment industry. The industry is only willing to provide it with DRM, which goes against Mozilla’s goals of transparency, openness, and user control. It used to be easy to let plugins deal with it, but Flash and Silverlight are slowly giving way to built-in browser functionality, and leaving it out means lots of users will just switch browsers when they can no longer watch Netflix etc. with Firefox.
Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and W3C EME
With most competing browsers and the content industry embracing the W3C EME specification, Mozilla has little choice but to implement EME as well so our …
Way too much HTML email is still done with the old slice-and-dice table-and-spacer method. In a world where people are reading mail on their phones first (and remember that means connectivity is sporadic & slow too), we should be doing this better.
Love it or hate it, there’s no denying the popularity of HTML emails. And, like the web before it, the inbox has officially gone mobile, with over 50 percent of email opens occurring on mobile devices….
Lawsuit Filed in Tragic Peanut Allergy Death
Some new details in this case: 1) The peanut butter-containing rice krispies treats were prepared by camp staff, who had been informed of her (and other children's) allergy. 2) They were not labeled. 3) Camp staff couldn't find the key to the storage cabinet with spare epinephrine. Her father ended up breaking open the glass case with his hand to get her the third dose.
Slashdot: Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit?
Wired: The Robot Car of Tomorrow Might Just Be Programmed to Hit You
Thought-provoking article on pre-programming ethical choices. and oddly enough, interesting discussion on Slashdot.
applinks.org [archived]
This looks like an interesting approach to solve the problem of linking to things on mobile apps. I’m going to have to read up…
Webhost raising price for unique IP. SNI covers my own SSL use, but I’m also considering all-HTTPS. Compatibility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
Sadly, looks like ancient WinXP and Android 2.x are still big chunks of those markets, which means they won’t be able to access SNI sites.
Advice on dealing with email without letting it take over. I do some of these already: I use filters to pre-classify a lot, and I’ve pared down notifications to only the most critical. But it’s still a struggle to keep on top of it sometimes. Some of the other suggestions look like they’ll be helpful.
Does your inbox constantly beg for attention? Do you suffer from always-on inbox anxiety? Email can easily take over your life—especially if you’re running a business. If that’s happening, it’s…
Snopes: Is Volkswagen’s 300 MPG Car Banned in the U.S.?
Is the federal government preventing Volkswagen’s XL1 model car from being sold in the U.S. because the vehicle is too fuel-efficient?
“And if one buys into the conspiracy theory that the government and Big Oil are colluding to keep high-mileage vehicles off the U.S. market in order to protect profits from gasoline says, one has to wonder why those powerful and malevolent entities aren’t doing anything to stop sales of cars produced by Tesla…”
(For the record, while Tesla has faced opposition, it’s not from the oil industry over their fuel source, but from car dealerships over their sales practices.)
Automattic Acquires Longreads, Invests in Digital Longform Publishing
Interesting counterpoint to the skimming-is-killing-our-ability-to-read-long-stuff article of a few days ago.
As a Matter of Law, the Opera is Haunted
Legal analysis of The Phantom of the Opera — specifically, did the old owners of the opera house have a duty to disclose the presence of the Phantom to the new buyers?
Remember the “million dollar homepage?” 9 years on, it’s still online, but 22% of its pixels/links are dead.
The Million Dollar Homepage still exists, but 22% of it has rotted away
Before Kickstarter and Indiegogo made crowdfunding projects simple for everyone, Alex Tew financed his college education by selling 10-by-10 pixel chunks of a webpage for $100 each. The Million Dollar…
Interesting: What if a different rift system had separated Africa and South America, leaving what is now the western Sahara attached to Brazil instead?
Android Wear Prototype: Quick Sharing to Pocket
Interesting idea: sending feedback from a smartwatch notification back into your other devices/accounts, in this case taking an alert linking to an article, and saving that article to read later on a more suitable device.
What is the GnuTLS Bug and How to Protect Your Linux System From It
Wow. One of several popular SSL libraries used in Linux and a lot of open-source software turns out to have had a similar cert validation bug to Apple's “goto fail” issue. OpenSSL and NSS were not affected, so Firefox was safe, but Chrome would have been vulnerable. Red Hat discovered the bug in an internal security review. Patches and updates are already available.
The desktop/laptop PC isn’t dying so much as the market is saturated and the upgrade cycle has slowed, while smart phones and tablets continue to demand regular replacements. Plus of course the lines are blurring.
Are PCs Dying? Of Course Not, Here’s Why
Reports of the PC’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. We’ve all heard that everyone’s just buying tablets and throwing out their keyboards and mice. But if you live in the real world, you see…
The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia
I was reading this last night. Obviously it was developed in hindsight, but it’s fascinating to see everything they would have had to do, and everything that would have had to go *exactly* right to reach Columbia before the crew succumbed to CO2 poisoning after a month in a craft that had been prepped for a mission less than half that time. Error margins are slim to nonexistent, and the time crunch would have put the rescue crew at risk as well. (via Slashdot)
