QoTD: Jason Pontin
"I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and print-like on something open, new, and digital."
— Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher, Technology Review
QoTD: Jason Pontin
"I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and print-like on something open, new, and digital."
— Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher, Technology Review
Security links
Some recent thought-provoking articles on security.
Instead of annoying CAPTCHAs, try "Design, Limit and Trapdoor" to limit damage from problem users: DLT is better than CAPTCHA
Roll your own middlebox: Low power silent firewall (and maybe help fix the broken Internet).
DRM is not really security, but often mixed up with it. Must-read from Charles Stross: More on DRM and ebooks. Joe Brockmeier: Publishers Starting to Reject e-Book DRM
Mozilla Persona gains features: Streamlining Login with Privacy Policy and Terms of Service APIs
Pay attention to that Persona thing. Doing passwords right is hard. Everything you ever wanted to know about building a secure password reset feature, How Companies Can Beef Up Password Security
Steven M. Bellovin on government-backed malware: Flame On! Two from Brian Krebs: EU to Banks: Assume All PCs Are Infected and How to Break Into Security, Schneier Edition.
This looks like a lot of work to do within existing web frameworks: Database level security in webapps (so do we need better frameworks?)
Advertising link frenzy
Some links that came up in a recent email thread on Internet advertising, and some more that should have.
Start with Charles Stross: The inadmissible assumptions. "All advertising tends towards the state of spam." (I would disagree with this as long as there are advertising media that can be made scarce and expensive. The challenge is how to make that possible. In my humble opinion, you can't de-spamify Internet advertising, and thereby make it valuable, without massive improvements in privacy tools. Quora thread: What is the percentage of Internet users that employ AdBlock Plus or similar ad blocking plugins?)
Good counterpoint from Terence Kawaja: The Golden Age of Advertising Technology. From the inside, it looks as if all is well. Local maxima or bust!
Somehow, it looks as if Microsoft, of all companies, is starting to get the online advertising problem. All I can see from the outside is a promising combination of Tracking Protection and other privacy-enhancing measures on the browser side, and utter FAIL on the advertising side. Anybody any closer to making sense of this? Or are the browser and ad tech groups so separated that it's pointless to talk about "Microsoft" as a decision-making entity here?
Do Not Track: It’s the user’s voice that matters
IAB’s Rothenberg: ‘Microsoft’s DNT Reversal Makes No Sense’
SOURCE: Microsoft May Abandon The Ad Business Over IE10 Fiasco (MSFT)
The Display Ad Market Is In Big Trouble
Enough about Redmond, Washington. No discussion of advertising on the Internet would be complete without some mention of the ad-infested Android platform.
Two useful pieces from Horace Dediu: Android Economics and The Android Income Statement
If you're not at the table, you're on the menu. Don Norman: Google doesn’t get people, it sells them.
Not all bad news, though: Android's Overblown Fragmentation Problem by Nick Bradbury makes a good point.
Get your head out of phone space anyway. Try The Phone Stack.
Some good discussion of that company your creepy ex-co-workers haven't killed yet. Michael Wolff: The Facebook Fallacy. "Facebook not only is on course to go bust but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it." Three follow-ups:
Doc Searls: After Facebook fails
Richard Stacy: Doc Searls, Michael Wolff and The Facebook Fairy
Benjamin Mako Hill: Why Facebook's Network Effects are Overrated
Robert Bruce says every company is a media company: Traditional Advertising is Truly Dead
Henry Blodget: Don't Mean To Be Alarmist, But The TV Business May Be Starting To Collapse - Business Insider
Think Different: Orbitz Discriminates Against Mac Users ... Just Like It Should Be Doing
Jerry Neumann breaks down the money in targeting: Your personal data is not worth anywhere near what you think it's worth
This makes sense to somebody, I guess: A Framework For The $10B+ Native Advertising Market. "Native advertising is defined as ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non-interruptive, integrated way."
At least we have some promising news from the Journalism front. Frédéric Filloux: Lessons from ProPublica and How ProPublica changed investigative reporting. Just to show a good example of a ProPublica story: Inside the Investigation of Leading Republican Money Man Sheldon Adelson. Your winnings, sir.
Original Alt-Tab behavior in GNOME 3
As we should all know by now, Alt-Tab should cycle among open windows, not applications. GNOME 3 by default does the Wrong Thing, Mac OS style.
How to fix?
I was working on a lengthy set of instructions here, old-school style, with "apt-get" and stuff, and it would have been pretty awesome as such things go, but it turns out that the answer is:
Go to this web page: AlternateTab
Flip the little switch thingy from "off" to on".
If you're curious about how or why this works, read this LWN article: Managing GNOME shell extensions.
To conclude, I would like to say: get off my lawn.
Rise of the New American Hipstertarian Consensus
Everybody go subscribe to Timothy B. Lee's blog on forbes.com (full feed available). Tech policy, zoning laws, politics, good stuff. A few recent items...
Social Distance and the Patent System: "Successful software entrepreneurs are a small fraction of the population, and most likely no judges of the Federal Circuit have close relationships with one. In contrast, every judge on the Federal Circuit knows numerous patent attorneys."
Dense enough to make traffic a mess, but not dense enough to support frequently-running transit: Silicon Valley Is Stuck In An Uncanny Valley Of Density
How Strong Property Rights Promote Social Equality: "People get to veto their neighbors’ land use decisions, and they’ve used that power to effectively prohibit anyone poorer than themselves from living in their neighborhoods."
Common sense on network policy in Adam Thierer, Infrastructure Socialist . "I think there’s less difference than Adam would probably like to admit between policies that force Verizon to 'share' its lines with other utility companies and policies that force Adam to 'share' his front yard with utility companies."
Corporations are groups of people with meetings and politics, not individuals of species Homo economicus. (Why this has to be news is another story) Seeing Like a Cable Company
Free the apartment builders! Are Growth Boundaries Responsible For High Housing Costs?
Arrr! Me gold! The Myth Of The Free-Market Gold Standard
d3wd will u teach me how 2 signal?
Russell Coker posts about advertising and signaling: Targeted Advertising.
User-targeted advertising is counterproductive because it fails to send a signal (More details: part 1 part 2).
The DNS Changer mess is an extreme example of low-value advertising—you can think of it as targeted to users of specific malware—but the same principle applies to all advertising that's tied to the user instead of the content. It's worth less and less as the targeting gets better.
So if targeting to users reduces signal, how can we increase signal?
Well, first of all we could increase the production values of the advertising itself. Advertising that clearly requires expense and skill makes a great signal.
The second way to signal, which is to attach the advertising to a resource that's difficult to produce, is probably generally the most useful. Russell suggests "sponsoring people who produce free things." This is what TV advertisers do. The resource doesn't even have to be free of charge. Readers pay for magazines that have a majority of ad pages. Because print ads are difficult to target by user, they're great signal, and people will pay money to get them. (Try that with online ads.)
Finally, we can send a signal by putting the advertising in front of a large audience. Buy a static billboard, TV commercial, or other medium that isn't easily targeted to individual users, and you're sending an difficult to fake, costly signal.
Any more?
Sunday morning good reads
Aaron Bialick: SF: Transbay Transit Center to Fill Downtown With People, Not Cars "The new Transbay Transit Center is expected to transform San Francisco’s downtown core by focusing new development around a massive regional transit hub in eastern SoMa."
Headline Snapshots: Supreme Court Health Care Decision How headline writers and web designers saw it.
Raw deal: Maine residents’ fight for unregulated food draws crackdown by David Gumpert at Grist. Eight Maine towns have "passed ordinances that explicitly allow local farmers and ranchers to sell their food — meat, eggs, unpasteurized milk, honey, veggies — directly to consumers within town borders, without state or federal licenses, permits, or regulations.
Scott Adams on an idea for an online system for organizing facts to debate about: Fact Bubbler
Mike Doughty on the economics of tour support for bands: Radiohead wouldn't exist without early major-label funding. The future won't bring new Radioheads. All I want to say here, truly, is: let's get used to it.
How environmentalists win by Bill Scher for Grist: "throughout American history, liberal advancements have been mainly achieved with corporate support, and not without."
How software-defined radio could revolutionize wireless by Timothy B. Lee. "Software-defined radio will make it possible to use the electromagnetic spectrum in fundamentally new ways" and here's a company that's working on it.
Office Buildings Add Cash Crops To Their Balance Sheet by Michael J. Coren at Co.EXIST. Rooftop gardening startup reports breaking even.
Hosting for non-PHP web applications
Did you know, that on the Internet, people who write like this: "saw yr pic!!! yr cute!!!" think I'm cute?
And, on the Internet, as Jeff Atwood points out, "If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option." No, wait, the cuteness one is bogus, and the PHP one is true.
Luke Plant writes, "It is perhaps the essential problem of PHP that a language that was designed to be a simple template language for non-programmers has turned into the work-horse of the web, and the network effects caused by adoption amongst amateurs have made it a language for professionals."
Want to code in something else? You can probably find Django-friendly hosts for not too much more than a decent PHP-only plan, but if you enjoy Go or another niche language, you'll probably need at least a virtual private server, which will cost you more, even from a low-priced source such as the new Google Compute Engine. No cheap hosting in this category.
After working through the installs for PHP and non-PHP applications, is PHP just easier to get set up? How much of PHP's popularity is from the network effect and how much is from the "FTP it into your DocumentRoot and change permissions until it works" deployment model? Heroku is teh awesome, but it's still harder than the screenshot-by-screenshot instructions on "Joe's $0.99 Web Hosting" for installing PHP applications.
Just for comparison, here are some good introductory non-PHP articles.
On a repeatable dev project setup
Django Requirements for a project
Django Chuck: your powerful project punch button - Bastian Ballmann and Lukas Bünger
Eleven Django blog engines you should know
I don't know. Is it network effect, or ease of deployment?
Bonus link: cgi-php: Well, that just about wraps it up for open-source
Here, Googlebot, have some links
(A bunch of articles that deserve a link, to feed the machines that help us find good stuff to read. Doing my part for semi-automated link propagation.)
Frequently Asked Questions About Filing for Temporal Bankruptcy by Curtis Edmonds
FBI: Smart Meter Hacks Likely to Spread
Open source is interoperable with smarter government at the CFPB
We Are Winning: How Pirate Parties Are Changing The World
Where's the Viewport Size Data?
An Event Apart: Big Type Little Type
Simon Wardley on open source product strategy: Be Wary of Geeks Bearing Gifts
Mobile first frenzy: Why Jakob Nielsen Is Wrong About Mobile Websites Mobile Isn't the Lite Version Why We Shouldn’t Make Separate Mobile Websites
Save the Cato Institute, Save the World? - By Justin Logan
Collective Idea acquires Harmony from GitHub
Warren Ellis has guests: GUEST INFORMANT: Laurie Penny GUEST INFORMANT: Anonymous
Don’t Leave All the PR Work To Colombian Prostitutes
Why 500px Plus Has Photographers Fired Up
Why did MPAA exec join Internet Society?
Do Jubilee shares make any sense?
Rackspace Eats Its Own Dog Food With OpenStack
The Frand Wars: Who’s on First?
The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Folly of Keeping Technology Adoption Secret
‘Re-Platforming’ The Workplace: Welcome To Next-Gen IT
Reports Reveal Two New Scandals in the Pepper-Spraying at UC Davis
Hardware Over People at the Pentagon (Again)
Review of “Version Control with Git” by Jon Loeliger
Programming fonts: proportional vs monospaced
Arctic Cable Could Cut Net Latency, Boost Profits
Court Won't Reinstate Suspended Sheriff
The Future of Manufacturing is going all digital
Remember what happened after the Alamo: 18 Minutes On a Day in April
AT&T wields enormous power in Sacramento
Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle
Stop Shouting. Start Teaching.
A Closer Look At Font Rendering
University of Florida CISE: Now More Than Ever
Norway: Terrorism Fought With Song, Not Surveillance
Should Libertarians Chide Warren Buffett for Not Sending the Government Money?
David L. Schwartz: Prospectivity and Retroactivity in Patent Law
Matthew Garrett: Anatomy of a Fedora 17 ISO image
sigrok - cross-platform, open-source logic analyzer software with protocol decoder support
Interview: Libre Office is taking off 'like a rocket'
Microsoft and Barnes & Noble settle patent dispute; create new subsidiary
The Wal-Mart mess: Everybody does it (and we don’t mean bribery)
Lennart Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature
Software industry reclaims open standards debate
Backroom Heroes – Are You One ?
Jim Gettys: Bufferbloat goings on…
Why the death of DRM would be good news
Bram Cohen: Engineering IP Telephony
Open Source Business: How to Support A Family of 5 By Running An Open Source Project
Asa Dotzler: The Firefox Roadmap: A Look at the Q1 and Q2, 2012 Goals
Charles Stross: The death of genre
Bram Cohen: TCP Sucks
My day doing everything the internet told me to
Fundamental Progress Solving Bufferbloat
Jeff Atwood: Please Don't Learn to Code
Robert Alsina: Hack English Instead
Jim Gettys: The Next Nightmare is Coming
Zero-Permission Android Applications part 2
A Hippocratic Oath For Software Engineers?
How to write low garbage real-time Javascript
The Community Organizing Geeks Who Could Revolutionize Campaign Tech
Move things with your mind: BrainGate robotic arm is controlled by brain waves
Three Days Before Elections, Largest German State Censors Pirate Party From The Net
GUEST INFORMANT: Justin Pickard
How to choose an Authenticated Encryption mode
Musings on the linux audio stack
Matthew Garrett: I've been a terrible person (and so have most of you)
US petition could tip the scales in favour of open access publishing | Dr Mike Taylor
A Glimpse Inside Google’s Data Centers
Jim Gettys: A Milestone Reached: CoDel is in Linux!
The Ada Initiative granted tax-exempt status in the U.S.
Supreme Court to Federal Circuit: Fix Ultramerical Decision
BootlegMIC – A kick in the boot for your phone!
Can Private Equity Firms Like Bain Do Whatever They Want With the Companies They Buy?
Resilient Fitness: A Killer App for a Successful Life
Maybe it’s time to rethink how we fund broadband
Crowdfunding via customers is the new startup capital
Scott Adams: The Digital Crossover
Conservancy's Coordinate Compliance Efforts
Jonathan Coulton theme song to the new John Scalzi book: Redshirt
5 Predictions for the Future of Work and Happiness
VMDK Has Left the Building – Follow Up
Senator Wyden Demands Access to Text of Secret International Agreements Regulating the Internet
Matthew Garrett: Implementing UEFI Secure Boot in Fedora
EP Committees Reject ACTA As Backlash Against Secretive IP Agreements Continues to Grow
How Our Government Incentivizes the Overproduction of Junk Food
Ethiopia Introduces Deep Packet Inspection
SEO Isn't Magic - So Stop Doing SEO Tricks
Steven M. Bellovin on cyber warfare: Flame On!
Bruce Schneier: The Vulnerabilities Market and the Future of Security
Critical vulnerability derails Ruby on Rails
Did Hollywood Not Use Available DMCA Tools Just To Pretend It Needed SOPA?
Open Goldberg Variations: free, open source recording and modern score of classical masterpiece
tl;dw: Stop mocking, start testing
Unemployment Is Up. Why Is It So Hard to Find the Right Hires?
Hog Wild: Hunting Boars With Congress' Most Conservative Member
25,000 signatures and still rolling: Implications of the White House petition
Animated solution to the "Never gonna give you up" program problem
‘People, not books, died in the fire’
Seth Godin on not feeding the trolls, even on the inside: The Milgram extension
Why we don’t need the government to protect us from online tracking
Facebook open sources internal C++ library
Mitt Romney’s inflated fearmongering
Small-Scale Slaughterhouses Aim To Put The 'Local' Back In Local Meat
Planting Entrepreneurial Innovation in Inner Cities
Maybe We’d Behave Better With Horrible Winters
Tor Books Announces E-book Store: Doctorow, Scalzi & Stross Talk DRM-Free
Death of the Queen's English Society
Netflix announces Open Connect CDN
The High Cost of 'Too Big to Behave' Banks
Obama’s and Brennan’s “Kill List”
Building Abundant Ponds, Chinese Wheelbarrows, and DiY Algae Reactors
The Great Wall of . . . Arizona (Miller)
The Problem With Public Sector Unions—and How to Fix It
Bringing the Battlefield to the Border
Australian Pirate Party Sets Course for Parliament
25 Reasons This Is The Best Time To Be A Storyteller
Thomas Hodgskin: Libertarian Extraordinaire, Part 3
Conditional-tier rendering; The battle of Server + innerHTML vs. JS MVC + JSON
The Coming Age of the Context Engine
A New Privacy, Pt. 2: Disclosure (Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t)
Rich Bodo on job ads: Rock genre terminology considered asinine
Review of "The Little Book Of Semaphores" by Allen B. Downey
Jonathan Coulton on the ethics of copying: Emily and David
John Regehr celebrates a powerful testing tool, jsfunfuzz: 1500+ Bugs from One Fuzzer
Why Bad Jobs-or No Jobs-Happen to Good Workers
Spark update: responsive layouts in Drupal
Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router
The First Draft of History – Will Be Vaporized
How to Bounce Back from Increasingly Extreme Weather Events
Freedom of Speech and Information Produced Using Computer Algorithms
The Guide to Developing a Content Strategy for "Boring" Industries
The Navy and a Sanctioned Class Divide
Gabriella Coleman: Helping Hackers Infiltrate Academia
The Developers Guide to PCI Compliant Web applications
Lennart Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part XV
Pantheon Raises $5M Series A From Foundry
H & Ahem: Cheap clothing hurts the planet, the economy, and your style
Wellcome Trust to penalise scientists who don't embrace open access
Jamie and Jeff’s Birth Plan by Paul William Davies
Take That Crowdfunding Cynics! Rally Raises Largest AngelList Deal Ever
Why Don’t Americans Take More Vacations? Blame It on Independence Day
Science FAIL
Again with the hand-wringing over the fact that the social, SEO, and publicity power of alternative medicine is kicking Science's behind: Dr. Google and Mr. Hyde by David Gorski.
This makes zero sense. If Science matters, why are scientists sending important research to locked-down proprietary journals? The only information that the general public is going to get from that is, "I'm running a large scary organization, and I'm trying to do something evil to you in a sneaky way."
Prof. Peter Coles says it best: Open access will be crucial to maintain public confidence in science.
Stuart Shieber at Harvard (which has journal access problems of its own) has a helpful list: Editorial board members: What to ask of your journal
Common objections to Open Access answered: Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing by Dr. Mike Taylor.
Or what the hell, we could all just skip the Scientific literature and read some dude's blog about taking drugs to get smarter, or watch Science go the way of Art.
Bonus links: Open access is the future of academic publishing, says Finch report
Online education startups: a field guide
Air Conditioning Is Boiling the Earth and Making Us Weak: An Interview with Author Stan Cox
Timothy B. Lee: Two Views of Innovation
Science and Scientism by Paul Feyerabend
Notes on Douglas W. Allen's The Institutional Revolution from Jeff Jarvis: The (continuing) institutional revolution
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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