alis.me

Oil and Apples.

2012-02-23T01:59:23Z

The Day Apple Left The Tech World’s Collective Mouth Agape | TechCrunch.

Do you remember when Apple was, well. Kind of a joke? Fit only for fandorks and whatever-we-used-to-call-hipsters-back-in-the-90s? I do. What the hell happened?

Oh, that’s right. Apple starting making good shit. Fancy that.

∞ permalink » comment? » 45 words posted in: Meanwhile, on the Internet..., apple

Bad habits breed bad habits.

2012-02-23T01:59:21Z

The idea of teens sharing passwords didn’t come out of thin air. In fact, it was normalized by adults. And not just any adult. This practice is the product of parental online safety norms. In most households, it’s quite common for young children to give their parents their passwords. With elementary and middle school youth, this is often a practical matter: children lose their passwords pretty quickly. Furthermore, most parents reasonably believe that young children should be supervised online. As tweens turn into teens, the narrative shifts. Some parents continue to require passwords be forked over, using explanations like “because I’m your mother.” But many parents use the language of “trust” to explain why teens should share their passwords with them.

danah boyd | apophenia » How Parents Normalized Teen Password Sharing.

My Inner INFOSEC Analyst shudders.

I started using the internet in, oh, probably around circa ’95/’96, when I was 13ish. I never gave passwords to my parents and they never asked. Actually, I was explicitly told never, ever to share them with anybody ever, on pain of Serious Parental Disapproval. If I lost them, it was my bad and I had to deal with the consequences.

Sharing a password the is a show of trust, but it’s a show of trust on par with Big Adult shows of trust like sharing finances and powers of attorney. It should never be coerced, especially between family members. A password allows whomever you’ve shared it with access to some very private aspects of your life — probably more than you realise, since I assume you use the same password for more than one service — and the ability to emulate you, nearly perfectly. You’d better trust whomever you’ve given it to not only not to hurt you now, but to never ever hurt you in the future.

Passwords also say something about you. If I know one of your passwords, I can probably guess the format the others will take; the sorts of words you’ll base them on, how and where you’re likely to pad them out to meet minimum complexity requirements. Are you a 12345678 person or a favourite movie person?

Passwords, in other words, are SRS BUSINESS.

I do like the piggy bank escrow idea, although I think there’s also merit in letting teens simply forget and recover their own passwords like adults. Little kids, maybe not so much, but I’d tend towards the opinion that a “password handover” should be part of growing up. “You’re old enough to manage your own passwords now, kid. From now on, I don’t want to know them.”

The flip side, of course, is that not knowing someone else’s password has merits too.

There really is something to be said for plausible deniability.

∞ permalink » comment? » 460 words posted in: Geeking, security

Evil is relative.

2012-02-23T01:59:03Z

So why are we calling this evil? Because Google changed the rules that it defined itself. Google built its reputation, and its multi-billion dollar business, on the promise of its “don’t be evil” philosophy. That’s been largely interpreted as meaning that Google will always put its users first, an interpretation that Google has cultivated and encouraged. [...] Google’s philosophy speaks directly to making money without doing evil. And it is very explicit in calling out advertising in the section on “evil.” But while it emphasizes that ads should be relevant, obvious, and “not flashy,” what seems to have been forgotten is a respect for its users privacy, and established practices.

Google’s Broken Promise: The End of “Don’t Be Evil”.

∞ permalink » comment? » 119 words posted in: Meanwhile, on the Internet..., google

Your side has propaganda too.

2012-02-23T01:58:59Z

None of that is bad. But it does get bad when you get huffy and go, “Well, that’s not a message! That’s just the way things should be!” Which is exactly the same goddamned thing fundamentalist Christian parents say when they flood their kids with Veggie Tales and Davey and Goliath. They’re not trying to give their kids a message, they’re just showing them how the world works. Right?

Why The Muppets Are Propaganda.

∞ permalink » comment? » 73 words posted in: Meanwhile, on the Internet..., people:ferrett steinmetz, tv:the muppets

Tolerance of intolerance.

2012-02-10T23:40:52Z

Jesus and Mo.

… yup.

∞ permalink » comment? » 5 words posted in: Meanwhile, on the Internet...,

Sadly we have them here, too.

2012-02-10T23:40:04Z

MARGARET COURT, TRANSLATED. | Mike Stuchbery.

Translating Evangelical Christish.

∞ permalink » comment? » 9 words posted in: Meanwhile, on the Internet..., places:australia, religion:christianity

I’ll just be here, locked alone in my room…

2012-02-10T23:39:58Z

Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale Test – SAS.

30 fear, 30 avoidance for a score of “moderate social anxiety”. Thanks, highly-accurate internet test!

A lot of these are weird questions for me, though, because they vary a lot as to whether I’m working in a personal or professional capacity. Like the one about meeting new people; fine at work, terrifying outside of it. Or the ones about working while observed; can’t (creative) write or draw while people are watching (mostly due to a pathological fear they’ll want to ask me questions about on make comments on what I’m doing; I’m okay in front of other writers/artists who Get It) but, again, work is fine.

The thing I loathe the most and will never, ever do unless almost physically forced to is talk on the phone, however. /shudder

∞ permalink » comment? » 136 words posted in: Miscellaneous,

It’s more of a guideline, really.

2012-02-10T23:38:55Z

Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.

Google: Do Yourself a Favor and Just Come Clean Already | PandoDaily.

Larry Page, just prior to Google going public. Honestly, anyone who thought this was going to last… yeah. Sorry, no.

∞ permalink » comment? » 102 words posted in: Meanwhile, on the Internet..., google

Nails for the culture industry.

2012-02-10T23:38:50Z

Dim Sum Thinking.

On iBooks, Author, and Amazon and Apple muscling in on the publishing world. Honestly, I welcome our new long-tail friendly overlords. Big Books will always be Big Books, but the current publishing industry (like most Culture Houses) is almost impossible to break into for small players. Reducing barriers to entry and increasing portability and accessibility? Not gonna complain about that, hey.

∞ permalink » comment? » 64 words posted in: Meanwhile, on the Internet..., apple:ibooks, books

You know you’ve been blogging too long when:

2012-02-14T21:25:27Z

You end up writing a script to archive any posts or comments older than seven years in a separate database, in order to clean them out of your live blog.

This is actually the first time I’ve split my blog archive in that way in over a decade. I’m such a hoarder, but it got to the point where having posts still around from 1999 (no, seriously) was more embarrassing that it was cool.

So now there’s a script that gets run against the DB every… whenever-I-decide-to-cron-it that trims content out based on its age and level of engagement. So at various intervals of 3, 5 and 7 years posts get first flocked, then marked private, then finally shifted — along with all their comments, but not taxonomy or metadata which actually I should’ve done but oh well — into the “archive” table and off the site. Having comments gets a posted shifted “back” a removal increment, but in the end (i.e. after 7 years) everything goes.

Or I can give post a noarchive meta key to preserve them, if they’re really that great (hint: they’re not).

Isn’t SQL fun?

… man I’ve been doing this way, way too long.

∞ permalink » comment? » 200 words posted in: Bloglife, Code Girl, domainia:alis.me, mysql