Recent Articles

Here we have Amazon taking the FTC to court over the fact that the FTC wants Amazon to prompt for passwords more often so as to prevent children from buying apps/IAP. That's actually pretty reasonable from the FTC (fines, etc. notwithstanding).

I know Apple has had to deal with this too, but take iOS 8 for example. Where Apple has gone over and above to create a system whereby parents get an approval notification on their device if their children want to buy something.

Why? Just think about where these companies are making their money. Apple from the devices themselves, Amazon from selling stuff. No wonder Amazon is fighting this, and Apple is just trying to make families want to be all Apple devices.

Robert Peston:

So there have been some interesting developments in my encounter with the EU's “Right to be Forgotten” rules.

It is now almost certain that the request for oblivion has come from someone who left a comment about the story.

On the surface, the European Union's 'Right to be Forgotten' law seems like a win for privacy advocates, but it is a complicated law. It can be both good and very bad. Take the linked article for example. In this case someone asked that the article be purged because they person made a comment on the article — the article isn't about them, they just commented on it. That's surely not the intent of the law, but it is the law.

What's even more odd, is that it appears that only searching for that person's specific name will show the article missing, other searches still turn up the “removed” article.

So essentially what the EU has created is a law that:

1. Is being abused already.
2. Doesn't actually work.

Well done.

Just wanted to point you guys over to this website. It's a really great site and one I read daily. It's also handy when you are busy and just want to know what is going on without going down the rabbit hole that is your RSS reader.

Sean Gallagher:

What’s really important in the end about the Blackphone is that it has made the idea of a privacy-focused phone a reality—and it opens a conversation about what security technology can do for average people. And if it brings enough people into the conversation, the next generation of the Blackphone, and of mobile security products in general, could reach a much wider audience—and perhaps force some of the bigger mobile players to pay more attention to privacy.

It’s about what I expected: good at privacy not great at the “other” phone stuff. I do like the above quote because it is what I hope happens. I hope that this phone pushes Apple to make their phones even more secure.

Side note: How did these guys miss a prime opportunity to color their UI with green text on a black background? It’s like they’ve never seen a hacker movie.

I’ve had a chance to test out this app for a while now, and it is quite useful. It won’t replace my standard app, nor is it a substitute for VSCO cam, but it is pretty handy.

The app works like this: you set a tag for the pictures you are taking, or about to take, and then snap photos. The app then allows you to view photos by tag.

For me, the neatest use of this app is in my day job. Often I do site visits to buildings and I need to snap a bunch of photos — this is the perfect way to keep all those photos together. Just tag with the building name and snap away — the app remembers the tag until you remove it.

Pretty clever, and could be useful for travelers as well. $1.99 on the App Store.

Tony Schwartz:

Too many of us continue to live by the durable myth that one less hour of sleep gives us one more hour of productivity. In reality, each hour less of sleep not only leaves us feeling more fatigued, but also takes a pernicious toll on our cognitive capacity. The more consecutive hours we are awake and the fewer we sleep at night, the less alert, focused and efficient we become, and the lower the quality of our work.

It seems to me, at least from what you see in popular culture that napping used to be more socially acceptable, but now it seems to have a pretty nasty stigma associated with it.

I’ve never been a napping type of person, but I am a big believer in getting enough sleep at night. I’ve started napping a bit here and there on the weekends since the kids nap, and it is quite refreshing.

What I like best about getting lots of sleep most nights is that on those odd occasions where getting lots of sleep isn’t possible — it feels like I can more easily “bounce back”.

Getting more sleep doesn’t mean you can’t stay up late, it just means you need to allot enough time for sleep.

Kashmir Hill:

Four months after this study happened, in May 2012, Facebook made changes to its data use policy, and that’s when it introduced this line about how it might use your information: “For internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”

So not only did Facebook sneak in the “OK” later, but according to Hill there is no reason to believe that Facebook excluded people under 18 from the study.

David Streitfeld:

The prospect of a long-running case in which Google is accused of exploiting that trust and misappropriating data will work against this ambitious program. Google was sued for breaking federal laws by secretly collecting people’s email, passwords and other personal information as part of its Street View mapping project, which began in 2007. The data was drawn from unencrypted household computer networks.

Man, poor Google, ya know?

I personally hope that this case, and Google not getting it dropped, causes Google to actually stop and think about what they are doing. Google has no doubt created some of the best web services out there — I don’t think anyone can deny that. If you live in the Google domain, you have it pretty easy, but Google is doing all of this by plucking away user privacy at an exponential pace.

Show me ads, but don’t delve this deep.

There was no reason for street view cars to collect emails and passwords — none — and yet that’s what Google did. And the best answer that can really be given as to why it was done is simply: because we could? And you simply have to end that statement with a question mark to correctly convey the naive lack of common-sense that Google consistently hides behind.

Threshold? I know it isn’t a final name, but I think it is telling. That name conveys a sense of anger, grit, and desperation — it’s aggressive — and I am not sure that is what you want being conveyed for an operating system.

I could write 10,000 words on why this is poorly done, but instead I think I'll just convey the deftness in two words: hardware keyboard.

I have two Safari extensions installed both with the purpose of blocking trackers. Now, my site does have trackers too — you should see one for Gaug.es and one for Mint.

Here’s the plugins that I use to do my best to keep myself from being tracked:

• Incognito
• Ghostery

It might be redundant to have both running, but I’ve yet to experience a problem having both running.

Two other useful Safari extensions:

• Nomoreitunes: Keeps the Mac App Store from opening.
• TED HTML5 Player

UPDATE: Quick note to let you know that blocking things like TypeKit means those fonts won’t load. Obvious, but still.

William Hughes:

Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences.

This story is incredible and should be the only reason you need to immediately leave Facebook. It's just not worth it.

Facebook is essentially telling people that they care so little about users that they see no reason to refrain from directly trying to control users emotional state. You'd be pissed if anyone tried to manipulate you in this unapologetic way, so don't let Facebook get away with it.