Recent Articles

Marco Arment:

Making Google+ succeed at all costs means exactly that. All previous rules are out the window. Google will eventually violate every formerly held principle if it might help Google+.

I agree with His entire post, though Marco clearly has a typo in here: “will eventually” really should be “has already”.

Not only is this opt-out, and therefore bullshit, but I don't see how it actually helps anyone but marketers. I can just picture this meeting: “How do we get the word out about our new app?”

“Why don't we just spam every blogger we can find on Google+, we will make it past span filters. We can't lose!”

Some nice URL schemes here for bloggers.

> Simple chat program using near ultrasonic frequencies. Works without Wifi or Bluetooth and won’t show up in a pcap.

*Woah.*

Zac Szewczyk, writing about me in his Who to Follow 2014 post:

> Now, though, eleven months after that [The B&B Podcast] show ended, Ben has become much too curmudgeonly for my liking. I understand that this personality is part of his shtick, bit it has gone too far. His writing no longer has the polish it used to: instead of thoughtful pieces, his articles, as Harry Marks pointed out in a recent episode of The Menu Bar, read as a stream of conscience with just enough editing to remove the typos. Lately his writing looks less like a labor born of love, and more like an exercise in anger in vulgarity. Enough is enough; I am finished.

I just want to point out one thing: nothing I do here is for ‘shtick’.

This ‘change’ bugs me, but John Hudson summarizes the likely reason nicely:

> In many ways, the agency had no choice but to de-emphasize white-collar crime. Following the 9/11 attacks, the FBI picked up scores of new responsibilities related to terrorism and counterintelligence while maintaining a finite amount of resources. What’s not in question is that government agencies tend to benefit in numerous ways when considered critical to national security as opposed to law enforcement. “If you tie yourself to national security, you get funding and you get exemptions on disclosure cases,” said McClanahan. “You get all the wonderful arguments about how if you don’t get your way, buildings will blow up and the country will be less safe.”

Matt Blaze:

> For over a decade now, the NSA has been drowning in a sea of irrelevant data collected almost entirely about innocent people who would never be selected as targets or comprise part of any useful analysis. The implicit assumption has been that spying on everyone is the price we pay to be able to spy on the real bad guys. But the success of TAO demonstrates a viable alternative. And if the NSA has any legitimate role in intelligence gathering, targeted operations like TAO have the significant advantage that they leave the rest of us – and the systems we rely on – alone.

John Gruber, in a link to something about using periods to end a sentence, ((Didn’t read it, don’t care to read it.)) remarks:

> I used to write more formally in texts and IMs, but as time goes on I’ve developed/accepted more of a dashed-off style, super terse, and without thinking about it, I do often omit the trailing period. Hitting “Send” feels like punctuation enough.

This is a pet-peeve of mine. I hate it when people don’t capitalize, and punctuate text messages because they are “just a text message”. I fully understand the logic, but I hate it.

I don’t care if you agree with me, but I do want to tell you something. I am an employer, and right or wrong I judge every correspondence you have with me. If you are misspelling shit and/or refusing to punctuate things in text messages, I strongly urge you not to fucking text message me.

Put another way: why would I want to promote you, or put you in higher paid positions, if every time you text me you can’t even be bothered to double-tap your space bar on the iPhone to put in a period.

If I see someone eating a cupcake like that I will publicly ridicule you. ((Douchebag.))

Brian Morrissey:

> The “organic” approach resembles the way ads are presented on social platforms. Facebook weaves ads within its news feed, much as Twitter does with promoted tweets that appear in its stream. Older content sites have mostly relied on advertising that’s off to the side. At a time when every marketer fancies itself a publisher, advertising units are becoming more entwined with non-advertising content, like it or not. The current vogue for native advertising is a reflection of the need for publishers to rethink how they present ads, like it or not.

So the ‘new’ design revolves around putting shitty ads in the middle of all *ten* of the articles you are *permitted* to read on The New York Times each month — oh, sorry, “organic” ads. What was I thinking, my apologies for forgetting the new marketing words “we” are using to try and hide the fact that ads are still fucking ads.

Carry on.

Stellar article on Google’s spying machine, by Yasha Levine:

> The fact that the biggest, most data-hungry companies in Silicon Valley joined up in a cynical effort to shift attention away from their own for-profit surveillance operations and blame it all on big bad government is to be expected. What’s surprising is just how many supposed journalists and so-called privacy advocates fell for it.

I’d urge you to read it if you use *any* Google services.