The Happy Moron

A somewhat frightening BBC story from my link archives:
It turns out that if you’re clever with a webpage, you can pretend to be a visitor’s PC for the purpose of finding out the ID number of their router.
Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. A little technical, perhaps, but not so bad.
Umm… unless Google happened to [...]

Thanks, Oracle.
“Deploying coherent packages of software functionality as loosely coupled, coarse-grained services delivers dramatically improved application flexibility, allowing enterprises to continuously adapt constellations of services to keep IT capabilities aligned with business goals.”
If I ever want to “continuously adapt constellations of services”, I’ll let you know.

Does not compute.

This is an angry post.
Recently Facebook “updated” its interface. I noticed no great improvement, but the bugs really riled me. Try to write a comment… doesn’t work. Okay then.
When I logged in to my yahoo mail, there was a little box asking me, “What are you doing right now?”
Do you remember back when e-mail was [...]

…before someone did this:
Please rob me searches twitter for tweets that indicate someone is not at home.
It’s made the news; a lot of the news. You’ve probably already read about it before you read this post. My first thought is, “Darn, I should have done this.” Hopefully it raises public awareness.
This is only one piece [...]

Like this:
“People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain [...]

Seth is brilliantly right today.
Ask any software developer, though, and they will tell you that Seth’s postulated 2 percent is invariably much greater.
2 percent is the minimum. The baseline. It only goes up from there.
Generally, however,  programmers don’t believe that they’re in the business of building relationships and connections and so the umpteen percent are [...]

If there’s English hidden in here, I don’t know where to find it.
Context
The presentation-tier request handling mechanism must control and coordinate processing of each user across multiple requests. Such control mechanisms may be managed in either a centralized or decentralized manner.
(from the Core J2EE Pattern Catalog)

We, as people, have an extraordinary power – the ability to define what is valuable.
A lump of crystalline rock is precious for no greater reason than we care for it.
It’s so easy to look at something like online game accounts being stolen and to say, “That doesn’t matter at all, they’re just game accounts.”
Professional thieves [...]

Is nice because it’s simple. But when it fails, it can fail big.
Yesterday I took the train at a different time than I usually take it. It just so happened that this was the rush hour train and so we were all tightly packed – squish, squish, squish.
Given the abnormally high level of solidarity on [...]