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I was limited in what I could write in the post, but this was something that just hit me after years of being able to log in with my username/password on Yahoo!.

I'm sure it was a well-intentioned guard against spammers that mercilessly attack Yahoo! accounts, but it's effectively locked me out as a genuine user. I'm definitely miffed because it'll cost me, but at the same time, I implement systems like this for small businesses for a living, and it's a constant thing on my mind how what I do will impact users down the line. I get so nervous about inadvertently pulling something like this!

(from the article:)

In fact, late last week, the CTIA wrote the FCC to tell it that the kind of blacklist approach taken by Foss’s company wouldn’t work. According to the lobbying group, it raises privacy concerns—and causes other problems too.

“Even assuming an accurate database of blacklisted and whitelisted numbers can be compiled and maintained, the ease with which modern equipment and software can allow a caller to spoof a caller ID would present significant challenge,” the group says.

I thought the phone companies had access to more information than caller ID for the calls they handle. Surely you can't fake caller ID details to dodge your phone bill? I'd love it if they'd give out a star code we could all dial after a call we didn't want to receive that would, if enough people did it, disallow future calls from that entity from reaching any phone line for which a customer has requested the blocking of calls reported as bothersome. No exemptions for charities or politicians either.

The most amazing thing to me is that if you had a student that demonstrated extreme aptitude and interest in any other subject in school they'd be looked at in the best possible light. But if it involves computers, they're a "hacker".

I'm sorry to see how little this has changed in fifteen years.

The article suggests Twitter should take a more active role in policing its community, and the author doesn't appear to think "don't engage trolls" is adequate advice... but, really, what position is Twitter in to take an obnoxious person and bar them from the platform?

One can imagine a solution that requires significant effort or cost to create a Twitter account, perhaps involving proof of identity, but how high can you set the bar without putting legitimate users off?

It may not sit well that people can't practically be removed for reprehensible behavior as it occurs, and I get that it can come across like victim-blaming to tell people they should ignore it, but somehow letting someone yell themselves hoarse (metaphorically) without realizing they've been muted seems even more satisfying than giving them a ban page and having them make a new account in five minutes.

Well, that's reassuring. Been reading lots of confusing and/or unsettling things on this topic in the news over the last year and really needed to hear a flat denial from somebody in charge to move past them.

Artist: Soundgarden. Badmotorfinger, Superunknown, and Down on the Upside, specifically.

Devo is my go to for programming music (Freedom of Choice, New Traditionalists, Oh No! It's Devo). Not gonna lie, you may well hate them, but for whatever reason Devo works for me when I'm trying to focus.

Also a big fan of the album Love by The Cult and pretty much anything by David Bowie or Rush. For newer stuff, Zero 7's Simple Things is really chill. Also, if you're really looking to zone out to something esoteric, Bethany Curve and Children of the Bong are nicely mellow. The album Who's Next by The Who is also great. Guess I'm just dumping my Spotify playlist out at this point, pick and choose what you want? :)

I think what's especially dangerous about it, as a software developer, is that broken crypto runs identically to properly-implemented crypto. If one is in the mentality of rewriting a program until runs without crashing a few times, well, that seems sufficient to land a gig to code printer drivers, but falls short of the rigor I'd hope would go into implementing a secure system.

Nevertheless, at this moment there's a PHP programmer somewhere in the world writing new code that stores passwords hashed with one round of MD5.

I think Park Dietz hits on an important point, one which the writer may not entirely buy into, but I do.

Tragedy after tragedy veers into "discussions" about gun control, violent videogames, violent music, violent movies, and lately, misogyny. This is not to be dismissive of those topics, but it's frustrating to realize the common element is mental illness and watch, yet again, that particular topic become eclipsed by the issue of the day in the national media.

As broadband becomes more pervasive I think we'll see other uses (for example, I could see VR being incorporated into virtual high schools for things like simulating a chemistry lab.)

How long did it take for electricity to be considered a necessity? And I'm legitimately curious how much of a factor radio was in motivating people to make the switch...

I enjoyed the article, but I'm not entirely convinced online gambling can be so easily lumped into the moral panic category with the rest. Unless it's gotten to the point where the games are tightly regulated for fairness and controlled for access to make sure only adults are playing.

On the other hand, I guess video game items having real world value already allows young adults to test these waters somewhat. Just seems that when actual money is involved you're moving beyond simply playing a video game. Or I'm old and panicking morally.

If that was the reaction to an incoming cellphone call, every time by every person, I don't think anybody would have a problem with cellphones in public spaces.

The goal of a movie theatre is leisure experience. If you know a movie is 90+ minutes, and there's a significant likelihood of you or your devices causing a disruption to the other 100 people in the audience in 90+ minutes...

On a different note, me and my friend and his wife went to see Roger Waters perform The Wall a couple years back. The tickets said "No photography", but the band was very careful to say "When you take photos, please make sure the flash on your cameras is off. There are effects during our production that camera flashes will disrupt." I'm paraphrasing, but they were projecting video on the bricks that were assembled onstage as part of the performance. Sure enough, not minutes into the first set, flash flash flash flash flash.

My friends were taking photos. I made sure not to look over at them.

Everyone puts their foot in their mouth from time to time, I guess.

Notice one performance of “Ceremonies” or “Distant Lands” streaming radio show like Hearts of Space that brings in 26 cents for the full writer’s share compared to 2,088 performances of “Gypsy Rain” on Spotify that brought in a total of 60 cents.

Presumably that HoS performance covers an entire audience hearing that song, whereas the Spotify performances are per-person. Wonder if the HoS fee also includes playing back old streams from the site?

At any rate, doesn't seem like enough money to live on. But I wonder if a Spotify is even possible if 14,000 performances could make a reasonable paycheck for a quarter. That'd be, what, around a buck a play per person? Why not just buy the CD at that point?

Perhaps even Firefox's Eich has rethought LGBT equality since his 2008 donation.

To be fair, he has had ample opportunity to say if this is the case by now.

Though, while I don't personally agree with his position at all, I do respect him for not backing down under pressure if it's what he truly believes. Some of my buying decisions in the past have been made on the basis of company politics, but I don't think an individual's participation in the political process (which, unfortunately, money is now part and parcel of) should be able to get them fired.

And I felt the same way when "job creators" were talking about firing employees for voting for Obama. One thing shouldn't have to do with the other.

Well, it's like Jonas Salk said: you can't patent the sun.

Clearly somebody has realized that's a fixable situation.

I don't disagree at all.

If Facebook puts itself to be in this position without possibility of opting out, that is what I hope would trigger people to seek an ethical competitor. And, similarly, that is what I hope would occur to them would be for consumers in aggregate to be an intolerable consequence of forcing on their customers Facebook's ability (and anybody's who could subpoena Facebook) to be privy to this sort of personal information.

I won't buy one of these if it can't be operated without a phone home. I don't mind sacrificing a bit of resolution or refresh rate with a competitor if the alternative is what you say. My hope is that Facebook recognizes that there is a significant market share they'd miss out on if they pushed that point... and, more importantly, that there would actually be a significant market share that they'd miss out on if they pushed that point.

I think, also, somebody has to be first to bring this technology to the market before it even occurs to others they'd want to compete.

Oculus under Facebook might not bring the finished product most of us were looking for, but having a device that's solved the technological challenges of consumer VR is the heavy lifting. And it puts Facebook in the position of being The Name in consumer VR.

Are they going to alienate that right off the bat by building a walled garden, putting heavy content locks on it, watching everything you do? Or will they do the soft touch of making their helmet the easiest (and perhaps only) way to tie your VR into the Facebook network when you wish, get special savings on new software, offer perks to developers that find Facebook-friendly features for their VR software?

I think if they squeeze too hard people will upgrade right out of them into the competition. Which is sure to follow shortly if the hardware is a massive success and the implementation is driving people away. So, cautiously optimistic.

I suppose it hinges on how intertwined you feel morality is with the law, and I don't mean to be insulting with this observation because it's a legitimate difference of opinion.

But "Just because you can doesn't mean you should" is another perspective some folks take on matters like this.

My own suspicion is that the laws may be adequate to the task of regulation, but the will to investigate and prosecute bad actors in the financial sector is not. Until the latter issue is fixed there doesn't seem to be much point in addressing the former.

Does get me thinking, though... granted, the Internet allows the lightning-speed spread of misinformation, but at least it compensates somewhat by giving the same opportunity to the spread of corrections.

Whereas in pre-Internet days, truth was entirely in the domain of trusted institutions, who were quite content to inform the public for over a decade about how, for example, rock music and role-playing games were going to send their kids to hell. Now, my own theory growing up (not established fact! don't reblog or tweet!) was that Parental Advisory stickers pushed more sales than they prevented and that if Parental Advisory had become a proper label and signed artists it could have easily rivaled Motown at its peak.

But the risk of rumors and fabrications becoming fact has been with us far longer than the Internet; only now the general public can address them and maybe correct them on a more equal footing.

But there are worries the harsher penalties may have actually led some women to falsely accuse men of groping in the hope of a cash settlement.

It looks like until Japanese men and women – but especially men – learn to behave themselves on trains in mixed company, completely gender-segregated cars might sadly be the safest way to ride.

I leafed through a book once (and fully intend to actually buy and read though the thing soon) called the "No Asshole Rule". [1] My takeaway was that there are people who on the surface are extraordinarily productive but who are so destructive in interpersonal relations as to contribute negative value overall to a business.

Reading this article makes me wonder if, on a more general level, anybody's tried to quantify the amount assholes cost society in general. And how much of that cost is truly wasted vs. that which creates industry of benefit to all of us. I know effort's gone into using our understanding of psychology to steer people into more responsible social behaviors, but I wonder if all things considered we somehow end up in a better place because assholes are constantly testing limits and we come up with social accommodations for that behavior.

1: http://www.amazon.com/The-Asshole-Rule-Civilized-Workplace/d...

It's surprising how badly a financial news channel got this wrong. Seeing the title I thought maybe this was a blog post under the CNBC domain from a first-day intern or something, but this is just shameful.

This might be a place to start, but I could see it evolving (with donations from programmers and the tech industry) into an organization that can hire some full-time lawyers, so it can challenge some of these patent cases where they begin with the small businesses instead of letting them build up steam.

I like the concept. That we both feel the need to put quotes around "union" suggests the term might be too loaded to use for programmers, but fixing that's as simple as hanging a label on it like "Independent Programmers For Innovation".

Of course, you give it a title like that, you almost have to turn it into a PAC at some point...

The lack of anonymity holds Bitcoin back from being an effective digital equivalent to cash.

I was just thinking about this the other day. If you have one well-meaning blacklist on certain Bitcoins, you could have dozens. Stolen coins, drug coins, "Democrat" coins, coins spent on Sunday. Like anti-spam lists, each Bitcoin user could choose which blacklists to pay attention to when receiving coins, but won't necessarily be privy to all the lists that divvy his seemingly fungible pool of Bitcoin into coins that are more portable and coins that are not.

It's not unworkable to have one list that everybody pays attention to, though even that is contentious. It's the ones that will follow that should really cause concern.

Genetics and environment each play a part, I suppose, but cruelty can be a learned behavior. The price point means this is more likely to be used by people who will take it seriously, but it just struck me as a particularly ghoulish piece of kit to put next to the microscope and chemistry set. I read "A Father's Story" not too long ago, so maybe that doesn't help the cause.

On the other hand, most of us had at least a couple dissections under our belt by high school, and it wasn't like those critters willingly offered themselves up towards our erudition, either. A practical education in science did seem to involve doing things we could have just read about in books, even if it caused a few nitric acid stains here and there and dozens of fetal pigs to lay down their lives, so maybe I'm being too quick to judge.

Now, are marketeers in general psychopaths? I don't think it's a hard and fast rule...

People used to worry kids ripping wings off of houseflies weren't right in the head. Budding aerospace engineers cheated of their true potential because no U.S. company had the ingenuity to market $100 wing scissors?

Note, I'm not saying it's a fantastic idea, just something that happened to occur to me as a possible development in Bitcoin's future.

It'd likely be along the lines of anti-spam lists. You might have one that's high-profile thefts or seizures. For that matter, these lists could be political, issue-based, or whatever.

It's ridiculous and unlikely to be followed if taken out to the extremes of issue-based disputes, but I don't think it's impossible for a significant number of people to agree not to transact in stolen Bitcoins, some on principle, some as self-preservation (the exchanges), and most because their utility is reduced by the first two groups refusing them. This also happens to increase the value of untainted Bitcoins.

Interesting thought. Could there be "shunned" Bitcoins where, if they held certain blacklisted wallets in their history, businesses and users would choose not to accept them?

One could imagine people still choosing to trade in these Bitcoins, but that such a penalty would forevermore reduce their value next to "unshunned" coins. Could legit businesses and people using Bitcoin collectively reduce the value of stolen Bitcoins in this fashion to discourage it without directly discovering who misappropriated them...?