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abitsios

12 karma · joined September 13, 2012

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abitsios··on Hey Paypal, why do you need access to my microphone, camera and photos?
And indeed it isn't (got the latest com.paypal.android.p2pmobile from play store and checked). They do to have an HTML component to their app, a Tour guide found in assets/ ("Pay with PayPal in Stores!").

I'm the same person as above, btw. I have noprocrast on that account. It is working very well for me ;)

They have, however, authored a Cordova plugin for others to use the PayPal SDK easily from their PhoneGap apps [1]

[1] https://github.com/paypal/PayPal-Cordova-Plugin

abitsios··on Meditate in front of your computer with Calm
I'm not sure if you could actually meditate with the weight of the thing on your face, but it would be an interesting experience nonetheless.
abitsios··on Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones
Coming soon: Windows Defender Mobile NAndroid Edition (Personal|Professional|Ultimate)
abitsios··on Adobe releases emergency Flash update amid new zero-day drive-by attacks
These posts wouldn't be more regular if they were on a cron job.

Chrome's click-to-play is just such necessity.

abitsios··on LinkedIn is not using email contacts to find people who have an account already
> Why did you create a profile?

1) The intent was to separate my personal and professional social presence: Facebook is no place for doing or talking business.

2) I was looking for work at the time.

3) I tend to try things out

> If you don't want to connect with your professional network, I never said that.

> if you don't care who looked at your profile Whether I care or not, I don't think the network should be reporting views to profile owners. I don't think I am alone in this either: Can you think of any other social network that does this? Would you go back to Facebook if it reported your every view to your contacts? Of course I'm spooked by this.

> What do you think is the purpose of having a LinkedIn account?

Not sure. I can eliminate a few things:

- Not finding employees. I'm supposed to pay for premium to be able to search properly and message people, and then (given my personal experience as a user) my message will be lost in the noise of irrelevant offers (who the hell thinks a PHP developer would be remotely interested/suitable for UI/UX, C++, Technical Writer, ... ? Mass mailers do). SO careers and behance has served me very well instead.

- Not finding work. Can I even separate my contacts into people-that-can-see-that-im-looking and people-that-shouldnt nowadays? If so, I'll call it progress. (My boss shouldn't know if I'm looking ffs)

- Not organizing contacts. One flat list of people?

- Not content. The majority of content I got to see was PR/HR kind of fluff that was almost exclusively cross-posted from elsewhere. None of my professional contacts actually generate content - that seems to happen on Twitter and G+.

I guess I use it as another online CV.

abitsios··on LinkedIn is not using email contacts to find people who have an account already
Really? That's something I haven't heard of from a technical person in a very long while (if ever). LinkedIn's public image from the last 2 years:

* 2012 hack. 6.5M unsalted SHA1 password hashes leaked [1]

* 2013 Acquires Pulse, forces existing users to create a LinkedIn account. Users are pissed [2]

* 2013 LinkedIn Intro. In case you missed it, it was an iOS app that changed your mail settings to proxy your incoming mail through linkedin's servers in order to inject a frame with business-card-like CTAs. In the meantime, this naturally gave them instant access to all your emails. Massive privacy implications.

* 2013 LinkedIn Intro, 3 days after release. Jordan Wright shows a CSS-based phishing attack: security implications as well [3]

My personal experience with LinkedIn:

* My profile info is available to premium users without my consent

* Premium users can spam me without my consent.

* "Who viewed your profile" feature. Unbelievable.

* Constant contact requests from random people. I can't turn their email notifications off entirely (introductions are mandatory). EDIT: I was mistaken - <sarcasm>the process is very straightforward [5]</sarcasm>

* They seem to be in the business of intentionally misleading people (2011) [4]

So, personally I'm the furthest you can get from being a fan and I can't imagine what you were a fan of. They're top ranking on my shit list.

[1] http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/linkedin-member-password...

[2] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2306932/linkedin-in...

[3] http://jordan-wright.github.io/blog/2013/10/26/phishing-with...

[4] http://www.michielgaasterland.com/online-reputation/try-link...

[5] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-disable-all-of-linkedi...

abitsios··on Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]
There's a new TV series that touches upon this - Orphan Black.

---- Spoilers, obviously ----

So they're clones, and they have a "special repeating marker" of some sorts. One of the clones is a biochemist, and she manages to decode it. Turns out, it is a copyright message covering those organisms and their biological offspring as property of X corporation. -------- Spooky, but wouldn't the message get diluted after reproduction?

abitsios··on The Star Wars Route: Do a traceroute to 216.81.59.173
Doesn't work for me... Strange.

I tried tweaking a few flags (such as much longer timeout: -w 30), still no luck.

$ traceroute -m 100 -e -w 30 obiwan.scrye.net

(...all normal here...)

8 core2-te0-0-0-4.faraday.ukcore.bt.net (109.159.249.45) 6.795 ms core1-te0-0-0-5.faraday.ukcore.bt.net (109.159.249.43) 11.500 ms core1-te0-0-0-4.faraday.ukcore.bt.net (109.159.249.41) 13.669 ms

9 host213-121-193-129.ukcore.bt.net (213.121.193.129) 5.964 ms 6.068 ms host213-121-193-137.ukcore.bt.net (213.121.193.137) 7.362 ms

10 * * *

11 * * *

12 * * *

(...and so on...)

abitsios··on Who says splash pages have to be vertical? YouRad.io's horizontal splash page.
I hope there wasn't any permanent damage, I'd feel responsible.
abitsios··on Who says splash pages have to be vertical? YouRad.io's horizontal splash page.
You'd be stunned if you saw the previous landing page as well. I'm with you on the scrolling experience though - I will try to implement a snap-to-center (or make the panels smaller)
abitsios··on Who says splash pages have to be vertical? YouRad.io's horizontal splash page.
In an attempt to explain this, I show a message ('Click "Connect" to start using YouRad.io, or scroll right to learn more') if you haven't scrolled after a while (7 or 8 seconds, I think).
abitsios··on Who says splash pages have to be vertical? YouRad.io's horizontal splash page.
That's true on iOS as well (probably). I am not capturing touch events. On the other hand, the app isn't mobile friendly, so this isn't top of my priorities list right now.