konklone

Google Analytics data is anonymized and aggregated - it's very different than request patterns and sessions tied to a specific IP.

Oh, whoops. Can you recommend how I should change the text? Anything you can link to to show me what you mean?

SSL Labs does a great job of SSL testing domains and making recommendations: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=konklone.com

I developed my nginx config based on their recommendations: https://gist.github.com/konklone/6532544

I think the main catch here is that they're only willing to issue level 1 certs to individuals. For commercial endeavors, they make you pay money, and then they also have you send in proof of identity and stuff, and manually review your documents. I don't think there's a practical difference in security level, but I'm not an expert in this (which is why I don't address this aspect in my guide).

Glad you found it useful!

Granted, this mingles both the federal FOIA and the state FPRA, but I believe the opinion is saying that neither was violated by the denial of the existence of the information.

The opinion actually does seem to suggest that it was okay to lie about the existence of the records - it's near the end, here's the relevant section:

> Finally, Plaintiff maintains that Broward violated the FPRA by falsely denying the existence of surveillance footage from the security checkpoint.

> Like FOIA, the FPRA provides that Florida citizens have a broad right to inspect the records of public bodies absent a clear and specific exemption from disclosure.

> TSA regulations, meanwhile, provide that airport operators must “(1) Restrict the distribution, disclosure, and availability of sensitive security information (SSI), as defined in part 1520 of this chapter, to persons with a need to know; and (2) Refer all requests for SSI by other persons to TSA.” 49 CFR § 1542.101(c); see also id. §1520.9(a)(3) (providing that airport operators must “[r]efer requests by other persons for SSI to TSA”).

> Here, Broward acted pursuant to federal regulations and the OTA when it consulted the TSA regarding Plaintiff’s records request, and it acted at the direction of the TSA in denying the existence of surveillance footage. The Court therefore has difficulty in concluding that Broward’s actions could be unlawful under the FPRA.

Conversation at events is a proper channel. It's not like one day you cross a threshold of influential-ness where it's unethical for you to share ideas with others who have crossed that threshold.

We may not trust the people in this world who tend to gain that level of influence, but I wouldn't describe the general idea of influential people talking, even in a group setting, as problematic.

It's up to the court (and maybe to the judge?). There's a pilot program that the District Court for Massachusetts is doing to allow them:

http://www.mad.uscourts.gov/general/Cameras.html

You're welcome! Though Lindsay Young did the actual sketching.

That was cool of you to write this. Most people let that word just go by.

This is a simple discovery, but an important one. Change.gov was the President's official transition website, and included a vision for his presidency. It's a central piece of the historical record of the US, and they yanked it from the Internet.

It doesn't matter whether or not the Administration was trying to remove something specific: taking down the content at Change.gov is un-American and un-Internet.

Awesome! You might consider removing the years before 1978 on the FISA Court page though:

http://www.plainsite.org/courts/index.html?id=223

Right, now I remember - just double-checked, and Crawl-delay refers to seconds, not minutes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Crawl...

I never thought to check that! Thanks, I may adjust my rate.

This is why I put the crucial space between "real" and "time". I cannot hold up to intensive buzzword scrutiny. :)

It's every 5 minutes because I don't want them to ban me. And in practice, this is an acceptable delay.

Good call. I'll do that.

Background: the FISA Court made a public docket only just last month. It's at http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/courts/fisc/index.html, and is a tiny flat page with links to scanned PDFs. They clearly update it by hand, whenever something becomes public.

I wrote a Ruby script to watch the page every 5 minutes. When there's a change, it texts me, emails me, and tweets as @FISACourt with a link to a diff of the changes.

When I get notified, I read the new documents and follow up the automatic tweet with a hand-written one that explains the update, usually within just a few minutes of the posting.

Simple, but it breaks news faster than the blogs and papers do. The code is here: https://github.com/konklone/fisa

And I have some further explanation on my blog: http://konklone.com/post/following-the-fisa-court-the-advanc...

Why not? Sounds like a reasonable band-aid to me.

Be honest - who here for a second thought this meant that Nate Silver had improved the effectiveness of antibiotics?

yeah....thanks for that.

Yeah, I'll definitely be doing that next time. Thanks for the tip.

I wrote up a post on the whole architecture here: http://konklone.com/post/the-making-of-isitchristmas-dot-com...

You're right, photos can be irreplaceable and I'm probably going to change how I back them up now. My choice of what is and isn't in Dropbox isn't actually based on importance -- but on what I both want on my laptop, but would want to restore if the laptop were stolen. Kind of weird criteria, but it (at one time) made sense to me.

Matt,

Thanks for posting here. The reason I'm confident that this bug is not due to filesystem errors on my machine's part is because Dropbox's version history for these files has become corrupted. If you read over the details and correspondence, you'll see that Dropbox engineers were able to recover two of my files that Dropbox's version history had reported as only having a 0-byte version. These files were edited recently, within the 30-day window that all Dropbox users, Packrat or not, have version control for.

The files had clearly been whole when first synced to Dropbox, but that version was not listed in Dropbox's history, and so I had no power to restore them. Even if my own disk had spontaneously 0-byte'd those files, this should not have caused Dropbox to lose the ability to restore it to its original version.

More circumstantially, others are reporting similar issues:

https://twitter.com/dangillmor/status/261921738441515009 - https://twitter.com/pc1oad1etter/status/261957001234505728 - https://twitter.com/frr149/status/261957708746469378 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704236 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704178 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704063 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704485

It's tough to tell from these small updates whether these users had their files 0-byte'd only locally, possibly by the ext4 bug, or whether they've also verified that it's not recoverable from Dropbox.

In addressing this bug report, please specifically address Dropbox's loss of version history. The two files that Dropbox engineers recovered had their version history wiped within the 30 day window.

Part of what makes this such a bad bug is because Dropbox's file versioning is suffering from it. I have file versioning enabled, but not all of my files were able to use it, because their pre-0-byte history had been wiped.

I didn't go into detail on my backup strategy in the post, but it's (slightly) better than that. I only use Dropbox for media - music, images, photos. Some if it is irreplaceable, but none of it is life-crucial. That stuff is backed up separately, and copied to private space on my web server.

I backed up everything else. :) I usually back up my Dropbox just in case, too, but I just didn't this time. I won't make that mistake again.