socket0

I suspect you've finally explained the existence of IE6...

A lot of people (most people?) seem to have that built into their BIOS. Or at least the most basic functionality needed to do that. That's not to imply they all like those situations, just that they don't freeze up and experience the human equivalent of a BSOD when confronted by one.

> I can't figure out how to set up a filter in Inbox. > The settings page is incomplete.

I'm a huge fan of Inbox, but this still gets me all the time. Inbox was pushed as a kind of advanced application to advanced users, yet I have to go back to Gmail for any kind of advanced settings or configuration. That makes absolutely no sense at all.

Dating might be entertainment to some, but I'm sure it's procreation to most.

Part of the challenge for publishers lies in deciding what they really are. Following a quantity over quality model might work well for many. On the other hand, Wired (as distinct from Condé Nast) have traditionally had a different kind of relationship with their readers. There's an emotional bond between many in the tech community and the Wired brand, which calls for a higher level of trust, but at the same time delivers a much more loyal type of readership.

I would probably not pay for access to Wired without advertising, regardless the price. I am more than willing to pay for services, or access to information that I can rationalise as an investment, but (apparently like many others) not for entertainment. On the other hand, I'm more than willing to disable ad blockers on wired.com, as long as I know everything include is served from their own network, and that they take my security as seriously as I do. Some friends can be trusted with unsupervised access to your home, but those are special friends. Wired have to convince us they're a special friend.

I have no idea whether they're commonly accepted rules. Like most other cargo cult daters I like to think there are rules, and that they mean something, but when all is said and done I'm pretty sure you're right. It's a complex interplay of roles and traits shaped in part by evolution to weed out unfit candidates. On that we built our cargo cult: I have no idea what I'm doing, but when interacting with a potential love interest I'll mimic the actions that have apparently served others so well, and even when they make absolutely no sense they'll probably still work. I suspect a lot of other interactions in the digital world can be partially explained by cargo cults based on evolved behaviour.

Conclusion: I might not be the only person who has no idea what he's doing when it comes to dating, so a lot of us are faking it and hoping for the best.

> Who enjoys these games?

I don't know if anyone really does. However, like me, most people probably like to think there's a right way and a wrong way of doing this, and that it's not all just a random coin flip where the house always wins. If someone we're attracted to apparently dislikes us for no discernible reason, it's comforting to think it's simply because we didn't follow the commonly accepted rules.

Charging one dollar instead of five isn't compromising, that's haggling. I don't think anyone could begrudge them charging money, it's just that they don't give their technically savvy audience a real choice. It's either pay up, or go read something else.

"Trust us, and everyone connected to us, and everyone connected to them.""

Wired is asking its readership to compromise, without being willing to make any compromises themselves. They're asking us to trust them on a one-to-one basis, but that's now how trust works in a network. We have to trust Wired, and trust every single one of the companies or servers they include content and scripting from, and trust every single one of the companies or servers that these companies or servers include content from. We're looking at trusting at least a hundred actors here, quite likely more.

"Trust us, and only us."

A much better compromise would be to ask us to turn off ad blocking on their site, while in turn guaranteeing that every single script and asset served on their domain will also be served from their own servers, after having undergone at least some type of inspection. Then we at least have a reasonable basis for trust.

> Try taking apart a modern cellphone or a laptop computer. > Assuming you can even figure out how to pry it open, the > inside is as mysterious and inscrutable as the outside.

I remember taking apart old radios as a child in the 70s, marvelling at the colourful transistors and resistors. But I had no way of knowing what exactly these were, and even less of a clue as to how it all worked. So sure, it's hard to intuit how a smartphone or a computer works just by looking at the insides. But today's budding scientists have the world's knowledge at their fingertips, and will be able to find diagrams and schematics for a lot of devices, and a large number of sites explaining what every component is and how it works. You don't raise scientists, you give them interesting toys to play with, and they simply raise themselves.

Well, the account is now secure. Objective achieved?

The last leaked draft the EFF have on their site is from May 2014 (specifically the chapter covering intellectual property). Other bits and pieces have surfaced over the last two years as well, not all of them obtained legally, which is presumably why the EFF don't have them on their site. I do believe Cryptome has them, but I'm at work, I can't risk visiting Cryptome to get the links right now.

Parts of the draft agreement have been leaked before. The EFF has links to relevant bits: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

You will most likely find a shift in the hive mind, but presumably only because Reddit grew from a smaller community with relatively dominant progressive and atheist/agnostic values into something much more mainstream. Reddit 2006 would not reflect mainstream US values and opinions, Reddit 2015 would be much closer. So I'm not sure we can draw any conclusions from the hive mind shift.

We're all someone's cattle in some greater scheme. The community funds education and healthcare, not because we're nice people, but because there's a net benefit to having a healthy and educated workforce. It's cynical and sad, but also realistic.

> Have some more goddamn kids.

Volunteers for the bordercases EU breeding programme eagerly awaited! :)

Your numbers can't be faulted, but the risks might be overstated. Based on purely anecdotal evidence (several young Syrian men who ended up in Belgium) I can say that many of these guys do indeed have families they intend to bring over. Because of the danger and uncertainty of the journey, those who could stash their families somewhere relatively safe for a short while did so. They knew it would be easier for them to reach real safety on their own, and that there will be organisations to help them reunite with their families afterwards. Of course, a negative aspect to this is that the current refugee numbers are lower than they should be, as many of these people will soon account for several more.

The struggle for economic resources might not be as bad as you envision. Countries like Germany have excellent social welfare systems with the capacity of processing refugees as quickly as possible. (OK, "as quickly as possible" isn't very quick, but they'll handle it.) The biggest challenge at the moment is getting these people off welfare and into the job market. Sure, because of cultural and educational differences we're probably not going to see many engineers or neurosurgeons, but the people who collect our garbage and do our cleaning mostly aren't engineers or neurosurgeons either. And language barriers are more fuzzy in the EU than in most other places, we tend to get around them. The jobs won't be fancy, but they'll pay minimum wage and give the refugees a purpose and a sense of self-worth. Also, there's no path to integration as straight and speedy as hanging out with colleagues over breaks.

But you're right, it's not going to be easy. It's going to take pragmatic and inspired leadership within the EU, and we're in very short supply of that. On the other hand, these people and their children will pay the future taxes that fund my pension and socialised medicine, all I need to do is make sure they're safe and land on their feet now.

Presumably Facebook would have CSP headers set on some of the scripts they load to prevent JavaScript on the page from interacting with their own scripts.

It's JavaScript, so the client pays for it. If you're on an already slow browsers, you don't want to see it choke after you click on a button. So companies like Facebook ignore the problem on the client side, and solve it on the server side.

It's possible to detect whether an element is visible using window.getComputedStyle(). Why don't Facebook do this? Because it's slow. And measures like this can cause problems on the page. They want their button integration to be fast and low impact, so they would rather handle a couple of abusers (which they're quite good at) than inconvenience a large number of sites.

Looking at the code, it's clear the strings are merely tests, and not used when a proper string is defined. However, the fact that their tests and examples use these strings, makes it clear what they thought a good application of their product was.

To determine whether something is really just "blog spam", I always look at whether the page adds anything that would be lost on YouTube. In this case there's the description, a link to slides, and information on the speaker. So this one gets a pass.

I don't remember so much excitement and fury when it became known that the NSA was spying on us common folk. "Espionnage? Against le prolétariat? Who gives une merde?" But suddenly it turns out that the Americans were not only spying on the unwashed masses, but also our unwashed elite, and it's midnight meetings at the Elysée and general outrage all round.

I like looking people up before a meeting as well, just to get a measure of how technical they are, what their backgrounds are, etc. But I hate that LinkedIn tells them I've been looking, at least when I use the free version. It sounds reasonable to do some prep work before a meeting, but gets decidedly more creepy when you get e-mail to tell you that someone was checking up on you.

Hysterics choose sides, realists distrust government and commercial interests equally. But the key to evaluating the threat can be summed up in the Senator's own words: "private sector entities gathering personal data for marketing and commercial purposes". That's it. I don't want to buy the crap Google and Facebook want to sell me, but I do want to use their services to make my own life easier. I'll keep on benefitting from this unequal relationship until I feel uncomfortable.

Government agencies, on the other hand, are not as forthcoming about their motives. "We spy on you to keep you safe?" No you don't. You spy on other people to keep me safe. You spy on me to keep other people safe. Who are these people? Why do they feel threatened by me? Are these people who have a reason to fear me? Should I rather fear them?

So no, not never mind the NSA. Or any other three letter agency. There's a world of difference between the transparent and often sleazy motives of commercial entities, and the secretive and often sinister motives of governments, government agencies, and the "patriots" who blindly support them.

I've run a similar test on my own blog (links dating back to ~2000), and I had the same problem. Some sites do a permanent redirect on broken links, others don't even redirect but show generic content on the original URL. I guess your success in automating this would depend on the nature of the links, but from a completely random collection the only success I had was with visual inspection.

(Someone with far too much time on their hands could probably write a script to attempt to retrieve a copy of the page from the Wayback Machine from around the time the link was posted, then calculate the percentage change compared to the current version. Not really reliable, but worth a try.)

I used to live on the same continent as these people, and even then I would live a life parallel to some of these family members. Now I know what they're up to, am reminded of their birthdays, and get photographic proof of their successful reproduction. Social obligations fulfilled.

As for Facebook being a "hostile platform", that's not quite true, is it? When they park a self-driving car they bought off Google outside your house and broadcast your life to everyone you know, that's when they're hostile.

I like to think that I'm "any intelligent individual", and I use Facebook. That's where some close friends and family are, and if I want to keep in contact with them, that's where I need to be.

I understand the nature of the data Facebook collects about me, and I understand what they would like to do with that data. They want to know who I am, what makes me tick, and use that knowledge to show me advertising I'm more likely to click on. They also want to draw me into their walled garden by promising me shiny things if I stay. It doesn't really work, because I see the same middle of the road content and advertising shown to my friends and family.

I also share my location on Messenger, although the friends and family I chat to might or might not be interested in where I am. I don't chat to strangers, or even "strangers". And if I'm somewhere people don't need to know about, I don't share my location. These are things we teach children about using the Net, or should be. Adults should be able to figure this out themselves.

And I explain the difference between myself and my devices to people; when Facebook tells them I'm at home, that's where my phone or tablet or desktop PC is connecting from. I might be there, I might be away, I might not even be awake.

The technology lies, and sometimes so do I.

As these measurements and observations are done inside the system, they're completely unreliable. Every time the computer clock ticks, a second goes by. It doesn't matter how fast it's ticking to an observer watching the screen, for code on the inside a tick means a second. The outside observer would notice the processor struggle to render all those details, slowing everything down to a crawl, but inside the code every tick will still signal a second.

Just as ridiculous: trying to cancel a Skype Premium account. Last time I checked, the official instructions on how to do this used screenshots from a version of Skype that was replaced long ago, indicating buttons and links that haven't been available in years. The only way to cancel a Skype Premium account appears to be to contact customer support and beg. The last automated renewal cost me 70 euros, for a service I don't use.