“I saw a supposedly dead person was alive in a photo, therefore dying is a hoax.”
Continue readingOn Russians & Their Apps
The FaceApp controversy took on a feverish pitch over its Russian roots. I have Opinions.
Continue readingOops
I was Wrong on The Internet when I raised alarm over FaceApp. It blew up. People got mad. Here’re the highlights.
Continue readingSurely
Sure, God commanded us to obey the laws of the land, but surely he didn’t mean this!
Ultraconservatives
Such statements from ultraconservatives can mean only one thing: God didn’t foresee the current state of affairs, so God misspoke. Surely, then, God is not a god. Or maybe such a statement is deeply, sinfully flawed.
Bigot
It’s a noun meaning a person who is bigoted. It originated in the 16th century and, back then, it meant specifically a superstitious religious hypocrite.
Continue readingDropbox – Here Be Monsters
Popular file-syncing service Dropbox has been in hot water lately. It was bad enough to find out awhile back their misleading phrasing wasn’t true and that files were indeed accessible to its employees. This has resulted in a formal complaint to the Federal Trade Commission. Now apparently that same design choice – the one about which they claim they didn’t mislead customers – made a new security snafu possible.
Continue readingBrowser Capability Detection: You’re Doing It Wrong
Web developers (developers, developers): I need you to listen to me. Are you listening? Good. Stop trying to be smart about detecting browser capabilities. You almost always get this wrong. Usually it’s because you’re used to a single platform and only test on others and so you’re not always up to speed on how the various browsers of the world work.
Continue readingKarma Police, Arrest This App
Apple capitulated* to more than 140,000 people who signed an online petition to remove a “Gay Cure” application from their App Store. While the ignorance of those who attempt to “cure” homosexuality still astounds me, I admit I have mixed feelings about Apple’s actions and wonder if a small adjustment might get them out of their current “Moral Police” predicament.
Continue readingMore Censorship
Today I read yet another example of censorship that made me quite sad. In order to make the world a better place, some upstanding citizens decided to expunge an awful word from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s not that the offensive word “nigger” will be changed to the dubiously better word “slave” but that there are people actually asking for it and buying censored history from a publisher. It’s all the nuances of history that allow us to understand it. If we expunge the offensive bits of history from our collective memories, we only doom ourselves to repeat it. I hate the word but value the lesson its use teaches us. So did Samuel Clemens.
Continue readingIncommunicado
This morning on my way into work I was listening to WTOP, a local news, traffic, and weather radio station. One of the anchors lamented that 2010 was the “year we stopped talking to one-another.” His assertion was that too many of us are using text and e-mail versus voice. I find this both puzzling and absurd.
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Josh lives in Danville, Virginia, USA with his husband and too many cats.