For a while now, the web browser vendors and major purveyors of targeted internet advertising have been working on a proposal for allowing users to prevent web sites from tracking their online activity and using it to “customize their web browsing experience,” a.k.a., displaying targeted advertisements which are, theoretically, tailored to the person viewing them.… Read More: Have you enabled do-not-track? »
Earlier this year, my wife and two of my daughters attended CELEBR-8 U, a conference for middle school and high school girls organized by Moving Traditions, a wonderful organization for which our family has a great deal of fondness and respect. One of the co-sponsors of the conference was BBYO. Unbeknownst to us, Moving Traditions… Read More: BBYO management: incompetent or merely stupid? »
UPDATE: The Consumerist has posted a template you can use for your opt-out letter. Furthermore, the Consumerist article says that eBay just did the same thing as PayPal, and you need to send a letter to opt out of that one as well. There’s a link in the article to a template for the eBay… Read More: PayPal adding mandatory arbitration to user agreement, but you can… »
I recently wiped Windows 7 from my ThinkPad and replaced it with Linux (Fedora 17). One of the (few) things I missed about Windows was the fact that when I docked my laptop, it automatically switched from the laptop’s internal speakers and microphone to the USB headset plugged into my dock. Pulseaudio doesn’t seem to,… Read More: Pulseaudio: switch to headset automatically when it’s plugged in /… »
A recent security breach exposed the plaintext usernames and passwords of almost 100,000 members of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The usernames and passwords were discovered by a researcher in 100GB of log files inadvertently left open to the public on an IEEE FTP server. Leaving aside for the moment how incredible… Read More: How to misread statistics, ArsTechnica edition »
I have several domains on Go Daddy, including my blog and my primary email domain. As a result, both my blog and my email were nonfunctional for much of the day on September 10, due to the Go Daddy outage you’ve probably already heard about. For the record, I first started using Go Daddy simply… Read More: How not to apologize for a service outage »
In June, I wrote about a technique used by spammers to harvest names and email addresses of “live” targets for their spam. In a nutshell: you post an ad to Craigslist; the spammer sends you an automated email which makes you think that maybe the sender is interested in your ad; you send a response,… Read More: New technique from the Craigslist spammers »
UPDATE [2012-10-03]: RightScale has ongoing issues with the stability of their command-line tools. In particular: rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with a timeout error. You can’t just retry, because sometimes the script you were trying to queue was queued despite the error, and there’s no way to tell. rs_run_right_script sometimes fails with an error “Failed to process… Read More: Auto-negotiation of pool updates in RightScale VMs »
UPDATED 9/4/2012: I accidentally had a hard-coded AWS_VOLUME_IDS setting in the script, which I inserted while debugging my own copy of the script and forgot to remove before posting the script here. I’ve removed it. D’oh! UPDATED 8/19/2012: The logic in my original script for determining which backups to preserve was incorrect. It is updated… Read More: My entry in the “nightly snapshot backups of EBS volumes”… »
At my current gig, we’re hosting our blog on Amazon EC2, at least until we have become so wildly successful that a single EC2 instance can’t keep up with our blog traffic. We wanted to make sure we wouldn’t lose our blog in case of an EC2 failure, so we configured our (Linux) blog instance… Read More: Yes, you CAN use attach a Linux EBS root volume… »