Pahalial

I think the real story here is that he chose the 35% royalty rate over the 70% rate “because you can opt out of Kindle Lending.”

I understand that some people view disabling that feature as less of an anti-customer move than I do, but to hate it enough to waive half your royalties?

More likely it was in the midst of the mass-deletion later referred to - deleting 6 years' worth of email could certainly make gmail sluggish.

Stating that this "seems like something Apple would consider" is a far cry from what this blog post does: take one data point's worth of design value from an existing design for one user, extrapolate that to be one of the lead drivers of said design for all users.

I'm all for giving Apple's designs as much credit as possible, but it's still a far cry from even that to "wow this thing about the design I just noticed that works for me must have been something they considered for the populace at large."

This seems useful, yet awfully much like another step on the slow path to legitimizing 'poor taste'.

That's a bit harsh, so let me qualify it. I actually rather agree with the division inherent in this and think it will resound with people, but I honestly believe that this is yet another step towards turning our society into idiocracy. It's the slow legitimization of appreciation for content that we acknowledge as garbage but consume anyway. I firmly believe that there is inherent social value in this garbage content remaining quasi-taboo - a social pressure not to like such things. Sure, most people will watch some anyway, or play the latest mindless shooter, or what-have-you, but so long as it's understood that most people will mock you for publicly liking this, the norm does not drift towards mindlessness - you still need to consume some legitimately good content, even if only to have something to talk about.

I don't mean to attack the site; I think it's a great way to slice into the recommendations game, and I do think a lot of people will get value out of it, and it seems like it may well succeed. I simply am afraid it's a net negative for our society in the long run (then again, of course, not launching is hardly going to reverse such a trend.)

Edit: Make that symptomatic of a net negative. I've thought some more and this is only giving an online portal to express the shift I talk about above, which has already been happening aplenty.

This is an 'enterprise-friendly' feature - the appearance of thorough security ("all our data is stored with AES-256 encryption") with only a nominal increase in actual security.

Just think: there will be AWS accounts using this while their master AWS console account continues to have a single-dictionary-word password and no MFA. Truly the Cloud is the silver bullet to save us all from shoddy CIOs!

The story kind of smells. He harps on pitching it as an alternative to their flash-based player, but what was stopping him from using the same streams he's repackaged in iTunes (or music player of choice)?

All in all, I don't really approve of his repackaging of our public content for personal profit. If he'd had to build a service to scrape the flash audio and then made it accessible via regular streams, that would justify this app's existence and price, but as it stands I find myself mildly unsympathetic.

1080p video with sound only recently improved from "FM radio" quality - what a strange combination.

I was surprised he didn't mention two-way contacts integration. I met a new person yesterday on G+ first, then in person; later that day he emailed me a doc and I was surprised to find that his name/email had not been added to my contact list from circles. This is something the facebook messages/chat integration gets right, and Google needs to figure out how to answer it sooner rather than later.

This might be very related, actually - Dropbox just sent out an email announcing downtime for a move to a different data center.

As usual, allow the smallest subset of functionality which still permits legitimate uses. In these cases they're relying on .htaccess files being allowed specific overrides - FileInfo and Options being the most powerful ones.

'AllowOverride AuthConfig Indexes' is generally relatively safe (in my humble experience) - i'd be scared to see an htshell like these with just those.

Twitter's API does not only service native (smartphone) apps. xAuth is always abysmal security; OAuth provides in some cases some increased security.

Surprisingly good link. While we're discussing Heroku, does anyone have any deep[er] insights into the differences between Zookeeper and Doozer?

I was not at all suggesting the story was false; rather that Poulsen was further "interpreting" the story based on a prior "interpretation" by the New Statesman. [honest edit: I suppose this is a weak sentence. I really did not mean to imply any actual falsehood, rather two levels of the kind of linkbaity shift one finds all too often in online news.]

That said, it seems my Google-fu is weak; I did not turn up that link nor any kind of repeat-threatening of the Guardian. Thank you for the link. Frankly, I think that both the Wired article and the New Statesman piece could have benefited tremendously (newcomer credibility-wise) from including it.

Having now read the Vanity Fair piece, I'll retract my prior criticism of the New Statesman article. If anything, given that I've given Wikileaks a lot of my attention over the last several months, I'm not sure how this escaped my attention, but it puts a lot of things in a different light. I for one certainly thought the relationship between WL and its chosen newspapers was a lot more rosy.