dingosity

I think I was talking about the pundits, not the staff at Bluesky. They certainly existed in 2020. You can be a pundit and say things without saying them on Bluesky. There is a notable history of people saying things before 2023.

If your assertion is "a bunch of people got on Bluesky to talk about the election..." well, did you notice there were two candidates? I think what you're saying is "DEMOCRATS left TWITTER to go to Bluesky," which may be true, but that is a hypothesis for which data would confirm or refute.

So your data is "I noticed BlueSky is people who left Twitter." This may not be the convincing argument you think it is.

It sounds like your point is when left wing politicos are targeted and people celebrate it, those are obviously sock-puppets and bots. But when right wing celebrities (for lack of a better word) are targeted, it's the democratic base that comes out in force to celebrate.

So only right wing commentators who advocate political violence deserve protection?

[Also... Do you have any data supporting this hypothesis?]

There was a joke bumper-sticker in the valley back in the day that said "Windows 95 == Macintosh 89". But the critique of this was "Macintosh 95 == Macintosh 89". In the same way, "NeXTStep 89 == MacOS X 2001 == MacOS X 2015 == MacOS X 2025" except that they hadn't steved everyone from the user experience research group in 2001 and there were vestiges of #a11y features left in Yosemite.

Complaining your current version of MacOS X has a worse user experience than it did 10 years ago is like buying a Tesla and then complaining about its resale value.

Once long ago I worked for a small company doing unified messaging as their Security Architect. In that job it meant I was a software engineer with domain experience in implementing cryptographic protocols. I was well prepared for this role due to my experience at RSA Data Security (when RSA was a middleware vendor) and Certicom. If you've used an ATM machine in the US in the last 30 years, you've likely used the modular exponentiator I wrote for POWER/PowerPC.

So here I am at this small company that's running out of runway. I'm meeting with my boss, let's call him Mark (not his real name). We're discussing what features we can add in the next three months before half the company is laid off. At the top of the list is the device-key-regen feature that would allow the user (through an arcane series of difficult-to-accidentally-perform user inputs) to regenerate a key and re-submit it for certification. It required changes to the device code, the security gateway code and to the manual. Mark is adamant we should not do this. It would "distract us from other high-value tasks." I then explain the devices will eventually brick themselves without some way to update, or at least re-certify device keys.

Fast forward a month or two and I get laid off. No one buys the IP, so it's no great loss. Just one more project on the burning pile of money called Silicon Valley.

Seven years later I'm working at a company in Seattle well known for a ebook reader that rhymes with "Bindle." Their first-gen devices have a problem. In three weeks, the certs for the device keys will expire, effectively disallowing them from authenticating themselves to network services. I get called in because I had the words "certificate" and "X.509" on my resume. It turns out the manager of the team who built the device software was my old boss Mark. The one thing he remembered is that allowing devices to update (or at least re-certify) keys requires changes to a lot of different software and there was no down-side to not doing it last time.

It is true... there was no down-side to not adding this functionality last time. The company died before anyone other than a smattering of companies could see our IP, and the few beta-users we recruited stopped using the product before the device key certs expired.

Back at the company in Seattle whose logo is half of a smiley face: after MANY failed updates, they eventually pushed out an update that re-certified the existing keys (i.e. - it submitted the public key to a third-party registration authority, authenticating the message with the device's private key.) Not a perfect solution, but given that they waited until about three days before devices started failing, not the worst in the world.

But there was a three-day window in which the devices needed to be on, notice there was a software update and convinced their users to press the "install update" button. Some large number of first-gen devices were not even turned on during this period. When they were later turned on, there was no way to get them the update that allowed them to connect to online services.

The solution was just to tell customers they would be given a new ebook reader. Given the engineering time invested and the number of new ebook readers shipped out, our team estimated it cost the company between $40M and $60M.

My old boss Mark was promoted.

I think my point is... with the possible exception of a company whose devices prominently feature a fruit-based logo, no large company understands what a key-pair or certificate is and how it relates to operational processes which enhance their products' security or trust. And I like to kvetch.

So the smartest guy in the world doesn't know that flashing a Nazi salute is bad?

Also, he's not an aspy. I worked with him. He's an Asshat.

Thank you for posting something unrelated to politics today.

This is problematic.

I wonder how much of Ferris' latency is related to net speed and rendering speed / computational horsepower of their local machine. I've seen several different evaluation regimes which try to objectively measure web-site "responsiveness" independent of net and rendering speed. Maybe the OP could use one of them to show how different sites were using techniques that unduly reduce the perceived performance of their site.

Think about what happens if you're on a site that loads hundreds of images and has keep-alive explicitly turned off. Or if you're doing a TLS handshake across a high latency network (TLS, for all it's benefits, requires at least one back-and-forth to setup the secure transport before sending "content.") Or you have a weird / inefficient dynamic loading process. Each of these will cause perceived latency, but have different solutions.

I tend to agree with the OP, it certainly seems like sites I use on a regular basis are laggy, but we may need a more objective evaluation framework than "ugh. the web is slow." And who knows, maybe most of the problem could be solved by getting the OP a better ISP and a faster machine.

I was born in Texas. I wonder what country I'll be deported to.

meh. i always thought the real reason for the ban was EVERYONE in the states who has had to deal with ByteDance walks away from the experience thinking they've been dicked. Or at least everyone I've talked with. In my own experience, we signed a deal with US/TikTok and started spending money on things to uphold our part of the bargain. Then ByteDance steps in and says "no. we're canceling this contract," and we point out, "uh... hey bevis... we just spent money on your behalf," and their response is "sucks to be you." The case has been in California courts for about 5 years. We may get our money back before TikTok/US goes out of business.

I was a little surprised by how many times commercial airliners have been shot down.