Recently, The American Prospect published an article excoriating the “men’s rights” movement. It was a pretty good article, and well-received. Lots of people tweeted links to it… or, they tried to. Curiously, those tweets all broke in the exact same way, pointing at a truncated version of the correct URL. That’s because the next character after […]
Author Archives: Kagan MacTane
How Do We Stop the Spying?
Friday, September 6th, 2013 – 1:49 pm
I should really write something about the ongoing — and increasingly horrifying — revelations of NSA spying. The latest round of news basically boils down to: The NSA can now say, “I’m in ur crypto readin ur comms — all of them!” Every time I try to write about this, my heart pounds faster and I feel overwhelmed by sorrow, […]
Stop Designing For Men
Saturday, July 20th, 2013 – 12:47 pm
If you’re designing or creating content on the Internet today, you need to remember one simple fact: Your audience has two genders, not just one. It isn’t just men, it’s women, too — and the women outnumber the men. Take a look at this report from last year, on “10 Key Trends From the Banking Trenches“. On […]
Why I Just Uninstalled Ad-Aware
Friday, June 7th, 2013 – 12:23 pm
I recently uninstalled Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware Antivirus. As part of the uninstall process, it suddenly took me to a page on Lavasoft’s web site asking me about what made me uninstall their product. I consider that kind of rude and unexpected, but since I was uninstalling the product specifically because of my deep dissatisfaction with it, I […]
Singularities Aren’t Just In the Future
Saturday, May 18th, 2013 – 3:10 pm
In my first post about the Singularity, I rummaged through various possible definitions for “what the hell does ‘Singularity’ even mean, anyway?” On my list of five options, number 2 was: “A time when when technological progress goes so fast that we people before it can’t predict it (or what comes after it).” But this means that […]
The Implications of “No Local Storage” Computing
Sunday, April 28th, 2013 – 2:48 pm
At http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/, Rob Pike talks about how computing should be everywhere, part of the infrastructure. He says storage “should be someone else’s problem, one I’m happy to pay to have them solve”. But the problem is, when you abstract away a problem like that, it will come around and bite you later. The people using Megaupload […]
To Stop “Six Strikes”, Declare Broadband a Public Utility
Monday, March 25th, 2013 – 7:16 am
Earlier this month, major ISPs started their “Six Strikes” program. By any rational measure, it’s a horrible idea. Yahoo! dubbed the plan“six strikes and you’re screwed”. Comcast’s implementation, using browser alert pop-ups, has been described as “a security disaster”. Among other problems, it costs nothing for a copyright holder to file a complaint or accusation, […]
Can jQuery Put Pressure On WebKit to Fix Bugs?
Sunday, February 17th, 2013 – 12:45 pm
If you didn’t already know that Opera Software decided to toss its Presto rendering engine in favor of WebKit, just stop reading this post right now and go catch up on the past week of news in the world of web development and browsers. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Assuming you did already know that, you should […]
Commandments For Handling Passwords
Sunday, February 10th, 2013 – 1:51 pm
If you’re taking passwords from users, here are some commandments you need to follow: Don’t Impose a Maximum Length Limit This is one of the most critical. One of the best things anyone can do to make their password — or pass phrase — more secure is to make it longer. Increasing the number of characters means an […]
The Problem With “Objectify A Man In Tech Day”
Tuesday, January 29th, 2013 – 8:46 am
Update: While putting the finishing touches on this post, I found out that its creator is cancelling Objectify Day, for a host of very good reasons. I think much of what I wrote here can still be useful, so I’m posting this piece anyway. I’m glad to see that the purpose I had in mind […]