The single biggest everyday-use thing I miss with PHP is keyword arguments. With PHP the only real equivalent is passing an array of arguments and then checking if each possible key exists, and that's just way clunkier.
The most provable thing is that if you ever make the mistake of granting them access to your email account, everyone on your contact list can expect multiple spam messages FROM YOU begging them to join LinkedIn. It's the kind of thing only the shadiest of shady Facebook apps employ.
Harvesting of contact information even without permitted access is less clear cut but there's widespread concern due to the large number of questionable coincidences.
Yep. I understand the resentment towards this decision, but anything that cuts down on the 10+ Conduit adware extensions I find myself uninstalling from clients' computers every day is fine by me.
Some of these infected extensions already show up as being installed by enterprise policy, though, which the article states will not be affected.
So I'm not sure how effective this will be in the long run.
I too have Verizon FIOS and have no issues to speak of, other than the cost. But I don't assume that everyone else has had similar experiences. Typically it works out that areas with choices tend to get better service while the experience degrades as customers have fewer choices.
Personally, I wish they'd quit trying to convince me to increase my bill by a significant amount by including TV, of which I've made it quite clear I do not want.
>Verizon FIOS has an excellent reputation and the product is far superior to the other choices we have.
Well, that's the crux of the problem, isn't it?
The shitty TWC service I pay for is probably far superior to the more expensive, 500kbps, line-of-sight based wireless network of the only other competitor I know of in the area. Not exactly a glowing testimonial though, is that?
Yep, it's a social status dogwhistle, just like requiring college degrees for jobs where it is in no way relevant.
There's also a significant racial component to it. It's not a coincidence that top power-broking universities have moved sharply away from objective towards subjective metrics and increased the percentage of legacy admissions at the same time that increased access for minorities has been sought.
It's astounding that an article like this is published in 2013 anywhere but the dark corners of supremacist sites and the memoirs of fading British lords, where it belongs.
This is nothing more than moaning that the modern predominantly-white, predominantly-male, virtually entirely rich elite are too "new money" for the old predominantly-white, predominantly-male, virtually entirely rich elite.
I love these "economists" waffling on about reasons why young people aren't spending money on X like their parents used to, that have nothing to do with oh I don't know "stagnant wages", "crippling student debt", or "30% unemployment".
"It's All About The Material Conditions, Stupid" -- Karl R.R. Marx, A Song of Capital and Ice
At which point you're back to the same basic problem with passwords: the weakest link and root-problem is the average user's lack of knowledge. There wouldn't be such a mad scramble to find a decent alternative to passwords if everyone was using KeePass or the like, and no alternative is going to be near-future viable if it relies on something too complicated for the nearly-everyone who isn't using strong generated passwords.
2FA is working because all the user has to do is get a text. Anything beyond that level of difficulty is simply a non-starter at this point.
There is nothing magical about being the customer. Paying money doesn't stop anyone from creating a multi sided market that makes you the product. As anyone who subscribed to a magazine, purchased season tickets to a cultural organization, or seen an ad on an Xbox can attest.
Also, you created an account an hour after this article was posted just to type a banal cliche that we've all had to endure endlessly?
Also : I'm a customer of my isp. Not too happy about them at all. In fact, I'm a lot happier being Google's product (and I would argue that at least in a few instances this is not true).
Yes, it can. Where exactly are they going to go? Even the really few of us who care about it enough to stop using Google search, turning to duckduckgo, still need to go back to Google every once in a while, when DDG obviously doesn't cut it. The interwebs are filled with Google's advertising products, and the number of Gmail users who evangelically try to beat its interface into behaving well enough to be worth a fuck is almost outrageous.
We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell, and with the decreasing amount of Internet education most users get before starting to surf the web, the distance from that point is increasing. They thrive on the eternal September.
We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell
I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived.
The Internet is a funny place. A lot of Internet users move in herds, which means a disruptive newcomer can grow very fast if the whole viral networking effect kicks in, but usually when that happens one or more established players must fall to create the space.
> I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived.
On the other hand, MySpace was not hooked on so many and so important portions of one's Internet life, nor did they have the advertising upper hand that Google has.
It has been so long; I almost forgot the phrase "Eternal September." Keeping an eye on your internet privacy is a pain in the ass: I use DDG when I can, block most scripts and trackers, and keep an eye on my cookies, but it breaks some websites in non-obvious ways, and I'll have to do something else to deal with browser fingerprinting. As long as most people are easily productized, it just doesn't matter.
My browsing habits are pretty much along the same lines, but I expect it will become much harder to do so in the following years. Between the feature creep and the monetization of idiocy, I expect we will lose even more diversity than we already have; on the software side, privacy-enabling features will just slowly disappear, as a smaller and smaller proportion of people will have the technical prowess to even care about them, let alone use them.
As for the Eternal September... I used to think it had been just a momentary problem that led to the unfortunate demise of USENET. I am starting to wonder if it wasn't, in fact, a first symptom. Programmers from my generation ought to have been so happy to see this happening -- the WWW available to everyone, connecting everyone. If only it weren't for the wrong reasons. The taste of my dream turned out to be a lot more bitter.
In the middle term, it will probably come down to stone tools: blocking via /etc/hosts, filtering headers through proxies, etc. I'll re-learn it.
As for the Eternal September... I used to be able to talk to people on the internet, with threads, groups, and killfiles, using the software of my choice. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Don't forget that Internet is the new television. We've built empires of television channels (including all the commercial football clubs) for the only sake of planting advertising inside each other's homes.
With Internet, we've had our innocence time, with few advertising, relatively clever users and smart, responsible usages.
But Internet will become the new plaza for the populace, filled with orange blinking advertisers, awful designs that only lowerclass people can accept (think saving a file in Windows 8 or just... facebook), like supermarkets who swap alleys around just to make you walk in front of new products, like neon lights which look awful as they try to catch your attention. And websites will get bugs as they grow old, because margins will be shallow again. The story of any long cycle in economy - 2012 was the top of the curve.
Google can definitely afford to alienate the small percentage of its users who actually care about privacy. They alienated me to the point where I no longer use any Google products, and I hear the company is still pretty successful.
People say that, but these are just labels, and ultimately it doesn't make a difference. The thing that matters is who has power in the relationship. Look at heroin; users are customers, but those supplying the product hold the power. Or look at the music industry: musicians are the product, fans are the customers, and neither of them have much power.
We would be the customer, if they hadn't messed up their advertising management systems so much that we've given up trying to make them work. I don't do our on-line marketing, but I think we're up to something like 4x actual spend that they're offering in credit as they beg us to start advertising with them now.
Even Facebook's ad buy system is better than Google's current one, and being worse than Facebook's ad buy system is an achievement that I always assumed would require years of practice and a lot of natural talent.
Precisely. It's as though Google is the new network television. Advertisers pay to be delivered bits of your attention, and the network focuses on trying to keep your attention, and with a little data mining & demographics match you with the "best" advertisements.
And there's no indication that they're in danger of not having you, or a large number of close approximations of you.
Social networking is today's TV, that you must participate both as a way to spend your life and to not be alienated from all the other people in your lives that use and talk about social, or TV, or whatever the next thing will be.
