You have no privacy online and there is nothing you can do about it
September 2nd, 2010
Privacy online no longer exists and there is nothing at all you can do about it. In fact, everything you can try to do about it will just make it worse. While everyone and the media and their dog have all been screaming and shouting about privacy on Facebook, privacy and Google Street View and privacy on Blackberries and iPhones, the real battle has been going on very quietly in the background. The battle is now over, the war is over, the bad guys won and you have lost your privacy. All of it. And you never even noticed. Everything you do online is trackable. Everything, and it is happening now.
This post just summarizes what is going on. For the full details, listen to the Security Now podcast on “Side Channel Privacy Leaking” by Internet security expert Steve Gibson.
Your computer’s fingerprint is as unique as yours
This is made possible by what is called “computer fingerprinting” or “browser fingerprinting”. The idea is very simple: Your browser and computer have a large number of characteristics that web pages need to know to be able to display the pages properly, and other characteristics that they don’t really need to know but that your computer shares anyway. Put all this information together, combine it with your computer’s clock time, your IP address range and a few other little items that are all freely available and it is generally possible to identify you with over 99% accuracy. None of these things can be switched off, any more than you can switch off your own fingerprints, height or eye color. Any changes you make to “protect” yourself will actually make it even easier to identify you, because it will make your computer even more easily identifiable.
Web designers’ responsibility in the web standards mess
August 8th, 2010
In a recent Twitter exchange Helen Emerson, a web designer I admire a lot, celebrated the fact that Internet Explorer 9 is finally going to support rounded corners. My feeling on this to this is that’s nice, but it would have happened a lot sooner if we web designers hadn’t hidden IE’s deficits by finding ways to make it display rounded corners anyway.
This is a general problem, and it’s the reason why web standards generally are still such a mess. Most users aren’t aware of this because we hide it from them. Everything seems to work fine in all browsers – as far as users are concerned we are living in an era of universally compatible browsers. Actually, we’re still a long way away from that.
If you look at the code of almost any modern web page you’ll find it full of workarounds that are necessary to make things work properly in different browsers. This applies particularly for Internet Explorer, which may have got better on the surface but still requires countless special solutions to get it to behave. Much of the work on any modern website is devoted to getting it to work in IE as well as in normal browsers.
Apple: “Do be evil.”
July 18th, 2010
Apple still makes exceptionally good and cool products, many of which may be the best in their classes. That’s not the issue. Apple’s antenna problems with the iPhone 4 are negligible even seen on their own, and piffling when compared to the quality of the iPhone 4, which is an astoundingly good smartphone. That’s also not the issue. The issue is that Apple is becoming an increasingly obnoxious company that it’s almost impossible to like.
The iPhone 4 “Antennagate” fuss is a perfect example of Apple’s dysfunctional public persona. A couple of years ago leading CNET podcaster Molly Wood summed up the same observation in her classic Apple is my bad boyfriend rant, and things have been getting worse rather than better since then. You just can’t help getting the impression that this is a company that is being prevaricating, arrogant, slippery and disingenuous to and frequently beyond the point of dishonesty in almost everything they do.
Convert TextExpander snippets for Windows
July 9th, 2009
If you use both Mac and Windows you may have wished you could use your Mac TextExpander snippet files on your Windows computers or virtual machines. TextExpander radically speeds up your work if you often need to use the same text blocks, and having the same texts with the same hotstrings available on Windows makes life a lot easier.
This post provides a free Perl converter script and instructions for converting your Mac TextExpander snippet files so that you can use them on a Windows machine with the free, open-source AutoHotKey program. In addition to this I will show you how to manage your snippet files for multiple machines in a free Dropbox account. Dropbox is a much better solution for synching your snippets than MobileMe and if you combine these two strategies you’ll never have to worry about synching your snippets again – both on multiple Macs and across Mac and Windows machines (including Windows virtual machines in Parallels or Fusion).
Version 1.2:
Cursor position: The 1.2 version now supports the caret/cursor position macro. This will work reliably provided your snippets don’t contain the clipboard pasting macro or date macros that use full month and weekday names or date numbers without leading zeros. All these things will throw the position count off (AHK doesn’t have a “put cursor here” macro).
Version 1.1:
The 1.1 version adds the following improvements:
Expand mode (immediately, at delimiter with keep/delete) is read from TextExpander and exported to the AHK script.
Abbreviation mode (case sensitive/ignore case) is read from TextExpander and exported to the AHK script. However, “Adapt snippet to case of abbreviation” does not work in AHK – at least, I haven’t been able to make it work.
The keep/abandon delimiter macros in individual snippets are now evaluated and work correctly in AHK.
MediaLink: Make the PS3 a Mac media center
February 6th, 2009
For a long time I was frustrated that I couldn’t access the media files on my Mac with my PlayStation 3, which has everything needed to be a great multimedia center, in addition to being one of the best BluRay players around (and incidentally allowing you to play some pretty good video games as well). Recently I discovered Nullriver MediaLink, which comes close to making Apple’s own AppleTV unnecessary. With one small but important restriction, MediaLink is a perfect solution for accessing all the media on your Mac on your TV. At just $20, it’s worth every penny and more.
The restriction? MediaLink can’t (yet) play anything with Apple’s copy protection on it, which means all movies, TV series and videos bought in the iTunes Store, in addition to any iTunes tracks you still haven’t converted to non-DRM. This is currently where the AppleTV still has a major advantage, but I’ve corresponded with Nullriver and they indicated that they’re working on a solution. My guess would be they want to somehow make it possible to register the PS3 as one of the up to five “computers” that are allowed to play your iTunes protected content. If and when they manage that, MediaLink is going to be the kickass solution for PS3/Mac integration.
Windows 7: Microsoft gets it right
January 25th, 2009
I’ve been playing around with Windows 7 for ever a week now and I have to say that this time Microsoft really got it right. It’s everything that Vista should have been and it’s probably the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced. The only downside is Internet Explorer 8, which is worse than ever. Hopefully the errors are bugs, if not life is going to get a lot harder for web designers, yet again.
With Apple working so hard to piss off their users (matte screen on 17″ only and costs more, no more firewire on the Macbook, only one firewire port on the 15″, non-removable battery on the 17″) Windows 7 is a welcome breath of fresh air. If Apple don’t clean up their act I may be switching back to Windows machines again real soon.
First few days with Office 2008
February 16th, 2008
I’ve now been using Office 2008 for about five days and I’m already ready to remove it from my Mac. It is painfully, embarrassingly, frustratingly bad. Either the Microsoft Mac team screwed up completely and lost all track of what they were trying to do or Microsoft is consciously trying to force users away from the Mac and back onto Windows. Possibly a little bit of both. This isn’t just my opinion — c’t, Germany’s most reputable professional computer publication, comes out very strongly and warns all users against installing Office 2008 in their new issue due to be published on Monday.
The iPod Touch as a Bluetooth Phone
December 27th, 2007
I just got a nifty little gadget from Gear4 called the BluEye that adds Bluetooth, an FM radio and a wired remote to my iPod Touch and effectively transforms it into a phone with voice dialing. When calls come in anything playing on the Touch is automatically paused and you accept the call by pressing Play on the remote. If your phone supports voice dialing you can use that too, you just press the Bluetooth button on the remote once and speak the name to dial. This means that you can leave the phone in your pocket pretty much all the time and you don’t miss calls because you’re listening to your iPod. You also have the added advantage of the wired remote, so you can pause, skip tracks and adjust the volume without having to futz around with the touchscreen.
hlp plz!!! How not to write to support…
November 18th, 2007
You often hear about how tough it is to get good information from software support desks. What you don’t so often hear is how tough it is for software support staff to understand the mails that they get from some users. Many users write clear and comprehensible mails to support, but there are others.
In addition to my other work I often have to answer questions in technical support mails from users of a professional authoring system for technical writers. Before I started doing this I thought that it would be relatively easy — after all, I thought, they’re writers, I’ll only be getting well-written, comprehensible questions. Don’t you believe it — the Dilbert cartoons on software documentation are not only close to the truth, they are actually the opposite of an exaggeration. When I read some of the questions these “help authors” and “technical writers” send in I often wonder how they manage to tie their shoelaces in the morning, let alone produce comprehensible documentation.
So let me give you a few little tips that may help you to be a little more successful when you write an email to a support desk:
WordPress automatic updater
November 13th, 2007
One of the few really annoying things about WordPress has always been its stone age updating mechanism. Actually, it doesn’t really have an updating mechanism at all – you have to do everything by hand and so many WordPress bloggers never update.
No longer! If you don’t have it already go out and get the WordPress Automatic Updater. It’s brilliant, it works and it just takes a couple of minutes on any WordPress installation from 1.5 and higher. Highly recommended!
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