jwz

Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

Google Reader Apocalypse Extremely Fucking Nigh

Those dicks at Google are shutting off Reader at the end of the week, and the world is in a mad tizzy trying to find a feed reader that will continue to function. First a word on why it is stultifyingly stupid that this is even a problem in the first place: I want to read my feeds on three devices: a desktop computer…

Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"

In a shamefully credulous statement, they say: Proponents of pseudonymity scored a major victory today, when Google executive Vic Gundotra revealed at the Web 2.0 Summit that social networking service Google+ will begin supporting pseudonyms and other types of identity. According to Mashable, Google+ will be "adding…

Facebook doesn't like privacy countermeasures

German tech-news site Heise changed their "Like" buttons to be locally-hosted images that only transform into real Facebook "Like" buttons once you click them -- meaning that if you don't click anything, Facebook can't track you, and that actually "liking" the page requires two clicks. (Also presumably meaning that…

Google seems to have broken email forwarding

Basically: I'm finding it impossible to reliably convince Google that email from my employees, to my employees, is not spam. I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to employee@gmail.com. When sending mail using their Gmail…

Engineering Pornography (2002)

This is one of my favorite geek stories of all time. I know I've mentioned it to a few of you recently, and you hadn't seen it, so here it is for posterity. Date: Wed, 27 Sep 89 10:27 PDT. From: "Thomas L. Mc Mahon" <tlm@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com> Subject: Cuts and jumpers (on a different scale) To…

YouTube's joke of a fair-use appeal process

Remember last month, when I was working on a screen saver and I reviewed all nine Hellraiser movies and made a supercut of every on-screen appearance of the Lament Configuration? As soon as I posted it, it was immediately blocked with seven content-ID matches. So I filed a DMCA fair-use counter-claim, because this…

Confiscating your ice cream cones

Hey, remember that awesome Hello City Planner video about how the Government is going to have to come and confiscate your ice cream cones? I thought the best thing about it was that it was actually created by the SF Planning Department, but I was wrong. It gets better: it turns out, it's a true story!! Before Ice…

Nym Wars (Google+ "real name" rules)

I hadn't been paying much attention to the Google "Real Names" clusterfuck, because it was so obvious to me that they were going to lose this one in the press that it would all be over soon. But it's still not over, and the Google brass appear to be digging in their heels, despite the universally bad press they're…