Technocrank

Google Gears (0.5.29) has just been released and now works with Firefox 3.5.  I’ve only tested it so far with WordPress.

I was wondering why my BT Home Hub 2.0 router would keep resetting/rebooting after about 3 minutes of a outbound activity.  Benign things like uploading FTP files to my webserver.  Infuriating, since my client was waiting for these files and it was looking like I’d have to courier DVDs across the ocean.

This had been happening for months and I started to get suspicious that it might be BT doing something sneaky like sending a reboot command to the router.  After all, they update the firmware remotely and silently with out telling you.  Who knows what else they can do?

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This “article” on the BBC Magazine site wrings its hands and cries:

Sat-nav clearly suits an era which has given up on understanding the roads as a coherent, logical system – an era in which map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.

I honestly wish I knew more about how the editorial process in the mainstream media works.  I can’t fathom the genesis of this story and I can’t understand the fear-mongering behind it or why its acceptable to crank out a fluff-piece that does nothing but weep about the loss of our humanity (which isn’t happening, in case you were wondering).  And yes, I am aware that this is quite a common pattern, particularly on slow news days.

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Password masking is the HTML thingy that replaces your password characters with bullet-points as you type.  It may not be the perfect or most effective way to stop snoopers, but it’s not meant to be.  It’s only meant to be good enough to stop most snoopers – at the very least make it somewhat inconvenient.  And it covers casual as well as determined distance creepers with binoculars.  He says:

More importantly, there’s usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website. It’s just you, sitting all alone in your office, suffering reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.

While I agree with Jakob’s general observations about usability and the apparent cost of failed password attempts, I think the alternative isn’t quite acceptable.  Because frankly, we’re not all sitting alone in our office.  Many of us, are in fact, in the real world…like airports and coffee shops.

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I have a Skype Unlimited Country subscription which, here in the UK, cost me £1.95/month.  It seemed like a great deal.  Just moments ago, I got an email from Skype telling me that my subscription renewal had failed because it had been refused by PayPal.  I logged into PayPal and there was no record of the transaction.

That’s when I headed over to the Skype site and noticed that my subscription was about to run out in 2 days because of this renewal “failure.”  However, I also noticed that the subscription rate had jumped from £1.95/month to £2.95/month without any indication as to what had changed.  The subscription forum makes no mention of it (but there does seem to be a lot of complaining going on over there).

You know, it’s just a little thing, but I would hope that if you’re going to summarily hike the rates, you’d at least (a) tell me, and (b) convince me it’s worth it.