Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Douglas Adams on How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, via @kevinmarks
Wow! Douglas Adams wrote this paragraph ten years ago, and it exactly summarizes why I find it extremely odd/uncomfortable that Twitter is being treated like a news source (and positioning itself as a news source, if their homepage redesign is any indication). Sure, you might found out the news from Twitter, but it’s just a bunch of people talking. There’s no journalist code of ethics involved.
When Amazon discovered these unauthorized sales, it did the right thing: it reversed them.
The police would do the same thing if they discovered a stolen car in your driveway: just take it away. You never owned it.
Amazon was stupid not to explain the situation. It should have explained long ago its ability to remotely delete inappropriately distributed books, and it should have explained what and why it was doing that in the present case.
— CNET: Making sense of the ‘1984’ Kindle kerfulffle
—Timoni
So some guy calling himself “Hacker Croll” stole hundreds of confidential documents from the Twitter founders, and he sent copies to TechCrunch. That blog’s founder, Mike Arrington, says the documents include people who interviewed at Twitter, floorplans, and security passcodes.
So of course once Mike (a former lawyer) saw this was some heavy illegally-gotten shit, he stopped reading, right?
Nope! He and his team read the docs all night. And MIKE PLANS TO PUBLISH SOME OF THEM.
I’ve never liked TechCrunch, but before now it was mostly personal preference or distaste. Now it’s major. IF YOU EVER, EVER, EVER READ OR LINK TO TECHCRUNCH, YOU ARE NOW SUPPORTING A SITE THAT UTTERLY DISRESPECTS ALL PRIVACY AND RULE OF LAW. THEY ARE SCUM.
—nickdouglas
Oh come on. This is the a ridiculous tempest in a teapot. If anyone believes this is rare, unique, or even remotely unorthodox, you may as well stop reading the news. How do you think we learned about yellowcake, or the pentagon papers, or that Apple is planning a tablet PC? Someone, somewhere, broke a law to learn these things or leak these things. This is how news WORKS. Do you think Steve Jobs like forgot to get a factory to sign an NDA or just called up the China Times and said “hey we’re gonna build a tablet PC. Don’t tell anyone I told you?” Do you think that however the WaPo learned about Cheney’s plans for an assassin squad was LEGAL? The shit was TOP SECRET. Someone broke the law to tell them. The only difference here is that Arrington is being on the up and up of where he got the info, and letting us judge the motivations of the hacker as well. And to call them illegally-obtained documents is disingenuous. Arrington didn’t break any laws. They landed in his inbox. — rickwebb
That said, Mike no longer gets to question why people spit in his face. —lauraglu
Agree with rickwebb & lauraglu, although for my money, Techcrunch is doing the best it can to be open and it’s laudable they’ve decided to only publish the “newsworthy stories.” They’re not being slimy, but they’re certainly being treated as if they are.
People
really like to hate Techcrunch.
Twitter recently made some changes to their @-replies that mean you wouldn’t see my replies to any of the above folks unless you were following them as well. Why did they change this from a user setting to a mandatory filter? From the Twitter blog:
[R]eceiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable.
Strongly put, but wrong, Twitter. Exploring one-sided conversations is my primary way of finding new, interesting followers and overhearing fascinating conversations I otherwise wouldn’t be privvy to. “One-sided fragments” aren’t undesirable to me or other Twitter users that previously opted in to see all followees’ @-replies; it’s the jam & cake to my regular Twitter stream.
Biz said they’ve been studying users’ “usage patterns and feedback”, and I have no doubt they’ve done their homework. I suspect this decision was similar to Netflix’s earlier move to eliminate user profiles back in September. It’s an honest mistake: if only a small number of users use a feature, it’s reasonable to think they may not miss it when it’s gone. But Netflix reversed their decision once they realized how important the feature was to a small number of users, citing listened to the “well-reasoned, sincere responses of loyal members who very much value this feature.” Diplomatically put, and incidentally the reason my roommate and I didn’t cancel our Netflix account.
At this point, only a few hours after the changes, there’s been a lot of negative feedback from the Twitterverse. A lot. The fact that the official blog post has been rewritten from its earlier breezier (and more condescending) tone indicates that Twitter underestimated the reaction they’d receive.
It’s an easy fix: change things back, Twitter. If you’d like to do us one better, take a tip from Troy’s Twitter Script and give us inline context for @-replies. Here’s a visual example of how it easily removes the whole “one-sided [conversation] fragments” without removing functionality:
Lovely.
—Timoni
They say that you can boil a frog if you put it in a pot with cold water and slowly turn up the heat. Well, then I’m a frog and Visio’s finally boiled me over.
Full CSS layouts have always been a compromise. The current CSS specifications were never designed to create the visually rich and complex interface layouts that modern Web demands. The current methods - floats and positioning - were never intended as layout tools.
[ from Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke, via Smashing Magazine ]
I’ve never heard of this before, and it doesn’t make sense to me. Can somebody quickly explain? What other possible uses do float: and position: have?
