Posts

After years of complaints about Cascading Style Sheets, many stemming from their deliberately declarative nature, it’s time to recognize their power. For developers coming from imperative programming styles, it might seem hard to lose the ability to specify more complex logical flow. That loss, though, is discipline leading toward the ability to create vastly more flexible systems, a first step toward the pattern matching model common to functional programming. O’Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent talks about the power of CSS. CSS selectors have won in the marketplace of ideas for good reasons. ...

Like everyone, I don’t feel like there are enough hours in the day. At any given moment, there are ten things I could be working on, and even more things I could be thinking about. Like most everyone, I’ve tried any number of techniques to be a more effective manager of my time. I usually don’t make it a week with any of these tools – I’m not even good at making lists. ...

How You Can Help Save Upcoming.org, Posterous, and More Andy Baio on Archive Team, a distributed effort to scrape sites like Upcoming and Posterous before they are shut down. Don’t you want to participate in a guerrilla effort to preserve the Web?

There’s been a lot of talk about the Miranda warning now that accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been taken into custody. The government has said that they will not be “reading him his rights,” and will not, I assume, be giving him access to a lawyer even if he asks for one, until they question him. I see a lot of people who are generally on the same side of issues as me arguing that this is a violation of his constitutional rights. That is not necessarily the case. ...

Linode’s security incident report Back on April 12, my Web host, Linode, sent me an email letting me know that I needed to reset my password without any further details. Today they announced that their user management application was hacked and that the hackers were able to download their full database, including hashed passwords and encrypted credit card information. The hackers also have the public and private keys to the credit card database. They can obtain the credit cards if they can brute force the passphrase for the private key. When it comes to security, taking shortcuts is death. ...

Laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act make criminals of us all. Ludlow describes the inevitable consequences: In a world in which nearly everyone is technically a felon, we rely on the good judgment of prosecutors to decide who should be targets and how hard the law should come down on them. We have thus entered a legal reality not so different from that faced by Socrates when the Thirty Tyrants ruled Athens, and it is a dangerous one. When everyone is guilty of something, those most harshly prosecuted tend to be the ones that are challenging the established order, poking fun at the authorities, speaking truth to power — in other words, the gadflies of our society. ...

This week The Daily Show mocked the NCAA for ruling a wrestler on a 10% scholarship ineligible for selling rap music. NCAA athletes are not allowed to profit from their own names. It seems crazy because it is crazy. And the NCAA is utterly unsympathetic. If you don’t know why, check out Taylor Branch’s 2011 article in The Atlantic, The Shame of College Sports. If you think like a security professional, though, the NCAA rule makes perfect sense. Players are not allowed to receive gifts or compensation for playing sports. If they were allowed to be compensated for other endeavors, it would create a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. Top ranked football recruits could just self-publish e-books on Amazon.com with titles like, “Buy This If You Want Me to Attend the University of Alabama” and rake in the dollars. Given a rule that disallows fans from compensating players, lots of other rules follow. ...

John Siracusa’s post on Technological Conservatism is one of the best pieces I’ve read in some time. There are many advantages that come with being an experienced professional, but increasing conservatism is one of the disadvantages. Read the whole thing.

As you probably already know, film critic Roger Ebert passed away today, and I know him as a deep and wide-ranging thinker, a humanitarian, and of course as a great film critic. Had he not started blogging, I would probably know him only as the latter. In fact, I’d likely only know him as that guy who had a TV show where he rated movies using his thumbs. Through the Web, Ebert reintroduced himself to all of us. He wrote about his family. He wrote about how to cook meals in a rice cooker. He struggled with how to appropriately take advantage of Amazon’s affiliate program. He took us on many impossibly romantic tours of London. ...

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. Roger Ebert on death