Category Archives: In The News

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Facebook’s IPO Filing

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There’s not really much to say about Facebook’s IPO filing other than we all knew the day would eventually come. People love to look at the number of users as the measure of the company, but the truth is users come and go, all empires eventually fall. They have since the dawn of man. It’s a terrible measure of what a company has done, and is capable of doing. Eventually market saturation will be reached. It’s unsustainable to grow quicker than the world’s population. Everyone but Wall Street and some tech blogs know that.

What really matters is a company’s DNA. For Facebook that’s the willingness to be agile, the willingness to push things, and the willingness to change. That may occasionally backfire, however it’s proven to generally work out quite well. Especially when Facebook is willing to back down and revise as it has in the past. Mark Zuckerberg’s goal is pretty lofty, especially given the world and it’s people are struggling to figure out privacy in a connected world.

To quote him in 2010: “we’ve made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected”. Balancing this mission and not crossing the line will be the challenge Facebook will face for years to come. I’ve criticized them several times in the past for either not doing enough, or not giving enough priority to the right to control privacy. Lately I’ve got less to complain about. I think that’s good for everyone.

Littoral Combat Ship Problems

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Interesting read on Gizmodo on the shortcomings of the Littoral combat ship:

It’s bad enough that the Navy’s newest ship has had wicked problems with corrosion, missed out on the latest naval wartime missions and is generally something of a Frankenstein’s monster. Now the Pentagon’s top weapons tester has found problems with its abilities to find and withstand mines – which is a big problem for a ship that’s supposed to be the Navy’s minehunter of the future.

Since it floats (until it corrodes) we’ll call it a time limited beta. Sounds like there’s a lot of work that needs to still be done here.

On Andy Rooney

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One of the benefits of working at or near the CBS Broadcast Center is you never know who you’ll see walking the many hallways of the storied yet somewhat obscure complex. It’s not at all uncommon to hear a head of state, or celebrity sighting. Lots of things, including some you wouldn’t expect are taped there.

I likely saw Andy Rooney at least a dozen times in my years at CBS, always in or outside the Broadcast Center, generally on my way in and out. He’d always be slowly shuffling through with those iconic bushy white eyebrows, a few papers in his hand, hunched over. I mention this detail because it stands out in my mind. You don’t enter your late 80′s and early 90′s and continue the daily grind the way he did unless you enjoy your job at least a little bit. I could be wrong, but I imagine it must have been exhausting for him. It looked tiring. Most people want to be retired by 65 and he was working a generation beyond that. But I guess you don’t want that to love of your job to be terribly obvious when your known as “America’s Curmudgeon”. He made a career out of expressing his disdain for so many little nuances of life.

He said before he hated being recognized, but every time I or someone else said “good morning” or “good evening”, he’d always look up and return the pleasantry then continue on his way. Hardly a grump whenever I saw him.

There aren’t many people who could make a career out of complaining about the little things. Not many could even make a career complaining about the big things. He managed to do this with just a few minutes. He said in his last piece “When I went on television it was as a writer. I don’t think of myself as a television personality. I’m a writer who reads what he’s written.” Reading the transcripts is a reminder that a great wordsmith can say quite a bit in very few words.

Disclosure:As always, the views expressed in this blog are mine alone, and do not represent the views of CBS or CBS Interactive.

The Great East Coast Earthquake

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8/23/2011 - Never Forget

I didn’t get a chance to post earlier about the earthquake. It was just a tiny earthquake for 15-20 seconds, but still extremely rare for this part of the world. Being 17 floors up the building definitely rocked a little bit. Hard to miss, but it wasn’t violent or anything like that. I was on a conference call which continued through it with no incident.

My first thought was construction in the building or across the street, but about half way through I realized without noise that wasn’t possible. My next thought was the fault lines near NYC, which I’ve heard about a few times before. I knew seismic activity is not unusual for NYC, but to the degree that we can feel it is very unusual. I suspect most never knew about those faults, but I like science ;-) . Oddly enough I wasn’t 100% wrong.

An immediate search of Twitter turned up reports of vibration in the city. A few seconds later turned up reports of the same thing in Philadelphia 94 miles away from NYC (which confirmed seismic activity in my head). Meanwhile my inbox had a bunch of reports about Pentagon evacuations and other happenings. A perk of working with a large news organization is being fed news 24×7 (it’s also a bad thing). Confirmation of an earthquake came what seemed like seconds after that. This all took place in a matter of a minute or two.

All together it took just a minute or two to find out the full story. I actually had the full story well before building management had it. They didn’t even know what happened and I knew it was about a 5.8. Amazing if you really think about it. Back in 2003 with the blackout it took considerably longer for substantially less information. Granted having electricity helped. Cell phone networks were still largely unusable for a short time after.

The jokes going across the net were quite amusing (as shown above).

Mork And Casey Anthony

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Jamie Zawinski linked to a very interesting blog post about the forensics problem in the recent Casey Anthony trial. To summarize, she was using an older version of Firefox, which stores its history in a Mork DB. For those not familiar with Mozilla internals, Mork is (I’m quoting JWZ here):

…the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career”.

That bug was actually one of two times where I brushed with Mork, that time learning, and another time shortly afterwards where I learned first hand how impossible it really is to work with as part of a hack I was trying to build and later abandoned. Perhaps it was my experience at the time that just made it impossible, perhaps it really was Mork.

Continue reading →

F.B.I. Violating Section 508?

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Section 508 is familiar to many in IT. For those who don’t know it, Wikipedia explains it best:

In 1998 the US Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Under Section 508 (29 U.S.C. § 794d), agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.

The F.B.I however decided it’s above this law and decided to replace the shutdown pages for a bunch of gambling sites they shut down with the following HTML (example link):

<html>
  <title>WARNING</title>
<img src="banner7.jpg"/>
</html>

I’ve noticed this several times over the years, so this seems to be a chronic problem nobody is calling them out on.

The image (linked locally for posterity) contains the following text below the FBI and DOJ seal’s:

This domain name has been seized by the F.B.I pursuant to an Arrest Warrant in Rem obtained by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Conducting, financing, managing, supervising, directing, or owning all or part of an illegal gambling business is a federal crime (18 U.S.C § 1955)

For persons engaged in the business of betting or wagering, it is also a federal crime to knowingly accept, in connection with the participation of another person in unlawful Internet gambling, credit, electronic fund transfers, or checks. (31 U.S.C §§ 5363 & 5366)

Violation of these laws carry criminal penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment and a fine up to $250,000.

Properties, including domain names, used in violation of the provisions of 18 U.S.C 1955 or involved in money laundering transactions are subject to forfeiture to the United States.
(18 U.S.C. §§ 981 & 1955(d))

To my knowledge, this is a direct violation of Section 508. There are provisions for when Section 508 compliance creates an undue burden, however this could be remedied in under 5 minutes by using text rather than an image. It’s a clear violation. Any federal IT employee would know about this. Civilian IT professionals know about Section 508. The seals could have been one image with an alt tag containing the text “FBI/DOJ Seals” and the above text in HTML. This is trivial. I did half the work just transcribing it up above. I have no doubt the individual who put it together was familiar with Section 508.

In a world where we web developers make efforts to bring information to the disabled and make the internet easily accessible to those with disabilities, this is pretty sad and a real step backwards. The rest of the Internet has been moving forward to making things accessible via initiatives like WAI-ARIA. Target had to settle a lawsuit for $6 million for failing to make a much more complex site ADA compliant. Since financial settlement with the FBI would be very unlikely this gets ignored by NFB and others, but I don’t think it should be.

The Web As We Know It Is Being Threatened

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From Scientific American:

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want. The ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides.

- Tim Berners-Lee

The same web we credit with promoting freedom and taking down dictatorships is under attack itself. Will the web in 10 years still have the power to shift political power?

Tim Berners-Lee may know a thing or two about the web.