onfocus

Mat Honan is experiencing a nightmare cascade failure of interconnected services. This is a good reminder to back things up and make sure your passwords are unique for each service.

"If you’re into experimentation, manual focus lenses, or just enjoy 'vintage' gear, at around $50 it is a bargain..." Nice review of an old 50mm Soviet lens. eBay, activate!

Why "Love it or leave it!" isn't a valid response to criticism of social networks.

Interesting look at "password padding" to create memorable AND secure passwords. [via Ask MeFi]

"We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future." Painful post to read but it makes sense. Now what?

"When people say there are no easy solutions to our problems, I don’t think they are thinking hard or creatively enough. If our problem is that we don’t have enough technically trained Americans, why are we not focused like lasers on educating people?"

"The kind of naming policy that Facebook and Google Plus have is actually a radical departure from the way identity and speech interact in the real world."

"A Swedish man who was arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen said Wednesday he was only doing it as a hobby." A hobby? Oh, that's ok then. ... WHAT?

"The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. 'Real names' policies aren't empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people."

Deconstructing the new Gmail/G+ interface for design ideas.

ok, it's 2011. No site is perfect, but it probably is time to shame sites that store plain text passwords. Especially those sites from big companies with the means to change things.

Dear media, please give Andy Rutledge complete control over the design of your sites. Thanks.

"...there will always be the open web for the geeks, the misfits, the eccentrics, the control freaks, and any other term we can think of to proudly express our healthy skepticism of giving up too much control over what really should be ours."

Dave Winer is correct: "Have the courage to stake out your spot on the open web. Fill it with delicious treats, and connect it to others. That's creativity."

Some things for companies to keep in mind when releasing "anonymized" data for research.

This is a free ePub book about SQL indexes. Loaded up on my iPad for light reading.

This article includes an interesting use of social media for identity obfuscation. "...we create bogus individuals around client names. One person could be a photographer, one person could be a chauffeur, or whatever. We develop about 15 to 20 web sites and create all these social media sites around you. Now if you are traveling somewhere and someone puts your name in, they are going to locate those 20 other people before they get to you, depending on how much information is known about you."

Crowdsourced documentary about life across the world on a single day: July 24th, 2010.

"We reckoned there there are five different things people mean in different contexts when talking about identity and the Internet." Nice summary of the pieces that make up Online Identity.

"In case you're as late to the party as me, it turns out that you can get web apps to behave like native apps." Nice run-down of some ways you can make a web app feel like a native app on the iPhone.

"...when you host your nameplate site (and blog) on a domain you control, it doesn't change, you never lose Google juice, and there's never a question about the canonical web page which identifies you." Gina is right!

A nice roundup of criticism of Ajax-spawned 'hashbang' URLs that sites/applications are starting to favor over traditional URLs.

"Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we've come to call the web?"

Fantastic engravings from an 18th century book on religious practice across the world.

Nice description of the terrifying uniform plague doctors wore in the Middle Ages.