Cubic

I've read a number of articles out there about Google's new push to unify their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy documents.  Most of the articles are about "privacy experts" complaining about how great the old documents were.  I have a question:  Who gets to decide when someone is an expert?  Is it some specific minimum level of knowledge?  If so, I just ooze knowledge and therefore that makes me an expert on stuff. Anyway, I'm glad Google is unifying their 60 or so Terms of Services and Privacy Policies into just one AND being open about the change long in advance.  Nobody reads these things anyway and is just a way to cover a business' rear end from frivolous lawsuits.  After all, hot coffee is hot...well, duh!  It doesn't matter how the McDonald's vs. Hot Coffee Lady case actually went down because it is a symbol of today's messed up legal system. Back to topic, Terms of Service and Privacy Policy documents are usually a pain in the neck...

When I visit websites that want me to create an account before doing something, I typically enter in bogus information and occasionally I see a "password meter" that determines that I've entered a "weak" password.  At least it is considered "weak" by some systems and "average/strong" in others.  Being the curious sort of person, I've been trying to come up with a good, consistent strategy for calculating password strength and then something useful to do with it.  I assume most developers only want to write password strength code one time, do something useful with it, and then move onto the next task. What constitutes a strong password?  An excellent question and something the industry seems to have difficulties figuring out at the moment.  NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has a few words to say on the topic.  Basically, password strength boils down to the number of bits of entropy that a password has. So the n...

Ever since "Google Instant" was released by Google, the search box occasionally just disappears in Firefox: This seems to happen right around the moment when Google Instant directs Firefox to a new URL and I happen to be pressing the back button on my Logitech G500 Mouse . Which is, by the way, a very nice mouse for gaming and general-purpose use for us right-handed folks. Left-handed folks are, unfortunately, so neglected by computer equipment manufacturers. Anyway, I'm not sure why this bug happens. There is also another annoying bug with Google Instant that happens when I'm typing quickly. It switches from the main page to the Google Instant page. The search box is there with my search but complete search results refuse to show up and clicking the search button does nothing. Starting over and running the exact same search causes search results to show up. Google is one of those companies that doesn't publish their e-mail addresses anywhere. I do...

In the field of Internet development - ICANN and Network Solutions/Verisign are eyesores. There is a very unhealthy relationship between the two organizations and ICANN holds a monopoly on the Internet as a whole by holding the domain name infrastructure hostage. On July 1, 2010, a price hike for .COM and .NET domain names will take place (VeriSign is the sole registrar for those TLDs). That means it will cost more to purchase and maintain those type of domain names. The core problem is the Domain Name System (DNS) as a whole. It was designed in the dark ages of the Internet by a bunch of nerds to map a name to an IP address. It was wholly owned by InterNIC, now known as ICANN through various transactions - or at least that is the best I can explain it in a single sentence. The original Internet (ARPANET) was designed to supposedly be robust in the event of nuclear war and people like it for its supposed anonymity. Basically, the Internet was a United States Department of Defense...

I hate the phrase "green computing". Why? Because the more stuff we have, the less environmentally friendly we actually are. In other words, if you can afford a computer, you ain't green. That would mean you sitting in front of the computer screen reading this. Yes, go ahead and squirm. However, that doesn't mean I shouldn't be aware of the world around me and therefore try to be responsible with my resources. And with those resources, I realize that if I can cut costs drastically, that would be a huge help to my fellow man. So, I have one question for you: How many Watts does your computer draw from the wall? Don't know? Neither do I. And I leave my computer on all day and night. There are important things my computer has to do every single day (besides filtering through thousands of spam messages) that requires it to be powered up and running. Of course, this usage comes at another cost - the room the computer sits in has to be within a tolerable ...

CAPTCHAs are those annoying little images that we have to use now to stop spammers from creating free e-mail accounts on the Internet. GMail, for several years now, has been considered a "safe haven" free e-mail address site where only manual signups were possible. This was made possible via their own homegrown CAPTCHA technology. But now it has been broken: Article on The Register Google actually uses its own CAPTCHA technology across multiple sites. For instance, Blogger requires filling out a CAPTCHA when posting comments to blog entries or having an account, which, unfortunately, uses the Google CAPTCHA. What triggered this post is something I heard combined with a recent comment on an older blog posting . At the top of every blog on Blogger is a little "Flag This Blog" button. I suspect that if enough people click that, it causes Blogger to declare the blog spam. Or at least it factors in. It could also include sudden bursts in traffic and maybe actual ...

Digg this In general, I'm a pretty big fan of the Google Toolbar for IE. I use IE6 SP2 for pretty much all of my web surfing needs. I have Opera and Firefox installed too with plugins/extensions for the latter, but I just like IE better (although some sites are starting to be IE6-unfriendly). But this isn't about starting a "which browser is better" debate/flamewar. Instead, it is about a little bug I found today while minding my own business. Actually, I found three bugs, but only one of them is a critical issue that should never have left Google's QA department. So I was minding my own business and responding to e-mails and other such things. For many of the groups I'm on, I tend to do web searches just so I can paste a link or whatever into the e-mail. I run into an e-mail that I had indirectly answered on another mailing list several weeks ago and didn't bother pasting links so I could search the archives. But I left myself enough clues that I...

Out of the blue I received today in my in-box (just now checking my e-mail - yes I'm still running on empty in terms of sleep) a job offer from Google. Well, not an offer per se, but somehow, somewhere I made a significant impression. The amazing thing is that I haven't sent my resume anywhere. In fact, it is sorely out of date - been busy with the whole CubicleSoft thing. A Google Internet recruiter came to me. Could have been the article I just put up on CodeProject, but who knows? (Maybe I'm more important than I think I am...don't let that go to my head now :P ). I'm not going to do anything about it today. I'm too tired. And likely to royally mess up something I'd be smacking my head against a brick wall over for the next 10 years. Best to get some sleep first before doing or saying anything I'll regret. Amazingly enough, I'm still pretty lucid.