Posts Tagged: Programming
The Internets
12

Every Web Action Will Be a "Like" Soon

| March 23rd, 2012

First came the advent of "I READ THIS" on Facebook: "Joe Schmo and 4 other friends recently read articles." Oh did you? That's neat. Sure: the age of automatically reported behavior began stodgily. A little sadly. And also, there was the rise of activity timelines: "Lady X commented on her own status"!

Now there's Svbtle, a blogging… platform? Maybe? But more likely a blogging network? It is currently in invite-only form, and was built by one Dustin Curtis to function as a digital scrapbook that allows him to store ideas that, at some point, become published posts. (The rest of us just use Gmail drafts for this. Or our [...]

The Channel Effect
2

Corporate YouTube Still Sucks

| February 22nd, 2012

After reading the New Yorker piece on YouTube's plans for channelization (is that a word? Sure), I was worried about the big leg up that all the big boys were getting in the "YouTube Original Channels." YouTube started acting as a producer and a promoter for 100 or so companies, and it seemed like the dreary end of the Internet—that GoogleTube's ambitions were, essentially, "to bridge Silicon Valley and Hollywood." Just what we needed: low-end NBC sitcoms on YouTube. (And a skateboard channel from Tony Hawk! And four channels from HuffPo/Buzzfeed's Ken Lerer and pals.) So here's a slightly misguided and delightfully premature look at how some [...]

What a World
4

Developers Should Rejoice: Goldman Sachs Programmer Freed from Prison

| February 17th, 2012

I've always worried about the Sergey Aleynikov case. Convicted 15 months ago and sentenced to eight years in prison, Aleynikov's crime, while employed at Goldman Sachs, was uploading chunks of software to an encrypted server for storage—possibly accidentally including proprietary code while trying to retain open-source stuff. (For a good description of what happened, there's this account.) Some of the problems with this case include that juries and judges are crazily out of their depth in figuring out what his actions mean and which are customary and ordinary for programmers, and also the media is way worse: most of the headlines called him a "spy," which is [...]