Monthly Archive for July, 2006
John C. Dvorak talks about why he hates CSS. I’m rather amused to read that he blames CSS (rather than the browsers) for not styling content consistently across different browsers, and asks what kind of standard CSS is. He even attacks CSS’s cascading property, which applies any styles to an element recursively to all its child elements. “One wrong change and all hell breaks loose” he says.
Everyone loses here, from users who can’t underĂ‚Âstand why things look screwy, to developers who can’t get CSS to do the job right, to baffled content providers. And what’s being done about it? Nothing! Another fine mess from the standards bodies.
Well if the developer can’t get CSS to do the job right, then maybe the developer should be learning more about CSS, rather than blaming CSS. I wouldn’t blame my chainsaw for being unable to slice cheese properly.
Via Digg: They called me a child pornographer
If you want to read the full salon.com article and don’t have membership, it’s also been conveniently posted as a Digg comment.
This story is about a family in the USA who went for a camping holiday. They did all the usual things: campfires, fishing, digging holes for toilets. In all, their children probably had a great time, and learnt a lot about nature, including how to care for it.
As usual during the trip, we took several photos. Because I forgot my digital camera, I bought a disposable camera at a gas station on the way to the campground. I took pictures of the kids using sticks to beat on old bottles and cans and logs as musical instruments. I took a few of my youngest daughter, Eliza, then age 3, skinny-dipping in the lake, and my son, Noah, then age 8, swimming in the lake in his underwear, and another of Noah naked, hamming it up while using a long stick to hold his underwear over the fire to dry. Finally, I took a photo of everyone, as was our camping tradition, peeing on the ashes of the fire to put it out for the last time. We also let the kids take photos of their own.
These photos, once developed, would bring this family to its knees and affect them in ways you probably cannot imagine. One of the employees at the place the photos were developed called the police due to the questionable contents in some of the photos. This was probably not a bad thing for him to do. What followed was an onslaught from the police and social services. The family were guilty until proven innocent, and once, finally, the case was closed (with the details kept on record) there was no apology or support.
I strongly recommend you read this article. Some of you might want a box of tissues handy.
CSpace provides a platform for secure, decentralized, user-to-user communication over the internet.
Users are simply identified by their 2048-bit RSA keys. Peer-to-peer means you send messages directly to the recipient, not via a central server. Messages are encrypted at your end and decrypted at their end - they are never handled in plain text anywhere else. Compare this with traditional instant messenger clients that use a central server to relay messages.
I wonder if this is any more secure than using PSI’s ability to use PGP keys for encrypting messages. Although it sends messages via a central server, the message is still encrypted with your public key, sent via the central server (still encrypted) and delivered to the recipient, who then decrypts it with their public key. Unless PSI covertly encrypts the message with an additional public key so someone else can decrypt it, I don’t see how this is any less secure than CSpace’s peer-to-peer model.