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Programming

'My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT' (pinboard.in) 177

Posted by msmash from the 'sewer-pipe-suggests-diet' dept.
Like many of you, I use IFTTT. It's one of the handiest tools on the internet to get your work done. Want a text alert for weather? Want a notification on your Android smartphone whenever someone you follow publishes a blog post? IFTTT can do all sorts of such things. It is able to do so because it works with different companies and utilizes APIs of their services. Many of these companies are happy to have IFTTT trying to enhance the experience of their customers. Many don't necessarily want -- or can allow -- IFTTT to do that. Pinboard, a social bookmarking website, falls in the latter category. Maciej Ceglowski, CEO of Pinboard in a blog post explained why that is the case: Imagine if your sewer pipe started demanding that you make major changes in your diet. Now imagine that it got a lawyer and started asking you to sign things. You would feel surprised. This is the position I find myself in today with IFTTT, a form of Internet plumbing that has been connecting peaceably to my backend for the past five years, but which has recently started sending scary emails. [...] Because many of you rely on IFTTT, and because [their request] makes it sound like I'm the asshole, I feel I should explain myself. In a nutshell: 1. IFTTT wants me to do their job for them for free. 2. They have really squirrely terms of service. In the blog post, Ceglowski further explains his concerns with IFTTT. He says IFTTT wants ownership of all right, title, and interest. "Pinboard is in some ways already a direct competitor to IFTTT. The site offers built-in Twitter integration, analogous to IFTTT's twitter-Pinboard recipe. I don't know what rights I would be assigning here, but this is not the way I want to find out." You should read the blog post, it's very insightful and sheds light on things that many of us might not have considered otherwise. Jason Snell has offered his take on this as well, he writes: If IFTTT sticks with this philosophy, it will rapidly become a lot less useful and interesting as a service.
Piracy

Submission + - Microsoft accidentally gifts pirates with a free Windows 8 Pro license key (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "In an amusing twist that undoubtedly spells the end of some hapless manager’s career, Microsoft has accidentally gifted pirates with a free, fully-functioning Windows 8 license key. As you have probably surmised, this isn’t intentional — Microsoft hasn’t suddenly decided to give pirates an early Christmas present (though the $40 upgrade deal from Windows 8 Release Preview is something of a pirate amnesty). In fact, it’s probably just a case of poor testing and a rushed release by Microsoft. The bug involves the Key Management Service, which is part of Microsoft's Volume Licensing system. Pirates have already hacked the KMS to activate Windows 8 for 180 days — but this is just a partial activation. Now it turns out that the free Media Center Pack license keys that Microsoft is giving out until January 31 2013 can be used on a KMS-activated copy of Windows 8 to turn it into a fully licensed copy of Windows 8 Pro. The massive irony, of course, is that Microsoft originally intended to strip Media Center from Windows 8 Pro — and then, in the face of consumer backlash, decided to offer it as a free upgrade until January 31 2013. Presumably, instead of taking the time to deliver the upgrade properly, Microsoft pushed it out the door as quickly as possible — and this is the result."
Transportation

Submission + - With Pot Legal, Scientists Study Detection of Impaired Drivers

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "A recent assessment by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, based on random roadside checks, found that 16.3% of all drivers nationwide at night were on various legal and illegal impairing drugs, half them high on marijuana. Now AP reports that with marijuana soon legal under state laws in Washington and Colorado, setting a standard comparable to blood-alcohol limits has sparked intense disagreement because unlike portable breath tests for alcohol, there's no easily available way to determine whether someone is impaired from recent pot use and if scientists can't tell someone how much marijuana it will take for him or her to test over the threshold, how is the average pot user supposed to know? "We've had decades of studies and experience with alcohol," says Washington State Patrol spokesman Dan Coon. "Marijuana is new, so it's going to take some time to figure out how the courts and prosecutors are going to handle it." Driving within three hours of smoking pot is associated with a near doubling of the risk of fatal crashes. However, THC can remain in blood and saliva for highly variable times after the last use of the drug. Although the marijuana “high” only lasts three to five hours, studies of heavy users in a locked hospital ward showed THC can be detected in the blood up to a week after they are abstinent, and the outer limit of detection time in saliva tests is not known. "A lot of effort has gone into the study of drugged driving and marijuana, because that is the most prevalent drug, but we are not nearly to the point where we are with alcohol," says Jeffrey P. Michael, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's impaired-driving director. "We don't know what level of marijuana impairs a driver.""
The Military

Submission + - Israel's Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield Actually Works

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Sarah Tory writes that the fighting between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza strip is the latest round of violence in a region that has been torn apart by a decades-old conflict but the debut of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense shield has added a new element to the conflict, one that military officials are calling a “game-changer.” Israeli officials are claiming that the shield is destroying 90 percent of missiles and rockets it aims at that have been fired into southern Israel by Hamas. This level of success is unprecedented compared with older missile defense systems such as the American-made Patriot model used during the 1991 Gulf War. The missile-defense system can detect rocket launches and then determine the projectiles’ flight paths and only intercepts rocket or artillery shells if they are headed for populated areas or sensitive targets; the others it allows to land. It takes a lot of raw computing power to rapidly build a ballistic profile of a fast-incoming projectile, make a series of quick decisions concerning potential lethality, and launch a countermeasure capable of intercepting said projectile in-flight and one reason Iron Dome is showing a much more robust capability than the Patriot system did in the early 1990s is simply that its battle control hardware and software are several generations more advanced than those early interceptor systems. "Israeli officials point out that Iron Dome saves money despite the fact that the interceptors cost up to $100,000 each," writes Tory. "The cost of rebuilding a neighborhood destroyed by a rocket attack—not to mention people wounded and lives lost—would be far greater than the cost of the interceptor." Most important, the system buys Israel time, allowing it to plan out an appropriate response without the political pressure that would be generated by hundreds of potential deaths."

Comment Some more things to test to help us debug (Score 1) 2

by vroom (#41304327) Attached to: Very weird display
Are you using D1 or D2? I see the parent comment by someone other than you is a -1, that doesn't affect viewing the descendant comments when I view. Could you verify your threshold dropped to -1 doesn't allow those to be seen?

Also if you run into issues like this please make sure to send to feedback@slashdot.org so we're sure to know about them as well.

Comment State of Slashcode update (Score 3, Informative) 1

by vroom (#39784249) Attached to: Installing Slashcode

The short version is, we'd like to release it and hope to do so again someday.

The issues that make that hard now are we used to maintain multiple sites & themes running Slash. Over time we stopped maintaining & updating the code on those sites (Slashcode.com, and use.perl.org) so some parts of the code have now become a little too Slashdot-specific from a theming and code perspective, making it harder for Slash to be useful as a general product.

Given time we'd like to clean that up, and make the code accessible and useful to everyone again, however finding the time to devote to clean-up and segmentation of the code so far has been difficult. We still hope to see that happen someday in the future though.

Comment Re:There are more important things for Slashdot to (Score 1) 203

by vroom (#39508067) Attached to: Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to SlashdotTV! (Video)
We have made some significant commenting system improvements end of last year fixing a lot of problems. We didn't post an announcement story but I did post a journal entry going over some of it. Since those changes number of comments per day have gone up significantly which I see as a win for the site and community. A lot of those were bugfixes for longstanding bugs or annoyances, since there was not enough new I posted it as a journal entry rather than an announcement story.

There's certainly more I'd like to take on as we're given the engineering bandwidth to get them done. If you have specific suggestions I'd love to hear them as a reply or sent to feedback@slashdot.org. We certainly have our list but I want to make sure your most pressing concerns are part of it. Thanks for being a longtime Slashdot reader!
Idle

Submission + - Facebook Is Suing 'Mark Zuckerberg'

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This has to be the funniest Facebook name story in a while. Facebook disabled the account of Israeli entrepreneur Rotem Guez because he runs a business called the Like Store, where he sold Likes to advertisers. Guez countered by suing Facebook for deleting his accounts on the social network. Facebook countered with its own cease and desist letter. Guez didn't respond to Facebook's demands. Instead, he legally changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg. "If you want to sue me, you’re going to have to sue Mark Zuckerberg," Guez reportedly told Facebook. Talk about a publicity stunt.

Comment Re:What about metamods? (Score 1) 21

by vroom (#38153148) Attached to: Comments & Moderation Improvements Under Way
That is one of the things further down my list to revisit and reconsider. Your complaints are definitely not alone and it was something that was mentioned on the survey several times.

I'm not 100% sure what our decision will be but it's a problem I was considering before delving into reader comments much, and it's certainly something that's been voiced by many community members too. There's certainly improvements which could be made, and one of those on the table is going back to the old way of doing things.

We have some things we intend to fix or improve on the core comment navigation experience first, but we should eventually get to giving metamod some attention.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Comments & Moderation Improvements Under Way 21

Journal by vroom
While reading through your responses to the reader survey from a couple months ago a couple things were clear. You both love & hate comments. You love the insightfulness of our readers, you hate trolls, and there are a number of things currently getting in the way from you being able to navigate through discussions as easily as you might like to.

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