Which surely brings us to the next question, which is why any 12-year-old has unsupervised access to systems where they could receive such images regularly enough to be concerned about being addicted (whatever that actually means if it's judged from the perspective of a 12-year-old). There is no law that says the moment a child is old enough to go to school on their own they also need an iPhone, a laptop in their own room at home, and an unrestricted data plan in each case.

Sure, it seems inevitable that any child will be somewhat exposed to these things. If nothing else, the kid who does have access because they're a bit older or their parents are a bit more generous is going to be everyone's new best friend. Still, it doesn't look like we're talking about incidental or exceptional exposure to things they don't fully understand here, it looks like we're talking about a sustained pattern and direct access.

In other news, around 10% of parents apparently have no idea how to supervise their 12-13 year old children when they go on-line. Maybe we should treat the problem, not one particular symptom? Age-checks on porn sites aren't going to stop those same inadequately supervised children from being groomed for other things, or subject to hate attacks by classmates at school, or any number of other threats that come with an open communication system like the Internet.

Probability of causing life-changing damage to victims: 100%.

Probability that as a result he would sooner or later be charged with serious financial and/or sexual crimes: close to 100%.

Probability that such crimes would result in a multi-year jail term on conviction: close to 100%.

Probability of achieving life-changing profits for self even under idealised conditions: close to 0%.

Even from a ruthless profit-making perspective, his odds of success were always negligible. This guy is a failure any way you look at it.

It seems what he was actually on trial for was the identity theft and extortion side of his behaviour rather than the act of leaking (or helping to leak) the personal photos. So in that sense, maybe the punishment was on the harsh side, though given the number of victims I don't think it was entirely unreasonable, and apparently neither did the legal system if the theoretical maximum sentence would have been significantly longer (or, as others have pointed out, life on a three-strikes rule had he been tried for multiple felony offences successively).

As it happens, I would hold him morally responsible for the leaks and the resulting distress as well, so I have little sympathy in this case. But yes, we should separate personal feelings from hopefully more objective legal rulings, so let's do that.

This guy seems to have a pattern of damaging behaviour, and has reportedly shown no remorse at any stage in the proceedings. That means if he gets out of jail before being sufficiently rehabilitated, assuming that such rehabilitation is even possible in his case, it is extremely likely that he will reoffend. As the law does increasingly recognise the damage caused by revenge porn itself, and in general has long recognised that sexual crimes have serious consequences for their victims that go beyond mere monetary loss, we should consider the likelihood that he will commit such crimes if released too soon and the preventable damage those crimes would cause. This is a person who destroys lives.

In that context, a sentence of just a couple of years, so he's probably out in maybe a year in reality, does little to protect society against his future actions. Any level of monetary fine seems unlikely to have much effect at all in terms of either avoiding future criminal behaviour on his part or protecting the rest of society from him. So this seems like a case where he probably does need to be in prison, or otherwise contained, for a considerable period for the protection of others.

Given what a horrible personal violation this must feel like for the victims, both the original act of disclosure and then using it as leverage for financial gain, and given how many victims he seems to have had and the sustained and systematic way in which he seems to have exploited them over a long period, I have no sympathy in this case.

Also, this guy made $30K, but if he actually serves anything like his full sentence will be spending over 150,000 hours "earning" it, for an hourly rate of pay of about 20 cents. Apparently as well as failing at being a human being, this guy also fails at business.

I doubt that will be much consolation to anyone who was a victim here, but I hope they will at least get some sense of closure and of justice being done as much as it can be under the circumstances.

Now, let's be fair here. Big Media need all the help I can get. I mean, how many movies we think of as blockbusters never actually make a profit?

Sadly, no. While MP4 has effectively won the battle to be the de facto standard video format, support for it still isn't completely universal and probably never will be until the patent issues are irrelevant. And of course there are numerous different variations that all typically end in .mp4 so you're also stuck with either inefficient encoding for widest possible support or smaller files but limited range.

As for controls, I have lost track of how many times even the same browser has changed its controls within the past 2 years. There is basically no standardisation across browsers at all. It doesn't matter much if you're building YouTube or Vimeo, when it's obvious which parts of the page are videos. However, if you want to integrate video content into a more general page the same way you'd use an image, having no idea whether your visitors will even get any indication that it actually is a video, or where that indication will be if so, makes it absurdly difficult to present the content well across browsers without going 100% custom controls and ignoring the built-in browser ones entirely (which then runs into numerous JS bugs, causing problems of their own).

What is this "regular HTML video" you're talking about? I'm talking about the new HTML5 media elements, things like <video>.

And Flash has been a viable technology for implementing these kinds of features for a very long time, and still would be had it not been deliberately sabotaged by the likes of Apple and Google for their own purposes. Ignoring your apparent personal prejudice, why objectively should I as a professional web developer not have been using such tools if they get the best results for my clients?

Exactly. Sites now have to provide the same functionality twice, because the browsers have made such a mess of standardisation that you can't rely on a single implementation to actually work portably.

Unfortunately, in the real world, that is often not an option. If your client wants multimedia elements on their site, you're going to need HTML5 multimedia elements despite the fact that numerous aspects of how they work aren't standardised. And just to be clear, this is stuff that has been available in browsers for 5+ years now. It's hardly some new development, and failure to standardise effectively after such a long period is just a demonstration of how worthless some of these standardisation processes have become.

Ultimately, what matters is whether your site works in visitors' browsers. Standards are only a means to that end, and validation in turn is only useful if you have useful standards to validate against. Since a lot of the web standards today are borderline worthless due to their instability and/or their failure to specify so many aspects that make a difference in practice, validation doesn't really give you the assurance you seek of compatibility either across today's browsers or with future browsers.

Once again, I'm not saying the world wouldn't be a better place if you did have that assurance or that I agree with the path the browser makers and standards bodies have chosen to follow. I'm just saying that as a web developer you have to play the cards you've been dealt, and I don't see formal validation as improving your chances to any useful degree today.

Well, OK, so when should I expect that I can build a brochure site for a hotel that uses HTML5 videos and have one video format and one set of custom controls to work with? Because the world has moved on and Flash is no longer a viable option for this kind of work despite offering those advantages for many years, thanks to much the same browser developers who can't get their act together and actually provide a better replacement. They can't even manage to make the default "this is a video" overlay look the same, or even put it in roughly the same place so you can design placeholder graphics accordingly.

If your company's video site actually is YouTube then this kind of problem probably doesn't affect you all that much. However, for normal web sites that are just trying to take advantage of multimedia as part of the presentation, HTML5 audio and video are a bad joke, and the punchline is that all the much better technologies that used to be viable alternatives have been deliberately killed off anyway.

But this brings us back to the original question from my first post in this thread: why? What objective advantage do you or your employer/client gain by insisting on such compliance?

I do sympathise with your position, in that it should be an advantage to follow standards, and browser compatibility now and in the future should be practically guaranteed by doing so. The world would be a better place if this were the reality. But it isn't, and so pragmatically, I'd rather build web sites and apps that work than sites and apps that dogmatically tick the right boxes even though it requires more effort and offers no demonstrable benefit.

Yes, I was, and I respectfully disagree. Browsers today do a lot more, but frequently the support for newer features is so specific to each browser and in some cases so unstable that it is completely useless for real world projects, it requires silly amounts of boilerplate and prefixing (= will break at some future point you can't predict, so also useless for production sites that won't have ongoing maintenance), or at best it requires implementing something in multiple independent ways.

An example of useful standardisation would have been all browsers using the same default stylesheet. Imagine how much developer time could have been saved and how many glitches could have been avoided over the years if we had never needed things like CSS resets or Normalize.

But the point is that these non-standard-compliant implementation techniques don't break anything in practice, because every browser is tolerant of them and will always remain so because far too much would break otherwise. The only downside to not following those standards is that someone can complain you're not following their preferred standards. And someone always will, but unless it really does matter (for example, because it excludes customers and damages your bottom line, or it actually does undermine some sort of accessibility aid) you can just ignore them.

Genuine questions: Who do you think that would help, and why?

This kind of validation can be useful if you need to follow a standard for something to work. If browsers all followed proper de jure standards then this would offer a useful benefit for compatibility, particularly forward compatibility with future browsers.

Unfortunately, most of the major browsers today do not do this at all consistently. Even some of the people writing the standards have basically given up. (HTML5 "living standard"? Seriously? If it changes arbitrarily then it's not a standard.)

The de facto standards that actually matter are how real browsers behave, which dictate whether your page looks right in the browsers your visitors are using today. Nothing else you do today is guaranteed to work tomorrow without regular attention anyway, which is foolish regression from the situation a few years ago for which we can thank Google and Mozilla, but it's the reality all the same.

In my entire career doing Web work -- which is measured in decades -- I'm not sure I have ever seen an example where a project was objectively better off because it routinely enforced having valid mark-up and stylesheets. I have, however, seen plenty of cases where someone has deliberately deviated from W3C standards for a specific, useful reason.

For example, Google have been known to omit mark-up that they were sure wasn't necessary in any browser in order to save a few bytes. Multiply those bytes by a bazillion visitors to their site every day and that's a lot of traffic saved overall. Another common case is trendy MVC frameworks like Angular, which often use non-standard attributes on HTML elements for their own purposes. They could use standard "data-*" attributes, but once you've got a few of those sitting on many elements in your mark-up, it's just noise and excess weight, so they use their own prefix for namespacing instead. And yet, I don't see anyone claiming that either Google's search engine or Angular as a JS framework have failed as a result of these heinous crimes...

However, we don't normally award punitive damages in civil cases here in the UK, so even if there is a definitive judgement at some stage that Google was invading privacy and failing to protect personal data, it seems unlikely they will suffer more than a token slap on the wrist from a privacy regulator provided that they cease and desist (as it appears they already have). Unfortunately, civil trials here are not very effective at recognising damage that comes in forms other than actual financial loss and doing much to compensate for it and/or discourage similar behaviour in the future.

Tell that to your six-months-ago self, who wrote the mess you've been debugging all week. :-)

Which is, of course, contrary to consumer protection laws in much of Europe. Merchants are often required by law to show tax-inclusive prices for B2C sales. (For anyone interested: I have now received conflicting advice on this from official sources in my own government, indicating that X+VAT pricing is now magically acceptable for this purpose again, despite it largely defeating the point of the previous consumer protection rule by hiding the bottom-line price in early advertising.)

The big problem with the new VAT rules isn't the principle of charging in each customer's home nation, if that just means looking up the rate for a given country from a database instead of using a fixed rate. It's a mild inconvenience, but it's an hour or two of programming work for someone, and with MOSS it's maybe an extra hour to file an additional tax return once per quarter.

For a lot of merchants (though certainly not all and particularly not the really tiny ones) the problem isn't even the need to impose VAT on transactions instead of having a threshold. As I understand it, some businesses selling digital goods in EU states didn't have VAT thresholds before anyway, so they already had reporting requirements here, and in places like the UK that did have a minimum threshold before VAT was compulsory, some merchants would have chosen to register for VAT voluntarily anyway because it was advantageous in terms of reclaiming VAT on their expenses.

IMHO the largest and most enduring problems with the new VAT rules are actually all the other things that came along with charging at customer-local rates, from conflicts with pre-existing laws on things like consumer protection and data protection (or potential conflicts, with inconsistent advice coming even from government departments) to the fact that you also have to match the entire VAT regime in each country not just the rate, which means things like knowing which rates apply to which products or services and the local geographical issues (I hope you're not just looking up a tax rate by ISO country code like, you know, everyone, because that doesn't actually work reliably). And of course you require a standard of evidence for the customer's location that will be literally impossible for many small merchants to comply with; at present, I don't see how it's possible for any fully automated system to be 100% reliable here, even for big payment services with dedicated resources and access to all the relevant raw data, because of those local issues of different interpretations of which product/service types get which tax rates and the local geographical anomalies.

The best part of all is that even the EU didn't manage to publish an accurate source of current VAT rates across all affected states in time for the deadline. The information on their own web site was actually wrong for several weeks after the switchover, because Luxembourg changed their VAT rate on the same day. And no-one wanted the data in an actually useful form so you could do something stupid like importing it into a database, right? PDFs running to dozens of pages that you can scan for relevant information are so much more useful.

Hilariously, Luxembourg are actually being compensated by the EU for these changes anyway, so all the arguments about preventing exploitation of low tax rates by different nations within the EU doesn't look so noble any more either.