It's too bad the Push API is such a mess to implement. It feels like an afterthought to make it available as an API, like Google wanted push notifications for their own sites and thought, "eh what the hell, expose this narrow-use-case API to web developers too."

I've seen Amazon bikes in Seattle already, though it was a bike with a big branded box and two tires in the rear, and the person riding it didn't seem all that experienced. Might've just been a test type thing.

If you're writing a big, complicated testing framework, don't forget to write tests for the tests. I'm not even joking

VR is the new sexy thing. Who wouldn't want to contribute the big chunk of VR code to firefox that potential millions of people will be using? The problem is that Firefox has over 40,000 other small, unsexy bugs, including some that are almost 15 years old. There's no corporate management who can say "this stuff is embarrassing, hey you, you gotta fix this before we can even consider a big new feature."

It's not a bad thing necessarily, just different priorities that can potentially result in bloated software. Hopefully "the next big sexy thing" will be streamlining Firefox to make it more efficient, and focus will be directed toward that.

The difference is that with EME the server wouldn't have to have access to the video; you wouldn't have to trust it because the video is encrypted before the server sees it. There's still other issues making it hard to adopt, like key exchange, but it's a step in the right direction for more convenient end-to-end encryption.

There are some positive aspects to the Encrypted Media Extensions API. It does provide some DRM options for companies like Netflix, which isn't great, but it can also enhance the security of personal media files. It will enable a web app to let you upload an encrypted video, then stream it from their server to your computer without having to download the entire thing and decrypt it -- without any browser plugin.

So if you really don't want anyone being able to see your personal videos (not just Netflix's videos), this thing isn't all bad.

I wouldn't be too worried. I looked into this for a web app for chat notifications, and the API is kind of a disaster IMO. From what I saw, it's very opinionated on how the data is acquired and passed on through a ServiceWorker to a notification, to the point that applications would likely have to be built from the ground-up with it mind.

Partway through writing a small browser extension last year, and realizing how much access they have to everything you look at, I stopped using all but a couple trusted browser extensions. Seriously, it was like 15 lines of code to take a screenshot of whatever page you're looking at and send it to a server every 2 seconds with no indication that anything is happening.

Granted, you have to accept a permissions dialog, but most extensions ask for way too many permissions. That cloud-to-butt extension? It already has all the permissions it needs to send the text on every page to a database somewhere, and unless you carefully audit the source of every extension you install (obviously google isn't), you'd never notice, you're just trusting some extension author.

To give more info on Amazon Web Services: They recently added domain name registration. It's very barebones, but also really easy to configure. So if all you want is the domain name, you know what you're doing, and all your servers are setup somewhere, you can point the records at them very easily. But if you also want email forwarding or something else or convenient bundled features, you might want another service.

Yeah, I was surprised there was no mention of the huge privacy implications this has. But hey, maybe this'll reduce the number of IDs and RFID cards you have to carry around since it'll be so easy to identify and track you when you're just walking around.

I'm no RFID expert, but it's just used for identification, right? It won't be long until face scanning is good enough that you can identify someone from even further away than the range of an RFID chip. The potential for people cloning the chips seems worse than any sort of privacy/tracking worries.

What baffles me is how Gawker would think to do this and expect their advertisers not to care. Why would a movie or game company give them any money after they've shown they're willing provide easy links to copyrighted material? Whether or not linking is illegal, advertisers are under no obligation continue supporting them. I sure as hell wouldn't pay to have a banner ad for some peice of media next to a link to a torrent or rapidshare link.

He's just a guy. A guy who spent a lot of time hand writing a script for a movie, and showed an early, unfinished copy of it to a few people. Now it's out there for people to criticize before it's even done. If I were him, I'd be pretty damn bummed out about it as well -- he's under no obligation to finish his own creative work if he no longer cares about it, and something like this could easily take all the passion out of a project.

I'm not set-up to work from home :-\ Usually just bring my laptop home, but didn't think a little rain on Wednesday evening was going to be any big deal, so left it at work. I'm pretty lucky though, a lot of people are having a really tough time.

I work in Boulder, but the Sheriff's office said that everyone should stay home today. A lot of the roads are perfectly fine, but empty because everyone is staying home. A few spots are really flooded and impassable though. As far as I know, my office isn't flooded, but we did put all our computers on our desks as a precaution. I'm sort of nervous because I forgot to push my code before I left, so I might have to redo some work if something happens to my computer.