Let me tell you the story about the guy who wanted to use oauth2 bearer tokens over an unsecured connection.

à_à
This is why we can't have nice things.

I would not use $RANDOM_SHOPPING_BANKING_APP, but I would visit a bank website using chrome, firefox, or the built-in android browsers. Those three programs, while undoubtedly not flawless, at least have enough respectability and history for me to trust them as well as anything on the internet. Admittedly, that's not much trust, but it's something.

Presumably you can write them for iOS, and I have no doubt that there are plenty of apps on the AppStore that are playing fast and loose with SSL trust managers.

True fact: I have written Java code to allow for self-signed or any old cert over SSL, or even none. It's not hard to find plenty of sample code. In the course of my employment the code was used for testing only and either not part of a production build or disabled by default in production, but I cannot say what other developers or teams may have done in with my code in their systems.

Why the authors focused on Android and why they felt the need to blame the OS rather than alerting people to cruddy apps, one can only speculate.

You have a nice playground called linux, and you ask everyone who comes to play in it to follow your rules, except for parts around the edges where you let other people make their own rules. One of the playground bullies comes along and says you should make the shiniest most fun part of your playground where you ask everyone to follow your rules into an "anyone else can make the rules" area. This bully says you have to do it because he needs to make more friends, and all the people he wants to be friends with play in the shiny part of your playground. You tell the bully that no, he has to make friends by being nice, not by making other people follow his rules, and he calls you a meanie doodoo head and says it's your fault he doesn't have any friends.

Spreadsheets -- well, Excel really -- are inescapable in business.

I know personally of complex multimillion dollar deals in the oil and gas business involving buying and selling entire refineries and gas pipelines where the numbers were all worked out on a spreadsheet.

The insurance industry lives on the spreadsheets put together by the actuaries.

The only consistent reason I've seen for Excel users will give up their rows and columns and have bespoke software created is when the dataset gets cumbersomely large. A secondary reason is when the kinds of calculations needed can't be cobbled together with Excel's function and macro tools. Even then, it's not unheard of for users to demand summary/aggregate reports and analytics that they then copy the numbers from into their spreadsheet to do their scenarios.

Just keep in mind the next time you hear about big money moving around in some deal -- somewhere someone probably had a pivot table for that.

Cookies are just one way to track. They aren't even the most convenient way anymore, in the technical sense, because of browser single-origin policies.

Does he not also realize how easy it is for users to block sites that don't honor Do Not Track?

Excellent solution. We can also start a filter list for AdBlock (or insert your favorite browser extension) and start dumping domains that refuse to honor DNT into the bitbucket.

> that loss of revenue means that marginally some sites will close, some will stop offering advanced features, and fewer such new features will be offered?

Guess what? That's called "capitalism". Can't make money or compete in the market? Out you go. Don't try to use the government or the legal system to force people to allow your marginal and failing revenue model to continue to be profitable.

You do realize you can create an maintain your own filter list that blocks what you want, right?

We should start another category and block list for AdBlock: domains that refuse to honor DNT.

So they want to play that game? Drop this line in your /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1 www.itif.org

Maybe we can start a blackhole list for domains that don't honor DNT the way it was designed? Maybe in the form of an addition list for AdBlock?

As a developer, the last thing I want to deal with in ops issues. Here, I give you the install script, does it fail? Fine, let's fix it. Do I want to be on call at all hours because your monkeys can't run 'make install' properly? Fuck no. Half-assed attempts by ops staff and craptastic server clusterfucks that result are not my problem, and trying to install my software on a mis-provisioned system with a single-core 128MB instance when the system requirements clearly state a 4-core system with 4GB should result in immediate termination.

Congratulations, you've illustrated perfectly one of the major problems with the DMCA. Written by corporations for corporations, the law implicitly equates a rights owner with a person or institution that has substantial resources to pursue and litigate violations. Nowhere in the law is there relief for the individual creator or small business whose works are appropriated by another party that has money and lawyers.