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Comment If used as a replacement for Neilsen Ratings... (Score 3, Interesting) 168

If used as a replacement for Neilsen Ratings then I would actually be all for this, as long as the data was properly anonymized (or only searchable/exported with an obscure TV ID or Viewer ID, and not easily identifiable information). I don't mind advertisers knowing which shows are more popular, but I'd rather that neither they or any other entity tracks all my TV viewership for the sake of either custom-tailoring ads/junk/spam at me or monitoring me specifically.

Judging by what is on TV right now, I think we need to try an alternative to Neilsen Ratings to see if that fixes anything ... or at least confirms that humanity isn't worth saving.

Comment G+'s biggest strength may be its biggest weakness (Score 2) 360

Google+'s biggest strength is that it puts circles front-and-center so that you can control who sees your posts on a per-post basis. Yes you can do the same in Facebook, but it is a tedious workflow in Facebook.

I am starting to think this may be Google+'s biggest weakness as well. Now that people can share posts with sub-sets of their friends list with ease, Google+ overall feels less active. I wonder how much of that feeling of inactivity has to do with not being aware of private, walled off conversations between members of your circles. Honestly, how many close friends do you have on Facebook or Google+? It is more than likely that the bulk of your friends lists / circles are acquaintances or friends of friends and those are the people that you are less likely to share posts with ... and vice-versa.

Comment Re:Addon breakage (Score 2) 683

They were referring to about:troubleshooting in the mozilla.dev.usability discussion linked in the article summary. I think it is the "Help > Troubleshooting Information" page (about:support in Firefox 5). Either they have plans to rename about:support to about:troubleshooting or add a new about:troubleshooting in the future ... or they misspoke in the conversation.

Comment Ability to install out-of-date addons (Score 4, Insightful) 247

I'd rather they add some easy way to let users install addons that say, "Does not support Firefox x.x". They can put a big disclaimer/warning/alert to make sure the user knows what they are doing, but with the Firefox rapid release schedule I am tired of having my addons break because of version string issues.

One example is the Stylish addon. I am using the Firefox 6 beta in Ubuntu 11.10 alpha and Stylish refuses to install due to the version string. The addon info says it supports Firefox 3.6 - 6.0a2 (key part being "6.0.a2"). That tells me that it should work in later alpha/beta version 6 builds.

Firefox really needs to address the issue of how addons determine whether or not they are out-of-date. The browser version is no longer a useful metric for that.

Comment Does this open up ISPs to legal liability? (Score 1) 338

I am not a lawyer, but if ISPs go this route then won't they lose common carrier status? Will they open themselves up to lawsuits if illegal content is found to be traversing their infrastructure? If a guy gets caught uploading or downloading child porn, then can family-focused or religious organizations sue his ISP for allowing child porn to be transmitted on their network? The ISPs will be monitoring traffic, so they can't play ignorant about what is being sent across it.

Comment Re:Can it altogether. (Score 2) 243

I use self-signed certificates on pages hosted on my intranet and all the major browsers throw a major fit about them. If I ever have guests over that want to utilize my intranet web apps then they have to approve and add exceptions for my self-signed certs. The browsers act like my certs are shady or suspicious and if I didn't re-assure my guests then they wouldn't have added the exceptions.

I haven't tried going to a site with a domain mis-match or expired cert, but I would assume browsers throw a fit about those too.

Comment Re:Change for the sake of change? (Score 1) 835

I switched to Xfce because Ubuntu is switching to Unity and ditching Gnome 2.x in the next release.

I must say that Xfce is really nice, and isn't much of a step down from Gnome 2.x

In fact, I managed to style Xfce to look nearly identical to Ubuntu's Gnome 2.x in 11.04. The one missing feature in Xfce 4.8 is the ability to manually sort taskbar buttons, but they have added that back in to 4.8.5 (I'll wait for Ubuntu 11.10 for this feature, as I don't want to hassle with getting 4.8.5 on 11.04 and end up in dependency hell)

Xfce could be a little more customizable, but it is not bad and I'd rather they keep doing what they are doing and not try to please everybody and end up with a lot of cruft.

KDE is getting their groove back, but I ultimately think Xfce will be the big winner of Gnome refugees.

Comment Re:Pre-fetching requires PERFECT security... (Score 1) 103

Google Instant Pages sounds like it will be rendering the entire page, including images and other external resources. I wouldn't be surprised if it also executed JavaScript, fetched embedded iframes, and anything else that the page would normally do if you clicked on that link. I wonder if it would even follow redirections?

What is to stop a malevolent webmaster from performing redirects to nasty trojan or malware-infected pages if it detects the page is being pre-rendered? If that page contains flash objects, java apps, or other attack vectors on it, I'd think you'd be just as at risk as if you actually visited the site directly.

I could be wrong, though. I haven't thoroughly researched Google Instant Pages, but from what little I've found it seems it will be performing a full page render in anticipation of you clicking on the link to the page.

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