Well, here's the tl;dr of TFA: Social media is the starting point. Hence the Arab Spring—you use Facebook or Twitter or whatever to spread your message and/or propaganda, and then accrue those with personal willingness to march and coordinate action through the net. Five dictators have been overthrown in the Middle East since December 2010 (as well as uprisings and protests in more than a dozen other countries) following social media germination, so clearly it's viable for that. Unfortunately this means it's also a single point of failure, as shown in Egypt when they depeered from the rest of the network in early 2011, easy to infiltrate and possible to manipulate.

I take it you didn't RTFA, then, which is a summary of the real paper, in which they show that doesn't really work. (And abuse factor analysis.)

Chrome just uses the operating system for a lot of the certificate validation of HTTPS, so it can be vulnerable to security holes that apply to the operating system. Chrome wasn't vulnerable to "goto fail", but presumably it has been vulnerable to others in Windows and Mac OS.

TFA:

...so it's a little less direct, but no great loss.

I was actually thinking of large platform developers such as Zynga. The fee and labour cost is potentially significantly higher, which makes it only attractive to a smaller number of companies prepared to do the work of scraping information itself, but the opportunity for information transfer still exists, doesn't it?

I believe you when you say the company's trying to improve its image in this regard, but, well, when you have a history of putting things like "Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information" in your privacy policy, that sours users' perception of your brand. It shouldn't really come as a surprise that people assume such things continue.

Hi, apk!

I've gotten quite a few random spam messages from Chinese industry, despite being a software engineer at an academic institution with absolutely nothing to do with any product development or manufacturing whatsoever. I've gotten offers for piping, ceramics, and a wide variety of plastics. At this very moment, I am reading a spam message from Kevin, who informs me he represents "one of the best digital images retouching/editing professionals located in China."

They seem like very good deals, and I'm almost saddened that I can't take them up on what appear to be very genuine, heartfelt attempts at mass mailing in an age where most unsolicited e-mail is about "your urgent Cooperation in transferring the sum of $11.3million immediately to your private account" and unauthorized activity notifications from Bl1zzard Entertanmnt on my several hundred Batt1e.net accounts.

If you ever figure out what kind of plastic it was, let me know, and I'll check to see if I got the same e-mail!

Facebook's position on providing large amounts of user data to its business partners has been the subject of scrutiny a few times. It remains unclear exactly how much stuff developers like Zynga have been able to access. There was also a series of events a couple of years ago where privacy controls were updated and set to overly permissive defaults—which is either spectacularly bad management (given how much bad PR it generated each and every time) or a bribed enablement of data-scraping.

As for sending email to a Gmail user, that's what I meant by "passive" use of Google's services, although I should note that if your e-mail never gets read, it cannot make Google money, just like a site with Google ads on it that never gets visited. You're really only an incidental bystander in that situation.

Well, there's at least one sentence that's essentially different: "even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you."

Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers. They exclusively use their own analytics; all an advertiser can do is submit their target demographics and keywords, and let Google do the math. While they're both huge storehouses of personal information, the big G is monolithic and generally non-porous—unless you're a malignant security agency, at least. If you're not using their services (at least passively), you're definitely not making them money.

This doesn't make them Totally Cool Groovy Guys You Should Trust With Anything, but it does make them naive ideologues surfing along the edge of a slippery slope rather than the outright thuggery of Facebook and other traditional advertisers—FB is more like a spam subscription; once you get signed up, you can be certain that your private information will propagate across the cosmos for eternity.

I love you, too, apk, we make quite the pair. I'd be offended by all this if I hadn't anticipated it when I posted my GP troll...

When I saw the headline, I thought, "DARPA doesn't embrace nature, it maims and kills it!" So, close...

"-1: Off-Topic" x 15 ;-)

git2svn has a problem that we ran into recently: because git does not support hierarchical branching, if you do not keep all your branches in a single Subversion directory, it will take an excessively long time for a local git repository to synchronize with a Subversion repository.

For example, let's say that you have the typical /branches directory in Subversion. Now user "myria" comes along, and she wants to make her own directory of branches so that her own branches don't pollute the /branches directory. She does an svn copy of /trunk to /branches/myria/new-crypto. Now git2svn tries to import this change from Subversion into a local git repository and takes three hours. Why?

Because git doesn't support hierarchical branch names, from git's naive perspective, what Myria has done is make a copy of the entire repository into a new directory named "new-crypto" inside of her "myria" branch. Git does not interpret her commit as a creation of a branch - it sees "myria" as the branch, and "new-crypto" as merely a directory within the branch. Subversion gives no special meaning to the directory named "branches", so git2svn is simply using a hack of assuming that the "branches" directory contains objects that it can convert into git's branch objects. Git thus sees her commit as one giant commit of 100,000 files, and consequently takes forever processing it.

The above was a recently-encountered real-life situation at the office from about two weeks ago.

Why, thank you... I think. You have a script?