72899377
submission
lemur3 writes:
Hot on the heels of the recent implementation of Canvas Ads (allowing advertisers to use the full page) Martin Bryant, the Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web, wrote a piece that, ostensibly, calls out mobile carriers in Europe for offering ad blocking as a service.
"Display ads are still an important bread-and-butter income stream. Taking delight in denying publishers that revenue shows either sociopathic tendencies or ignorance of economic realities."
While referring to those using ad blocking as sociopathic is likely not to win many fans, this mindset seems to be prevalent in certain circles, as discussed previously on Slashdot.
Martin closes his piece with a warning.
"For all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web. Cut them out and you’re strangling the diversity of online voices and publishers – and I don’t think consumers really want that."
55969547
submission
lemur3 writes:
On January 24th Google had some problems with a few of its services. Gmail users and people who used various other Google services were impacted just as the Google Reliability Team was to take part in an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Everything seemed to be resolved and back up within an hour.
The Official Google Blog had a short note about what happened from Ben Treynor, a VP of Engineering. According to the blog post it appears that the outage was caused by a bug that caused a system that creates configurations to send a bad one to various "live services." An internal monitoring system noticed the problem a short time later and caused a new configuration to be spread around the services. Ben had this to say of it on the Google Blog, "Engineers were still debugging 12 minutes later when the same system, having automatically cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration at 11:14 a.m. and began sending it; errors subsided rapidly starting at this time. By 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users’ service was restored."
48638165
submission
lemur3 writes:
State legislators in Colorado have not been receiving speeding tickets due to inadequacies in the implementation of a DMV database. The current system ties plates to vehicles rather than to individuals, the special plates for legislators are issued to individuals. The result is that there is no entry in the database for the special plates when the automated photo radar system is triggered, this means nobody receives a citation. In one case a Colorado resident , who had vanity plates reading "33", received the photo radar citations intended for Senator Mike Johnston representing district 33, whose vehicle was identified by a "33" on his special plate. Lt. Matt Murray of the Denver Police, speaking of the system commented, “Our system works, the database works. What needs to happen is the state’s database need to be complete,”.
47160991
submission
lemur3 writes:
After multiple months of discussing possible changes to the prohibited items list the Transportation Security Administration in the United States has determined that it is best to go ahead without any changes to the list of items passengers may have in their carry-on baggage when traveling by air. Under the proposed change (discussed previously on slashdot) pocket knives and other items, such as hockey sticks and ski poles, would have been allowed.
