Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Some smaller pirate sites have become concerned about Windows 10 system phoning home too many hints regarding that the users are accessing their site. Therefore, the pirate administrators have started blocking Windows 10 users from accessing the BitTorrent trackers that the sites host. The first ones to hit the alarm button were iTS, which have posted a statement and started redirecting Windows 10 users to a YouTube video called Windows 10 is a Tool to Spy on Everything You Do. Additionally, according to TorrentFreak, two other similar dark web torrent trackers are also considering following suit. "As we all know, Microsoft recently released Windows 10. You as a member should know, that we as a site are thinking about banning the OS from FSC," said one of the FSC staff. Likewise, in a message to their users, a BB admin said something similar: "We have also found [Windows 10] will be gathering information on users' P2P use to be shared with anti piracy group."

jones_supa writes: As pointed out by a Redditor, it seems that suspending the machine is not officially supported by SteamOS anymore. A SteamOS user opened a bug report due to his controllers being unresponsive after a suspend cycle. To this, a Valve engineer bluntly reported that "suspend is no longer supported". He further explained the issue by saying that given the state of hardware and software support throughout the graphics stack on Linux, the team didn't think that they could make the feature work reliably.

AmiMoJo writes: Reddit's new CEO, Steve Huffman, announced new a content policy and the banning of a small number of subreddits today. Additionally, some subreddits will be "quarantined", so users can't see their content unless they explicitly opt in. "Our most important policy over the last ten years has been to allow just about anything so long as it does not prevent others from enjoying Reddit for what it is: the best place online to have truly authentic conversations.I believe these policies strike the right balance." The names of the nixed subreddits make clear that they're not exactly neighbors exchanging pleasantries.

AmiMoJo writes: Reddit's new CEO, Steve Huffman, announced new a content policy and the banning of a small number of subreddits today. Additionally, some subreddits will be "quarantined", so users can't see their content unless they explicitly opt in. "Our most important policy over the last ten years has been to allow just about anything so long as it does not prevent others from enjoying Reddit for what it is: the best place online to have truly authentic conversations.I believe these policies strike the right balance." The names of the nixed subreddits make clear that they're not exactly neighbors exchanging pleasantries.

itwbennett writes: OpenSSH servers with keyboard-interactive authentication enabled, which is the default setting on many systems, including FreeBSD ones, can be tricked to allow many authentication retries over a single connection, according to a security researcher who uses the online alias Kingcope, who disclosed the issue on his blog last week. According to a discussion on Reddit, setting PasswordAuthentication to 'no' in the OpenSSH configuration and using public-key authentication does not prevent this attack, because keyboard-interactive authentication is a different subsystem that also relies on passwords.

AmiMoJo writes: It will be more difficult to find "abhorrent" content posted to community news site Reddit, the site has announced. It stopped short of banning the material outright and instead will require users to log-in to access it. The company reiterated its existing complete bans of illegal content, including child abuse images and so-called "revenge porn." Chief executive and co-founder Steve Huffman told users: "We've spent the last few days here discussing, and agree that an approach like this allows us as a company to repudiate content we don't want to associate with the business, but gives individuals freedom to consume it if they choose."

An anonymous reader writes: A video posted on YouTube showing a drone firing a gun in a wooded area has caused some controversy today. The short video shows a four-rotored custom drone with a special rig containing a handgun. The handgun proceeds to fire four shots, handling the recoil better than might be expected. The user who posted the video also submitted it to Reddit, where a commenter noted that the apparent use of a solenoid trigger would class the device as an automatic weapon under ATF rules.

An anonymous reader writes: Reddit's new CEO, cofounder Steve Huffman, has made a statement regarding the site's controversial racism- and abuse-related community "subreddits." He said, "we don't have any obligation to support them." In the brief announcement, Huffman explains that a robust content policy is something they have "been thinking about for quite some time" and is in the cards in the near future. It has also come to light via former CEO Yishan Wong that ousted interim boss Ellen Pao was one of the few defenders of the controversial subreddits, favoring a strategy of coexistence over the board's plan to eliminate problem communities. Wong blames another co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, for strategy changes that led to the firing of "Ask Me Anything" administrator Victoria Taylor whose unexpected absence crippled that component of the site.

An anonymous reader writes: Reddit's new CEO, cofounder Steve Huffman, has made a statement regarding the site's controversial racism- and abuse-related community "subreddits." He said, "we don't have any obligation to support them." In the brief announcement, Huffman explains that a robust content policy is something they have "been thinking about for quite some time" and is in the cards in the near future. It has also come to light via former CEO Yishan Wong that ousted interim boss Ellen Pao was one of the few defenders of the controversial subreddits, favoring a strategy of coexistence over the board's plan to eliminate problem communities. Wong blames another co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, for strategy changes that led to the firing of "Ask Me Anything" administrator Victoria Taylor whose unexpected absence crippled that component of the site.

An anonymous reader writes: Reddit's new CEO, cofounder Steve Huffman, has made a statement regarding the site's controversial racism- and abuse-related community "subreddits." He said, "we don't have any obligation to support them." In the brief announcement, Huffman explains that a robust content policy is something they have "been thinking about for quite some time" and is in the cards in the near future. It has also come to light via former CEO Yishan Wong that ousted interim boss Ellen Pao was one of the few defenders of the controversial subreddits, favoring a strategy of coexistence over the board's plan to eliminate problem communities. Wong blames another co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, for strategy changes that led to the firing of "Ask Me Anything" administrator Victoria Taylor whose unexpected absence crippled that component of the site.

theodp writes: "We're investing $10 million in organizations that are upgrading the world," Microsoft announced on in its new Upgrade Your World website, which was created in conjunction with the Windows 10 launch. "We've identified nine global nonprofits, and we'd like your help choosing the 10th." The missions of the selected nonprofits include fighting global poverty, preventing children living with HIV from needlessly dying, increasing access to quality education for children in the developing world, conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends, and ensuring that all kindergartners learn 'computer science.' To paraphrase Sesame Street, can you guess which cause is not like the others? If you guessed Code.org, which wants CS made a "core" K-12 subject in U.S. schools, you're right! Coincidentally, Code.org's biggest donors include Microsoft ($3M+), Ballmer Family Giving ($3M+), and Bill Gates ($1M+). And Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, who once reported to Satya Nadella, is coincidentally a sometimes jogging partner of Steve Ballmer, as well as the next-door neighbor of Microsoft General Counsel and Code.org Board member Brad Smith, whose FWD.us bio notes is responsible for Microsoft's philanthropic work. Code.org emerged on the scene shortly after Smith suggested that action on Microsoft's 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy to increase K-12 CS education and the number of H-1B visas could be galvanized by 'producing a crisis'.

Deathspawner writes: To say that it's been a tumultuous month for reddit is an understatement. While multiple events have occurred in recent months that have caused an uproar, such as the banning of popular "hate" subreddits, nothing impacted the site quite like the out-of-nowhere firing of "Ask Me Anything" admin Victoria Taylor last week. Following that, other minor revelations surfaced, and finally, this past Monday, reddit CEO Ellen Pao came out from hiding to issue an apology. While her message instilled a bit more confidence in the future of the site, it wasn't enough. Today, it's been announced that Ellen Pao has left the company she joined last fall, and will be superseded by someone who knows what he's getting into: founder Steve Huffman.

An anonymous reader writes: After moderators locked up some of Reddit's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, and an online petition asking the company to fire CEO Ellen Pao reached more than 175,000 signatures over the weekend, Pao has issued an apology. The statement reads in part: "We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven't communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes. We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven't delivered on them. When you've had feedback or requests, we haven't always been responsive. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit. Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me."

vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.

Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.

Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.

This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.

vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.

Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.

Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.

This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.

vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.

Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.

Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.

This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.

vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.

Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.

Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.

This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.

vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.

Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.

Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.

This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.

vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.

Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.

Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.

This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.

vivaoporto writes: As reported by CNET and TechCrunch, reddit moderators are locking up the site's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, a key member of the site's behind-the-scenes team. Taylor, who was the main facilitator for the site's question-and-answer community "Ask Me Anything" (graced by the presence of notables like Barack Obama, Jerry Seinfeld and regular folks like a line cook at Applebee's) was fired yesterday, causing all sorts of problems for Reddit's most mainstream offering.

Taylor's reported departure, which has been dubbed AMAgeddon, led other moderators of the marquee IAmA subreddit to switch the page's settings to private, rendering the Reddit userbase unable to view the page. Since then, dozens of other subreddits including /r/askreddit, /r/videos, /r/gaming and /r/gadgets — each with several million subscribers — have also been made private, instead re-directing readers to a static landing page.

Reddit's cofounder and executive chairman, Alexis Ohanian, said in a post, "we don't talk about specific employees. (...) We get that losing Victoria has a significant impact on the way you manage your community, (...) I'd really like to understand how we can help solve these problems, because I know r/IAMA thrived before her and will thrive after." He later apologized for how communication was handled. A full recap of the situation is available at the site itself, with insights from redditors about the whole situation.

This comes in the wake of other highly controversial events like the response to what became known as The Fappening, and the more recent ban of the controversial but popular FatPeopleHate subreddit.

New submitter sethstorm writes: As a change to their community management, Reddit administrators have banned multiple communities (known as subreddits) in a bid to remove harassment. In response, users have responded in different ways — some have pointed out the bias of Reddit admins for leaving known harassers alone such as those in the "SRS" subreddit, others have attempted to re-create the banned subreddit "FatPeopleHate", and many have gone to overwhelm Voat (a competitor).

so.dan writes: The CTO of Fight for the Future — the non-profit activism group behind Battle for the Net, Blackout Congress, and Stop Fast Track — Jeff Lyon, is seeking advice regarding a problem with facing the website they created — stopfasttrack.com — to fight the secret Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.

The site been blacklisted by Twitter, Facebook, and major email providers as malicious/spam. Over the last week, nobody has been able to post the website on social networks, or send any emails with their URL. Lyon has posted a summary of the relevant details on Reddit in the hope of obtaining useful feedback regarding what the cause might be. However, none of the answers there right now seem particularly useful, so I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help him out by posting here.

Lyon indicates that the blackout has occurred at a particularly crucial point in the campaign to kill the TPP, as most members of the House of Representatives would likely vote against it were it brought to a vote now, and as pro-TPP interests have started to escalate their lobbying efforts on the House to counteract what would otherwise be a no vote.

jones_supa writes: After lots of work by Chrome for Android team and a huge change, Chrome for Android is now almost entirely open source, a Google engineer announced in Reddit. Over 100,000 lines of code, including Chrome's entire user interface layer, has been made public, allowing anyone with the inclination to do so to look at, modify, and build the browser from source. Licensing restrictions prevent certain media codecs, plugins and Google service features form being included, hence the "almost." This is on par with the open source Chromium browser that is available on the desktop.

According to Wikipedia, 'Project Ara is the codename for an initiative that aims to develop an open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.' Google is the sponsor, and the project seems to be moving faster than some people expect it to. There's a Project Ara website, of course, a GitHub repository, a Facebook page, even an Ara subreddit. During his conversation with Timothy Lord, Ara firmware project lead (and spokesman) Marti Bolivar said it won't be long before prototype Ara modular phones start user testing. Meanwhile, if you want to see what Marti and his coworkers have been up to lately, besides this interview, you can read a transcription of his talk (including slides) from the January Project Ara Developers Conference in Singapore.

theodp (442580) writes "If at first you don't succeed, lobby, lobby again. That's a lesson to be learned from Microsoft and Google, who in 2010 launched advocacy coalition Computing in the Core, which aimed "to strengthen K-12 computer science education and ensure that computer science is one of the core academic subjects that prepares students for jobs in our digital society." In 2013, Computing in the Core "merged" with Code.org, a new nonprofit led by the next door neighbor of Microsoft's General Counsel and funded by wealthy tech execs and their companies. When Code.org 'taught President Obama to code' in a widely-publicized White House event last December, visitor records indicate that Google, Microsoft, and Code.org execs had a sitdown immediately afterwards with the head of the NSF, and a Microsoft lobbyist in attendance returned to the White House the next day with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and General Counsel Brad Smith (who also sits on Code.org's Board) in tow. Looks like all of that hard work may finally pay off. Education Week reports that computer science has been quietly added to the list of disciplines defined as 'core academic subjects' in the Senate draft of the rewritten No Child Left Behind Act, a status that opens the doors to a number of funding opportunities. After expressing concern that his teenage daughters hadn't taken to coding the way he'd like, President Obama added, "I think they got started a little bit late. Part of what you want to do is introduce this with the ABCs and the colors." So, don't be too surprised if your little ones are soon focusing on the four R's — reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic, and Rapunzel — in school!"

First time accepted submitter iMadeGhostzilla writes TechCrunch reports: "Magic Leap is showing what it might look like to use its hardware for augmented reality gaming in the future, with a new demo of what the team is apparently 'playing in the office' right now. The brief video shows examples of interacting with YouTube and Gmail apps, along with browsing a menu system for OS-level interaction. The person in the video from whose perspective it's apparently shot then selects a shooter game, tests out a weapon after choosing from a variety of options, does some tower-defense style stuff by placing a current and fights some visually impressive but fairly generic baddies. [...] The video was posted with an apology for Magic Leap's absence at TED." Commenters on reddit and elsewhere believe the video is fake. Magic Leap recently came into the spotlight with its recent $540M backing by Google and others.

rossgneumann writes The r/Civ subreddit is currently hosting a fascinating "Battle Royale" in the strategy game Civilization V, pitting 42 of the game's built-in, computer-controlled players against each other for world domination. The match is being played on the largest Earth-shaped map the game is capable of, with both civilizations that were included in the retail version of the game and custom, player-created civilizations that were modded into it after release.

HughPickens.com writes David Streitfeld reports at the NYT that people routinely use the Internet to review services from plumbers to hairdressers, but now the tables are turned as companies like Uber are rating their customers, and shunning those who do not make the grade. "An Uber trip should be a good experience for drivers too," says an Uber blog post. "Drivers shouldn't have to deal with aggressive, violent, or disrespectful riders. If a rider exhibits disrespectful, threatening, or unsafe behavior, they, too, may no longer be able to use the service." It does not seem to take much to annoy some Uber drivers. On one online forum, an anonymous driver said he gave poor reviews to "people who are generally negative and would tend to bring down my mood (or anyone around them)." Another was cavalier about the process: "1 star for passengers does not do them any harm. Sensible drivers won't pick them up, but so what?" In response, some consumers are becoming more polite and prompt. "The knowledge that they may be rated is also encouraging people to submit more upbeat reviews themselves, even if the experience was less than stellar," writes Streitfeld. "When services choose whom to serve, no one wants to be labeled difficult."

jones_supa writes Apple has always had attractive and stylish hardware, but there are always some customers opting to run Linux instead of OS X on their Macs. But why? One might think that a polished commercial desktop offering designed for that specific lineup of computers might have less rough edges than a free open source one. Actually there's plenty of motivations to choose otherwise. A redditor asked about this trend and got some very interesting answers. What are your reasons?

jones_supa (887896) writes "Reports are coming in that users of certain devices by Indian phone manufacturer Micromax noticed apps being silently installed without their consent or permission. Uninstalling these apps won't help, as they will be automatically reinstalled. Alternatively, instead of downloading apps, the phone might litter the UI with stack of notifications which are advertisements for online stores and other apps. It turns out that the "System Update" application is responsible for all of this. When starting to tear down the application (which is actually called FWUpgrade.apk on the filesystem), the first thing you notice is that it's a third-party application. A Chinese company named Adups developed it as a replacement for the stock Google OTA service. The article shows the potential abilities of this app and how Micromax customers can work around the disruptive behavior."

An anonymous reader writes After years of relative silence, the development team behind the classic roguelike game NetHack has posteda question: going forward, what internal representation should the NetHack core use for Unicode characters? UTF8? UTF32? Something else? (See also: NH4 blog, reddit. Also, yes, I have verified that the question authentically comes from the NetHack dev team.)

"The United States Postal Service "Click-N-Ship" site suffered no outages or slowdowns during Christmas rush," writes Bennett Haselton. "It just has bugs that make the process more annoying than just standing in line at the post office, which defeats the purpose. The most frustrating part is that most of these bugs could have been fixed, just by having some testers run through the ordering process and make a note of anything that seems confusing or wrong. (Although I've included notes on how to work around all the bugs, so you really can print your own labels and skip the line.)" Read on for the rest; what other gripes do you have about the current package delivery regime, and how would you resolve them? This suggestion on the LifeProTips subreddit reminded me that I'd been meaning to try printing my own USPS mailing labels to skip the lines at the post office. I'd been putting it off because I knew that I'd be determined to find the most efficient way of doing everything through the site, and if the site didn't steer me towards exactly the best options, I'd end up forcing myself to reverse-engineer their whole algorithm in order to find the most efficient way myself. That's why I always appreciate it when a website just tells me the best option instead of making me second-guess them.

Right away, the USPS website failed that test because it does not allow you to print first-class mail labels, instead steering you towards the more expensive Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express options. Online users have complained about the lack of first-class-mail options on USPS.com for years, and users on several forums suggested using the PayPal Ship Now site instead, which does let you print first class mailing labels online, along with Priority Mail labels other options.

In my case it was a moot point because I had to use the Priority Mail labels in order for my packages to arrive by Christmas, but the deception was still hugely aggravating. Not just because of the thought of millions of people wasting money (and the finite resources of the postal system) due to the USPS site tricking them into a more expensive upgrade that they didn't need. But because it now meant I'd have to second-guess every recommendation they made, wondering if they were steering me toward something that was worse for me and better for them. The reason sites like Amazon are so stress-free to use is because, for the most part, they do display the options that are best for you, even at the expense of their own short-term profit. Some third-party merchant is selling a book for less than Amazon's list price? They'll let the seller list the book right on their site and undercut Amazon's own sales. The benefit to the user is not just the cost savings, but knowing that you don't have to feel like a chump for not wasting time on search engines trying to find a cheaper deal.

Once I realized the USPS site was concealing the cheaper options, in my determination to avoid getting ripped off by the USPS I almost ended up getting ripped off much worse by one of their "partners". I remembered an ad on a Google search mentioning Stamps.com, so I signed up for an account there and downloaded their software, which does in fact let you print first-class postage. It was only after reading a warning in the original subreddit that I realized I had unwittingly "agreed" to a $15.99/month charge. It turns out that the Stamps.com registration page says above the credit card form that your card info is "required to purchase postage", but this is misleading -- the fine print in the sidebar says you will be charged $15.99 per month if you don't cancel. (And neither the software nor the website gives you a link to cancel -- you have to call their customer service number.) Fortunately, I did call and cancel after realizing I'd been duped, but I was not surprised to learn on Wikipedia that the company had been the subject of over 1,000 Better Business Bureau complaints from users regarding the unauthorized monthly charges. (The part on Wikipedia about "long hold times" is out of date, though -- the automated prompts recognized my account by my phone number and let me cancel without any waiting.)

What does that have to do with USPS.com? Because it never would have happened if the USPS website had been on my side in the first place, giving me all the mailing options that I actually needed. It's bad enough when a private company does this, but the USPS works for us, don't they?

So that's not a "bug" in the traditional sense, but I'm counting it: #1: Not giving users all the mailing options they want to know about.

Most of the other bugs are not self-serving tricks; rather, they're just unclear directions where you have to pause and puzzle out what you're really supposed to do, which is different from what the site tells you to do. For example:

#2: Listing boxes as shipping options that don't fit the dimensions that you've already entered

On the label printing page (requires a USPS.com login if you don't have one) is the option to enter package dimensions. If you specify package details of 1 lbs and 13x5x6 inches, and click to calculate "available Services and Prices" based on the details you've entered, you're presented with a list of options that include 'Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelope 12-1/2" x 9-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Small Flat Rate Box 5-3/8" x 8-5/8" x 1-5/8"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 11" x 8-1/2" x 5-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 13-5/8" x 11-7/8" x 3-3/8"', and 'Priority Mail Padded Flat Rate Envelope 9-1/2" x 12-1/2"' -- all of which, of course, are too small to hold the package whose dimensions you just specified.

You could argue that it's the user's responsibility to make sure their package fits into the box they select, but a user could reasonably assume that the whole point of entering the length, width and height is so that the USPS can recommend only those boxes that will hold the item. Remember, the user usually doesn't have these boxes in front of them at the time they're printing the label. They could end up selecting a box option, printing the label, taking it all the way to the post office along with their package, only to find out that the package doesn't fit into the box that they printed the label for, and that they have to wait in line anwyay to pay for an alternate method.

It's a middle-school-level programming exercise to take the length, width, and height of a package as an input, take as a second input a list of boxes of varying lengths, widths, heights, and costs, and find the lowest-cost box that will hold the package (keeping in mind that the package can be rotated to different orientations so that the "height" becomes the "width", etc.). It's reasonable to expect the postal service to be able to do this too.

#3: Everything wrong with the "print your labels" page

Here's a screen grab of the "print your labels" page that appears after you've paid, which you can use to play the Highlights "What's Wrong?" game:

• The text at the top says "You'll have until 11:59 PM CST of the Ship Date to print these labels." OK, but if I print them at 11:59 PM, what good does it do if the post office closed at 6? Are the labels only valid on the ship date, or will they still work if I take them to the post office the next day? This should be more clear.

• Text says "A SCAN Form must be printed when taking packages to the Post Office." Fine, but there's a checkbox next to that sentence. If that sentence describes a postal regulation, what does it mean if I un-check the box? That the regulation no longer applies to me? Can someone tell me if the drug laws work that way as well?

• The next sentence says: "Close out and print your SCAN Form here." I have no idea what that sentence means. Close out of the browser? And where is "here"? When it's not hyperlinked, "here" means here.

• WHY IS THE "PRINT LABELS" BUTTON DISABLED?? I have the checkboxes checked for both labels. I want to print them. What else do you want me to DO? (My PC has a printer, which the Chrome browser is aware of -- it lets me print from other webpages with no problem.) I got it to work by saving the PDF and printing that, but I never figured out why the Print button was just sitting there, mocking me from behind its veil of grey.

• The "Schedule a Pickup" button at the bottom -- same problem as the "print until 11:59 PM" message at the top. Since I printed these labels with the ship date specified as today, it should be more clear if the labels will still be considered valid tomorrow, which is the soonest time that a pickup could be scheduled.

#4: Over an hour on hold and never got through.

As an adherent to the touchingly quaint notion that a reporter should talk to the subjects of their story before running it, and also because I just wanted clarification on some of these questions, I called the USPS help line and waited on hold for 30 minutes before their help line disconnected me. I called back and waited for another 40 minutes before I hung up this time. OK, strictly speaking that's not a "bug". They just suck.

In the end, after reverse-engineering their pricing options as I had vowed to do, I determined what appeared to be their rules, (applies only to domestic Priority Mail), which you may find handy:

• If you're shipping in a Flat Rate box, the weight of the package doesn't matter (up to the 70 lb limit), only the dimensions, to the extent that they determine which Flat Rate box you can fit it into, with the bigger ones being more expensive.
• On the other hand, if you pick the Priority Mail "Use your own box" option, then the dimensions don't matter (unless you exceed the allowed limits), only the weight -- a 5 lb, 3"x3"x3" package and a 5 lb, 21"x21"x21" package both ship for $15.22, but if you change the weight, that's when the price changes. (If you try to ship a 22"x22"x22" package, you get an error that you've exceeded the dimensions for a Click-N-Ship.)

Using this, I was able to strategically break my one shipment, which would have cost about $30, into two separate shipments which cost $12 and $8. All told, with the effort to reverse-engineer their pricing options and to document all of the bugs for posterity, it took me about an hour to figure out that $10 savings and to print labels that I could take to the post office and skip the line -- which, it turned out, looked only about 3 minutes long -- in order to experience what one redditor described as "feeling the hate from the people standing in line as I casually stroll up and drop my packages off at the front desk". But the important thing is, I did it efficiently.

"The United States Postal Service "Click-N-Ship" site suffered no outages or slowdowns during Christmas rush," writes Bennett Haselton. "It just has bugs that make the process more annoying than just standing in line at the post office, which defeats the purpose. The most frustrating part is that most of these bugs could have been fixed, just by having some testers run through the ordering process and make a note of anything that seems confusing or wrong. (Although I've included notes on how to work around all the bugs, so you really can print your own labels and skip the line.)" Read on for the rest; what other gripes do you have about the current package delivery regime, and how would you resolve them? This suggestion on the LifeProTips subreddit reminded me that I'd been meaning to try printing my own USPS mailing labels to skip the lines at the post office. I'd been putting it off because I knew that I'd be determined to find the most efficient way of doing everything through the site, and if the site didn't steer me towards exactly the best options, I'd end up forcing myself to reverse-engineer their whole algorithm in order to find the most efficient way myself. That's why I always appreciate it when a website just tells me the best option instead of making me second-guess them.

Right away, the USPS website failed that test because it does not allow you to print first-class mail labels, instead steering you towards the more expensive Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express options. Online users have complained about the lack of first-class-mail options on USPS.com for years, and users on several forums suggested using the PayPal Ship Now site instead, which does let you print first class mailing labels online, along with Priority Mail labels other options.

In my case it was a moot point because I had to use the Priority Mail labels in order for my packages to arrive by Christmas, but the deception was still hugely aggravating. Not just because of the thought of millions of people wasting money (and the finite resources of the postal system) due to the USPS site tricking them into a more expensive upgrade that they didn't need. But because it now meant I'd have to second-guess every recommendation they made, wondering if they were steering me toward something that was worse for me and better for them. The reason sites like Amazon are so stress-free to use is because, for the most part, they do display the options that are best for you, even at the expense of their own short-term profit. Some third-party merchant is selling a book for less than Amazon's list price? They'll let the seller list the book right on their site and undercut Amazon's own sales. The benefit to the user is not just the cost savings, but knowing that you don't have to feel like a chump for not wasting time on search engines trying to find a cheaper deal.

Once I realized the USPS site was concealing the cheaper options, in my determination to avoid getting ripped off by the USPS I almost ended up getting ripped off much worse by one of their "partners". I remembered an ad on a Google search mentioning Stamps.com, so I signed up for an account there and downloaded their software, which does in fact let you print first-class postage. It was only after reading a warning in the original subreddit that I realized I had unwittingly "agreed" to a $15.99/month charge. It turns out that the Stamps.com registration page says above the credit card form that your card info is "required to purchase postage", but this is misleading -- the fine print in the sidebar says you will be charged $15.99 per month if you don't cancel. (And neither the software nor the website gives you a link to cancel -- you have to call their customer service number.) Fortunately, I did call and cancel after realizing I'd been duped, but I was not surprised to learn on Wikipedia that the company had been the subject of over 1,000 Better Business Bureau complaints from users regarding the unauthorized monthly charges. (The part on Wikipedia about "long hold times" is out of date, though -- the automated prompts recognized my account by my phone number and let me cancel without any waiting.)

What does that have to do with USPS.com? Because it never would have happened if the USPS website had been on my side in the first place, giving me all the mailing options that I actually needed. It's bad enough when a private company does this, but the USPS works for us, don't they?

So that's not a "bug" in the traditional sense, but I'm counting it: #1: Not giving users all the mailing options they want to know about.

Most of the other bugs are not self-serving tricks; rather, they're just unclear directions where you have to pause and puzzle out what you're really supposed to do, which is different from what the site tells you to do. For example:

#2: Listing boxes as shipping options that don't fit the dimensions that you've already entered

On the label printing page (requires a USPS.com login if you don't have one) is the option to enter package dimensions. If you specify package details of 1 lbs and 13x5x6 inches, and click to calculate "available Services and Prices" based on the details you've entered, you're presented with a list of options that include 'Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelope 12-1/2" x 9-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Small Flat Rate Box 5-3/8" x 8-5/8" x 1-5/8"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 11" x 8-1/2" x 5-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 13-5/8" x 11-7/8" x 3-3/8"', and 'Priority Mail Padded Flat Rate Envelope 9-1/2" x 12-1/2"' -- all of which, of course, are too small to hold the package whose dimensions you just specified.

You could argue that it's the user's responsibility to make sure their package fits into the box they select, but a user could reasonably assume that the whole point of entering the length, width and height is so that the USPS can recommend only those boxes that will hold the item. Remember, the user usually doesn't have these boxes in front of them at the time they're printing the label. They could end up selecting a box option, printing the label, taking it all the way to the post office along with their package, only to find out that the package doesn't fit into the box that they printed the label for, and that they have to wait in line anwyay to pay for an alternate method.

It's a middle-school-level programming exercise to take the length, width, and height of a package as an input, take as a second input a list of boxes of varying lengths, widths, heights, and costs, and find the lowest-cost box that will hold the package (keeping in mind that the package can be rotated to different orientations so that the "height" becomes the "width", etc.). It's reasonable to expect the postal service to be able to do this too.

#3: Everything wrong with the "print your labels" page

Here's a screen grab of the "print your labels" page that appears after you've paid, which you can use to play the Highlights "What's Wrong?" game:

• The text at the top says "You'll have until 11:59 PM CST of the Ship Date to print these labels." OK, but if I print them at 11:59 PM, what good does it do if the post office closed at 6? Are the labels only valid on the ship date, or will they still work if I take them to the post office the next day? This should be more clear.

• Text says "A SCAN Form must be printed when taking packages to the Post Office." Fine, but there's a checkbox next to that sentence. If that sentence describes a postal regulation, what does it mean if I un-check the box? That the regulation no longer applies to me? Can someone tell me if the drug laws work that way as well?

• The next sentence says: "Close out and print your SCAN Form here." I have no idea what that sentence means. Close out of the browser? And where is "here"? When it's not hyperlinked, "here" means here.

• WHY IS THE "PRINT LABELS" BUTTON DISABLED?? I have the checkboxes checked for both labels. I want to print them. What else do you want me to DO? (My PC has a printer, which the Chrome browser is aware of -- it lets me print from other webpages with no problem.) I got it to work by saving the PDF and printing that, but I never figured out why the Print button was just sitting there, mocking me from behind its veil of grey.

• The "Schedule a Pickup" button at the bottom -- same problem as the "print until 11:59 PM" message at the top. Since I printed these labels with the ship date specified as today, it should be more clear if the labels will still be considered valid tomorrow, which is the soonest time that a pickup could be scheduled.

#4: Over an hour on hold and never got through.

As an adherent to the touchingly quaint notion that a reporter should talk to the subjects of their story before running it, and also because I just wanted clarification on some of these questions, I called the USPS help line and waited on hold for 30 minutes before their help line disconnected me. I called back and waited for another 40 minutes before I hung up this time. OK, strictly speaking that's not a "bug". They just suck.

In the end, after reverse-engineering their pricing options as I had vowed to do, I determined what appeared to be their rules, (applies only to domestic Priority Mail), which you may find handy:

• If you're shipping in a Flat Rate box, the weight of the package doesn't matter (up to the 70 lb limit), only the dimensions, to the extent that they determine which Flat Rate box you can fit it into, with the bigger ones being more expensive.
• On the other hand, if you pick the Priority Mail "Use your own box" option, then the dimensions don't matter (unless you exceed the allowed limits), only the weight -- a 5 lb, 3"x3"x3" package and a 5 lb, 21"x21"x21" package both ship for $15.22, but if you change the weight, that's when the price changes. (If you try to ship a 22"x22"x22" package, you get an error that you've exceeded the dimensions for a Click-N-Ship.)

Using this, I was able to strategically break my one shipment, which would have cost about $30, into two separate shipments which cost $12 and $8. All told, with the effort to reverse-engineer their pricing options and to document all of the bugs for posterity, it took me about an hour to figure out that $10 savings and to print labels that I could take to the post office and skip the line -- which, it turned out, looked only about 3 minutes long -- in order to experience what one redditor described as "feeling the hate from the people standing in line as I casually stroll up and drop my packages off at the front desk". But the important thing is, I did it efficiently.

"The United States Postal Service "Click-N-Ship" site suffered no outages or slowdowns during Christmas rush," writes Bennett Haselton. "It just has bugs that make the process more annoying than just standing in line at the post office, which defeats the purpose. The most frustrating part is that most of these bugs could have been fixed, just by having some testers run through the ordering process and make a note of anything that seems confusing or wrong. (Although I've included notes on how to work around all the bugs, so you really can print your own labels and skip the line.)" Read on for the rest; what other gripes do you have about the current package delivery regime, and how would you resolve them? This suggestion on the LifeProTips subreddit reminded me that I'd been meaning to try printing my own USPS mailing labels to skip the lines at the post office. I'd been putting it off because I knew that I'd be determined to find the most efficient way of doing everything through the site, and if the site didn't steer me towards exactly the best options, I'd end up forcing myself to reverse-engineer their whole algorithm in order to find the most efficient way myself. That's why I always appreciate it when a website just tells me the best option instead of making me second-guess them.

Right away, the USPS website failed that test because it does not allow you to print first-class mail labels, instead steering you towards the more expensive Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express options. Online users have complained about the lack of first-class-mail options on USPS.com for years, and users on several forums suggested using the PayPal Ship Now site instead, which does let you print first class mailing labels online, along with Priority Mail labels other options.

In my case it was a moot point because I had to use the Priority Mail labels in order for my packages to arrive by Christmas, but the deception was still hugely aggravating. Not just because of the thought of millions of people wasting money (and the finite resources of the postal system) due to the USPS site tricking them into a more expensive upgrade that they didn't need. But because it now meant I'd have to second-guess every recommendation they made, wondering if they were steering me toward something that was worse for me and better for them. The reason sites like Amazon are so stress-free to use is because, for the most part, they do display the options that are best for you, even at the expense of their own short-term profit. Some third-party merchant is selling a book for less than Amazon's list price? They'll let the seller list the book right on their site and undercut Amazon's own sales. The benefit to the user is not just the cost savings, but knowing that you don't have to feel like a chump for not wasting time on search engines trying to find a cheaper deal.

Once I realized the USPS site was concealing the cheaper options, in my determination to avoid getting ripped off by the USPS I almost ended up getting ripped off much worse by one of their "partners". I remembered an ad on a Google search mentioning Stamps.com, so I signed up for an account there and downloaded their software, which does in fact let you print first-class postage. It was only after reading a warning in the original subreddit that I realized I had unwittingly "agreed" to a $15.99/month charge. It turns out that the Stamps.com registration page says above the credit card form that your card info is "required to purchase postage", but this is misleading -- the fine print in the sidebar says you will be charged $15.99 per month if you don't cancel. (And neither the software nor the website gives you a link to cancel -- you have to call their customer service number.) Fortunately, I did call and cancel after realizing I'd been duped, but I was not surprised to learn on Wikipedia that the company had been the subject of over 1,000 Better Business Bureau complaints from users regarding the unauthorized monthly charges. (The part on Wikipedia about "long hold times" is out of date, though -- the automated prompts recognized my account by my phone number and let me cancel without any waiting.)

What does that have to do with USPS.com? Because it never would have happened if the USPS website had been on my side in the first place, giving me all the mailing options that I actually needed. It's bad enough when a private company does this, but the USPS works for us, don't they?

So that's not a "bug" in the traditional sense, but I'm counting it: #1: Not giving users all the mailing options they want to know about.

Most of the other bugs are not self-serving tricks; rather, they're just unclear directions where you have to pause and puzzle out what you're really supposed to do, which is different from what the site tells you to do. For example:

#2: Listing boxes as shipping options that don't fit the dimensions that you've already entered

On the label printing page (requires a USPS.com login if you don't have one) is the option to enter package dimensions. If you specify package details of 1 lbs and 13x5x6 inches, and click to calculate "available Services and Prices" based on the details you've entered, you're presented with a list of options that include 'Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelope 12-1/2" x 9-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Small Flat Rate Box 5-3/8" x 8-5/8" x 1-5/8"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 11" x 8-1/2" x 5-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 13-5/8" x 11-7/8" x 3-3/8"', and 'Priority Mail Padded Flat Rate Envelope 9-1/2" x 12-1/2"' -- all of which, of course, are too small to hold the package whose dimensions you just specified.

You could argue that it's the user's responsibility to make sure their package fits into the box they select, but a user could reasonably assume that the whole point of entering the length, width and height is so that the USPS can recommend only those boxes that will hold the item. Remember, the user usually doesn't have these boxes in front of them at the time they're printing the label. They could end up selecting a box option, printing the label, taking it all the way to the post office along with their package, only to find out that the package doesn't fit into the box that they printed the label for, and that they have to wait in line anwyay to pay for an alternate method.

It's a middle-school-level programming exercise to take the length, width, and height of a package as an input, take as a second input a list of boxes of varying lengths, widths, heights, and costs, and find the lowest-cost box that will hold the package (keeping in mind that the package can be rotated to different orientations so that the "height" becomes the "width", etc.). It's reasonable to expect the postal service to be able to do this too.

#3: Everything wrong with the "print your labels" page

Here's a screen grab of the "print your labels" page that appears after you've paid, which you can use to play the Highlights "What's Wrong?" game:

• The text at the top says "You'll have until 11:59 PM CST of the Ship Date to print these labels." OK, but if I print them at 11:59 PM, what good does it do if the post office closed at 6? Are the labels only valid on the ship date, or will they still work if I take them to the post office the next day? This should be more clear.

• Text says "A SCAN Form must be printed when taking packages to the Post Office." Fine, but there's a checkbox next to that sentence. If that sentence describes a postal regulation, what does it mean if I un-check the box? That the regulation no longer applies to me? Can someone tell me if the drug laws work that way as well?

• The next sentence says: "Close out and print your SCAN Form here." I have no idea what that sentence means. Close out of the browser? And where is "here"? When it's not hyperlinked, "here" means here.

• WHY IS THE "PRINT LABELS" BUTTON DISABLED?? I have the checkboxes checked for both labels. I want to print them. What else do you want me to DO? (My PC has a printer, which the Chrome browser is aware of -- it lets me print from other webpages with no problem.) I got it to work by saving the PDF and printing that, but I never figured out why the Print button was just sitting there, mocking me from behind its veil of grey.

• The "Schedule a Pickup" button at the bottom -- same problem as the "print until 11:59 PM" message at the top. Since I printed these labels with the ship date specified as today, it should be more clear if the labels will still be considered valid tomorrow, which is the soonest time that a pickup could be scheduled.

#4: Over an hour on hold and never got through.

As an adherent to the touchingly quaint notion that a reporter should talk to the subjects of their story before running it, and also because I just wanted clarification on some of these questions, I called the USPS help line and waited on hold for 30 minutes before their help line disconnected me. I called back and waited for another 40 minutes before I hung up this time. OK, strictly speaking that's not a "bug". They just suck.

In the end, after reverse-engineering their pricing options as I had vowed to do, I determined what appeared to be their rules, (applies only to domestic Priority Mail), which you may find handy:

• If you're shipping in a Flat Rate box, the weight of the package doesn't matter (up to the 70 lb limit), only the dimensions, to the extent that they determine which Flat Rate box you can fit it into, with the bigger ones being more expensive.
• On the other hand, if you pick the Priority Mail "Use your own box" option, then the dimensions don't matter (unless you exceed the allowed limits), only the weight -- a 5 lb, 3"x3"x3" package and a 5 lb, 21"x21"x21" package both ship for $15.22, but if you change the weight, that's when the price changes. (If you try to ship a 22"x22"x22" package, you get an error that you've exceeded the dimensions for a Click-N-Ship.)

Using this, I was able to strategically break my one shipment, which would have cost about $30, into two separate shipments which cost $12 and $8. All told, with the effort to reverse-engineer their pricing options and to document all of the bugs for posterity, it took me about an hour to figure out that $10 savings and to print labels that I could take to the post office and skip the line -- which, it turned out, looked only about 3 minutes long -- in order to experience what one redditor described as "feeling the hate from the people standing in line as I casually stroll up and drop my packages off at the front desk". But the important thing is, I did it efficiently.

"The United States Postal Service "Click-N-Ship" site suffered no outages or slowdowns during Christmas rush," writes Bennett Haselton. "It just has bugs that make the process more annoying than just standing in line at the post office, which defeats the purpose. The most frustrating part is that most of these bugs could have been fixed, just by having some testers run through the ordering process and make a note of anything that seems confusing or wrong. (Although I've included notes on how to work around all the bugs, so you really can print your own labels and skip the line.)" Read on for the rest; what other gripes do you have about the current package delivery regime, and how would you resolve them? This suggestion on the LifeProTips subreddit reminded me that I'd been meaning to try printing my own USPS mailing labels to skip the lines at the post office. I'd been putting it off because I knew that I'd be determined to find the most efficient way of doing everything through the site, and if the site didn't steer me towards exactly the best options, I'd end up forcing myself to reverse-engineer their whole algorithm in order to find the most efficient way myself. That's why I always appreciate it when a website just tells me the best option instead of making me second-guess them.

Right away, the USPS website failed that test because it does not allow you to print first-class mail labels, instead steering you towards the more expensive Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express options. Online users have complained about the lack of first-class-mail options on USPS.com for years, and users on several forums suggested using the PayPal Ship Now site instead, which does let you print first class mailing labels online, along with Priority Mail labels other options.

In my case it was a moot point because I had to use the Priority Mail labels in order for my packages to arrive by Christmas, but the deception was still hugely aggravating. Not just because of the thought of millions of people wasting money (and the finite resources of the postal system) due to the USPS site tricking them into a more expensive upgrade that they didn't need. But because it now meant I'd have to second-guess every recommendation they made, wondering if they were steering me toward something that was worse for me and better for them. The reason sites like Amazon are so stress-free to use is because, for the most part, they do display the options that are best for you, even at the expense of their own short-term profit. Some third-party merchant is selling a book for less than Amazon's list price? They'll let the seller list the book right on their site and undercut Amazon's own sales. The benefit to the user is not just the cost savings, but knowing that you don't have to feel like a chump for not wasting time on search engines trying to find a cheaper deal.

Once I realized the USPS site was concealing the cheaper options, in my determination to avoid getting ripped off by the USPS I almost ended up getting ripped off much worse by one of their "partners". I remembered an ad on a Google search mentioning Stamps.com, so I signed up for an account there and downloaded their software, which does in fact let you print first-class postage. It was only after reading a warning in the original subreddit that I realized I had unwittingly "agreed" to a $15.99/month charge. It turns out that the Stamps.com registration page says above the credit card form that your card info is "required to purchase postage", but this is misleading -- the fine print in the sidebar says you will be charged $15.99 per month if you don't cancel. (And neither the software nor the website gives you a link to cancel -- you have to call their customer service number.) Fortunately, I did call and cancel after realizing I'd been duped, but I was not surprised to learn on Wikipedia that the company had been the subject of over 1,000 Better Business Bureau complaints from users regarding the unauthorized monthly charges. (The part on Wikipedia about "long hold times" is out of date, though -- the automated prompts recognized my account by my phone number and let me cancel without any waiting.)

What does that have to do with USPS.com? Because it never would have happened if the USPS website had been on my side in the first place, giving me all the mailing options that I actually needed. It's bad enough when a private company does this, but the USPS works for us, don't they?

So that's not a "bug" in the traditional sense, but I'm counting it: #1: Not giving users all the mailing options they want to know about.

Most of the other bugs are not self-serving tricks; rather, they're just unclear directions where you have to pause and puzzle out what you're really supposed to do, which is different from what the site tells you to do. For example:

#2: Listing boxes as shipping options that don't fit the dimensions that you've already entered

On the label printing page (requires a USPS.com login if you don't have one) is the option to enter package dimensions. If you specify package details of 1 lbs and 13x5x6 inches, and click to calculate "available Services and Prices" based on the details you've entered, you're presented with a list of options that include 'Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelope 12-1/2" x 9-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Small Flat Rate Box 5-3/8" x 8-5/8" x 1-5/8"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 11" x 8-1/2" x 5-1/2"', 'Priority Mail Medium Flat Rate Box 13-5/8" x 11-7/8" x 3-3/8"', and 'Priority Mail Padded Flat Rate Envelope 9-1/2" x 12-1/2"' -- all of which, of course, are too small to hold the package whose dimensions you just specified.

You could argue that it's the user's responsibility to make sure their package fits into the box they select, but a user could reasonably assume that the whole point of entering the length, width and height is so that the USPS can recommend only those boxes that will hold the item. Remember, the user usually doesn't have these boxes in front of them at the time they're printing the label. They could end up selecting a box option, printing the label, taking it all the way to the post office along with their package, only to find out that the package doesn't fit into the box that they printed the label for, and that they have to wait in line anwyay to pay for an alternate method.

It's a middle-school-level programming exercise to take the length, width, and height of a package as an input, take as a second input a list of boxes of varying lengths, widths, heights, and costs, and find the lowest-cost box that will hold the package (keeping in mind that the package can be rotated to different orientations so that the "height" becomes the "width", etc.). It's reasonable to expect the postal service to be able to do this too.

#3: Everything wrong with the "print your labels" page

Here's a screen grab of the "print your labels" page that appears after you've paid, which you can use to play the Highlights "What's Wrong?" game:

• The text at the top says "You'll have until 11:59 PM CST of the Ship Date to print these labels." OK, but if I print them at 11:59 PM, what good does it do if the post office closed at 6? Are the labels only valid on the ship date, or will they still work if I take them to the post office the next day? This should be more clear.

• Text says "A SCAN Form must be printed when taking packages to the Post Office." Fine, but there's a checkbox next to that sentence. If that sentence describes a postal regulation, what does it mean if I un-check the box? That the regulation no longer applies to me? Can someone tell me if the drug laws work that way as well?

• The next sentence says: "Close out and print your SCAN Form here." I have no idea what that sentence means. Close out of the browser? And where is "here"? When it's not hyperlinked, "here" means here.

• WHY IS THE "PRINT LABELS" BUTTON DISABLED?? I have the checkboxes checked for both labels. I want to print them. What else do you want me to DO? (My PC has a printer, which the Chrome browser is aware of -- it lets me print from other webpages with no problem.) I got it to work by saving the PDF and printing that, but I never figured out why the Print button was just sitting there, mocking me from behind its veil of grey.

• The "Schedule a Pickup" button at the bottom -- same problem as the "print until 11:59 PM" message at the top. Since I printed these labels with the ship date specified as today, it should be more clear if the labels will still be considered valid tomorrow, which is the soonest time that a pickup could be scheduled.

#4: Over an hour on hold and never got through.

As an adherent to the touchingly quaint notion that a reporter should talk to the subjects of their story before running it, and also because I just wanted clarification on some of these questions, I called the USPS help line and waited on hold for 30 minutes before their help line disconnected me. I called back and waited for another 40 minutes before I hung up this time. OK, strictly speaking that's not a "bug". They just suck.

In the end, after reverse-engineering their pricing options as I had vowed to do, I determined what appeared to be their rules, (applies only to domestic Priority Mail), which you may find handy:

• If you're shipping in a Flat Rate box, the weight of the package doesn't matter (up to the 70 lb limit), only the dimensions, to the extent that they determine which Flat Rate box you can fit it into, with the bigger ones being more expensive.
• On the other hand, if you pick the Priority Mail "Use your own box" option, then the dimensions don't matter (unless you exceed the allowed limits), only the weight -- a 5 lb, 3"x3"x3" package and a 5 lb, 21"x21"x21" package both ship for $15.22, but if you change the weight, that's when the price changes. (If you try to ship a 22"x22"x22" package, you get an error that you've exceeded the dimensions for a Click-N-Ship.)

Using this, I was able to strategically break my one shipment, which would have cost about $30, into two separate shipments which cost $12 and $8. All told, with the effort to reverse-engineer their pricing options and to document all of the bugs for posterity, it took me about an hour to figure out that $10 savings and to print labels that I could take to the post office and skip the line -- which, it turned out, looked only about 3 minutes long -- in order to experience what one redditor described as "feeling the hate from the people standing in line as I casually stroll up and drop my packages off at the front desk". But the important thing is, I did it efficiently.

Nerval's Lobster writes: Many programming languages have come and gone since Dennis Ritchie devised C in 1972, and yet C has not only survived three major revisions, but continues to thrive. But aside from this incredible legacy, what keeps C atop the Tiobe Index? The number of jobs available for C programmers is not huge, and many of those also include C++ and Objective-C. On Reddit, the C community, while one of the ten most popular programming communities, is half the size of the C++ group. In a new column, David Bolton argues that C remains extremely relevant due to a number of factors including newer C compiler support, the Internet ("basically driven by C applications"), an immense amount of active software written in C that's still used, and its ease in learning. "Knowing C provides a handy insight into higher-level languages — C++, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Java, PHP, C#, D and Go all have block syntax that's derived from C." Do you agree?

An anonymous reader writes Three Inbox by Gmail engineers today answered questions as part of a Reddit AMA session. Most of the answers were tidbits we've heard of before, but one stood out to us: Google plans to eventually replace Gmail with Inbox. In response to the question "Do you think Inbox will replace Gmail on the long road?," lead designer Jason Cornwell gave the following answer: "In the short term, no. In the very long term, we hope so. Inbox is something new — that's why we're launching it as a separate product. We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide." The followup question asks how Google believed one email product possibly target both casual (Gmail) and power (Inbox) users, to which Cornwell replied: "They are not aimed at fundamentally different audiences. Both Gmail and Inbox are designed to scale from low volume to high volume users."

theodp (442580) writes "Whether it's winning yacht races, assembling the best computer science faculty, or even dominating high school basketball, billionaires like to win. Which may help explain why three tech billionaires — Code.org backers (and FWD.us founders) Mark Zuckerberg, VC John Doerr, and Sean Parker — stepped up to the plate and helped out Code.org's once-anemic Hour of Code Indiegogo crowdfunding project with $500k donations. When matched by Code.org's largest donors (Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and others), the three donations alone raised $3,000,000, enough to reach the organization's goal of becoming the most funded crowdfunding campaign ever on Indiegogo. On its campaign page, Code.org remarked that "to sustain our organization for the long haul, we need to engage parents and community members," which raises questions about how reliant the K-12 learn-to-code movement might be on the kindness of its wealthy corporate and individual donors. Code.org started shedding some light on its top donors a few months back, but contributor names are blank in the 2013 IRS 990 filing posted by the organization on its website, although GuideStar suggests the biggest contributors in 2013 were Microsoft ($3,149,411) and Code.org founders Hadi and Ali Partovi ($1,873,909 in Facebook stock). Coincidentally, in a Reddit AMA at Code.org's launch, CEO and Founder Hadi Partovi noted that his next-door-neighbor is Microsoft General Counsel and Code.org Board member Brad Smith, whose FWD.us bio notes is responsible for Microsoft's philanthropic work. Just months before Code.org and FWD.us emerged on the lobbying scene, Smith announced Microsoft's National Talent Strategy, which called for "an increase in developing the American STEM pipeline in exchange for these new [H-1B] visas and green cards," a wish that President Obama is expected to grant shortly via executive action."

blottsie writes The "anonabox" has raised more than $550,000 on Kickstarter in only three days. But some believe the company's claims that the router-like device, which is said to automatically route users' Internet traffic through Tor, is entirely open-source are false. Anonabox developer August Germar tells the Daily Dot, however, that the device was commissioned specifically to run their code.

An anonymous reader writes Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel and designed by Google to work with web applications and installed applications. Chromebook is one of the best selling laptops on Amazon. However, devs decided to drop support for ext2/3/4 on external drivers and SD card. It seems that ChromiumOS developers can't implement a script or feature to relabel EXT volumes in the left nav that is insertable and has RW privileges using Files.app. Given that this is the main filesystem in Linux, and is thereby automatically well supported by anything that leverages Linux, this choice makes absolutely no sense. Google may want to drop support for external storage and push the cloud storage on everyone. Overall Linux users and community members are not happy at all.

An anonymous reader writes A developer who goes by the handle Vladikoff has tweaked Google's App Runtime for Chrome (ARC) to allow any Android app to run on any major desktop operating system, not just the handful announced last week which were also limited to Chrome OS. His tweaked version of ARC is re-packaged as ARChon. The install isn't very straightforward, and you have to be in developer mode on Chrome. But there's a support forum on reddit. The extension will work on any OS running the desktop version of Chrome 37 and up as long as the user also installs chromeos-apk, which converts raw Android app packages (APKs) to a Chrome extension. Ars Technica reports that apps run this way are buggy, fast, and crash often but expresses optimism for when Google officially "opens the floodgates on the Play Store, putting 1.3 million Android apps onto nearly every platform."

rbowen writes The Apache Software Foundation is the latest not-for-profit organization to accept bitcoin donations, as pointed out by a user on the Bitcoin subreddit. The organization is well known for their catalog of open-source software, including the ubiquitous Apache web server, Hadoop, Tomcat, Cassandra, and about 150 other projects. Users in the community have been eager to support their efforts using digital currency for quite a while. The Foundation accepts donations in many different forms: Amazon, PayPal, and they'll even accept donated cars. On their contribution page the Apache Software Foundation has published a bitcoin address and QR code.

Paul Fernhout writes: This explanatory compilation video by CGP Grey called "Humans Need Not Apply" on structural unemployment caused by robotics and AI (and other automation) is like the imagery playing in my mind when I think about the topic based on previous videos and charts I've seen. I saw it first on the econfuture site by Martin Ford, author of The Lights in the Tunnel. It is being discussed on Reddit, and people there have started mentioning a "basic income" as one possible response. While I like the basic income idea, I also collect other approaches in an essay called Beyond A Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics. Beyond a basic income for the exchange economy, those possible approaches include gift economy, subsistence production, planned economy, and more — including many unpleasant alternatives like expanding prisons or fighting wars as we are currently doing.

Marshall Brain's writings like Robotic Nation and Manna have inspired my own work. I made my own video version of the concept around 2010, as a parable called "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income." (I also pulled together a lot of links to robot videos in 2009.) It's great to see more informative videos on this topic. CGP Grey's video is awesome in the way he puts it all together.

itwbennett writes: "Half a billion lines of code for a transactional website — more than five times as much code as that behind OS X — just didn't pass the sniff test. But just how many lines of code does it take to generate HealthCare.gov? This question came up on Reddit again last week and it appears that we may now have an answer. One commenter who claimed to have worked on HealthCare.gov as part of the post launch clean-up crew at the end of 2013, provided counts of the lines of code behind HealthCare.gov, broken down by programming/markup language."

Jason Koebler (3528235) writes "A Redditor got more than he bargained for in the mail today: He was accidentally mailed parts to a $350,000 environment and wildlife monitoring drone owned by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. 'We sent a set of about eight boxes for this one aircraft system, and one was misdelivered by UPS. We're working with UPS to find it,' the federal agency says."

An anonymous reader writes "In a Q&A session on Reddit last night with Valve's Gabe Newell, the founder confirmed that the company is in the process of getting the highly anticipated Source 2 game engine 'working well with VR.' Valve's Alex Vlachos, Senior Graphics Programmer, is apparently leading the charge. Still no word on when the engine may ship. Valve, who is openly collaborating with Oculus VR, demonstrated a VR headset prototype in January at Steam Dev Days. The company also launched a beta version of SteamVR which offers Steam's 'Big Picture' mode in a format compatible with the Oculus Rift VR headset. A developer who got to experiment with Valve's VR prototype says it's very impressive, even more so than the original Oculus VR dev kit."

nk497 writes "A UX designer working at Microsoft has taken to Reddit to explain why Windows 8's Metro screen isn't designed for power users — but is still good news for them. Jacob Miller, posting as 'pwnies,' said Metro is the 'antithesis of a [power user's desktop],' and designed for 'your computer illiterate little sister,' not for content creators or power users. By splitting Windows into Metro and the desktop, Microsoft has created space for casual users as well as power users." Update: 02/18 18:14 GMT by S : Further explanations from Miller are available now.

dotarray writes "Valve has stepped up to answer allegations that the company's anti-cheat system was scanning users' internet history. Rather than a simple, sanitized press release or a refusal to comment on 'rumours and innuendo,' Valve CEO and gaming hero Gabe Newell has personally responded." Newell or not, not everyone will like the answer. The short version is that Yes, Valve is scanning DNS caches, with a two-tiered approach intended to find cheating users by looking for cheat servers in their histories. Says Newell: "Less than a tenth of one percent of clients triggered this second check, accessing the DNS cache. 570 cheaters are being banned due to DNS searches."

An anonymous reader writes "Online black market Silk Road 2.0 has pledged to pay back more than £1.7 million worth of bitcoins stolen from its servers during a heist last week. Speaking in a post on Reddit, Silk Road 2.0 moderator Defcon said the website would refund the more than 4,000 bitcoins stolen during the heist, and would not pay its staff until users had been reimbursed."

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.'"