Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Pie, Election, Alarm
Does he feel like Reese Witherspoon? Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier writes "After many years of trying, Branden Robinson has finally won the Debian Project Leader election. Linux Magazine has an in-depth interview with Robinson about his plans as DPL, the problems that face Debian, and what it's like to finally win the election."
(We mentioned Robinson's election a few days ago.)
In lieu of perfection, fixability is a good start. gyardley writes "After discovering that a company called United Virtualities was making use of Flash's Local Shared Objects to silently restore my deleted cookies, I decided to combat this marketer behavior with a Firefox extension.
Objection 0.1 adds a 'Local Shared Objects' line to Firefox's Options > Privacy panel, allowing you to delete them as easily as you'd delete cookies. It's still pretty rudimentary - all or nothing deletion, working on Windows only - but Slashdotters are more than welcome to improve it. Since Local Shared Objects have the same functionality as cookies, we need the same amount of control over them as we do over cookies - and built into the browser, not tucked away in some obscure Macromedia page."
Sure, come on in, there's still some punch and snacks left, I think. orv writes "The Unichrome project has issued a response to VIA's recent open source announcement covered on Slashdot.
The response (and further comment) clarifies the current Unichrome driver situation and whilst welcoming VIA's move suggests that VIA should become more involved in existing open source projects rather than simply issuing repeated grand sounding press releases. The Unichrome project has provided and supported a full open source driver, including MPEG support, for the Unichrome and Unichrome Pro chipsets for the past two years."
But this implies that 'perky' is the desired state. dhalsim2 writes "Yahoo reports of a Smart Alarm Clock Set for Perky Wakeups. On the heels of Clocky comes this new alarm clock that will monitor a sleeper's brain waves to determine the best time to wake him up. The device uses a microprocessor within a headband that wirelessly transmits brainwaves to the clock. When the person is in a light sleep and is likely to wake up 'perky,' the alarm will go off. Brain wave monitoring? Sounds a lot like Plankton's Plan Z."
on the heels of this, comes news of a Smart Alarm Clock for Perky Wakeups ...
... and then on alternate Tuesdays it doesn't wake you up at all and laughs in an evil way when you finally regain conciousness ... plus it always broadcasts CNN.
Yes, but make sure you don't get the Darth Vader edition of the Smart Alarm Clock for Perky Wakeups.
That one not only reads your brain waves, but instead of adjusting itself to help you, it uses the dark side of alarm clock force to ring just a little bit too much
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The unichrome link is broken:
http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/
I have blogged on this repeatedly and even mentioned a good article which should give some perspective on this whole cookie question. Its not that cookies are such a bad thing when used correctly. Some people dont want to use them and thats fine. For them let them log in repeatedly and see ads that arent relevant or contextual to what they have been doing or watching. Coming up with another way of tracking users isnt the problem. The problem is that users are scared of the tracking. Educate the masses on the benefits and advertisers would see positive results. Who knows maybe they wouldnt have to resort to making ever more annoying advertisements just to try and snare my attention.
But If I wore my tin foil hat, it would be kind of counter productive ....
Wouldn't it?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There's already a watch that helps you wake up at the "optimal" time:
http://www.sleeptracker.com/
Hardware hack, anyone?
Firefox needs to disable third party cookies by default. There's no reason why images/iframes from other(3rd party) domains should be allowed to set cookies. I don't see any reason why 3rd party cookies should be allowed, they are frequently abused and used as web bugs that track your web browsing from site to site.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
The device monitors how deeply you are sleeping, if you are dreaming, etc. If you are woken up when you are sleeping lightly you are likely to wake up quickly, but if your alarm interrupts a dream you tend to wake up slowly and more tired. Have you ever woken up early and felt ready to go, but felt like sleeping til your alarm goes off... then when it does you feel tired? This prevents that by picking a time close to your target wakeup time (but before your cutoff time) when you are the least likely to wake up tired.
Something along the lines of:
Slashback: Because you enjoyed these articles the first TWO times around.
or
Slashback: The nice way to say DUPE!!!
or
Slashback: This time we realized we've duped a story before we posted it.
OTOH, what's to prevent unscrupulous editors from going back and editing the topic from Linux, YRO, etc. to Slashback in an attempt to cover their butts?
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
I'm probably not the first one who's thought of this but it seems to me that cookie abuse could be reduced dramatically without affecting most websites by doing the following:
"Disable cookies on all images that are being pulled from another domain."
That is, if a web page grabs an image from another domain (a banner, pixel, etc.) then pull it but don't send any of the cookie information for that image.
I mean isn't that the way that most developers track access across websites? You put a one-pixel image and set the cookie through there. Then by reading the http_refer, you know where they've been and associate it to a single user. To track across sites though, this pixel is usually on a separate domain than the site being accessed.
By the way, I originally thought to disable cookies on all images but realized some servers may do security checking via cookies before sending an image. But there is very little legitimate use for sending cookies on images that are outside the domain.
Also, the same could be said of ANYTHING that is pulled off a different domain including scripts, css, etc. If it is on the same domain, send the cookies. If not, then make the request but don't send the cookies.
I would say precious few sites would depend on this behavior and it shouldn't break anything except for the tracking (which we want to break). Not saying that a site couldn't be made to break on this but I can't think of many reasons why a site would.
By the way, I think cookies are great for the most part. SlashDot uses them, I use them, anything with a login (mostly) uses them. I find it humorous when people insist that cookies are evil and you shouldn't have a single one. You can just as easily fake a cookie for a session by sticking an ID in the URL which, personally, I think is worse. Now your personally identifying tracker is available for all to see.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When the snooze bar is pressed, Clocky rolls off the table and finds a hiding spot, a new one every day.
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
Why? How many different people have to worry about your wife waking up grouchy? :P
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
This may beat the 90-minute rule.
Sleep cycles are about 90 minutes long, so setting the alarm at a 90-minute interval from when you fall asleep will make it more likely that you'll wake up on the high side of sleep, and more likely that you'll feel refreshed. The rule fails if something disturbs your sleep pattern, though, which is where this device (if it exists) would be better.
I find it easier just to use the Flashblock extension. In the (very rare) event I need to run a Flash display, I just click the play button.