Long-time Twitter users, myself included, value it mostly for the general feed (everyone you follow, live and in chronological order) and the ability to replicate the general feed model for specific lists you've made of people you follow and for specific search terms and hashtags. At the same time, Twitter is a confusing experience for … Continue reading Twitter won’t kill the general feed, cos that’d kill Twitter
Category: Media
It's been Good Times Online as Crikey gets hold of a copy of News Australia's detailed management accounts for fiscal year 2012-13 (I've uploaded a copy here, since the Crikey version, hilariously, is paywalled). As a way of demonstrating its commitment to journalism, News has threatened to sue anyone who reports on the topic. The … Continue reading $27 million a year is a bargain price to buy a government
The suggestion has been doing the rounds, at least at the more paranoid/self-fancying end of the technology spectrum, that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)'s Netbank online banking platform might have been vulnerable to the Heartbleed vulnerability. TL/DR: it wasn't. Heartbleed only hit sites that use certain versions of the OpenSSL secure toolkit, with its … Continue reading CBA’s Netbank platform was never vulnerable to Heartbleed
I don't normally get teary over the death of celebrities. Just out of recent far-too-young deaths, Amy Winehouse and Philip Seymour Hoffman have contributed far more to life than the rest of us ever will, and yet I was a bit sad, rather than losing-it sobbing, for those two. Peaches Geldof wasn't an artist on … Continue reading The Teaches Of Peaches*
This joke does the rounds a bit too often: It doesn't work. In the show, because Walter White is a salaried professional, his insurance covers the same procedures that national healthcare insurance schemes generally cover in the sensible world. The nature of the extremely expensive experimental cancer treatment for which he needs the money isn't … Continue reading The Dorkiest Fun-Spoilingest Thing Ever Written About Breaking Bad
The obvious answer to the question "why won't Facebook decline by 80% by the end of December this year" is "because obviously it won't, what kind of idiot would even claim it would?". It's the leading social network in all age groups, and between July and December 2013 total user numbers only fell by 3%. … Continue reading The Facebook decline paper is a disgrace to Princeton’s name
How should we judge someone's words? By intent, by effect, or what? How much does unintended offence matter? Also, LILY ALLEN and TWERKING and EATING IRISH BABIES. I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only … Continue reading Did globalisation kill satire? And is that for the best?
Anne Treasure has written an excellent piece on the impact of digitisation and globalisation on the publishing industry. The piece is global in scope, and works well in the context of UK and US publishers and writers. The picture is more complicated in Australia, where the global shift creates an additional problem. Traditionally books by … Continue reading Globalisation and the death of literary Australiana
The news from the horrible (and immensely stupid: who the fuck would allow a chemical plant to be built literally next door to a school) West fire in Texas today, with its "70 injured, no I mean 70 dead, no I mean 5 dead" just reminded me of this brilliant commentary on newspaper reports of … Continue reading Thanks for all the fish
I was Googling for an old Banditry post yesterday, as part of a discussion about that new 'people lie about their drinking' study. Eventually I found it, only to discover that I'd linked to a (London) Times article, and that therefore the paywall had ruined the whole thing (curiously, even though the Times now shows … Continue reading Pharma hackers gonna pharma hack, 2013 edition