Top all-time · #21746
D
Don Blaheta
Personal blog · blahedo.org/blog · on HN as blahedoprogrammingculture
Don Blaheta writes Digital Analogue, a personal blog at blahedo.org about programming and culture. Since 2009, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “How Apple handles iTunes ToS and its changes”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
17mentions?
3HN people?
2009–2013first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- How Apple handles iTunes ToS and its changes2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2010-08-13
What Hacker News says?
> Banks don't optimize for security, they optimize for profits. So true, and to them "profits" often means "user convenience" long before "user security". I've talked about it here before so this time I'll just post a link to my story about the time my bank reset all its users' passwords to be equal to their usernames (intentionally!): http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/000836.html
Comment linking /blog/archives/000836.html
on “Fuck passwords”Submitted Reason #73 why C++ is a terrible intro language as a story · 33 points
HN discussionHe did ?? Does he know the iTunes Music Store contract is a whopping 23 pages long, with some 112 sections? At least, it was as of early 2009, which was when I A) really read the thing and B) decided I was done with iTMS. (Full details at http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html .) (EDIT: iTunes ≠ iTMS)
Comment linking /blog/archives/001060.html
on “Burning man defeats PayPal”Submitted How Apple handles iTunes ToS and its changes as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> You break the rules, you pay the consequences. Ignorance is NOT an excuse. While this is technically true, I feel that it has slipped to the level of a polite fiction rather than a core civic principle. People pretty much never read contracts anymore because they've gotten so long and dense, and the contract writers know this and make them longer and denser anyway. Apple, among others, presumes you won't actually…
Comment linking /blog/archives/001060.html
on “Wolfram Alpha doesn't "get it"”Submitted Hey healthcare.gov, your username requirement is wonky as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'd like to see the numbers for licenses in general (and particularly accounting for how often various sites' licenses change ). I've written before[0] about how Apple's iTMS policy is long and frequently updated and that they clearly have no expectation that you'll actually read it or even be able to. [0] http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html
Comment linking /blog/archives/001060.html
on “Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days”It's true. About five years ago my bank upgraded their systems and, no kidding, set everyone's password to their login name as part of the transition. When I called them on it, they stonewalled me and repeatedly claimed that I was being unreasonable, and as far as I know never fixed it, and fearing something like the OP I never pushed it. (I closed my account and switched banks.) Edit: My summary of that saga, poste…
Comment linking /blog/archives/000836.html
on “First State set police on man who showed them how accounts could be ripped off”I've thought about this issue before (and proof-of-concepted a similar system, see http://www.blahedo.org/botblock/ ), and came to similar conclusions, but there's an important difference: A crucial part of making this a successful anti-spam system is that it is a moving target. Every user of the system must be able to write their own questions. If that happens, the spammer's task is intractable. But if there is a c…
Comment linking /botblock/
on “TextCAPTCHA: 180 million simple logic questions”Huh. Section 5.1 (one of the new ones) is presented as this new epiphany about hyperspheres and tau, but I made a post back in 2010 about this ( http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001083.html ), emailed Hartl at the time, and he said he'd already thought of that. Still, cool to see that my observation was worth (eventually) including in the manifesto itself. (He did elaborate on the idea considerably, of course.)…
Comment linking /blog/archives/001083.html
on “A new section of The Tau Manifesto: Getting to the bottom of pi”As opposed to Apple: http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html
Comment linking /blog/archives/001060.html
on “Google's privacy policy changes happening in October”I love visual proofs, but the problem with them is that they rarely work without some explanation (and the ones that seem to work without some explanation are often those that re-express theorems you already sort of understand). What the visual proof does is eliminate excess words so that you have multiple streams of information. For instance, I have published a cool visual proof of the amortised analysis of array r…
Comment linking /papers/dblaheta-iticse09-amort-talk.pdf
on “Proofs without words”I've written about this before, and wrote a proof-of-concept plugin that I dogfood on my own blog: http://www.blahedo.org/botblock/ Two core ideas: 1) the truly hard thing for the computer is the language understanding. It's the question , not the computation , that's the problem. 2) Any site that becomes popular will be worth it to the spammers to hard-code, so any successful widely-deployed system needs to let the…
Comment linking /botblock/
on “How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms”I'm glad to see the wider exposure, but I don't see anything new here---this is essentially the same issue I ranted about two years ago ( http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html ). Right down to the "why don't they provide a diff?" problem.
Comment linking /blog/archives/001060.html
on “What you should know about iTunes' 56-page legal terms”A little dense, sorry; I reposted on my blog with slightly better formatting (and at least breaking out some of the math onto separate lines): http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001081.html
Comment linking /blog/archives/001081.html
on “On the evidence of a single coin toss”Yeah, the problem with most captchas is that they're visual and they're working in an area where computers are starting to get really good. The main thing that computers are still pretty bad at is understanding completely arbitrary text, so the way to go has to be in that direction (which also has the benefit of being handicap-accessible). Ask questions, in text, that have textual answers. Throw in a random-number g…
Comment linking /botblock/
on “How Not to invent the next-gen CAPTCHA”