Recently a new movement has sprang up in the Netherlands pushing education towards Open Source. In education, proprietary software is the norm. I think that’s bad since this locks children into using a particular vendor’s software basically for ever. Unlocking Education aims to change this and I fully support their work.
You might have heard about DigiNotar, a Dutch company (owned by Vasco Data Security) that sold security (SSL) certificates used on the internet. They were hacked in a big way. They were so hacked, that all their certificates are now declared un-safe everywhere in the world.
The security of 200.000 Citigroup customers was compromised recently. But not as part of an elaborate hack or phishing expedition. Citigroup allowed anyone to get everyone else’s customer information by simply changing URLs. No security was in place, at all.
This is a serious problem and criminally negligent of Citigroup. They have no locks to protect you as a customer; instead they leave everything wide open for everyone to grab. Wtf?
I like this quote on Slashdot:
I would not even prosecute the group. Seriously…. for what? Walking into a bakery where a mentally challenged person was just freely giving away cherry pies?
There have been tens, hundreds, thousands blogs posts related to Latin1/UTF8 encoding issues. So here is yet another, this time related to upgrading from Ruby 1.8.6 + mysql gem to Ruby 1.9.2 + mysql2 gem. Continue reading
I have played with Office for Mac 2011 lately and noticed one of my personal annoyances still present. I am talking about the Microsoft User Data folder inside ~/Documents.
I am not a big fan of Facebook. As a matter of fact, I think people who post their entire private life will pay a price some time in the future. Continue reading
In my series “corporations are amoral” here is a new installment. It’s all over teh interwebs that an AT&T customer emailed the AT&T CEO and was “thanked” by …. legal action! Wow, great customer relations there! Woohoo!
You only appreciate fast version control when you’re on a slow link. Thank you Linus for creating git, I would have gone insane without it today!
Apple, as puritan as any US company, has pulled all sexual apps from the iTunes store after “complaints”. Mysteriously, all the violent games remain. A MacRumors reader put it very succinctly:
So boobs are bad, but murdering cops is ok. Got it.
Mind you, these apps are all rated for 18+. So you have to wonder how these complaints even are possible. If you are a concerned parent pull the rating-switch on your child’s iPhone!
Strong words? Yes, indeed. Though I have the SMTP-headers to prove the fact that NS (Dutch Railways) actively hates their customers and wants to annoy them as much as possible. Case in point: e-mail newsletter.