Due to this srs fffffff-up, all of my accounts that use the email associated with my Gawker Media account, that I only used for Kotaku, have been getting hit on all fronts. Had I lost control of my LinkedIn, World of Warcraft, or Gmail account due to this exposure, this would have been not only horrible because I was using the same password across multiple accounts but that they got hit in the first place. It’s a tad embarrassing for Gawker as a whole and really reduces the faith in what they do as a whole, even if they fix the issue so it is even less likely to occur again. Nonetheless, when I am given the chance to delete my account, I likely will. And it seems I’ll have to go about finding the different places that use said email and password I had on Gawker Media. Hell, maybe it’s time to get a second email account going for sh*t like this…

Email I received from Gawker at 8pm Monday night follows below:

This weekend we discovered that Gawker Media’s servers were compromised,
resulting in a security breach at Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel,
io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin, and Fleshbot. As a result, the user name
and password associated with your comment account were released on the
internet. If you’re a commenter on any of our sites, you probably have
several questions.

We understand how important trust is on the internet, and we’re deeply
sorry for and embarrassed about this breach of security. Right now we
are working around the clock to improve security moving forward. We’re
also committed to communicating openly and frequently with you to make
sure you understand what has happened, how it may or may not affect you,
and what we’re doing to fix things.

This is what you should do immediately: Try to change your password in
the Gawker Media Commenting System. If you used your Gawker Media
password on any other web site, you should change the password on those
sites as well, particularly if you used the same username or email with
that site. To be safe, however, you should change the password on those
accounts whether or not you were using the same username.

We’re continually updating an FAQ (http://lifehac.kr/eUBjVf) with more
information and will continue to do so in the coming days and weeks.

Gawker Media

==============================

================
You are receiving this email because your email
address was associated with a Gawker Media user
account. We are using this list only for the
purpose of sending you this important notification.

Yet the other questions have either been really rather dull, like should all if statements have a set of encapsulating braces when they are not needed or should they always be there (rather dull, but makes a big difference in readability.. I went with always, for now), and others are neat in a different way. In my GUI class, the professor uses Moodle to manage the class and her habit is to have every link to a document, such as a tutorial that she finds great or even the assignment pages, must open in a new window. Generally, this wouldn’t bother me in the least as I am used to center-clicking links to open them in a new tab and will only occasionally run into a website that futz up my browser. Thank goodness for browser override on that targeting behaviour. But with Moodle, when you set it to always open in a new window, it checks to see if the page is in a new window, and if it isn’t, it gives you a stupid sh*t-eating-grin error message with a link to the page again. Luckily, you can finally get the page open in a new tab instead of a whole new window but it took two page visits and two clicks to get there because the UI didn’t respect your environment settings. This only amuses me because it’s a UI design class where we spend more time on programming iffy assignments in Java and finally JavaScript at the end of the semester. Thankfully the professor didn’t have time for databases.. might have to throw a fit and likely a few chairs. This is probably the only UI design-related question I’ve had all semester for a UI design class. … Oi. But this issue made me question what I think about how hyperlinks are designed for targeting the web page. Well, first.. let’s break down what the targeting is…

<a href=”http://TheWebPageUrl.com” title=”Some fancy title” target=”_blank”>Link text</a>

The bit in bold above is the targeting section of the entire hyperlink. That’s some generic non-standard-specific HTML, btw. Target can be defined to a few different values and that are:

• _self
  • Default action. Whatever window/tab/frame the link is in is focused.
• _blank
  • Open a new window.
• _top
  • Essentially _self outside of multiple frames, but opens in the whole window (if there are 3 frames, this will cause there to be one frame with the document in it)
• _parent
  • Open in the parent frameset. Dealing with frames.. ugh.
• framename
  • Open in that frame. Ugh, frames!

The ones that generally matter are _self and _blank as they have the most meaning still. The others are generally when dealing with frames (ugh, frames). I like to pretend that frames died out a long time ago. (Looking at the old Nintendo of America websites is always interesting for not only the frames but fully image-based navigation.. things I did when I was 14 and early into web development.) So either way, one opens in the current frame and the other is a whole new window, by specification. Of course, that doesn’t mean the browser has to do what the specification calls for, which is obvious with all of the browser presentation differences, but in this instance.. this is an awesome thing. My browser can choose to just open _blank in a new tab and it’s all dandy. But another user can have a new window. No fuss, no UI difficulties. Yes, the browsers should follow the spec but when it comes down to it, is that piece of the spec still meaningful and is it all that bad for a browser to do what the user wants instead? After all, the spec is the guidelines for what things should be. The user is the one getting the experience so why are you catering to the spec? The spec doesn’t care, but the user does.

Anywho, the whole question is do you want to control the user or just let the user do what they want. There is only so much you can do the save the user from hurting themselves, and there is a back button for a reason. And there’s even a multiple-back button by clicking the little arrow or right-clicking the whole thing. Magically, it all works out that the page is stored somewhere. I know my idea is still to just let the user open the link however they want and I won’t design anything that checks to see if you opened a new window or not. Seems like a lot of wasted development time and user time for something that really shouldn’t happen in the first place. Now if only I could get my professor to see that so I don’t have to have either 10 windows or double the clicks to get it in a single window with multiple tabs. The semester is almost over either way. . .

As you can see above, I have two windows shown for comparison. The top is the Design portion of the editor in The Netbeans while the top is the executed version of the exact same window, from within The Netbeans. Why they look different and have different sizes of elements? No fscking clue! <.<`

What. The. Hell. The. Netbeans?!

I should just go back to using vi for everything again…

This is half the reason I really hate the industry I’m in. If I come up with what I think is a neat and original idea, implement it, and start a business around it.. somewhere in that process, I might get a lovely message saying I am infringing on a software patent.

Looking back to Dmitry Sklyarov‘s arrest in 2001, they took 6 months of his life and never said anything close to sorry (from what I remember of the story at least). Sure, he was doing something that I morally don’t agree with, but it was legal for him to do in Russia so there is no reason that things should have gone as far as they did. Sure, since I’m not going to be creating something like his project anytime soon (or at least, not that obviously) but I don’t want to get thrown in jail for any amount of time because somebody else has a patent somewhere that fscks me over. I’m a huge supporter of Open Source and I wouldn’t be surprised if something that I make in the next 20+ years falls under some patent somewhere and I get a lovely letter someday..

Software patents need some work.. but I know I don’t have the answers other than knowing I don’t like them. =)

What really amuses me is I didn’t vote Franken in when I voted in Minnesota last. Feel like a dolt for not knowing all his views last time. :/

Video after the break.

This frightens me beyond means.

While I believe that Free Speech is not entitled to you automatically on the Internet (it’s an international stage that has no set boundaries and it comes down to a local area to deal with it..) but I strongly believe that if somebody is against it, they can block it themselves and that they cannot sue/hurt/remove my work because it offends them. If you are offended, you don’t go there. It’s the Internet ffs, you are not forced to go somewhere and you can chose to ignore something or censor yourself from it (if you want to just not ignore it and go on with your day).

So this little step in the direction of censorship truly frightens me. I’m already srsly annoyed that ISP want to deny usage of BitTorrent (which has legal uses.. a vast number that can equally combat the illegal uses) but this idea of complete censorship back at the publisher of some online content (which is all the porn is in this story) because somebody doesn’t like it makes me shit bricks. “That guy there has an insulting website.. sue sue sue!” >.>

This unconstitutional bullspit (as this story deals directly with the US of A, but the Globe indirectly nonetheless) should be publicized so that people can stand up against it. Net neutrality and non-censorship _at the source_ (the publisher as in this story) should be an everyday idea. Or at least, that’s how I like my cookie to crumble.