Moral: laws should cover behavior not specific technologies. The implementation can change, laws shouldn’t take such dependencies.
A howto on making your video game accessible to those with disabilities (blind, color blind, deaf, etc)
The AbleGamers Foundation has created a 48-page document it hopes will serve as a how-to guide for game developers and publishers on how to create more accessible games. The in-depth guide by the disability non-profit covers in great detail how to make games available to those with varying degrees of mobility, hearing, visual and cognitive issues.
Winterton, a senior entomologist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, has seen a lot of bugs. But he hadn’t seen this species before.
There’s no off switch when you’re the senior entomologist. If you’re browsing the web you find your way to Flickr photos of insects or start correcting Wikipedia articles on insects.
Link roundup and summary of Reddit and traditional news coverage of the Aurora shooting.
The Verge has the best earliest coverage of the Microsoft Surface press conference and pretty photos.
Microsoft Surface event 2012: everything you need to know
As you might have guessed, Flame is also US/Israel produced malware. From the people who brought you Stuxnet, its… Flame!
We never recovered the bicycle, of course. The lock itself wasn’t attacked at all, as you can see.
The Metro Developer Show is the first podcast exclusively for Metro developers and enthusiasts.
Each week Ryan and Travis Lowdermilk traverse the exciting world of Metro (phone, tablet, desktop and Xbox); covering the latest news and exploring what it means for the developer community and everyday users.
Dark Patterns are UI patterns used to trick users into doing things they’d otherwise rather not: buy traveler’s insurance, click on ads, etc. Covers the anti-patterns and how we as technical folk can help stop this.
Seems generally bad to embed sensitive info in the URI (the http+aes URI scheme’s decryption key) similar to the now deprecated password field.
Use case is covered here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2012JanMar/0811.html. Also discussion including someone mentioning the issue above.
As a professional URI aficionado I deal with various levels of ignorance on URI percent-encoding (aka URI encoding, or URL escaping).
Getting into the more subtle levels of URI percent-encoding ignorance, folks try to apply their knowledge of percent-encoding to URIs as a whole producing the concepts escaped URIs and unescaped URIs. However there are no such things - URIs themselves aren't percent-encoded or decoded but rather contain characters that are percent-encoded or decoded. Applying percent-encoding or decoding to a URI as a whole produces a new and non-equivalent URI.
Instead of lingering on the incorrect concepts we'll just cover the correct ones: there's raw unencoded data, non-normal form URIs and normal form URIs. For example:
In the above (A) is not an 'encoded URI' but rather a non-normal form URI. The characters of 'the' and 'path' are percent-encoded but as unreserved characters specific in the RFC should not be encoded. In the normal form of the URI (B) the characters are decoded. But (B) is not a 'decoded URI' -- it still has an encoded '?' in it because that's a reserved character which by the RFC holds different meaning when appearing decoded versus encoded. Specifically in this case, it appears encoded which means it is data -- a literal '?' that appears as part of the path segment. This is as opposed to the decoded '?' that appears in the URI which is not part of the path but rather the delimiter to the query.
Usually when developers talk about decoding the URI what they really want is the raw data from the URI. The raw decoded data is (C) above. The only thing to note beyond what's covered already is that to obtain the decoded data one must parse the URI before percent decoding all percent-encoded octets.
Of course the exception here is when a URI is the raw data. In this case you must percent-encode the URI to have it appear in another URI. More on percent-encoding while constructing URIs later.
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.
“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
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