codev

It's right there at the start of the law you cite in A.1.:

  It is unlawful for an operator of a website or
  *online service directed to children*, or any operator
  that has *actual knowledge that it is collecting
  personal information from a child*, to collect personal
  information from a child in a manner that violates the
  regulations prescribed under subsection (b) of this section.

So either:

* service directed to children (LEGO, Disney etc) * actual knowledge that it is collecting information from a child (birthdate, age etc)

My understanding was from internal legal guidance at a previous company I consulted for but I haven't worked on COPPA projects for a few years so I don't know if there have been any major cases.

In any event Path specifically asked for birthdates and then allowed children to carry on and use the service with no changes which is a violation that should have been spotted by anyone with some understanding of COPPA.

That isn't how it works. COPPA is pretty narrowly defined.

You only have to take action to get parent's permission if:

a) Your site or app is very specifically targeting children (LEGO or Disney for example)

b) You have asked for some information from the user that positively identifies them as a child - birthdate is the main one

Path were fined because they asked for birthdate during the signup process and then allowed registration even if the user was under 13.

Swatch had a time system like that for a while:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

1000 beats in a day, 0 is midnight at UTC+1 but it doesn't adjust for time zones. It never took off and I think they scrapped it but it would be useful for coordinating between time zones. I'm sure people would fairly quickly adjust to it for their longitude but it'd be very confusing when you were travelling.

It's similar to what Gruber posted on daringfireball:

"Great new service, sort of like Google Voice but private."

I guess implying that Google have access to your phone calls and this company isn't going to.

If you're going to write an article like this you have to cite some evidence - if Dwight Lundell really believes what he's saying he should apply to the Atkins Foundation and do some research - instead he's selling his self help book and dietary supplements:

http://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/lundell.html

JANET (the UK university network) had a NRS (Name Registration Service - similar to DNS) that worked from least-to-most specific. So Cambridge was uk.ac.cam instead of today's cam.ac.uk. There were gateways to talk to email servers on ARPANET and reverse the ordering - there's more on it here:

http://www.uknof.com/uknof7/Reid-History.pdf

I wrote a userstyle for Firefox mobile that gets rid of the different sized text on comments and makes the whole of hn more readable:

http://userstyles.org/styles/82587/hacker-news-responsive-fo...

The reason they gave you a code is because they have competition in unlocking - you could just go to an iPhone unlock website and do it yourself.

Once it becomes illegal to unlock your phone by any other method it won't take long for them to start charging for this 'premium service' or not allowing it at all.