dripton

You and I are educated enough about web security that we know not to type one site's password into another site.

Many people aren't. Phishing is a real problem.

When "legitimate" sites start doing slimy, insecure things like asking for third-party passwords, three things happen. One, those "legitimate" sites have the power to do things that most users don't really want them to, like spam their entire contact list as them. Two, it becomes harder for unsophisticated users to distinguish legitimate sites from phishing sites. Three, it means that if a criminal breaks into a "legitimate" site, there's more valuable information there for him to steal.

I've seen it once before. Udacity did it to me a few years ago when I signed up for a course, and I closed that account too.

I'm not surprised that MySpace or Facebook does it, but those sites are so transparently bad that I never considered joining them, so it didn't affect me personally.

I apologize for the error and have edited the post.

I apologize for the error and have edited the post.

LinkedIn sent me an email saying I had a new contact. When I clicked the link in the email, it put me on the LinkedIn site. As an afterthought on the "we added your new connection" page, they tried to phish my email password.

I have a plain old Wordpress blog. What is it doing that you consider phishy? (Should I disable comments? I hardly get any anyway.)

No, there was a password input box. Definitely giving them my password per se.

(Someone else noted that Gmail has a contacts API, so if you use Gmail then they can harvest your contacts without actually getting your password. Which is much better, though still kind of rude to your friends.)

LinkedIn's business model is that regular people join for free and recruiters pay for an account that lets them contact those people.

Some skeevy recruiters use the "I already know this person" button when they don't, to avoid paying LinkedIn. Because they're breaking the rules of the site, I think it's correct to call them spammers.

The recruiters who contact without lying to do so aren't spammers, since that's indeed a large part of what the site is for, and you agree to such contact when you join. (And I believe you can turn off such contacts in the preferences, though I can't double-check since I just closed my account.)

Honestly, LinkedIn wasn't providing me much utility anyway. Recruiter spam plus the occasional question from an ex-cow-orker who could find me with a Google search anyway.

It would be a harder choice if the business in question were providing a more valuable service. If I were a recruiter, or a freelancer who was constantly looking for jobs, then it would be harder to dump LinkedIn. I'd like to think I'd do it anyway on principle, though.

Why do you think I have a Facebook account?

Asking for my email password is phishing, period.

It may be phishing for a less nefarious cause, but how's the average enduser supposed to know the difference? We need to plant the meme that any site asking for another site's password is always wrong.

That's a pretty defeatist attitude. If nobody complains when companies do bad things, what incentive do they have to stop?

Not everyone uses Gmail.

LinkedIn showed my email address on their web page, and provided a box under it to type my email password.

Maybe they wouldn't have actually stored my password locally, but there's no way for a user to know that for sure.

I've lived in Syracuse. DC gets what Syracuse would consider a real snowfall about once every five years. But when it happens, everything shuts down. Not enough plows. And terrifyingly bad snow drivers.

The US national debt is denominated in dollars. The US government decides what a dollar is. There's no way they can default. Just trigger hyperinflation.

That makes me happy; it means it'll probably work on my box too if I upgrade Firefox. (I'm using Ubuntu 12.04's default apt repository.)

Doesn't work at all for me in Firefox 21.0 on amd64 Linux. Works in Chromium 25 on the same box. This is particularly disappointing because there's a Mozilla logo on the page.

They left the Pittsburgh "yinz" off question #7.

I'd rather use Amazon than Google or Facebook, but I'd rather use a site that only did identity than any of the rest. (I don't want access to my Kindle books screwed up because Amazon decided I did something wrong when using them for login, and banned my account. Yes, that reminds me that I need to backup all my Kindle books monthly.)

I don't know what the business model for such a site would be, though.

Glad to see that she's being forced to step down after such an egregious invasion of privacy.

But that's just a school. The much more important case is whether anyone in the federal government gets punished when they do the same thing without a warrant. So far, it doesn't look like it.

Convenience. But more as a proxy to whether the game studios really care about their Linux ports, or are just checking the box then forgetting about them.

(I like the convenience of Steam, but I think having DRM-free downloads is important too.)

Thanks. I was hoping it was just release-time rush.

Steam won't install Linux versions of Dear Esther and Capsized. (The Steam keys imported okay, and those games now show up in my Steam library, just not as Linux games.)

Maybe they're just being slow getting them uploaded, but it's a disturbing trend. I think there are now 23 games in my Steam library that claim not to be available for Linux, even though Linux ports exist. Writing games is very hard. Porting games is hard. Uploading games is easy.

Neither language has channels or selects baked in.

Python does have threadsafe queues in the standard library, which you can use to coordinate work between threads and processes.

C doesn't come with anything like this, but you can use a library like ZeroMQ. The main Go compilers are written in C, so clearly anything Go can do C can do too -- but it'll be more work.

It's not a real search warrant if the cops' boss's boss's boss signs it. A real warrant needs to come from a judge.

Kubuntu on my home desktop, Fedora on my work laptop.

Except that the truly rich tend to get most of their income from capital gains rather than wages and salaries, and there's a much lower rate for capital gains than for earned income. The "Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary" problem.

Residual value on luxury cars is typically poor, because part of the justification for the price premium on a luxury car is being seen in something impressive, and a 3-year-old car is no longer so impressive.

So saying "for the same residual value percentage as the iconic Mercedes S Class, one of the finest premium sedans in the world" is honest but kind of deceptive. You'd much rather have the same residual value percentage as the much less expensive Jeep Wrangler.

This is basically a lease, phrased as a sale with the option to sell back, to take advantage of incentives that governments give to buyers but not lessees of electric cars. A nice option, but hardly worthy of the breathless marketing hype.

A smartphone is at least $50 per month for 2 years, or $1200. Cable or satellite TV is also at least $50 per month. The initial teaser costs of these items are nowhere near the true costs. (Except for the rare user of a big screen TV who only uses it to watch free TV.)