This just sounds to me like the next step in a game of cat-and-mouse. What innovative technology can we geeks develop to circumvent these censorship systems?
There's a Dropbox Droplet (http://wiki.getdropbox.com/DropboxAddons/Dropbox%20Droplet) that does essentially this. For somebody who doesn't have Dropbox, this tool seems cool, but I wouldn't go to the effort of adding yet another tool when Dropbox is close enough.
If I/he were to hire out the design stuff, where is the best place to find designers? Optimally I'd love to find a designer to partner with and work on projects as equals, but I'm willing to pay somebody to do the design if necessary. Any ballpark estimates on what reasonable web designers cost?
Wow. So geeks sit around in forums arguing the finer points of eigenclasses, and constitutional lawyers sit around in forums arguing about who is president during a 60-second period. Awesomeness!
I'm currently starting a project on App Engine because it's free, but I'd much rather work with Rails. The free version of Heroku still incurs EC2 costs, right?
I only ever use Guest mode with friends I trust. I'd let them use my account, but screen corners and funky shortcuts freak them out. The guest mode is a great way of giving people I trust a vanilla Mac to use for a few minutes.
Mostly it's the administration. Somebody was hosting Trac on her Joyent shared account and didn't want to go through the hassle of moving it, much less continuing to maintain it. Plus we had no GitHub integration. Of course, that's a pretty easy fix, but somebody's gotta actually go and upgrade it.
I agree the little chuckle is pretty dumb, but it points to an important discussion for technology people: how do we do AAA in a way that actually works? OpenID and Facebook Connect seem like good steps to me, but we're not there yet. So many web apps totally ignore AAA and just throw some pre-packaged solution with it's super-amazing-secure 256-bit salted hash and walk away. There's opportunity for innovation in this space. The bash.org quote is just to get the discussion started and highlight the pathetic state of things.
But, then you've got to keep track of this "private key" thing that's completely intangible to users. What happens when they switch machines? What about when they accidentally format their hard drive? I think having a physical USB dongle would really be the way to go. Plug it in wherever you are, swipe your finger to unlock it. You've got two-factor right there in a simple, easy package. Now all we need is an operating system and environment that would support such a device...
I got the same failure with a WebKit nightly. I run Java applets and JWS apps from the browser all the time, so the Java Plugin doesn't seem to be broken on my system.
This is good to hear! I just started a project that happens to fit well within GAE's free requirements, so it's good to know Google will support me as it grows.