This isn’t dominos selling my data. I assume they’re using location and any ethnographic data I’ve given permissions to for having their app. Does that require breaking ad blocking? I wouldn’t think so...
Is dominos trying to monetize traffic to their e-commerce site by serving ads for other companies?
Their site which exists to facilitate the sale and fulfillment of their own products?
The only ads should be them trying to get you to add to your order.
Having partners is useful for funding, there may in fact be semi exclusive offers with those partnerships. As well partnerships can sometimes drive conversions.
Ecommerce is a weird game.
Ahhhhhh
Though they could embed this directly into their site assets though, which shouldn’t be affected by ad blockers, right?
I mean it’s all kind of pointless, I’m just flabbergasted at how shitty dominos appears to be about their digital stuff.
Dominoes is hardly alone in this. It's basically everybody.
This isn’t dominos selling my data. I assume they’re using location and any ethnographic data I’ve given permissions to for having their app. Does that require breaking ad blocking? I wouldn’t think so...
Is dominos trying to monetize traffic to their e-commerce site by serving ads for other companies?
Their site which exists to facilitate the sale and fulfillment of their own products?
The only ads should be them trying to get you to add to your order.
Having partners is useful for funding, there may in fact be semi exclusive offers with those partnerships. As well partnerships can sometimes drive conversions.
Ecommerce is a weird game.
Ahhhhhh
Though they could embed this directly into their site assets though, which shouldn’t be affected by ad blockers, right?
I mean it’s all kind of pointless, I’m just flabbergasted at how shitty dominos appears to be about their digital stuff.
They're actually decent at it, industry-wise. There's a lot of ways to design websites that are considered good practice that are wholly incompatible with screen readers, especially if you're trying to hide IP or systems design.
It's the pop up Dominos ads that are splashed across their storefront that likely break with ad blockers.
I wouldn't put it past the site to fight against adblocker use, as some of these ads appear to be pushed at the 'correct' moment for the upsell.
Like at checkout, or as a time limited deal when you spend too long on the site.
NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
...Huh, it never occurred to me to think of those "hey would you like extra cheese" or "hey would you like a dessert" as ads, I just looked at them as upselling.
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
So I saw a Trump tweet that bragged about winning a court battle about net neutrality. I can only assume this is bad for normal people but good for corporations? Does anybody know what he was talking about?
So I saw a Trump tweet that bragged about winning a court battle about net neutrality. I can only assume this is bad for normal people but good for corporations? Does anybody know what he was talking about?
It wasn't a win. If anything it was a loss for him, because he only won the thing they were kinda EXPECTED to.
Last week, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upheld Pai's 2017 order to repeal the net neutrality rules, finding the agency had not overstepped its authority. It was an important win for Republicans at the agency. Consumer groups, tech companies and local government officials had sued to restore rules passed in the previous administration.
But the decision wasn't a total victory for the agency: The court also found that the FCC had overstepped its authority when it banned states from enacting their own open internet rules, as Rosenworcel pointed out. Now, the fight to restore net neutrality rules will likely head to the states. The court also remanded part of the order back to the FCC, stating the agency hadn't considered the effect the repeal would have on public safety and programs such as Lifeline, which offers subsidies for phone and internet service for the poor.
ie, "yes, the FCC can stop their own rules. But by so doing, they abdicate the right to prohibit states from doing so." So congrats, we now have fragmented laws (which means that CA's and WA's laws are on the books, I think).
So I saw a Trump tweet that bragged about winning a court battle about net neutrality. I can only assume this is bad for normal people but good for corporations? Does anybody know what he was talking about?
It wasn't a win. If anything it was a loss for him, because he only won the thing they were kinda EXPECTED to.
Last week, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upheld Pai's 2017 order to repeal the net neutrality rules, finding the agency had not overstepped its authority. It was an important win for Republicans at the agency. Consumer groups, tech companies and local government officials had sued to restore rules passed in the previous administration.
But the decision wasn't a total victory for the agency: The court also found that the FCC had overstepped its authority when it banned states from enacting their own open internet rules, as Rosenworcel pointed out. Now, the fight to restore net neutrality rules will likely head to the states. The court also remanded part of the order back to the FCC, stating the agency hadn't considered the effect the repeal would have on public safety and programs such as Lifeline, which offers subsidies for phone and internet service for the poor.
ie, "yes, the FCC can stop their own rules. But by so doing, they abdicate the right to prohibit states from doing so." So congrats, we now have fragmented laws (which means that CA's and WA's laws are on the books, I think).
Which means ISPs have to contend with them and either somehow fragment their throttly bullshit to various net requirements, or adopt those requirements in how they deliver service.
So I saw a Trump tweet that bragged about winning a court battle about net neutrality. I can only assume this is bad for normal people but good for corporations? Does anybody know what he was talking about?
It wasn't a win. If anything it was a loss for him, because he only won the thing they were kinda EXPECTED to.
Last week, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit upheld Pai's 2017 order to repeal the net neutrality rules, finding the agency had not overstepped its authority. It was an important win for Republicans at the agency. Consumer groups, tech companies and local government officials had sued to restore rules passed in the previous administration.
But the decision wasn't a total victory for the agency: The court also found that the FCC had overstepped its authority when it banned states from enacting their own open internet rules, as Rosenworcel pointed out. Now, the fight to restore net neutrality rules will likely head to the states. The court also remanded part of the order back to the FCC, stating the agency hadn't considered the effect the repeal would have on public safety and programs such as Lifeline, which offers subsidies for phone and internet service for the poor.
ie, "yes, the FCC can stop their own rules. But by so doing, they abdicate the right to prohibit states from doing so." So congrats, we now have fragmented laws (which means that CA's and WA's laws are on the books, I think).
Which means ISPs have to contend with them and either somehow fragment their throttly bullshit to various net requirements, or adopt those requirements in how they deliver service.
They already have different policies in different areas. For instance, in the Northeast Comcast has no data caps because they have competition.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
edited November 2019
Welp. It was probably inevitable, but 8chan is back, now hosted by a Russian service that primarily hosts ransomware, calling itself 8kun and the insane Q types (but I repeat myself) are rejoicing. I expect them to inspire more stochastic mass shootings within days.
At some point these people have to look around and realize who they're in bed with.
... no? no.
Everything you'd list as a negative about the Russian government is a selling point for the 8chan crowd. They love authoritarians because they tell them they're special and that committing violence is good.
At some point these people have to look around and realize who they're in bed with.
... no? no.
Everything you'd list as a negative about the Russian government is a selling point for the 8chan crowd. They love authoritarians because they tell them they're special and that committing violence is good.
I'm honestly not sure if we're talking about 8chan looking around and realizing they're dealing with the Russians or the Russians looking around and realizing they're in it with 8chan...
At some point these people have to look around and realize who they're in bed with.
... no? no.
Everything you'd list as a negative about the Russian government is a selling point for the 8chan crowd. They love authoritarians because they tell them they're special and that committing violence is good.
I'm honestly not sure if we're talking about 8chan looking around and realizing they're dealing with the Russians or the Russians looking around and realizing they're in it with 8chan...
Why would Russia care? They want to provide a platform to disaffected malcontents festering in America and the EU to get together and talk about ways to destabilize the places they live.
At some point these people have to look around and realize who they're in bed with.
... no? no.
Everything you'd list as a negative about the Russian government is a selling point for the 8chan crowd. They love authoritarians because they tell them they're special and that committing violence is good.
I'm honestly not sure if we're talking about 8chan looking around and realizing they're dealing with the Russians or the Russians looking around and realizing they're in it with 8chan...
Why would Russia care? They want to provide a platform to disaffected malcontents festering in America and the EU to get together and talk about ways to destabilize the places they live.
It's a petri dish to cultivate and run foreign assets.
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Yuan now says he underestimated the threat of harassment – a hallmark of so many online platforms – on Zoom. "I never thought about this seriously," he said.
Zoom was designed as software for business meetings. Yuan said his company was accustomed to working with clients' IT departments and was caught off guard by an influx of new users who were not as savvy about digital security.
(headdesk until the hurting stops)
In this day and age, if you are running an online service and you don't treat security and harassment as major issues, you are by definition incompetent at your job and should find another line of work.
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
I mean... no. Non-public distribution has a very different set of criteria. If you give the zoom out to your accounting department and tim is a dick you can fire him. This is something that isnt possible with semi-public access
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
No. Just...no. I am absolutely done with this attitude in the tech community, which in my opinion is just another form of victim blaming. There are many reasons that people would want to publicize online meetings, and treating doing so as some sort of error is part of why the tech community keeps failing with regards to abuse and harassment.
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
No. Just...no. I am absolutely done with this attitude in the tech community, which in my opinion is just another form of victim blaming. There are many reasons that people would want to publicize online meetings, and treating doing so as some sort of error is part of why the tech community keeps failing with regards to abuse and harassment.
For a corporate meeting? What are those reasons?
E: Okay, I read a bit more on this subject and apparently the technology doesn't (or didn't) even permit the identification of who's drawing things on the screen. So if Tim is a dick then nobody will ever know it was him. That's an obvious issue for every imaginable use-case.
I'm glad that they're improving the software. More and better security options are good things. I just think sometimes people don't even employ basic measures like password protection when it would solve all their problems and would only cost them 30 seconds. That's on them.
I mean, originally Zoom allowed someone to invisibly invite you to a meeting by clicking on a link, and then could continuously leave your microphone and camera on and recording.
Security is not something that appears to have been considered at the start.
And in fact, I believe they had implemented features to break sandboxing of browsers so that their application was more convenient.
Zoom has definitely been up to some sketchy shit, and their reactive instead of proactive approach to security concerns leaves a lot to be desired. I'm glad most of the issues people have raised have been patched but the approach does not exactly inspire confidence that the company culture takes security seriously. That being said, it's incredibly easy to create a meeting with basic attendee controls, e.g. attendees can't screenshare, so I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for victims of "Zoombombing". Take two seconds to double check your meeting settings, that's all it takes. Of course, throwing teachers and other non-business users onto a platform without any onboarding or training and saying "Here, use this" is a whole other problem.
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
No. Just...no. I am absolutely done with this attitude in the tech community, which in my opinion is just another form of victim blaming. There are many reasons that people would want to publicize online meetings, and treating doing so as some sort of error is part of why the tech community keeps failing with regards to abuse and harassment.
I'm going to rant for a minute, because this is something I feel very strongly about as a programmer.
People are fallible. People make mistakes. If we design any component of a system - software or otherwise - without taking human error into consideration, we have failed our users. Software should always default to the safest option, and it must offer ways for users to easily and quickly identify and correct their mistakes, especially if they are not expert users.
I am tempted to say there's no such thing as PEBKAC. Obviously it's not literally true, but I believe people who design and write software need to approach it with the attitude that users do not make mistakes; programmers do. A user's available actions and options in a program are entirely defined by us, the programmers; so if the user does something that results in an outcome they didn't want or anticipate, that's on us. We wrote the pathways that allowed that to happen. Maybe our controls need to be more intuitive; maybe the program needs to communicate better what a given option does (and why you'd want to use it); maybe we need better guardrails for naive users. We cannot assume that any user - corporate or private - has the time or inclination to learn our software inside and out. That's not their job! Their job is to do their job, and our job is to support them as seamlessly as possible. If a user has to actively think about how to make our software do what they want, we have not done our job, and we are wasting their time.
There's an attitude in tech that designing user-friendly, fault-tolerant software is somehow beneath us - that people who can't figure out how to use our products (or aren't willing to spend hours learning) are just dumb and shouldn't be allowed near a computer. That's stupid and toxic. The fact is, it is hard to design user-friendly software. It requires programmers to step outside our own heads and think like people who aren't us, and who may be uncomfortable with or even afraid of computers - usually because of bad experiences with badly-designed software. A lot of people's defining experiences with technology are (still) like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy, having figured out he needs to step only on the floor tiles that spell the name of God, sets his foot on the first letter - and promptly falls through the floor.
When the first iPhone came out in 2009(?), the really remarkable thing about it wasn't the touchscreen, or the beautifully simple form factor. The remarkable thing was that it somehow worked exactly how you'd expect, despite being the first mainstream device of its kind. It should be a point of pride to create software that is robust while being easy to use and hard to screw up.
And, of course, we need to assume that some of our users will be evil, and build in protections that are active by default. Software that exposes its users to harm is like a bridge with unsupported sections. No competent engineer would sign off on such a design, and neither should we.
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
So if someone's dad, who's 70+, makes a Zoom session with one of their parents who is living in a home, but doesn't understand tech well, he's to blame? This is textbook victim blaming. And this is a very fixable issue by Zoom, by just changing their default settings to require a password and make it so you have to disable the password requirement.
I am reminded of an old and rather infamous SF short story, "The Cold Equations". It is, IMO, not a very good story, as the situation it comes up with to present its moral is just as contrived and implausible as the deus ex machina happy endings it was written in response to, but that moral remains sound: The Universe does not care. It cares not for our feelings, our wishes, or our safety; and if we are careless in turn, bad things can happen.
Which is why, in the real world rather than unsubtle fables, good engineers - civil, electrical, mechanical, and (one would hope) software - take this into account, and build in things like redundancy, safety margins, error checking, and so on. They cannot anticipate everything; but they can and should be expected to be aware of the most common vulnerabilities and failure modes within their chosen field, and take appropriate and reasonable precautions.
Commander Zoom on
+7
Options
WhiteZinfandelYour insidesLet me show you themRegistered Userregular
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
So if someone's dad, who's 70+, makes a Zoom session with one of their parents who is living in a home, but doesn't understand tech well, he's to blame? This is textbook victim blaming. And this is a very fixable issue by Zoom, by just changing their default settings to require a password and make it so you have to disable the password requirement.
I think looking at in terms of blame is a mistake. Yes, I know I used that language in the last post. Forgive me. It's better to start with how a problem can most easily be solved.
The key variables in that situation you described are 1. Zoom had password protection available as an option but left it off by default. 2. The non tech-savvy person chose not to activate password protection. 3. The wide world of 7.8 billion people out there contains many who are willing to abuse others.
1 and 2 are changeable (with the effort of an individual person, even!). 3 is not. We should absolutely take what actions we can to make the world a less hostile place because any measure of progress is progress... but no matter how hard you, I, and the next hundred thousand people fight, 3 will still be true for the foreseeable future. Anybody who doesn't take that into account is making an error. It doesn't mean they deserve to be abused, but it does mean that they will be. One must treat with the world as it exists, not as it should exist.
It is absolutely a good thing that Zoom is making their product more foolproof. We should try to protect fools from undue consequences of their foolishness. We should also try to educate fools so they're not fools any more. Those approaches can coexist in this context.
WhiteZinfandel on
+1
Options
ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
So if someone's dad, who's 70+, makes a Zoom session with one of their parents who is living in a home, but doesn't understand tech well, he's to blame? This is textbook victim blaming. And this is a very fixable issue by Zoom, by just changing their default settings to require a password and make it so you have to disable the password requirement.
I agree with this. But, for the record, a huge number of people get very angry about passwords. I find it all the time when I'm setting up cameras, routers, and other devices in people's homes. Asking them to create a unique, strong password often results in me getting screamed at about how fed up they are with having to deal with passwords all the time. Discussion of security is pretty much wasting my breath.
Hell, my wife uses the same password for multiple sites, and she gets angry with me when she needs a password to sign a new device into Netflix. "Is this one of those stupid random passwords again?"
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
So if someone's dad, who's 70+, makes a Zoom session with one of their parents who is living in a home, but doesn't understand tech well, he's to blame? This is textbook victim blaming. And this is a very fixable issue by Zoom, by just changing their default settings to require a password and make it so you have to disable the password requirement.
I agree with this. But, for the record, a huge number of people get very angry about passwords. I find it all the time when I'm setting up cameras, routers, and other devices in people's homes. Asking them to create a unique, strong password often results in me getting screamed at about how fed up they are with having to deal with passwords all the time. Discussion of security is pretty much wasting my breath.
Hell, my wife uses the same password for multiple sites, and she gets angry with me when she needs a password to sign a new device into Netflix. "Is this one of those stupid random passwords again?"
Nothing allows you to use correct horse battery staple, which doesn't help matters.
Don't even get me started on trying to convince people that using a password manager will make their lives easier. We've been using Lastpass at my company since 2014, I onboard everyone onto it on their first day, and still we have people who refuse to touch it. They'll ask me for login info for this or that service, I'll say "it's in Lastpass, in such-and-such shared folder" and a pained expression appears on their face. People complain about remembering too many passwords but would still rather use dogsname1989 for the hundredth time than use a tool.
Protecting meetings with a password is a decent step, but clumsy and annoying in a business environment when you are dealing with multiple back-to-back Zoom calls throughout the day. I'd much prefer if Zoom defaulted to "only authenticated users can join meetings" (e.g. if you haven't been explicitly invited, you can't join) instead of "anyone with the Meeting ID can join a meeting". Of course this feature is not even available at the Free tier, which is insanity.
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
No. Just...no. I am absolutely done with this attitude in the tech community, which in my opinion is just another form of victim blaming. There are many reasons that people would want to publicize online meetings, and treating doing so as some sort of error is part of why the tech community keeps failing with regards to abuse and harassment.
I'm going to rant for a minute, because this is something I feel very strongly about as a programmer.
People are fallible. People make mistakes. If we design any component of a system - software or otherwise - without taking human error into consideration, we have failed our users. Software should always default to the safest option, and it must offer ways for users to easily and quickly identify and correct their mistakes, especially if they are not expert users.
I am tempted to say there's no such thing as PEBKAC. Obviously it's not literally true, but I believe people who design and write software need to approach it with the attitude that users do not make mistakes; programmers do. A user's available actions and options in a program are entirely defined by us, the programmers; so if the user does something that results in an outcome they didn't want or anticipate, that's on us. We wrote the pathways that allowed that to happen. Maybe our controls need to be more intuitive; maybe the program needs to communicate better what a given option does (and why you'd want to use it); maybe we need better guardrails for naive users. We cannot assume that any user - corporate or private - has the time or inclination to learn our software inside and out. That's not their job! Their job is to do their job, and our job is to support them as seamlessly as possible. If a user has to actively think about how to make our software do what they want, we have not done our job, and we are wasting their time.
There's an attitude in tech that designing user-friendly, fault-tolerant software is somehow beneath us - that people who can't figure out how to use our products (or aren't willing to spend hours learning) are just dumb and shouldn't be allowed near a computer. That's stupid and toxic. The fact is, it is hard to design user-friendly software. It requires programmers to step outside our own heads and think like people who aren't us, and who may be uncomfortable with or even afraid of computers - usually because of bad experiences with badly-designed software. A lot of people's defining experiences with technology are (still) like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy, having figured out he needs to step only on the floor tiles that spell the name of God, sets his foot on the first letter - and promptly falls through the floor.
When the first iPhone came out in 2009(?), the really remarkable thing about it wasn't the touchscreen, or the beautifully simple form factor. The remarkable thing was that it somehow worked exactly how you'd expect, despite being the first mainstream device of its kind. It should be a point of pride to create software that is robust while being easy to use and hard to screw up.
And, of course, we need to assume that some of our users will be evil, and build in protections that are active by default. Software that exposes its users to harm is like a bridge with unsupported sections. No competent engineer would sign off on such a design, and neither should we.
/rant
Aye. You see this all the time in homebrew or free software or things like that. The kind of often very useful programs you find thrown together for a specific purpose and distrusted free on the internet or the like. UI and UX always comes last and is often barely considered.
UI/UX design is long and hard and annoying and often not fun or clever and requires the ability to approach your own work from the perspective of someone who doesn't understand it, which is anywhere from very difficult to basically impossible which is why testing is so valuable.
It is absolutely a good thing that Zoom is making their product more foolproof. We should try to protect fools from undue consequences of their foolishness. We should also try to educate fools so they're not fools any more. Those approaches can coexist in this context.
Here's the thing though - they're not fools. Or ignorant. Or any one of a number of pejorative terms the tech community uses to denigrate users who are not technically skilled. What they are is not possessing the skills we have because of their differing interests. The tech community needs to stop treating non-technical users as mentally defective because they don't share the same interests as them.
I am reminded of an old and rather infamous SF short story, "The Cold Equations". It is, IMO, not a very good story, as the situation it comes up with to present its moral is just as contrived and implausible as the deus ex machina happy endings it was written in response to, but that moral remains sound: The Universe does not care. It cares not for our feelings, our wishes, or our safety; and if we are careless in turn, bad things can happen.
Which is why, in the real world rather than unsubtle fables, good engineers - civil, electrical, mechanical, and (one would hope) software - take this into account, and build in things like redundancy, safety margins, error checking, and so on. They cannot anticipate everything; but they can and should be expected to be aware of the most common vulnerabilities and failure modes within their chosen field, and take appropriate and reasonable precautions.
This is why The Cold Equations is such a bad story - Campbell was so determined to have his "hard men making hard choices" polemic that he left plot holes so large you could fly spaceships through them, and one of the biggest is that carelessness in the execution of one's duties (like, say, securing a fucking spacecraft) is not "the Universe is unfeeling", but "someone fucked up somewhere, and that someone needs to be punished for said fuckup."
It is absolutely a good thing that Zoom is making their product more foolproof. We should try to protect fools from undue consequences of their foolishness. We should also try to educate fools so they're not fools any more. Those approaches can coexist in this context.
Here's the thing though - they're not fools. Or ignorant. Or any one of a number of pejorative terms the tech community uses to denigrate users who are not technically skilled. What they are is not possessing the skills we have because of their differing interests. The tech community needs to stop treating non-technical users as mentally defective because they don't share the same interests as them.
Given the kind of problems that crop up in testing of any kind, I think you are vastly overestimating the ability of designers/programmers/etc to effectively predict end-user behaviour in order to try and cast the people in question as malevolent. There is, after all, a reason we have all these kinds of testing. And even then you don't catch everything.
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
No. Just...no. I am absolutely done with this attitude in the tech community, which in my opinion is just another form of victim blaming. There are many reasons that people would want to publicize online meetings, and treating doing so as some sort of error is part of why the tech community keeps failing with regards to abuse and harassment.
I'm going to rant for a minute, because this is something I feel very strongly about as a programmer.
People are fallible. People make mistakes. If we design any component of a system - software or otherwise - without taking human error into consideration, we have failed our users. Software should always default to the safest option, and it must offer ways for users to easily and quickly identify and correct their mistakes, especially if they are not expert users.
I am tempted to say there's no such thing as PEBKAC. Obviously it's not literally true, but I believe people who design and write software need to approach it with the attitude that users do not make mistakes; programmers do. A user's available actions and options in a program are entirely defined by us, the programmers; so if the user does something that results in an outcome they didn't want or anticipate, that's on us. We wrote the pathways that allowed that to happen. Maybe our controls need to be more intuitive; maybe the program needs to communicate better what a given option does (and why you'd want to use it); maybe we need better guardrails for naive users. We cannot assume that any user - corporate or private - has the time or inclination to learn our software inside and out. That's not their job! Their job is to do their job, and our job is to support them as seamlessly as possible. If a user has to actively think about how to make our software do what they want, we have not done our job, and we are wasting their time.
There's an attitude in tech that designing user-friendly, fault-tolerant software is somehow beneath us - that people who can't figure out how to use our products (or aren't willing to spend hours learning) are just dumb and shouldn't be allowed near a computer. That's stupid and toxic. The fact is, it is hard to design user-friendly software. It requires programmers to step outside our own heads and think like people who aren't us, and who may be uncomfortable with or even afraid of computers - usually because of bad experiences with badly-designed software. A lot of people's defining experiences with technology are (still) like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy, having figured out he needs to step only on the floor tiles that spell the name of God, sets his foot on the first letter - and promptly falls through the floor.
When the first iPhone came out in 2009(?), the really remarkable thing about it wasn't the touchscreen, or the beautifully simple form factor. The remarkable thing was that it somehow worked exactly how you'd expect, despite being the first mainstream device of its kind. It should be a point of pride to create software that is robust while being easy to use and hard to screw up.
And, of course, we need to assume that some of our users will be evil, and build in protections that are active by default. Software that exposes its users to harm is like a bridge with unsupported sections. No competent engineer would sign off on such a design, and neither should we.
/rant
Aye. You see this all the time in homebrew or free software or things like that. The kind of often very useful programs you find thrown together for a specific purpose and distrusted free on the internet or the like. UI and UX always comes last and is often barely considered.
UI/UX design is long and hard and annoying and often not fun or clever and requires the ability to approach your own work from the perspective of someone who doesn't understand it, which is anywhere from very difficult to basically impossible which is why testing is so valuable.
Well it's not considered because that's not the problem they are trying to solve and it's not even really in the overall goals at all except for maybe the biggest protects. Once the problem is solved you're done and you could be working on the next fun/interesting thing, or you can go back and try to make it easier to use, but you can already use it for its intended purpose so why bother? It's not like improving UX will make it easier for you to use and a reduction in interface complexity to improve UX can make complex situations require more UI interaction so it might actually worsen things for your use
Until money has been exchanged for goods and services there's not much point in listening to UX complaints IMO
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
No. Just...no. I am absolutely done with this attitude in the tech community, which in my opinion is just another form of victim blaming. There are many reasons that people would want to publicize online meetings, and treating doing so as some sort of error is part of why the tech community keeps failing with regards to abuse and harassment.
I'm going to rant for a minute, because this is something I feel very strongly about as a programmer.
People are fallible. People make mistakes. If we design any component of a system - software or otherwise - without taking human error into consideration, we have failed our users. Software should always default to the safest option, and it must offer ways for users to easily and quickly identify and correct their mistakes, especially if they are not expert users.
I am tempted to say there's no such thing as PEBKAC. Obviously it's not literally true, but I believe people who design and write software need to approach it with the attitude that users do not make mistakes; programmers do. A user's available actions and options in a program are entirely defined by us, the programmers; so if the user does something that results in an outcome they didn't want or anticipate, that's on us. We wrote the pathways that allowed that to happen. Maybe our controls need to be more intuitive; maybe the program needs to communicate better what a given option does (and why you'd want to use it); maybe we need better guardrails for naive users. We cannot assume that any user - corporate or private - has the time or inclination to learn our software inside and out. That's not their job! Their job is to do their job, and our job is to support them as seamlessly as possible. If a user has to actively think about how to make our software do what they want, we have not done our job, and we are wasting their time.
There's an attitude in tech that designing user-friendly, fault-tolerant software is somehow beneath us - that people who can't figure out how to use our products (or aren't willing to spend hours learning) are just dumb and shouldn't be allowed near a computer. That's stupid and toxic. The fact is, it is hard to design user-friendly software. It requires programmers to step outside our own heads and think like people who aren't us, and who may be uncomfortable with or even afraid of computers - usually because of bad experiences with badly-designed software. A lot of people's defining experiences with technology are (still) like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy, having figured out he needs to step only on the floor tiles that spell the name of God, sets his foot on the first letter - and promptly falls through the floor.
When the first iPhone came out in 2009(?), the really remarkable thing about it wasn't the touchscreen, or the beautifully simple form factor. The remarkable thing was that it somehow worked exactly how you'd expect, despite being the first mainstream device of its kind. It should be a point of pride to create software that is robust while being easy to use and hard to screw up.
And, of course, we need to assume that some of our users will be evil, and build in protections that are active by default. Software that exposes its users to harm is like a bridge with unsupported sections. No competent engineer would sign off on such a design, and neither should we.
/rant
Aye. You see this all the time in homebrew or free software or things like that. The kind of often very useful programs you find thrown together for a specific purpose and distrusted free on the internet or the like. UI and UX always comes last and is often barely considered.
UI/UX design is long and hard and annoying and often not fun or clever and requires the ability to approach your own work from the perspective of someone who doesn't understand it, which is anywhere from very difficult to basically impossible which is why testing is so valuable.
Well it's not considered because that's not the problem they are trying to solve and it's not even really in the overall goals at all except for maybe the biggest protects. Once the problem is solved you're done and you could be working on the next fun/interesting thing, or you can go back and try to make it easier to use, but you can already use it for its intended purpose so why bother? It's not like improving UX will make it easier for you to use and a reduction in interface complexity to improve UX can make complex situations require more UI interaction so it might actually worsen things for your use
Until money has been exchanged for goods and services there's not much point in listening to UX complaints IMO
I mean, yes, this is certainly an excellent summation of the attitude that is the root of the problem.
Eh. He was selling a corporate product to corporations. Its not a surprise that personal use was not high on his priority list
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
No. Just...no. I am absolutely done with this attitude in the tech community, which in my opinion is just another form of victim blaming. There are many reasons that people would want to publicize online meetings, and treating doing so as some sort of error is part of why the tech community keeps failing with regards to abuse and harassment.
I'm going to rant for a minute, because this is something I feel very strongly about as a programmer.
People are fallible. People make mistakes. If we design any component of a system - software or otherwise - without taking human error into consideration, we have failed our users. Software should always default to the safest option, and it must offer ways for users to easily and quickly identify and correct their mistakes, especially if they are not expert users.
I am tempted to say there's no such thing as PEBKAC. Obviously it's not literally true, but I believe people who design and write software need to approach it with the attitude that users do not make mistakes; programmers do. A user's available actions and options in a program are entirely defined by us, the programmers; so if the user does something that results in an outcome they didn't want or anticipate, that's on us. We wrote the pathways that allowed that to happen. Maybe our controls need to be more intuitive; maybe the program needs to communicate better what a given option does (and why you'd want to use it); maybe we need better guardrails for naive users. We cannot assume that any user - corporate or private - has the time or inclination to learn our software inside and out. That's not their job! Their job is to do their job, and our job is to support them as seamlessly as possible. If a user has to actively think about how to make our software do what they want, we have not done our job, and we are wasting their time.
There's an attitude in tech that designing user-friendly, fault-tolerant software is somehow beneath us - that people who can't figure out how to use our products (or aren't willing to spend hours learning) are just dumb and shouldn't be allowed near a computer. That's stupid and toxic. The fact is, it is hard to design user-friendly software. It requires programmers to step outside our own heads and think like people who aren't us, and who may be uncomfortable with or even afraid of computers - usually because of bad experiences with badly-designed software. A lot of people's defining experiences with technology are (still) like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy, having figured out he needs to step only on the floor tiles that spell the name of God, sets his foot on the first letter - and promptly falls through the floor.
When the first iPhone came out in 2009(?), the really remarkable thing about it wasn't the touchscreen, or the beautifully simple form factor. The remarkable thing was that it somehow worked exactly how you'd expect, despite being the first mainstream device of its kind. It should be a point of pride to create software that is robust while being easy to use and hard to screw up.
And, of course, we need to assume that some of our users will be evil, and build in protections that are active by default. Software that exposes its users to harm is like a bridge with unsupported sections. No competent engineer would sign off on such a design, and neither should we.
/rant
Aye. You see this all the time in homebrew or free software or things like that. The kind of often very useful programs you find thrown together for a specific purpose and distrusted free on the internet or the like. UI and UX always comes last and is often barely considered.
UI/UX design is long and hard and annoying and often not fun or clever and requires the ability to approach your own work from the perspective of someone who doesn't understand it, which is anywhere from very difficult to basically impossible which is why testing is so valuable.
Well it's not considered because that's not the problem they are trying to solve and it's not even really in the overall goals at all except for maybe the biggest protects. Once the problem is solved you're done and you could be working on the next fun/interesting thing, or you can go back and try to make it easier to use, but you can already use it for its intended purpose so why bother? It's not like improving UX will make it easier for you to use and a reduction in interface complexity to improve UX can make complex situations require more UI interaction so it might actually worsen things for your use
Until money has been exchanged for goods and services there's not much point in listening to UX complaints IMO
I mean, yes, this is certainly an excellent summation of the attitude that is the root of the problem.
Yep, but explain to me why I should do specific work, that I don't particularly care about, for free at someone else's behest? That's sounding suspiciously like a job
It is absolutely a good thing that Zoom is making their product more foolproof. We should try to protect fools from undue consequences of their foolishness. We should also try to educate fools so they're not fools any more. Those approaches can coexist in this context.
Here's the thing though - they're not fools. Or ignorant. Or any one of a number of pejorative terms the tech community uses to denigrate users who are not technically skilled. What they are is not possessing the skills we have because of their differing interests. The tech community needs to stop treating non-technical users as mentally defective because they don't share the same interests as them.
Given the kind of problems that crop up in testing of any kind, I think you are vastly overestimating the ability of designers/programmers/etc to effectively predict end-user behaviour in order to try and cast the people in question as malevolent. There is, after all, a reason we have all these kinds of testing. And even then you don't catch everything.
The problem isn't that they're not catching everything. The problem is the terminology that is routinely used to talk about (and too often mock) end users. And yeah, when I was a younger, more ignorant Hedgie, I used to make those jokes as well because they're easy to reach for, especially when one is frustrated. We need to stop talking about end users as mentally defective, and start considering that they do see computers and such as tools to accomplish the things they see as important.
Posts
Dominoes is hardly alone in this. It's basically everybody.
They're actually decent at it, industry-wise. There's a lot of ways to design websites that are considered good practice that are wholly incompatible with screen readers, especially if you're trying to hide IP or systems design.
It's the pop up Dominos ads that are splashed across their storefront that likely break with ad blockers.
I wouldn't put it past the site to fight against adblocker use, as some of these ads appear to be pushed at the 'correct' moment for the upsell.
Like at checkout, or as a time limited deal when you spend too long on the site.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
It wasn't a win. If anything it was a loss for him, because he only won the thing they were kinda EXPECTED to.
https://www.cnet.com/news/trump-calls-net-neutrality-court-decision-a-great-win/
ie, "yes, the FCC can stop their own rules. But by so doing, they abdicate the right to prohibit states from doing so." So congrats, we now have fragmented laws (which means that CA's and WA's laws are on the books, I think).
Which means ISPs have to contend with them and either somehow fragment their throttly bullshit to various net requirements, or adopt those requirements in how they deliver service.
I can only imagine the party of States' Rights (State's Rights?) fully supports California and Washington setting their own standards, right?
You are hilarious.
They already have different policies in different areas. For instance, in the Northeast Comcast has no data caps because they have competition.
... no? no.
Everything you'd list as a negative about the Russian government is a selling point for the 8chan crowd. They love authoritarians because they tell them they're special and that committing violence is good.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I'm honestly not sure if we're talking about 8chan looking around and realizing they're dealing with the Russians or the Russians looking around and realizing they're in it with 8chan...
Why would Russia care? They want to provide a platform to disaffected malcontents festering in America and the EU to get together and talk about ways to destabilize the places they live.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
It's a petri dish to cultivate and run foreign assets.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
(headdesk until the hurting stops)
In this day and age, if you are running an online service and you don't treat security and harassment as major issues, you are by definition incompetent at your job and should find another line of work.
"Is that a thing? Do people actually have that happen to them? For real?"
All the more reason to make sure it's secure and has strong privacy controls!
If people choose to make a session without enabling password-protection and then publicize the link to that session, then... PEBKAC.
I mean... no. Non-public distribution has a very different set of criteria. If you give the zoom out to your accounting department and tim is a dick you can fire him. This is something that isnt possible with semi-public access
No. Just...no. I am absolutely done with this attitude in the tech community, which in my opinion is just another form of victim blaming. There are many reasons that people would want to publicize online meetings, and treating doing so as some sort of error is part of why the tech community keeps failing with regards to abuse and harassment.
For a corporate meeting? What are those reasons?
E: Okay, I read a bit more on this subject and apparently the technology doesn't (or didn't) even permit the identification of who's drawing things on the screen. So if Tim is a dick then nobody will ever know it was him. That's an obvious issue for every imaginable use-case.
I'm glad that they're improving the software. More and better security options are good things. I just think sometimes people don't even employ basic measures like password protection when it would solve all their problems and would only cost them 30 seconds. That's on them.
Security is not something that appears to have been considered at the start.
And in fact, I believe they had implemented features to break sandboxing of browsers so that their application was more convenient.
I'm going to rant for a minute, because this is something I feel very strongly about as a programmer.
People are fallible. People make mistakes. If we design any component of a system - software or otherwise - without taking human error into consideration, we have failed our users. Software should always default to the safest option, and it must offer ways for users to easily and quickly identify and correct their mistakes, especially if they are not expert users.
I am tempted to say there's no such thing as PEBKAC. Obviously it's not literally true, but I believe people who design and write software need to approach it with the attitude that users do not make mistakes; programmers do. A user's available actions and options in a program are entirely defined by us, the programmers; so if the user does something that results in an outcome they didn't want or anticipate, that's on us. We wrote the pathways that allowed that to happen. Maybe our controls need to be more intuitive; maybe the program needs to communicate better what a given option does (and why you'd want to use it); maybe we need better guardrails for naive users. We cannot assume that any user - corporate or private - has the time or inclination to learn our software inside and out. That's not their job! Their job is to do their job, and our job is to support them as seamlessly as possible. If a user has to actively think about how to make our software do what they want, we have not done our job, and we are wasting their time.
There's an attitude in tech that designing user-friendly, fault-tolerant software is somehow beneath us - that people who can't figure out how to use our products (or aren't willing to spend hours learning) are just dumb and shouldn't be allowed near a computer. That's stupid and toxic. The fact is, it is hard to design user-friendly software. It requires programmers to step outside our own heads and think like people who aren't us, and who may be uncomfortable with or even afraid of computers - usually because of bad experiences with badly-designed software. A lot of people's defining experiences with technology are (still) like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy, having figured out he needs to step only on the floor tiles that spell the name of God, sets his foot on the first letter - and promptly falls through the floor.
When the first iPhone came out in 2009(?), the really remarkable thing about it wasn't the touchscreen, or the beautifully simple form factor. The remarkable thing was that it somehow worked exactly how you'd expect, despite being the first mainstream device of its kind. It should be a point of pride to create software that is robust while being easy to use and hard to screw up.
And, of course, we need to assume that some of our users will be evil, and build in protections that are active by default. Software that exposes its users to harm is like a bridge with unsupported sections. No competent engineer would sign off on such a design, and neither should we.
/rant
So if someone's dad, who's 70+, makes a Zoom session with one of their parents who is living in a home, but doesn't understand tech well, he's to blame? This is textbook victim blaming. And this is a very fixable issue by Zoom, by just changing their default settings to require a password and make it so you have to disable the password requirement.
I am reminded of an old and rather infamous SF short story, "The Cold Equations". It is, IMO, not a very good story, as the situation it comes up with to present its moral is just as contrived and implausible as the deus ex machina happy endings it was written in response to, but that moral remains sound: The Universe does not care. It cares not for our feelings, our wishes, or our safety; and if we are careless in turn, bad things can happen.
Which is why, in the real world rather than unsubtle fables, good engineers - civil, electrical, mechanical, and (one would hope) software - take this into account, and build in things like redundancy, safety margins, error checking, and so on. They cannot anticipate everything; but they can and should be expected to be aware of the most common vulnerabilities and failure modes within their chosen field, and take appropriate and reasonable precautions.
I think looking at in terms of blame is a mistake. Yes, I know I used that language in the last post. Forgive me. It's better to start with how a problem can most easily be solved.
The key variables in that situation you described are 1. Zoom had password protection available as an option but left it off by default. 2. The non tech-savvy person chose not to activate password protection. 3. The wide world of 7.8 billion people out there contains many who are willing to abuse others.
1 and 2 are changeable (with the effort of an individual person, even!). 3 is not. We should absolutely take what actions we can to make the world a less hostile place because any measure of progress is progress... but no matter how hard you, I, and the next hundred thousand people fight, 3 will still be true for the foreseeable future. Anybody who doesn't take that into account is making an error. It doesn't mean they deserve to be abused, but it does mean that they will be. One must treat with the world as it exists, not as it should exist.
It is absolutely a good thing that Zoom is making their product more foolproof. We should try to protect fools from undue consequences of their foolishness. We should also try to educate fools so they're not fools any more. Those approaches can coexist in this context.
I agree with this. But, for the record, a huge number of people get very angry about passwords. I find it all the time when I'm setting up cameras, routers, and other devices in people's homes. Asking them to create a unique, strong password often results in me getting screamed at about how fed up they are with having to deal with passwords all the time. Discussion of security is pretty much wasting my breath.
Hell, my wife uses the same password for multiple sites, and she gets angry with me when she needs a password to sign a new device into Netflix. "Is this one of those stupid random passwords again?"
Nothing allows you to use correct horse battery staple, which doesn't help matters.
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Protecting meetings with a password is a decent step, but clumsy and annoying in a business environment when you are dealing with multiple back-to-back Zoom calls throughout the day. I'd much prefer if Zoom defaulted to "only authenticated users can join meetings" (e.g. if you haven't been explicitly invited, you can't join) instead of "anyone with the Meeting ID can join a meeting". Of course this feature is not even available at the Free tier, which is insanity.
Aye. You see this all the time in homebrew or free software or things like that. The kind of often very useful programs you find thrown together for a specific purpose and distrusted free on the internet or the like. UI and UX always comes last and is often barely considered.
UI/UX design is long and hard and annoying and often not fun or clever and requires the ability to approach your own work from the perspective of someone who doesn't understand it, which is anywhere from very difficult to basically impossible which is why testing is so valuable.
Here's the thing though - they're not fools. Or ignorant. Or any one of a number of pejorative terms the tech community uses to denigrate users who are not technically skilled. What they are is not possessing the skills we have because of their differing interests. The tech community needs to stop treating non-technical users as mentally defective because they don't share the same interests as them.
This is why The Cold Equations is such a bad story - Campbell was so determined to have his "hard men making hard choices" polemic that he left plot holes so large you could fly spaceships through them, and one of the biggest is that carelessness in the execution of one's duties (like, say, securing a fucking spacecraft) is not "the Universe is unfeeling", but "someone fucked up somewhere, and that someone needs to be punished for said fuckup."
Given the kind of problems that crop up in testing of any kind, I think you are vastly overestimating the ability of designers/programmers/etc to effectively predict end-user behaviour in order to try and cast the people in question as malevolent. There is, after all, a reason we have all these kinds of testing. And even then you don't catch everything.
Well it's not considered because that's not the problem they are trying to solve and it's not even really in the overall goals at all except for maybe the biggest protects. Once the problem is solved you're done and you could be working on the next fun/interesting thing, or you can go back and try to make it easier to use, but you can already use it for its intended purpose so why bother? It's not like improving UX will make it easier for you to use and a reduction in interface complexity to improve UX can make complex situations require more UI interaction so it might actually worsen things for your use
Until money has been exchanged for goods and services there's not much point in listening to UX complaints IMO
I mean, yes, this is certainly an excellent summation of the attitude that is the root of the problem.
Yep, but explain to me why I should do specific work, that I don't particularly care about, for free at someone else's behest? That's sounding suspiciously like a job
The problem isn't that they're not catching everything. The problem is the terminology that is routinely used to talk about (and too often mock) end users. And yeah, when I was a younger, more ignorant Hedgie, I used to make those jokes as well because they're easy to reach for, especially when one is frustrated. We need to stop talking about end users as mentally defective, and start considering that they do see computers and such as tools to accomplish the things they see as important.