Technology, law, life, and more.
Discusses web design, web development, and sites on the Internet.
It’s generally an honour to be appointed to serve as the head of a federal agency. After the revelation this morning that President-elect Trump will nominate a S&C partner to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, the whole law firm’s website appears to be down because of the increased interest:
A friend directed my attention to a startup-y website selling “cheap smartphone [insurance] coverage” for “as little as $3 a month”. Right at the top of the Penn-branded subdomain (penn.getcovered.co) was an iPhone mockup showing the Penn shield:
I highly doubt they went through all the trouble of actually licensing the trademark from the university. Penn’s policy on use of its logos by external entities provides (emphasis added):
Outside sponsors of University programs or activities often seek to use University names or insignia in promotional or advertising materials. While the University is pleased to recognize the contributions of sponsors, such recognition must not suggest University endorsement of the sponsor’s activities. Therefore, University names or insignia may not be used in connection with any outside entity’s name or logo without prior approval of the Secretary of the University. In general, the Secretary will approve uses which recognize or acknowledge the sponsor’s contribution to the University program or activity. Uses which, in the Secretary’s judgment, may suggest University endorsement or approval of the sponsor’s goods or services will not be permitted.
The big issue, of course, is the risk of confusion — by consumers, etc — who might think that the service is sponsored or endorsed by the university. There would be a pretty good prima facie case for trademark infringement, especially since the registrant behind the domain name appears to be a Stanford grad with no connection to Penn.
But to top it all off, the site seems to be lying on its face. The Penn page includes a quote from a “Leah B, Philadelphia, PA”:
but the exact same quote is used on the non-Penn-branded homepage of GetCovered, this time from “Leah B, Washington, DC”!
As an alum, I certainly don’t want the university’s shield to be used in connection with this company. What they’re doing is strangely reminiscent of the Campus Backup service that OCM was marketing a few years ago — which shut down after my blog post overtook their site in search engines.
Update (2015-11-02): a quick Google search of the opening sentence of the quote directed me to the source — a 2012 comment on a Gawker post by a Gawker contributor, no obvious connection to GetCovered.
When I first came to Penn, the website for the Nominations & Elections Committee looked like this:
I set out to redevelop and redesign this, upgrading it from a static HTML site edited over SFTP to a WordPress CMS on Canvas. More importantly, the website redesign in 2012 needed to fit the rebranding that Penn underwent that academic year. In other words, I wanted it to look more like the university’s design. (An email to the Communications office responsible for web assets clarified that we could, in fact, do this.)
The YYYY-MM-DD format (%Y-%m-%d) is an internationally accepted, and standardized (ISO 8601) date format. The entire ISO 8601 system is based on big-endian ordering (greatest-to-least units) within the string, so… year, month, day, hour, minute, second. It makes a hell lot more sense than the American traditional MM/DD/YY format. So much so, in fact, that ANSI and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have both adopted it. In some countries, like China, the traditional format in the language follows the same big-endianness: 2006年1月29日, which spells out 2006-01-29.
The advantage of this format isn’t just for programmers, where sorting dates and times requires no special logic (i.e. 2014-01-31 unambiguously precedes 2014-02-01, even if they were both written without delimiter symbols).
The format also eliminates any confusion between the fields. For instance, though colloquial American 11/12/13 should be interpreted as November 12, __13, it could just as easily pass for December 13, 2011. There is no room for confusion in 2013-11-12.
XKCD says it best:
Now, it’s understandable that maybe Google needs to recognize people’s different formats of entering dates in their colloquial formats, like MM/DD/YY. But there is no excuse not to recognize the YYYY-MM-DD format.
Even more so, because the date in my screenshot, 1995-09-24, has no possible misinterpretation. To any rational human being, there’s no way to think that this is the 9th day of the 24th month (!) of 1995.
BuzzFeed is not known to be a shining beacon of quality journalism. It has a reputation for link-bait headlines (“38 Crazy Things You Never Knew About Kangaroos”) leading to GIF-laden lists. It publishes quizzes (answer a bunch of seemingly random questions before a script shows you the logical conclusion of your answers) so unscientific that no one should ever take them seriously for big life decisions.
BuzzFeed thrives on the short attention span of Generation Z—children born into an age when they can expect news to be spoonfed to them in bullet points and images.
The people behind The Onion certainly saw right through this. They recently launched “ClickHole — Because all content deserves to go viral”, to parody both BuzzFeed and every other content-aggregating website that feeds on social media frenzies. (Worth mentioning: ClickHole parodies far more than BuzzFeed itself; it even incorporates references to “Upworthy, the feel-good viral-video site with a cloying habit of telling you what to think about its clips before you’ve even watched them.”)
But BuzzFeed has also published some high-quality longform pieces, dubbed BuzzReads. These are serious articles that cover the entire spectrum of subject matter, from politics, to technology, to rape and social justice. They’re of sufficient quality that they could easily pass for an extended newspaper exposé or magazine centrepiece. Targeting a more mature audience seeking longer reads, these feature stories often carry the same socially-liberal perspectives espoused by the rest of the site, while employing words more eloquent than their pop-culture GIFs could ever be.
I’ve had my doubts that BuzzFeed can sell itself in both markets. As great as the quality of their content may be, and as awesome as their access to reliable sources might be (the site has a DC operation with press pass access), it’s hard to “[break] down the divide between the light and the serious.” It’s a challenge the site’s editors realize:
“I think we need to show people that it’s up to us to write it in a way that has the context, has a compelling narrative to it. If you give them more of this and mix it in with fluff, and it’s treated equally by the publication, the public will start to treat it the same way too.”
Two years later, I think they’re starting to make some headway, at least among the social media users who are more publishers than consumers. People are sharing BuzzFeed’s longform essays on social media, using the site’s content to express beautifully the thoughts they could not write themselves.
What’s the reception like? I think many people on the consuming end of content are still sometimes skeptical. And I’m not sure that many people associate BuzzFeed sufficiently with quality content that they would be willing even to give reading BuzzReads a chance.
Case in point? This ignorant comment posted by a BuzzFeed reader on a post about the termination of American Apparel CEO, Dov Charney.
That article wasn’t even a longform essay. BuzzFeed had, through an anonymous leak, obtained an exclusive copy of the CEO’s termination letter, which no other news outlet reportedly had done. It was news, and it was worldly.
Apparently too worldly for this one commenter, who seems to think that only funny, entertaining, and “pertinent” (whatever that means in this context) content deserves to be published on a site from which they expect only entertainment.
I would be a fool to equate this one person’s opinion with everyone else’s. However, this is merely one example of the derisive attitude towards long online content I’ve witnessed first-hand—scroll through my Facebook timeline, or my friends’, and you will certainly find that GIFs and short interactive quizzes get more likes and click-throughs than essays about anything.
Why is that? It’s not like everyone is working 18-hour days in finance… Why don’t we, college students and young professionals, seem to have time for intellectual engagement outside of the classroom, on the Internet?
This old lady learns about the Internet for the first time, in Orange is the New Black—my newest favourite show. “But people are still stupid, right?” Indeed, the very technologies that made information so much easier to access, also made it easier to seek information in the shortest tidbits possible. Why read an entire screen of text, if you can get the essentials in 10 animated images?
There’s something deeply disturbing about this trend. It’s different—markedly different—from high school classes recognizing comic books as valid literature. This is a trend that makes education and self-expression more difficult, and less valuable in the eyes of this generation.
Media in our technological age must seek not only to earn pageviews, but also spark deep, insightful conversations about important contemporary issues. Instead of stooping to the lowest common denominator, as BuzzFeed seems to have done in its early launch, they have to champion the cause of literacy and engagement.
Why are genuine discussions about ethnic conflict or self-determination (indeed, a late-night discussion I’ve had quite a few times this week with my friends) outside of the academic environment so rare? Maybe, in part, it’s because of the Internet we consume.
On one of my sites running WordPress, Akismet (and other antispam plugins) is not installed. In some ways, it has served as a honeypot, revealing interesting tidbits about how spambots work.
Fascinatingly, there were several hundred of these comments, all identical to each other. They look like templates for comments to be generated by spam-producing software, except that the software never processed the templates and posted them verbatim instead:
I’m calling out The Daily Pennsylvanian for worst uses of Flash, ever. Flash animations make sense when interactivity is demanded, and only then, in rare cases.
A couple of months ago, this happened: a post lauding the university for winning the 2012 CIO 100 Award for mobile-friendly sites, using Flash as the only content on the page:
To top it off, guess what the mobile site shows on a phone?
Yeah, that’s right. A blank article.
I wouldn’t be so mad if it were a one-time thing. But then this illustration of our commencement speakers was published this week:
Again, a blank article shows on mobile. And it’s not just my phone that does this: development of Flash for mobile was halted nearly 2 years ago, and iOS has clearly not had Flash since the start.
But my gripe isn’t with Flash itself, or even with mobile compatibility — I’m just upset that people are using a medium that doesn’t make sense for things that shouldn’t even be interactive. I get it; college kids like to play around with software, or whatever. But you guys gotta stop this.
… I expect the answers to be right.
Namecheap, a domain registrar and web services provider, is currently running a Twitter contest with tech/domain/company trivia, awarding free domain registrations to participants, and top prizes of a Macbook Air and iPads to the top of the leaderboard. To be clear, I am not competing in this contest, and my first involvement with it was with this question. In other words, I’m not posting this because I want anything out of it—I’m posting it just to point out the mistakes.
[#115] What record does one need to edit on his/her DNS settings to speed up domain propagation?
— Namecheap.com (@Namecheap) December 21, 2012
Inconsistent tenses aside (one… his/her), the most important parts to emphasize are:
The best answer, although not necessarily the 100% correct answer (see below), as I answered in my tweet, is the Start of Authority (SOA) record. About three other individuals on Twitter agreed with me, facing hundreds with a different answer.
In fact, the Refresh and Minimum TTL data entries in the SOA record are responsible for domain zone propagation, whether to a secondary nameserver or to the broader Internet.
Hundreds of others poured in their answers, most lending their support to the answer that Namecheap ultimately declared correct: Time to Live (TTL).
This is (mostly) wrong. For two reasons:
Ultimately, the question posed was a bad one. The traditional understanding of the SOA minimum TTL is that it is the shortest frequency with which other nameservers will check against the authoritative/primary nameserver—at least according to this DNS service provider. While the original specification, RFC 1912, would completely agree with me here in declaring…
Minimum: The default TTL … This is by far the most important timer. Set this as large as is comfortable given how often you update your nameserver.
RFC 2308 changed things so that the minimum TTL in the SOA record affects only negative caching: e.g. you visit ‘doesntexist.namecheap.com’, it doesn’t work, the ISP’s nameserver caches it, and the minimum TTL specifies how long before your ISP’s nameserver fetches that data again. It’s not supposed to be used as a lower bound for update frequency anymore.
That having been said, given the constraints of record and domain propagation, we can be certain that TTL on individual resource records is an incorrect answer that was erroneously, but not maliciously, accepted.
</rant>
