The whole HTTPS push is a cynical and perfidious effort by Google (Alphabet) and Mozilla. Here’s why.

I wonder if they’ve even tried to quantify the outages they’ll cause. So many sites are simply residing on a hard disk somewhere, served by an ancient version of some unknown and not maintained server software, chugging along as someone keeps paying the electric bill, and replaces a broken hardware component when needed. The people who created the site might not have understood HTTPS or how to deploy it, and many are long gone. Some of course are dead. We are certainly not all sitting around doing nothing waiting for a handful of programmers on a mail list to make us perform a ridiculous act of security theater for our blog posts written in 2002.

Most of these sites do not need HTTPS. It isn’t an issue for my ancient blog posts. Or yours.

Even those who style themselves as guardians of the web seem intent on destroying it with no lack of celerity. Mozilla, having turned its back on allowing the user control (one of the core tenets of the early web), is also on the side of evil with this push to HTTPS which just throws so much of what made the web great in the garbage.

Dave Winer is one of the few who actually understands the issues at play here and hasn’t been infected by propaganda.

None of my active sites will ever move to HTTPS. If that is ever required of me, they will all be shuttered.

Hey ya’ll, it doesn’t seem like you can change the console resolution of a Linux guest running on HyperV, but you totally can.

Here’s how:

Edit /etc/default/grub with your favorite editor of choice.

Here it be:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Change this line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

To this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=hyperv_fb:1600x1200"

Then in a console type:

sudo update-grub

I believe the max might be 1920×1200 but I didn’t try it, so I don’t know for sure.

I can’t remember where I pilfered this from, but half of all Americans live in the red counties, half in the orange:

The world was better with far more blogs.

The idiots, however, have won.

I’m glad sexual harassment is being addressed. The scale of it is vast.

The unfortunate part, though, is that the way it is being addressed will lead to much loneliness for many, with the real perpetrators largely going unpunished (except a few high-profile cases that we are seeing now).

Essentially, sociologically speaking what will occur is that a few very-visible castigations and banishments will happen — as much as you can punish someone already enormously rich like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. While in the world most of us inhabit, what will occur is that this push will be used a bit against actual harassing men but just as much if not more to punish undesirable or socially awkward men.

This is the Amanda Marcotte model of sexual mores enforcement and competition limitation, and it’s what we’ll actually get in the real world.

I know people will hate to hear it and hate me for saying it, but unfortunately it’s what will be.

The UI for Skype for Business (replacement for Lync) is just dreadful. I am not sure how it is possible to fail so hard, to use space so poorly, and to misunderstand what an application needs UI/UX-wise to be successful.

Fuck all modern designers.

Have been reading more academic writing than usual lately.

I *hate* it. Academic writing and how academics are required to write if they want their papers to be published is just horrifically bad.

Strange how norms develop, and how they are enforced.

I have no idea if this book is any good (though I do like Bulkin), but the title is frickin’ fantastic.

Wow. All of the sudden, I like Green Day.

That is very much like something I’d do. I have very low tolerance for men harassing women and if I see it in person, I step up.

Fuck yeah Billie Joe. Who knew he was the real deal? Well, now I know.

About the below, the endpoint of all that — as in, what will actually happen in the real world — is that women will only end up interacting with the worst men, as that sort of social sanction doesn’t have any impact on them.

Meanwhile, men with good intentions will follow social conventions and not interact at all.

Strange how many human “solutions” have exactly the opposite of the intended effect.