OSNews

A few users have shared some conspiracy theories about the privacy violation of using gravatar services. I'd like to explore them quickly.

One user shared that we should change our privacy policy since we now share email addresses. I'd like to point out that that assertion is completely false and, frankly, absurd. The best way to crack an md5 string, usually a password, is by comparing the encrypted string to a known md5 string, in what is called a "lookup table." This is why using a dictionary word as your password is so bad: comparing your password to a known string will quickly allow someone to find your password.

But, that's just it, we're encrypting an EMAIL address. There are hundreds of millions of addresses in this world, if not billions, and no one keeps a table of every email address every invested, hashed. It wouldn't make sense: it rarely pays off, and there are so many ways to get email addresses off the net with so much less effort. So of course, this fear is nonsense.

One user suggested a script could crawl the net and find your email address everywhere and build a profile. Perhaps. I work in reality, and I think this is too much effort for too little payoff. You still won't have an email or a real name.

In fact, there are several ID services out there, but in the end, it's just not that hard to piece together pieces of someone identity based on what they share and post online. So any entity using gravatar as their starting point is wasting their time: there are so many more effective ways to harvest personal data - start with Google, Twitter, Facebook public pages, - it just seems like being scared the window panes can be cracked with a hammer, when your house has no doors.

There are several legitimate reasons to be concerned about identity today, but gravatar use shouldn't be one of them.

As some of you have noticed, there is a new page selector box in the sidebar and a new set of tabs across the front page. We hope you enjoy these as we "feel out" what "Page 2" is and should be.

What you may not realize is that there have been a lot of changes behind the scenes. OSNews is now using [link]http://jquery.com|| ||jQuery[/link] for our javascript framework, and as a result, we have several new abilities available to us. Expect to see new improvements over the next weeks or months.

Also, some of you may notice that we now serve our JS and CSS "minified." Much of OSNews is served from cache, so in order to create the best and most reliable site experience, we're now pushing regular updates aimed at increasing performance and usability even more.

Your comments are welcome.

After a silly-long wait in line (7:30-11:30) at an AT&T store, I'm off and running with my iPhone 3G. Push email and Exchange syncing are flippin' awesome. App Store is awesome.

Anyone else up and running on their 3G yet?

I'm calling it. I may look like a fool in eight days, but I'm calling it.

I just read [link]http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/12/att_now_showing_iphon... ||this story on Gizmodo[/link] about some "placeholder text" on the AT&T site that mentions the "iPhone Black." Apple is out of iPhones. It's here. I'm predicting a new iPhone tomorrow or next Tuesday in the Apple store.

I know that AT&T employees were told to limit vacation in June, but there are lots of little tidbits (e.g. Italy launch in "weeks") that lead me to this: I have a sneaking suspicion that we'll see a new iPhone sooner than most think.

As some of you will immediately notice, I've disabled themeing on the site. Very few users - fewer than 1% actually - use themes at all, and we are preparing to make some site structure changes that will make maintaining themes very challenging. As a result, we've disabled themes and we will be rolling out our changes in the coming weeks or months. When we're confident our output is stable, we'll look into re-introducing themes in a new, improved, and much more complete fashion. In the meantime, the site will only be offered with our default skin. Thanks.

We just migrated OSNews to a bigger, badder multi-processor/quad-core server. If you see some issues over the weekend, report them here (remember it can take up to 48 hours for your ISP to update their nameservers!)

It's been pretty much decided internally that what you see here at www4.osnews.com is not going to be the final look and feel of OSNews v4, but it probably will be an option as an alternative theme. I've made some style tweaks to the look and feel and would like to know your thoughts.

Only constructive feedback will be addressed.

Over the last few days, I finally made some long overdue changes to OSNews.

You may have noticed that we can now close conversations and news items. When closed, comments will no longer be allowed. This will be useful for threads that degrade into a flamewar or become overridden by trolls.

As suggested by one of our users, like trusted users whose comments start a score of 2, users with negative trust will start at 0 and users with really low trust will start at -1.

The new moderation system is done and works well, but I haven't turned it on yet because it will corrupt the experience of v3. At some point in the near future, I will "port" these changes over to v3 and make it active here.

The "average score" indicator has been removed as well. It was never a good stat, since it was easily manipulated. I am currently exploring a better option to indicate the "quality" of a user. One possibility is exposing trust, which was previously hidden.

I have been hard at work on writing the new and improved moderation system. Since I pushed out loads of new functionality, I have also been cooking up some fun easter eggs, like for example:

I use at work, at home, and on many servers.

Anyway, here is a glimpse at what I'm working on:



More details to follow soon.

Bookmarks are comments you want to refer back to later.
Starred stories are stories you want to refer back to later.
Recommendations don't have a great place in the UI. The question is: do we need them at all? Do you think we should just yank recommendations from the site for v4?

More: http://www4.osnews.com/thread?239461