Month: October 2017

The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images

“The Birth And Death Of Privacy: 3,000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images” is a rather extensive look at the history of privacy.

Privacy, as we understand it, is only about 150 years old.  Humans do have an instinctual desire for privacy. However, for 3,000 years, cultures have nearly always prioritized convenience and wealth over privacy.

I said “there is no such thing as privacy, and there never was” way too many times.  But I never had to go deep into the subject to defend it.  This article, on the other hand, does a much better job defending the argument than I ever cared to.

UI Museum: Turbo Pascal 7.1

Ilya Birman continues his (now) series of the historical user interfaces with the post “UI Museum: Turbo Pascal 7.1“. (I’ve linked previously to his post about Norton Commander).

Turbo Pascal wasn’t my first programming language (some variation of BASIC was), but I’ve spent countless hours coding in Turbo Pascal, both for my studies and outside.

It’s interesting to see how different and, at the same time, similar those interfaces of the past are to those of today.  Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have gone a long way, but their basic principles, as well as some shortcuts and UI elements, are very similar to the 30-old tools.

One thing that I find in common with Ilya’s comments is that the teachers didn’t know or cover all the options.  The information was scarce and Google wasn’t around.  For many, there was also a language barrier, rendering even the available documentation useless.

Oh, good old times!

Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency

Dropbox Tech Blog has this in-depth article on “Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency“.  It goes over everything from hardware and low level operating system stuff all the way up to the application level.

Great job, guys!

I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets

“I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets” is a must read for any of you who believe in online privacy.  Here’s a quote to get you started:

At 9.24pm (and one second) on the night of Wednesday 18 December 2013, from the second arrondissement of Paris, I wrote “Hello!” to my first ever Tinder match. Since that day I’ve fired up the app 920 times and matched with 870 different people. I recall a few of them very well: the ones who either became lovers, friends or terrible first dates. I’ve forgotten all the others. But Tinder has not.

The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Legit Hookup Sites and their associations.

With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye from personaldata.io and human rights lawyer Ravi Naik, I emailed Tinder requesting my personal data and got back way more than I bargained for.

Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many times I connected, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened … the list goes on.