Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, October 28, 2022
Odds and Ends
1. A Microsoft honcho fell for a security meme, but it happened because so many real security holes are at least equally ridiculous.
A large e-commerce site hands out personal information at the cost of entering an email address. Another site securely stores passwords, but sends them out over email in plain text. Some of the responses he got when he pointed them out topped the flaws.
But my "favorite" passage came from a Hacker News comment thread on the post and illustrates the free pass too many people give to "the government:"
I remember admissions [forms containing] Aadhar (UID of India) listed in a server with directory listing enabled. Response was - the site is hosted in a secure government datacenter. No chance of leaking data."The government" is staffed by fallible human beings and it is often engaged in things it is ill-suited for and shouldn't be doing. The people there often work under perverse incentives.
Given the above, people should be even more suspicious of government "security" measures than they are, and eager to get its paws off our personal information.
2. It's not just me: "Most People -- 92% -- Never Finish Online Job Applications."
"On the positive side, applications on average took only 5 minutes to complete," Wierzbicki said. "But there are an exorbitant number of steps and clicks involved. After clicking 'Apply,' candidates must make nine more clicks on average before even getting into the application. Along the way, they are asked to create user accounts and passwords, they are being asked to answer the same question more than once, or they are being asked to enter data that is already contained in the resume that is also being uploaded."It's a GUI-dominant world, so I half-expect to flirt with a stress injury to my wrist any time I fill out one of these; It's the last sentence that describes what drives me crazy: Aren't computers supposed to make things easier by remembering things so we don't have to serve as unpaid data entry clerks?
It's like someone who has never used a computer before has designed some of these forms.
3. Some people get REALLY confused when people actually use their own middle names. The latest example is a piece in the British press about a footballer whose "real name [is] throwing off" fans.
That sounded odd, so I clicked the headline only to discover that Harry Maguire does what I do with my real name and my pen name: He uses his middle name most of the time, in the same way most people use their first.
Mini rant: Harry is indeed (part of) his "real" name -- just like his first name is.
Yes, this is somewhat unusual, but it isn't as if it's unheard of: J. Edgar Hoover and F. Scott Fitzgerald immediately come to mind, and the most cursory search turns up tons of pop celebrities who do this, such as Mindy Kaling, Ashton Kutcher, and Garth Brooks. So does the eminent historian C. Bradley Thompson.
And yet, I've had people flip my legal name around and say things like, "Oh, so your real name is..." too many times to count.
I guess one man's headline is another man's head-scratcher.
| I also share a name with a rock musician, but not this one. Fun fact: The term assclown was coined on the set of this movie. |
4. 1.5 million people use this guy's hobby project as an alternative to Photoshop. It's called Photopea. It's web-based and I am very impressed after playing around with it the other day.
The developer recently hosted an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, where he received a feature request and implemented it during the AMA.
-- CAV
2 comments:
Yo, Gus, you mention, "He uses his middle name most of the time, in the same way most people use their first." It's amusing when people encounter different naming conventions more generally. The first that comes to mind is a (female) friend who was pursuing a Russian woman and was confused by the names there. "So would it be okay if I used her middle name?" "Russians don't have middle names." "Yes they do, hers is Andreyevna." "That's not a middle name, that's a patronymic. Her father's Andrei." "So I couldn't call her that?" "Of course not. Unless you use both her given name and her patronymic. But then that would be so formal she'd never go out with you because that's how her boss or her teacher would address her. Forget the patronymic. It's not like a middle name." Though I'm not sure why she thought to use a middle name in any case...
And there's a couple of amusing examples I can think of with Chinese names, the first basically being Chinese or Korean authors blindly following instructions that initials are used for first names in references and only last names are used in full--so they use the initials of the family name because it comes first and the full given name because it comes last! More journals should specify given name and family name, not first name and last name--and I have actually edited revisions of authors' instructions for a couple of journals and got to introduce that change, I'm pleased to say.
Second was a time I saw someone address a Chinese woman as Mrs. Li, say, where Li is her husband's family name. Not only is that not the custom, it would traditionally be considered rather irritating, I think--traditionally it was considered incestuous to marry someone with the same family name, and wives never took their husband's names. Chinese culture and law traditionally were very strict about the degree of relatedness allowed for marriage, and so even if you did not have an ancestor in common despite the same family name, it just was not readily done. (Amusingly, if you look at late imperial encyclopedias, they rated the degree of civilization of other nations by how many distinct kinship terms they had and how many degrees of kinship were the basis for incest taboos. Chinese was the most civilized, of course, with I think 65 kinship terms; Koreans were second with around 62. English doesn't even distinguish different types of uncles, never mind the utter lack of rigor in naming cousins. What barbarism!)
And as you probably know, it's not that common for Japanese women to take their husband's family name. An amusing example is "She Blinded Me with Science," that song by Thomas Dolby. "Miss Sakamoto" is in fact the then-wife of his collaborator Ryuichi Sakamoto (famous in the west for certain soundtracks, and super-big in Japan)--only her name is actually Akiko Yano; she's a famous jazz pianist in Japan. But yes, that's her in the video. And no, she was neither Miss nor Sakamoto, but the name wasn't random.
Very interesting, and I do appreciate you pointing out that Given Name/Family Name is a more general and useful distinction that First/Last.
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