Rants Posts 6–10 of 14

Click to Play

Even when think you are being safe, browsing the web can be a dicey affair. Websites use Flash to initiate “drive by downloads” or to track you sureptitiously. More worrisome is the constant stream of Java exploits (37 so far this year and it’s only March). Even mainstream sites can get hacked and end up serving malicious code to your browser. However, there is an easy solution supported by all major browsers and it’s called Click to Play.

Click to Play temporarily disables all your browser plugins. When a website embeds a Flash file or a Java applet, you will see a grey, clickable rectangle. You can ignore it or click inside the area to enable the content on just that page.

Not only does this keep you safer, but it will also speed up web browsing because Flash and Java contents are not loaded automatically. And you can stop worrying about a plugin crashing your browser.

So here’s how to enable it in your browser of choice.

The Reality of Wealth Distribution in America is Not What You Think

Watch this video and decide for yourself if the current reality of wealth (not income) distribution in the U.S. is healthy and/or fair.

Delete anyone's eBay listing

I was just the victim of an eBay fraud attack which resulted not only in my eBay listing being canceled but also of the entire listing being deleted with no way for eBay to recover it.

I had listed my old iPhone and was happy to see people bid over $200 for it. The listing was eventually won by a certain shahid.quraishi. However, within 45 minutes of the auction ending, I received an email from eBay saying,

Unfortunately, we had to cancel bids and purchases for the following buyer because they're no longer registered on eBay: shahid.quraishi

What eBay didn’t mention is that they completely deleted my listing. It no longer shows up in the Selling section of My eBay and when I called eBay Support they said it was completely removed from the system with no way to get it back.

Let's Teach Kids to Code

When kids first enter primary school, they spend their time doing creative things like drawing, painting, building, and experimenting. But after those first years, the creativity stops. Dr. Resnick is working to change that. He and his team have developed new ways to help older students engage with technology in order to encourage them to create and experiment the way they did in kindergarten.

Researchers Identify the Cause of Stop-and-Go Traffic

When I commuted to Tysons from DC, I would have lots of time stuck in stop-and-go traffic to consider the reasons and causes for traffic slowdowns. It seemed that often, we’d all be slowing down and then speeding up again for no reason. I always speculated that sudden braking could cause a wave of slowdowns that would propagate backwards for hours/miles, leading to the annoying slow-down-speed-up cycle.

A team of Japanese researchers recently created an experiment to show that the effect of breaking can easily create traffic jams. It’s all just physics. Their experiment shows that when the density of cars on the road passes a certain threshold, traffic jams will be caused simply by the multi-particle interactions of the system. In layman’s terms, drivers inconsistently hitting their breaks will cause a wave of stop-and-go backups behind them.