If they valued my privacy so much, they would simply not be using the 100s of tracking cookies on their site. My privacy is not valued, nor is anyone else’s. We’ve known this for a very, very long time. In recent times the biggest culprits of personal data harvesting have been forced to make this more obvious because of the EU’s privacy laws, particularly GDPR. They now have to display to visitors their use of cookies, and seek clear consent to proceed on that basis.
Nevertheless, I have observed that many major sites are flouting the law by not making the consent process clear, by using opt-out instead of opt-in, and by not providing any kind of “reject all” (even if that only applies to non-essential cookies). Indeed, it would seem that they have adopted a strategy of presenting a massive “cookie notice” overlay that has a big “I accept” button and a refinement process that is so convoluted that almost nobody will go through it. The “I accept” button is essentially coercion.
It would also seem to be the case that some sites have already dropped cookies into your browser while they are presenting the big cookie notice and waiting for your consent!
This has to stop.
I trust the CJEU and the various associated national data protection agencies will be slapping more fines as time goes on, and hopefully the message will get through.
The potential for physical money to be the vector for the virus has encouraged every capable society to shift towards card-based payment, preferably contactless at the point of sale. As a consequence I, like many other people, stopped using cash.
In fact, it has been about a year since I last used cash, and I’m getting to like it. One downside of this is that now all of my transactions are being tracked by someone. With the demise of cash comes the demise of privacy.
So now I predict that there will be a growing popular demand for a true digital cash technology, one that has all the convenience of traditional cash, the added benefits of personal accounting (not to mention the added hygiene), and without loss of transactional anonymity. That’s going to be quite a challenge.
I won’t give the perpetrators the benefit of a mention or link, but it is really troubling when those responsible for a top level DNS domain don’t adhere to their own rules by allowing unethical use of a domain name during the current global crisis. A phrase strongly associated with public health is undoubtedly going to encourage people to enter into their browser’s address bar a site name based on that phrase. Sadly, these unsuspecting people will then be presented with the latest conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination tripe and bizarre political agendas.
During the current worldwide calamity it is not only the search engines and social media companies that need to keep a close eye on their services. All of the infrastructure providers have an equal responsibility. The problem for the public is that any attempt to bring issues to the attention of the providers merely gives publicity to those who are abusing the services, which just makes things worse because the providers are ignoring the complaints.
Claims about removing tens of thousands of inappropriate messages/pages/sites may sound good, but there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of such cases. And the problem just keeps growing. The future of public discourse, education and engagement is under threat.
It looks like we’re polishing off the main course served to us by 2020. I summarised the first 6 months of this calamity back in June, at which point the coronavirus infections had passed 7 million globally. It is now more than ten times that number! According to Johns Hopkins University 75 million people have been infected and over 1.5 million people have lost their lives. (2020-12-19) Countries across the world are either in, or going into lockdowns of varying severity.
Despite these shocking numbers, we have some good news. There are now several vaccines – two of which have been approved in the US, EU approval only a matter of days away, two others rolling out in Russia and China, and at least one more in a few months. We’re being assured that the approved vaccines have been developed so rapidly not because of cutting corners, but because of intense effort, parallel activities and pre-emptive resourcing (manufacturing ahead of regulatory approval). Naturally this means that a lot of work went to waste. There were many fruitless lines of investigation, much production that eventually had to be dumped, lots of promising developments that failed for one reason or another.
Nevertheless, we now have vaccines.
The planet has almost 8 billion people and the vaccines generally need two doses per person, so we need 16 billion doses. This is shipped in little glass vials typically holding 5 doses each. Maybe 60% of people will actually get the vaccine, as there will always be people who will decline, and some who can’t for sound medical reasons. Hopefully the world will ensure that those who want the vaccine but don’t have the resources will be helped by those of us who are better off.
The different vaccines have their own complications. One needs to be stored at -70°C. Another, bizarrely, seems to work best given as a half dose followed by a full one several weeks later. This is all going to be challenging in terms of logistics and data management.
Even good intentions by medical teams could cause problems. For example, with the early rollout of the first vaccine in the West it was discovered that some of the 5-dose vials contained enough for a 6th dose. Rather than waste the extra vaccine, many have been giving it to patients. However, as a second dose is a necessary follow-up, this means that the suppliers need to know about the unexpected beneficiaries of the overflow doses to ensure they have stock for the second round.
Meanwhile, the after-effects of Brexit still loom large. The temporary transition period expires in two weeks and there is still no agreement between the EU and UK regarding trade and other topics of mutual interest. This weekend could be the last chance the two will have to iron out the remaining creases (the thorny subject of access to fishing waters around the UK being the last straw). The signs are not good, but failure to come to some arrangement would be a disaster for everyone so there will be some colourful manoeuvring and overt pressure on both sides to hammer out something, even if it means going beyond the final, final deadline.
Across the bigger pond the US has chosen a new president, so while their problems haven’t gone away, perhaps there will be less chaos compared to the past few years, which will be a welcome change. At least we won’t be waking every morning wondering what new horror has appeared on Twitter.
This 2020 main course should be over in the next month or two. Everything will change as we use the New Year palette cleanser and prepare to tuck into 2021 dessert, which will involve a ramped-up vaccination programme, some clarity on UK-EU relations, a steady hand on the US tiller and a new determination to get our world back in shape.
It could still take another six months before there’s some semblance of normality, whatever that is.
Many years ago, a work colleague/friend and I had a disagreement over the use of tabs and spaces in software source code. At the time, my preference was to indent my code with two spaces as I often had complex nested operations that would vanish on the right-hand side of my screen if I were using the conventional 8 spaces.
Indenting with 2 spaces:
while ( unopenedThingsExist() ) {
for ( eachThing in theCollection ) {
with ( opened ( eachThing ) ) {
if ( lookInside ( eachThing ) == something ) {
display ( nameOf ( eachThing ) );
}
}
}
}
Indenting with 8 spaces
while ( unopenedThingsExist() ) {
for ( eachThing in theCollection ) {
with ( opened ( eachThing ) ) {
if ( lookInside ( eachThing ) == something ) {
display ( nameOf ( eachThing ) );
}
}
}
}
His well-reasoned argument for using tabs was that other people with different width screens could simply tell their development tool of choice to render tabs as 4 or 8 spaces, or whatever was their preference. I adjusted my tools to replace the double-spaces with tabs, and all looked well, until it was pointed out to me that after the adjustment, comments to the right were a mess:
while ( unopenedThingsExist() ) { # guaranteed to end
for ( eachThing in theCollection ) { # collection is not empty
with ( opened ( eachThing ) ) { # once opened, stays opened
if ( lookInside ( eachThing ) == something ) {
display ( nameOf ( eachThing ) ); # guaranteed not blank
}
}
}
}
becomes:
while ( unopenedThingsExist() ) { # guaranteed to end
for ( eachThing in theCollection ) { # collection is not empty
with ( opened ( eachThing ) ) { # once opened, stays opened
if ( lookInside ( eachThing ) == something ) {
display ( nameOf ( eachThing ) ); # guaranteed not blank
}
}
}
}
Thus came about my general rule about tabs and spaces in source code:
Tabs on the left, spaces on the right.
To be precise, all the blank space from the left up to the start of the code should be tabs, and from that point on, all blanks are spaces. With this rule we get the following:
while ( unopenedThingsExist() ) { # guaranteed to end
for ( eachThing in theCollection ) { # collection is not empty
with ( opened ( eachThing ) ) { # once opened, stays opened
if ( lookInside ( eachThing ) == something ) {
display ( nameOf ( eachThing ) ); # guaranteed not blank
}
}
}
}
While this approach produces a better, albeit indented, alignment of the comments on the right, it doesn’t maintain the precise vertical arrangement of the original. Is it possible to preserve the vertical alignment of the comments? Yes, but not without some awkward mix of tabs and spaces. To achieve a vertical alignment that can survive a change of tab width, first you have to determine the maximum indenting expected in the source code. In the example, this maximum is 4 tabs (the “display” line). Next you have to ensure that this many tabs are present on every line, with the first tab(s) before the source code, and the remaining tabs after the last character of the source code (before the spaces that occur before the comment). For example, the second line of the source would be arranged as follows:
[**]for ( eachThing in theCollection ) {[**][**][**] # collection is not empty
That’s one tab on the left, and three tabs to the right of the final “{“. With this use of tabs, the vertical alignment of the comments will be preserved regardless of how you set the tab/space equivalence.
while ( unopenedThingsExist() ) { # guaranteed to end
for ( eachThing in theCollection ) { # collection is not empty
with ( opened ( eachThing ) ) { # once opened, stays opened
if ( lookInside ( eachThing ) == something ) {
display ( nameOf ( eachThing ) ); # guaranteed not blank
}
}
}
}
However, this would require a level of discipline with the input of invisible characters that I doubt any coder could achieve.
Optimal solution
There is an optimal and far superior solution, but it involves getting rid of two ideas: 1) tabs can be replaced by N spaces and 2) tabs align vertically with a multiple of N spaces. These two ideas come from the old fixed-width printers and screens. The printer tabs were a particular influence, and are not the equivalent of “tab stops” as found on typewriters, which are more like the tabbing positions you find in wordprocessing applications (e.g. MS Word).
By using a tab stop approach, you can continue to use tabs on the left for indenting, but on the right the tab character is interpreted semantically to indicate that you are moving to a new “block” of content. The tab is used more like an indication to move into the next cell of a table, rather than moving a certain number of characters to the right. This approach, outlined in detail by Nick Gravgaard in the mid-2000s, was adopted in Go’s tabwriter and a Notepad++ plugin, and Nick’s own extension for VS, but most IDEs don’t yet have this feature. Eclipse doesn’t have the underlying rendering features to support tab stops, while Netbeans could support it via its Swing components but nobody has created a plugin for it.
So, until tab stops come to all the IDEs that I use, I’ll stick with “tabs to the left, spaces to the right” and hope for the best.