An interesting page that illustrates how much stuff happens in a mere second on the internet. Amazing.

Elliott Kember found that saved passwords in Chrome are viewable as plain text with the click of a button - all without a master password:

Google isn’t clear about its password security.

In a world where Google promotes its browser on YouTube, in cinema pre-rolls, and on billboards, the clear audience is not developers. It’s the mass market - the users. The overwhelming majority. They don’t know it works like this. They don’t expect it to be this easy to see their passwords. Every day, millions of normal, every-day users are saving their passwords in Chrome. This is not okay.

Open indeed.

When those close to us are negatively impacted by life, we naturally find ourselves affected as well. Susan Silk and Barry Goldman, in an Op-Ed for The LA Times, offers Silk’s “Ring Theory” for these situations and how we should properly manage the flow of comfort:

Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie’s aneurysm, that’s Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie’s aneurysm, that was Katie’s husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order.

[…]

If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.

Comfort IN, dump OUT.

Paul Farhi, reporting for The Washington Post, on the sale of the paper to Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos:

Bezos, 49, will take the company private, meaning he will not have to report quarterly earnings to shareholders or be subjected to investors’ demands for ever-rising profits, as the publicly traded Washington Post Co. is obligated to do now. As such, he will be able to experiment with the paper without the pressure of showing an immediate return on any investment. Indeed, Bezos’s history of patient investment and long-term strategic thinking made him an attractive buyer, Weymouth said.

The newspaper industry has struggled adapting to the digital revolution. Bezos, who has been at the forefront of that revolution (see his prescient push into ebooks), seems like the perfect fit. Even better, he can do what he wants without investor influence.

This was originally posted in 2011, but it still remains cool. The Sad and Useless Blog posted numerous illustrations made by French artist Villemard in 1910 of how he imagined the future to be in the year 2000.

Somewhat prescient pictures include:

• Schools will be equipped with audio books
• You’ll be able to send mail just by dictating it into loudspeaker
• Building sites will be equipped with automatic devices and machines, and
• Video-telegraph

(via: Brian Bridges)

Melissa Hogenboom, BBC News, on some interesting geologic activity on one of Saturn’s moons:

Saturn’s gravitational pull is responsible for the extraordinary hot geysers on the Enceladus moon that spew water out into space.

The particles are ejected from active fissures known as “tiger stripes” at Enceladus’s south pole.

Salt in the plumes suggest the water may come from a liquid ocean beneath its icy shell.

But it had been unclear what was ultimately driving the geological activity on this moon.

Scientists believe the moon could answer questions surrounding the potential for extraterrestrial life.

Alan Taylor, The Atlantic:

The winning entries in the 25th annual National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest have just been announced. First prize winner Wagner Araujo will receive a 10-day Galapagos expedition for two for his image of competitors in the Brazilian Aquathlon. Collected here are the ten 2013 prize winning photos, plus the Viewers’ Choice selection. Photos and captions by the photographers.

I’m partial to #4.

Joe Fassler, writing for The Atlantic, asked several authors about their favorite opening lines in books:

When I interviewed Stephen King for the By Heart series, he told me about some of his favorite opening lines in literature. Then, the author had an off-the-cuff idea.

“You could go around and ask people about their favorite first lines,” he said. “I think you’ll find that most of them, right away, establish the sense of voice we talked about. Why not do it? I’d love to know, like, Jonathan Franzen’s favorite first line.”

So I reached out to Franzen and 21 other writers. In honor of King’s new novel Joyland and its nouveau-pulp publisher Hard Case Crime, there are a good number of crime writers featured in this list. Other writers I spoke to don’t write crime fiction at all, preferring to focus on other brands of human mystery. Collected below, the opening lines they picked range widely in tone and execution–but in each, you can almost feel the reader’s mind beginning to listen, hear the inward swing of some inviting door.

There are so many great introductory passages throughout literature. One that came to mind is from “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon. I think I like it because it gets right to the point:

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead.

Jeffrey Martin, writing for 360Cities:

The first one, shot from the roof of the lower observatory on Tokyo Tower is the second-largest image I’ve ever made. That’s 600,000 pixels wide. Just a reminder that your mobile phone shoots photos around 3000 pixels  wide. The largest possible size of an image in Photoshop is 300,000 pixels. So, this image was very difficult to assemble into a single seamless image. In fact, it has never existed as a single image file. To view it on the web, the image is cut into more than a million little “tiles” which are loaded as needed depending on your view (similar to google maps, for example)

The panorama is 600,000 pixels wide and is composed of 8,000 photos. The detail is simply amazing.

Aaron Souppouris, The Verge, on a recent survey that shows the increasing fragmentation of Android devices and OS versions:

This mix of old and new hardware in the device chart, as well as lax update policies from manufacturers, leads us to an inevitable point: Android fragmentation. It’s been the butt of many an Apple keynote joke, and is frequently cited as a major problem for Google, but is it getting better or worse? According to OS, its worse now than ever before. The company used Google’s data for the visualization above, which groups Android by the API set that each version uses. With the release of Android 4.3, we’re now up to level 18 of the Android API, but OS’s charts don’t reflect the recent change. The most prevalent version of Android remains Gingerbread, released in 2011, and stuck on API level 10.

As a comparison, Apple states that 93% of iOS users are using the latest version.

Another graph shows that Samsung has distributed over 100 devices to reach the top spot in the smartphone market. Apple, on the other hand, has claimed second on the list by releasing a total of six iPhone models since 2007.

Some contend that choice is better for consumers, and perhaps they are correct. However, as someone who develops mobile applications, the thought of supporting the vast number of screen sizes, device capabilities, and OS versions in Android is mind-numbing. I would argue that those constraints often lead to sub-par experiences for many end-users.