David BlumeMy digital self has been under attack lately. So tiring.
1. Yahoo informed me that somebody is attempting to reset my password with the security questions.
2. OpenPaths.cc, which stores my location data, disappeared without a warning. All that data, gone. (I kept a cronjob constantly backing up their data.)
3. My web hosting provider, DreamHost, stopped executing the cron jobs I'd set. (There are two sanctioned ways to set cron jobs, and I followed their rules.) This disabled a part of my Dead Man's Switch, and affected the backup in item 2.
4. Twitter is changing their API policy for a more consistent Twitter experience, and it remains to be seen if this'll impact the Twitter parts of my Dead Man's Switch.
Not worth mentioning, but also true: Properties like Digg just up and lose their users' entire account activities histories. (It's OK, I maintain my own, but all my privately kept URLs to my activities at places like Pownce, Hulu, Jaiku, Blippr and Digg are now invalid because those sites didn't see what's so great about making Uniform Resource Locators a little more persistent for immutable data. "Here's this thing today." "Yeah, it's still there tomorrow.")
Dave Winer is right when he says http://scripting.com/stories/2012/08/16/privatizingAndSocializing.html "The web is socialist, but it's not a family."
Don't blindly and entirely trust any service out there with anything of yours of value. If it's valuable, keep an original copy locally. (As is often said, if the service is free, then you're the product. What's more, they owe you nothing when they suddenly disappear.)
Scripting News: The web is socialist, but it's not a family
1. Yahoo informed me that somebody is attempting to reset my password with the security questions.
2. OpenPaths.cc, which stores my location data, disappeared without a warning. All that data, gone. (I kept a cronjob constantly backing up their data.)
3. My web hosting provider, DreamHost, stopped executing the cron jobs I'd set. (There are two sanctioned ways to set cron jobs, and I followed their rules.) This disabled a part of my Dead Man's Switch, and affected the backup in item 2.
4. Twitter is changing their API policy for a more consistent Twitter experience, and it remains to be seen if this'll impact the Twitter parts of my Dead Man's Switch.
Not worth mentioning, but also true: Properties like Digg just up and lose their users' entire account activities histories. (It's OK, I maintain my own, but all my privately kept URLs to my activities at places like Pownce, Hulu, Jaiku, Blippr and Digg are now invalid because those sites didn't see what's so great about making Uniform Resource Locators a little more persistent for immutable data. "Here's this thing today." "Yeah, it's still there tomorrow.")
Dave Winer is right when he says http://scripting.com/stories/2012/08/16/privatizingAndSocializing.html "The web is socialist, but it's not a family."
Don't blindly and entirely trust any service out there with anything of yours of value. If it's valuable, keep an original copy locally. (As is often said, if the service is free, then you're the product. What's more, they owe you nothing when they suddenly disappear.)
Scripting News: The web is socialist, but it's not a family
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