PicPlz Sold Out: Why, Again, Are We Letting Fickle Startups Own our Content and Relationships?

I missed this last week: PicPlz is barely live as a service, and it’s already been spun off in a cash deal so its makers can be done with it.

These little mobile apps combine convenience with effortless social interaction, but the final loyalty isn’t to the user. I’m hoping that the social sharing experience for stuff like this becomes less dependent on proprietary services that try to own the social interaction. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to find more effective ways of recreating these rich experiences on platforms that let me own and control my content.

San Juan

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I’m staying in the old colonial part of San Juan, Puerto Rico for a couple days before meeting up with family on Vieques, a small island east of the main island of Puerto Rico. I’ll post more photos once I’m not on a capped 3G plan.

This place is insanely reminiscent of Andalusia. I immediately felt at home.

NY Licenses Unready for Gay Marriage: “You’re Making Me the Bride?”

Designers of forms must often consider a diverse range of possibilities to cover everyone that might need to fill the form out, especially when it comes down to issues of identity. I’ve been party to quite a few conversations of how or whether to prompt for one’s gender pronoun (Sex, Gender, or “I identify myself with the pronoun _____?” Male, Female, other, none?)

You're finally getting equal treatment, but you still have to decide on a bride.

Today there was a pretty funny case of an antiquated form suddenly being a major problem: New York City’s online marriage license application was built to track a bride and groom, but since the state legalized gay marriage, it suddenly forced same-sex spouses to identify which partner was “bride” and “groom.” To the city’s credit, they managed to change the field to suit everyone with “Bride/Groom/Spouse A” and “Bride/Groom/Spouse B” in the same day, so it wasn’t so much harmful as a good example of how data should be formatted in a matter that will address all its suppliers both today and in the future.

(That said, they still have to bicker over whom is Spouse “A” and Spouse “B.”)

The city clerk’s online forms offered only the choice of “bride” and “groom.” Mr. Kaplan, 50, a vice president of the Stonewall Democrats, and his partner of six years, Anthony Cipriano, 43, were puzzled, but also amused.

“He said, ‘You’re making me the bride?’ ” Mr. Kaplan recalled. “It was confusing on many levels.”

Seeking Marriage Licenses, Gay Couples Hit Roadblock – NYTimes.com

 

Macs get viruses. And the trojans are getting more deceptive.

For years, virus makers have been tricking people into installing trojans under the disguise of a program intended to actually remove trojans that weren’t there. They usually did so by disguising themselves as part of Windows XP – which was an obvious fake for anyone using any other operating system.

But today my boss ran into this and asked me to take a look:

Imitation OS X UI attempting trojan installation
(click image for full-size version)

Look at that imitation of the OS X Finder. Not perfect, but it’s pretty dang good! I wouldn’t expect everyone to be able to tell that it’s fake.

News of legitimate Mac trojans recently cropped up again, but it looks like they’ve gotten even more sophisticated with some pretty convincing fake Finder interfaces. People used to assume that Macs aren’t targeted for viruses for their lower market share, but it looks like that’s an even more unsafe assumption now. If you use a Mac, you aren’t exempt from being safe with your computer: don’t give it your Administrator password when you aren’t trying to install or update software. Any other time, it’s a trap!