For King And Country
As I write this, “Don’t Ever Come Back” is the headline on the Huffington Post. It refers, (not quite correctly), to proposed legislation from two U.S. Senators following the move from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin to renounce his US citizenship. (For reference, Eduardo Saverin was the one played by Andrew Garfield in The Social Network). This move will save Saverin a reported $67 Million in potential taxes as Facebook goes public. Some Americans seem to have taken Saverin’s decision to leave as a personally offensive. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo wrote, “It’s ungrateful and it’s indecent. Saverin’s decision to decamp the U.S. suggests he’s got no idea how much America has helped him out.”
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CSS on Amazon S3
Hosting websites on Amazon S3 gives you an incredibly cheap and robust platform to work on. To save myself, (and hopefully you), from having to figure this out again, here are the solutions to two issues I’ve found.
For details on how to set up a website on S3, here is Chris O’Sullivan’s guide.
Displaying CSS on an S3 Hosted Site
When you view your uploaded website, the stylesheet probably will not display, this is because when you upload a .css file to an S3 Hosted site it will set the content type of the file to ‘binary/octet-stream’.
To fix this, log into the AWS Management Console, click on the Amazon S3 tab, then your website bucket. Find the .css file and click on properties. Under the Metadata tab set the Content-Type key to value: text/css
You have to set this every time you upload the file. But there is a fix if you use Transmit on OS X, (more in a moment).
Using Reduced Redundancy
Amazon S3 has two different storage costs: Standard, and Reduced Redundancy. So, the standard storage costs for the first 1 TB / month is $0.125 per GB standard, $0.093 per GB. (Prices were accurate May 2012). Amazon describes Reduced Redundancy as suitable for “storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than Amazon S3’s standard storage”. If you have a local backup of your website, then personally I would recommend setting your storage to Reduced Redundancy. But, the S3 web interface only lets you set Reduced Redundancy per file which if you have a couple of hundred-odd files in your S3 is not a fun task. Here is where Panic’s Transmit comes in. Don’t ask me if there is a non-OS X application that does this- I neither know nor care.
Set the following custom headers in Transmit’s preferences to use Reduced Redundancy by default and setting the Content-Type of css files correctly:
Thanks to Les Pozdena at Panic for helping me figure this out.
Google Engineer Told Others of Data Collection [F.C.C. Report]
The full version draws a portrait of a company where an engineer can easily embark on a project to gather personal e-mails and Web searches of potentially hundreds of millions of people as part of his or her unscheduled work time, and where privacy concerns are shrugged off.
I’ve lost all confidence I had in Google steadily over the last few months, and have been actively trying to reduce my use of the company’s products. So far I’ve replaced Gmail with Fastmail, and DuckDuckGo is now my search engine of choice.
Everything else was already away from Google’s clutches- contacts, calendars, bookmarks all on iCloud. Really, Google Reader is the only piece of the puzzle I haven’t managed to find an adequate replacement for, although I am intreagued by Goodbits.
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Online Child Protection Report
MPs are back on the internet porn hand-wringing. A new report (pdf) from a cross-party parliamentary inquiry found that the government and internet service providers need to do more to protect children online.
As Pаul Bаttley points out, “(the) ‘evidence’ in the context of a parliamentary inquiry actually means hearsay & speculation.”
This is the same old “block the internet for the sake of the children” argument that has been trotted out before. It is worth noting that the report was sponsored by “Premier Christian Media”, which would explain the willful disregard of evidence.
Cookies and Privacy and EU Regulation
John Gruber writes on Daring Fireball about the Wall Street Journal report that Google (and a few other ad networks) were storing third-party cookies in Safari and Mobile Safari even when the option was set only to accept cookies from visited websites, as it is by default.
Essentially Google were bypassing the browser settings, and tracking users across huge numbers of websites, not just Google’s own sites. Tut tut, slap on the wrist- Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal. But not end of story. In Gruber’s piece he writes that:
No one is criticizing Google for using third-party tracking cookies in general. No one. What’s being criticized is Google devising and implementing a method to store third-party cookies in web browsers which are set not to accept third-party cookies. It didn’t happen by accident. Google wrote code specifically to circumvent this setting in Safari.
Actually the EU is criticising Google for using third-party tracking cookies. They’ve wrote a law about it.
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