Morgan Todd Lewistown, PA

Putting An End To The Biggest Lie On The Internet : It’s long been said that “I agree to the terms of service” is the biggest lie on the internet. And even if you do read them, many TOS are so ridden with legalese that you practically need to be a lawyer to understand them. Also, as I wrote in a gloomy post last weekend , users have no choice but either agree to the terms offered by a web app or simply not use the service at all. But a new project called TOS;DR wants to change that. The site aims to give more power to users by summarizing terms of service, flagging potential issues and rating apps on a scale from A (the best) to E (the worst). So far the only company with an E, the worst possible rating, is TwitPic , which reserves the rights to sell users’ photos to news agency without giving the photographer a cut. Project lead Hugo Roy tells me that he considers Wikipedia to be an exemplary service, though it hasn’t been rated by TOS;DR. He says both Wikipedia’s short, clear s...

Fixing Bugs - if you can't reproduce them, you can't fix them: "Generally, if you can’t reproduce it, it’s almost impossible to fix". Anonymous programmer, Practices of Software Maintenance , Janice Singer Fixing a problem usually starts with reproducing it – what Steve McConnell calls “ stabilizing the error ”. Technically speaking, you can’t be sure you are fixing the problem unless you can run through the same steps, see the problem happen yourself, fix it, and then run through the same steps and make sure that the problem went away. If you can’t reproduce it, then you are only guessing at what’s wrong, and that means you are only guessing that your fix is going to work. But let’s face it – it’s not always practical or even possible to reproduce a problem. Lots of bug reports don’t include enough information for you to understand what the hell the problem actually was, never mind what was going on when the problem occurred – especially bug reports...

Do not envy the life of a Web app. It's a brutal, public existence filled with attacks from all sides. In fact, a new report by Imperva sheds some light on this sad life, showing that a typical Web app is attacked once every three days and some are targeted as many as 2,700 times in a given year. Web apps are lots of fun for attackers because they're publicly accessible and take all kinds of interesting inputs. Attackers can take their time, throwing whatever data they choose at a given app and then see what happens to break. To determine what this attack landscape looks like, Imperva monitored 50 Web applications for six months, looking at the kinds of attacks each one endured and pulling out trends.  One of the more interesting findings was that the typical Web app can expect to be attacked every third day and that some of the applications are under attack as often as 292 days per year. There are likely to be multiple attack incidents on any given day, as well. The average ...

Dispelling The Eureka Myth: Big Ideas Take Time And Space : Editors Note : Peter Arvai, CEO of Prezi, is passionate about helping people create and communicate big ideas. Peter is a serial entrepreneur, prior to joining Prezi, he established healthcare startup omvard.se and was part of creating the first mobile news reader. Big ideas fuel the entrepreneurial spirit. An idea passionately pursued through a labyrinth of “what-ifs” can be the launch of the next great company, the new skyrocketing startup. Apple, under the leadership of Steve Jobs offers an example of a company built on a foundation of big ideas. With a storied reputation of innovation, Jobs and Apple seemed to have captured the magic of having the right idea at the right time over and over again. But this magic is misleading. We applaud the genius of those like Steve Jobs for big ideas that transform our perceptions about what is possible. However, we fail to recognize the work that got him there. For every ‘Steve s...

Google says that YouTube isn’t going to somehow solely escape its new “pirate penalty.” Any popular site may be OK, as the penalty works off of more than pure copyright infringement reports. Nuances in calculating the penalty should save popular user-generated content sites, the company said. The Pirate Penalty Initially, it sounded as if sites with many copyright infringement complaints filed against them with Google — such as those listed  here  in the Google Transparency Report — would be at risk under the new  pirate penalty  Google will begin imposing next week. If that were the case, Google’s own YouTube site would have a unique advantage in that copyright infringement notices filed against it are largely handled through a separate system and wouldn’t count against it in the way other sites would be hit, under the forthcoming penalty. YouTube & Copyright Infringement Notices Our article from Friday,  How YouTube Will Escape Google’s New Pirate ...

Where Does Your Dealer Website Fit into the Mix? : If you can't tell, I wrote this on an extremely empty stomach. But enough about me, let's talk about you and your success! As a provider of dealership website solutions, it almost seems that there are two different categories of clients that I work with. Those that utilize the tools and resources made available to them to which they experience great results, and then there are those that huff and puff determined that “your website doesn't work”. It's sometimes quite funny to look at from a birds-eye view, because when the shiny new website is delivered the tone is, “Our website is awesome!” but when things are not going as expected it's, “ YOUR  website...” With that in mind, I think it's time to dispel some myths regarding the role that your dealer website plays in the marketing mix. Let's look at what it can do for you and what it absolutely  WON'T  do for your business. There will be some key ta...

Email To Be Featured in Google Search Results : As an active Google user, my search results are always personalized. Thanks to Google's social search, I find results that fit me as a user: If Google is taking advantage of the social shares they're receiving in Google+, it should come at no surprise that they would also utilize a user's Gmail information. Google announced this week that they will be featuring a user's Gmail e-mails if they are relevant to that search term: Considering that Google, along with other digital giants like Facebook, are usually getting heat for taking advantage of user information, I wonder how far Google will take this. We already know Google "reads" emails, thanks to the ads in Gmail that pop up based on keywords found within the email body. Of course with Bing being able to include Facebook results in their search due to their partnership with the social network, Google could have been pushed to make things even more person...