Grave Gravatars make comments seem sarcastic

Tuesday, 7th September, 2010 — Mark

Like many other blogs, this one uses so-called “globally recognised avatars”. or “gravatars” to provide each commenter with their own unique image which will match from site to site, and from visit to visit, so long as they use the same email address when commenting. It’s a clever idea – the supplied address is encrypted using a one-way hash (so there’s no easy way to get the email address from the hash), and that unique hash is used to return an image associated with the user.

If they’re so inclined, users can create an account at www.gravatar.com and set their own custom image. If they don’t then the site will algorithmically create an image for them, based on their email hash, ensuring that they get the same image every time they use that email address. There are a few types of algorithmically generated images – a geometric pattern, a monster, or a generated face (which they refer to as a “wavatar”). It is the latter that I use on this site, and it is the latter than is the source of the apparently sarcastic comments.

Wavatars are made up of several pieces that canchange with each hash: a background, a “face” shape, eyebrows, eyes and mouth. The problem is the mouth in particular, though the eyebrows can also be an issue: several of the mouth variations look unhappy, and the eyebrows can appear as a frown. An unhappy, frowny wavatar can give a completely different feel to even the nicest of comments. In fact the nicer the comment, the more sarcastic it seems to become.

Let’s look at some examples. The images below are all genuine gravatars for real comments that have been left on this blog, or on my webcomic. I’ve posted just the image and the opening or closing words of the comments, but omitted the full text and the posters’ details. See what your sarcasm detectors think about this lot:

When seeing wavatars like these, I can’t help but feel that there’s an implicit “…NOT!” that should be added, regardless of how complimentary the comment is.

The only real solution to this would be for the gravatar developers to change their palette of mouths to replace the miserable, downturned, grimaced variants with happier versions. Alternatively, if you do decide to leave a comment on my blog or comic, you might want to set your own gravatar image just in case. Or at the very least, choose your words to sound less sarcastic if they do get paired with a grumpy visage.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tech, Web. No Comments »

Using Calibre with a Kindle 3 on Ubuntu 10.04

Thursday, 2nd September, 2010 — Mark

I’ve been waiting and watching the eReader world for some time now, waiting for the price (for a half decent product) to drop below about £100. The Kindle 3, starting at £109, was close enough for me to preorder one – although I actually ended up being swayed by the allure of the 3G version at £149.

While waiting for it to arrive I installed the Calibre eBook manager on my Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) system from the repositories and went trotting off to download a bunch of out-of-copyright classics. The new Kindle arrived yesterday, so I plugged it into my machine, fired up Calibre, told it to send the eBooks to the reader… and got an error message.

The problem is that the Kindle 3 is supported on the latest version of Calibre (0.7.16) but of course the version in the Ubuntu repositories is far older than that (0.6.42). Even the version in the Maverick repository is too old (0.7.13). One obvious answer would be to download the source of the newest version from the Calibre site and build it myself, but where possible I prefer to stick to software from the official repositories so that I get automatic updates.

A bit of googling resulted in the answer in this forum thread: the changes to support a Kindle 3 are fairly trivial and only occur in one Python file, so it’s very easy to modify an installed 0.6.42 version. When Ubuntu pushes updates I’ll simply tell it to keep my modified file until they push a version >0.7.16, and which point I’ll let it get replaced with the official repository version.

So for anyone in a similar situation, here’s the step-by-step guide to getting the version of Calibre in the Ubuntu Lucid repositories to support a Kindle 3:

  1. Install Calibre from the Universe repository using your package manager of choice. You can click on this link and open with “apturl” to achieve the same effect: apt://calibre
  2. Press ALT-F2 to bring up a “Run Application” dialogue.
  3. Copy and paste the following line into that dialogue: 
    gksudo gedit /usr/lib/calibre/calibre/devices/kindle/driver.py
  4. Enter your password when prompted and you should see “gedit” (text editor) open with the file ready for editing.
  5. Scroll to the bottom of the file.
  6. Copy and paste the following code at the end of the file: 
    class KINDLE2(KINDLE):

    name           = 'Kindle 3 Device Interface'
    description    = _('Communicate with the Kindle 3 eBook reader.')

    FORMATS        = KINDLE.FORMATS + ['pdf']
    PRODUCT_ID = [0x0004]
    BCD        = [0x0100]
  7. Save the file and quit “gedit”.
  8. Launch Calibre from the Applications=>Office menu and start managing your eBook collection for your Kindle 3.

Note that I’m no Python programmer, but my reading of the code suggests that this change might stop Calibre working with a Kindle 2 as it appears to override the existing KINDLE2 class. So if you’ve got both a Kindle 2 and a Kindle 3 and want to use Calibre with both you’re probably better off downloading the latest version and building from the source.

Posted in Linux, Miscellaneous, Tech. 4 Comments »

Solved: Ubuntu Missing Numpad Issue

Friday, 13th August, 2010 — Mark

If you just want the quick fix: try pressing SHIFT+NUM_LOCK. For the full gory story, as it affected me, read on…

A few weeks ago the numeric keypad on my work PC stopped responding. The Enter key still worked, but most of the other keys didn’t seem to do much. I wasn’t really surprised that it had finally given up the ghost: it was supplied with the machine seven years ago, and wasn’t the most deluxe keyboard in the world even when new. The silver painted coating had long since worn off of the well travelled parts of the device, and it had probably collected enough particles of my lunch over seven years to furnish a full banquet if anyone were foolish enough to shake it out.

It wasn’t until I was devoid of a numeric keypad that I realised how much I use one. Dotted quads for IP addresses trip lightly off the fingers of the right-hand rather than being laboriously thumped out of the row of digits at the top of the typewriter section. When programming my muscle memory flitted /* and */ comment delimiters into existence almost subconsciously. And when working with Inkscape the +,-,* and / of the keypad are my preferred route into the world of boolean operations on paths. I quickly resolved that a replacement keyboard needed to be found, pronto.

I could have asked work to buy me a new keyboard, but that would have got me another cheap model. Now I don’t mind the cheap HP model that had just died: it was quite a comfy keyboard to type on, and I hadn’t felt a desperate need to replace it in the past 7 years. But I’ve used other cheap (and some expensive) keyboards that were just horrible – one of my colleagues has a Dell monstrosity that nearly breaks your fingers to type on. But I knew that I had an old buckling spring keyboard kicking around at home that would be a delight to use every day.

An AT-to-PS/2 adaptor into a PS/2-to-USB adaptor later and I was typing away, number pad and all, with two side-effects. Firstly the clicky-clacky sounds emanating from my cubicle were enough to keep them awake – Hah! Secondly they made it a lot more obvious when I wasn’t writing code – D’oh!

Everything was rosy, I was a happy, clicky-clacky man. And then it happened: my number pad stopped working again. This was too much of a coincidence, so I went off a-googling and quickly found this to be a common issue, with the culprit being one of the keyboard accessibility options. From the search results I found it would appear that this has been an issue at least since Hardy Heron (8.04); the machine I’m using has the latest release, Lucid Lynx (10.04) so presumably this has been an issue for all the versions in-between as well.

Go to the System menu, select Preferences, then Keyboard, then the Mouse Keys tab. The issue was that this option had become enabled, meaning that my numpad no longer acted as a pad for entering numbers, but as a pad for controlling the mouse:

How had this happened? I wasn’t aware of ever going into that window and enabling that option – let alone having done it twice. It seems that there’s a keyboard shortcut to enable that mode – SHIFT+NUM_LOCK – which immediately toggles Mouse Keys whatever you’re doing at the time. With my frequent use of CTRL+NUMPAD for various Inkscape options, an accidental brushing of SHIFT+NUM_LOCK is a likely candidate for the cause of this confusion.

I can understand that having a keyboard shortcut for toggling this is invaluable for anyone who needs to use Mouse Keys regularly. However I’m not the only person to have been caught out by this, so I would suggest making it a little harder to enable by mistake. Specifically, there is an application called Assistive Technologies Preferences in which I specifically have “Enable assistive technologies” unchecked. Perhaps the state this checkbox should be honoured when a SHIFT+NUM_LOCK is detected.

There’s also a section for Accessibility in the Keyboard Shortcuts control panel. Why isn’t SHIFT+NUM_LOCK exposed there? That would perhaps be the best solution of all, as it would allow the toggle to be set to Disabled for users like me, who don’t want to trigger it by accident, but it would also allow an even more convenient shortcut to be defined by anyone who does want to access this feature regularly.

So if you’ve stumbled across this post because you’ve been affected by this issue, and a web search has sent you this way, try SHIFT+NUM_LOCK first. Unless you want to use your “broken” keyboard as an excuse to invest in a nice clicky-clacky affair.

Oh, and for what it’s worth the 7 year-old keyboard turns out to be fine. But I think I’ll stick with the buckling spring monster, if only for the sadistic pleasure of keeping my colleagues awake.

Posted in Linux, Miscellaneous, Tech. No Comments »

DIY Foxkeh SVG Wallpapers

Monday, 2nd August, 2010 — Mark

I’ve long argued that there should be more SVG-based wallpapers available, so that users can modify or tweak them to suit their own requirements.

A step in the right direction is Foxkeh’s Wallpaper Creator – a web page which lets you combine an image of Foxkeh (Mozilla Japan’s cute mascot) with a background, calendar and Firefox logo to create your own desktop image (or mobile phone wallpaper, or Firefox Persona). The source images are SVG, letting you scale Foxkeh to a size that suits you.

Foxkeh's Wallpaper Creator

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to save the finished SVG file, you can only export a bitmap image in PNG format. Although that’s fine for simple desktop wallpaper creation, it prevents any significant post-production editing. Perhaps that was intentional, as they don’t let you produce a wallpaper without a Firefox logo, either.

It’s currently in Beta, so maybe such an option will get added. In any case, if you’re after a cute, Firefox-promoting wallpaper with an optional calendar, it’s well worth trying.

Source: Mozilla Hacks

Posted in Miscellaneous, Web. No Comments »

Graze

Monday, 19th July, 2010 — Mark

A few weeks ago I signed up to Graze, and so far I’ve been really impressed.

The idea behind the company is that they regularly send you a box containing four punnets of fruit, seeds, nuts and other healthy offerings. How regularly is up to you – I receive a box per week, but you can make it more frequently if you want to (and can afford to). At £2.99 per box it’s a little on the pricey side*, but they do have a tremendous choice of over 100 products.

Well, “choice” isn’t the right word, I suppose. You don’t choose your four punnets directly, but rather rate products as “bin” (never send), “try”, “like” and “love”. They rend four random punnets from your “try”, “like” and “love” choices, but you can weigh the selection to favour “love” or “try” if you want to. The fact that I can’t choose the punnets is part of the appeal for me, as it adds a little randomness and variety to my food each week. It’s surprising how exciting it is checking their website each week to see what selection is winging its way to me.

Their website is a work of beauty. It looks great and the user interface is absolutely spot-on – right down to little details like the button which lets you easily push back your box by a week with a single click. If they weren’t on the wrong side of London, I’d seriously be considering applying for a programming job there – it’s refreshing to see a company that really knows how to produce a great web-based UI.

If you don’t mind paying a little over the odds for a semi-random selection from a great range of healthy foods (and if you’re based in the UK), then you should give them a try. Use the link below to get your first box free, and your second one half-price (plus I get a pound off my next box if you do):



* £2.99 per box = 75p per punnet, with each punnet containing between 35g and 45g of produce. By comparison Marks and Spencer offer similar products (though a greatly reduced choice) for £1.00 for a pot weighing 70g. It would be nice if there was a six punnet option for £3.99, bringing the price-per-punnet down to a more reasonable 67p. The box would be longer, but the same width and depth, so would still fit through a letterbox – plus I find that four punnets isn’t quite enough for the week, but eight would be too many.


Posted in Miscellaneous, My Green Life, Things I Love. No Comments »

A bettr Flattr dashboard

Friday, 16th July, 2010 — Mark

I’ve mentioned Flattr on this blog before, and now that I’ve been using it for a while I’d like to suggest some changes to the Flattr “Dashboard” which might make more effective use of the screen.

I would imagine that many Flattr users treat the Dashboard as their “Home” page on the site. It provides a quick overview of any recent flattery you may have received, shows you how dilute your own flattery is, and provides a few links to help you discover things to flatter. Here’s how it looks (click for the full sized version):

The site is fresh and modern, with a familiarly blog-like design which partitions it into the four commonly used sections of a Header, Footer, Main Content Area and Sidebar:

I’m specifically not going to talk about the Header or Footer areas. I’m just interested in the real meat of the page: the Main Content and the Sidebar. I’m also not going to suggest any radical changes to the content of these areas. I’m just going to suggest some ways in which they could be made more beneficial to a Flattr user without having to go so far as a radical redesign.

Main Content Area

Let’s get started with the Content Area – specifically the panel at the top:

There are three particularly useful sections in this panel: your Means, your Revenue, and the Current Click Value section. Keeping the Means and Revenue large and obvious is a good idea as it lets you immediately see whether you need to top your account up, and whether you’ve received some money to withdraw or transfer in the past month. The Current Click Value shows your Monthly Flattr Amount, the number of things you’ve flattered and as a result the value of each of those clicks.

What about the rest of the panel? The Monthly Flattr Amount section is completely redundant as a source of information as you can see the figure in the Current Click Value area. Yes, it also acts as a control to let you change your monthly Flattr amount, but do people really change this value often enough to warrant giving it so much space every time they visit the Dashboard? Better to turn the Current Click Value into a button or link which will reveal this control when clicked.

As for the Transactions sections, I would wager that most people only have a few transactions each month so don’t need to see the details on every visit. How about making this show just the date and value of the most recent transaction and the next upcoming one – the “View all transactions” link is still there if you want more details.

A bit of work in The GIMP to apply these suggestions results in the image below. It’s still got the same basic layout as the current version, but with less redundancy and just the relevant details shown. All the other information and controls from the original panel are still available via links or slide-out controls. You’ll notice that I’ve also filled up the space in the bottom right with a “Your user info” section, taken from the sidebar to free up a little more space there.

This version of the top panel only takes up about half the vertical space of the original design, but still offers the same functionality. That extra space can then be used to show more items in the tabbed lists at the bottom of the content area. On the subject of those lists, while I can understand showing two lines of the description for items in the “Things I have Flattred” tab, it seems a little excessive in the “My latest things” and “My top things” tabs. They’re listing my things – I don’t really need much description to remind myself about them. Cut that down to a single line and you can fit more items in.

So we’ve reduced the size of the top panel, resulting in more space for the bottom panel. And we’ve reduced the size of each item in the bottom list. Together these changes will free up the space to show a few more items in those bottom lists… but where are the “Show all” links? It would be nice to be able to open to an extended view of each of these lists rather than just losing things off the bottom as new entries appear at the top.

Sidebar

There are five panels in the sidebar, so let’s just deal with them one at a time, starting from the top…

Did you know?
Did I know that I could invite friends to join Flattr? Why yes I did, because you tell me that every single time I access my Dashboard. If you must have a box like this, at least vary the tips from time to time. Better still lose the box altogether, or just show it occasionally as a reminder.

Your user info
I’ve already dealt with this one by moving it to the Main Content Area. Even without any of the other changes I’m suggesting here, there’s plenty of space in the existing design to move this information across. It doesn’t serve any real purpose living in the sidebar, so move it or get rid of it to free up some space.

Newest things on Flattr
Undiscovered things
I’ll deal with both these as one entry as they’re similar. “Undiscovered things” shows Flattr users’ submissions that haven’t yet been flattered at all. It can be a great way to discover interesting and underrated sites… but it can also reveal that there’s a reason why some things never get flattered ;)

I’m not quite sure what “Newest things” shows. All the entries here usually have just a few flattrs, so I don’t think it’s as simple as “most recently flattered” (otherwise more popular things would show up too). However they populate this list, it’s another good way to discover items that you might not otherwise have stumbled across.

Both these lists are great when you’re in a random browsing mood – except for the fact that they’re too short. These should both be doubled to show 10 items.

All time top 5
At the time of writing, the list looks like this:

This is actually quite a shocking image because, for the first time in weeks, the number 4 and number 5 spot have swapped position! Other than that, this list has been pretty much the same for as long as I’ve been a Flattr member. There’s a positive feedback mechanism at work here: the top rated get additional visibility from appearing in this list, so are more likely to get flattered, so are more likely to stay on the list…

What’s most depressing is that only two of the entries here are for “real” content. The other things are all to do with Flattr itself. If it’s to flourish, Flattr needs to be a way to find (and fund) exciting and interesting content – not just a self-referencing collection of closed loops back to Flattr itself, or the few other things that manage to reach the top 5.

Personally I would lose this panel completely, replacing it with a “Random things” panel which shows entries selected at random, regardless of their existing popularity.

The sidebar has now been reduced to three panels (“Latest”, “Undiscovered”, “Random”), each showing ten items. I would also have a “More…” link on each of these to open a page full of items – ideal for those rudderless browsing sessions we all sometimes have.

Conclusion

I’ve deliberately steered clear of suggesting any radical changes, but instead focused on incremental changes that I feel could make the Dashboard a more functional and useful part of the Flattr site. Of course this is just my opinion – perhaps you do change your monthly Flattr amount regularly, or you love the Top 5 panel. Feel free to leave a comment with your own ideas for the Dashboard – and if you like my suggestions… well, there’s a little orange button just a short mouse move away that would appreciate your click ;)

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tech, Web. No Comments »

The “Don’t Be An Arse” license

Wednesday, 14th July, 2010 — Mark

I’m the co-creator of a webcomic: go on, have a look – you might enjoy it. That’s it advertised over in the sidebar.

Our comics are generally released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) license, like many other webcomics. But I’m not really happy with this license, because that NC part makes it incompatible with Free Culture works, as explained in excessive detail in this article. The trouble is that BY-SA feels a little too open to abuse, but BY-NC-SA is too restrictive. What we need is something that encompasses the idea that you should be allowed to use our comic commercially, but that if you make a load of money off it you should do the decent thing and send some back our way. Hence the “Don’t Be An Arse” license, or BY-SA-DBAA.

We want people to share our work, to pass it round, to post it on their blogs and to use it in their newsletters. Yes, even if those blogs have ads and the newsletters have a cover charge – the kind of “commercial” activities that BY-NC-SA unfortunately prohibits. What we don’t want is to be egregiously ripped off by someone who just repackages our work to make a profit without passing any of it back down the line.

Unfortunately the law doesn’t have much to say about what constitutes “being an arse”, so it’s tricky to define in legal terms just where the cut-off comes between a blogger with a few ads and someone making a huge profit just re-hosting our content and setting up some link farms. After literally minutes of consideration, I’ve distilled our DBAA clause down to a couple of rules:

  1. You can use up to X of our comics commercially…
  2. …so long as they make up no more than Y% of your product’s content

I’m specifically referring to “comics” here, but you could replace the word with “stories”, “novels”, “photos” or just “creations” as appropriate.

Let’s set some values for X and Y, say X=5 and Y=10. This would result in our BY-SA-DBAA license becoming a BY-SA-5/10 license and works like this:

You can use up to 5 of our comics, constituting up to 10% of your commercial product. If you’re planning to sell a 100 page anthology of webcomics, you can fill up to 10 pages with our work without needing a commercial license. But if your 10 pages contain more than 5 of our strips then you’re back in the realms of needing a different license.

In practice we would usually use values of X=10 and Y=10, leading to a license of BY-SA-10/10, or BY-SA-10 for short. This license means that you can do the following things without requiring an explicit commercial license (assuming <=10 comics representing <=10% of your content):

  • Distribute some comics on a Linux CD
  • Put some comics into an anthology
  • Re-post some of your favourite comics to your own blog
  • Publish them on a clip-art collection CD
  • Use them for any non-commercial purpose, as with a normal BY-NC-SA license
  • Use them in a review of our comics or an Inkscape tutorial, or similar

But you can’t do these things commercially without needing a different license:

  • Re-print a load of our comics as a book
  • Print T-shirts of our comics
  • Distribute a CD of nothing but our comics
  • Produce posters, mouse mats, mugs and other merchandise

The BY-SA-10 license isn’t perfect and doesn’t cover all possibilities. I’m sure that a bit more thought could refine it further. But the key point is that it allows a reasonable trade-off between the freedom to re-use of BY-SA and the protection from arses of BY-SA-NC.

Unfortunately BY-SA-10 (or BY-SA-20 or BY-SA-5/15 or whatever levels you want to set for allowable commercial exploitation) doesn’t really exist, other than in this blog entry. License proliferation is a real issue, so I don’t plan to actually use this license in my works unless it gets officially adopted by Creative Commons or some similar organisation. It probably needs serious work – not to mention some legalese behind it – in order to provide a reasonable compromise between the desire to share, and the desire to not get ripped off.

So until such a license exists in anything other than my ramblings, it’s likely that our comics will remain licensed as BY-NC-SA. In practice we won’t sue you if you re-post them on your personal blog or use them in any other reasonable way – just don’t be an arse and we’ll get on fine.

Posted in Miscellaneous. No Comments »

Project Canvas

Tuesday, 29th June, 2010 — Mark

It looks like my wish for a common on-demand TV service might actually become reality with the BBC Trust’s approval of “Project Canvas”.

From the sounds of it they’re primarily targeting set-top boxes, though hopefully their current iPlayer implementations for various phones and games consoles will see an upgrade as well.

It’s just a shame that it will all be too late to save me from the dearth of TV channels I’m currently experiencing – well, unless they manage to set light to the transmitter again.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tech. No Comments »

No footie for me

Monday, 14th June, 2010 — Mark

I’m not a big football fan, to be honest, but I do usually try to catch the England games during the World Cup – or at least any that are shown at sensible times.

Not so much this year, though. The first match was played against the USA at the weekend, and broadcast in the early evening on a terrestrial channel (ITV1) here in the UK. I was in the house, and wasn’t doing anything else in particular. Yet still I didn’t watch it.

Or more to the point, still I couldn’t watch it.

Way back in February I wrote about how the transmitter upgrade in Oxford had resulted in almost all my Freeview channels becoming unwatchable as they had switched to a reserve transmitter. Judging by how shy it is about broadcasting to the world, perhaps it should be re-branded as a “reserved” transmitter.

Back then the work was due to be finished by April.

That date slipped. Next it was due to be finished by May.

Then the transmitter caught light. No, really. No TV at all for a few hours, not even the few channels that had been working. It seems that the reserve transmitter was left intact, though, as our limited reception had resumed by the following evening.

Of course fires cause damage. In this case sufficient damage that a whole new antenna had to be commissioned. And that takes time.

So we’re stuck with little more than the main BBC channels until the end of September. If I’d known it would be that long, I would have signed up to cable or satellite for a year. As it is, I’m going to grin and bear it for a while longer, and thank the gods of bittorrent that I know how to download the episodic serials we watch, and the devs of MythTV that I know how to play them on the telly.

Assuming the September deadline is accurate (and my money’s on it overrunning) then I will have been on a limited TV service for 8 months. There’s no recompense for that. There’s no rebate in the TV license (which arguably wouldn’t apply anyway, as I can still receive the BBC channels). But worse than all that, there was no widely broadcast warning that the works were due to take place – leading me to initially think my house’s aerial needed work. There was no leaflet sent to the households in affected areas. And there was no update sent out when the fire resulted in a further 5 month delay to the work.

And what the hell sort of “reserve” antenna have they got up there? A bent coat-hanger? A piece of wet string? If it doesn’t come anywhere close to replicating the job of the main antenna, in what way is it a reserve?

At least I’m not a huge footie fan. But I bet Virgin and Sky will have seen a particularly large surge in subscribers from the area around Oxford in the past few weeks.

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Fixing online safety where it counts

Tuesday, 8th June, 2010 — Mark

Facebook’s in the news again as yet another country wants them to add a “safety” or “panic” button to the site so that users (especially children) can easily report any improper contact from other users. This time it’s Australia asking for it, but a similar row erupted a few months ago with Facebook’s UK operation.

The trouble is that these law enforcement and child protection agencies are trying to address the problem in the wrong place. Facebook is an obvious target because of its size, and because it has definitely been the source of improper contact in the past. But what of the many other websites out there which allow inter-user communication – from forums, through IM proxies, all the way up to the social networking sites of which Facebook is just one example (albeit the biggest)?

Trying to get buttons added on a site-by-site basis is a Sisyphean challenge – no sooner has one site gained a button than there is another growing in market share which needs to be similarly adorned. No, adding buttons to sites is not the right solution. Instead they need to be added to the browser.

Adding the panic button to the browser itself isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. There would need to be agreement on how it works: Would the browser become responsible for submitting an abuse report to the authorities? If so, it would require some sort of API to obtain relevant information from the site itself. Or would it simply call a web service on the site, triggering an abuse report from that end, and hooking into whatever abuse reporting system the site already has in-place.

My preference would be for both. Hitting the button would call an API on the site, triggering any well-behaved site to store a log of relevant details, and returning an identifier to the browser. The browser itself would submit an incident report to the relevant authorities which includes the returned identifier (so that the two reports can be reconciled if needed), and attaching a screenshot, copies of cookies, or other pertinent data. The user would be able to review this information before sending it, and add their own notes. This isn’t too different to the automatic crash reporters that most browsers include now, except that the more sensitive nature of the information would require some additional safeguards.

The beauty of this approach is that the authorities only have to deal with the relatively small pool of browser vendors, not the much larger ocean of websites. If a website doesn’t support the API then a report can still be submitted, it just means slightly less evidence being available. The authorities might still need to bring a little pressure to bear on individual websites to support the API, but as this has no visible impact there’s likely to be less resistance than there is to adding a button to every page on a site.

By building this into the browser itself it’s immediately available on all sites regardless of size. Adults could opt to not show the button at all, while browsers and extensions that target children (such as Kidzui or Glubble) could enforce its visibility at all times. Consistent button design and default placement across browsers would make it easy to educate children about the button’s use without needing to get specific about any one browser.

So stop pestering Facebook with this, because the day after they give in and implement a safety button, some other bright star of the online world will hit the headlines with improper contacts. Fix the issue where it really needs fixing: at a place in the software stack that can address it for all websites, not just one.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Web. No Comments »
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