Tag: technology

Forget the data hack, this revelatory analysis about Ashley Madison should kill the entire online dating business. Such is the sexual desperation of men that I don’t know it will, but it absolutely should:

When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison….

It’s worth noting that those 12,108 women’s accounts may represent the only true number we’ve got for women who used the site. After all, paying to delete an account is a sure sign of activity, though of course it’s evidence of disengagement rather than the amorous engagement that Ashley Madison promised.

Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.

The men’s accounts tell a story of lively engagement with the site, with over 20 million men hopefully looking at their inboxes, and over 10 million of them initiating chats. The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.

Sure, some of these inactive accounts were probably created by real, live women (or men pretending to be women) who were curious to see what the site was about. Some probably wanted to find their cheating husbands. Others were no doubt curious journalists like me. But they were still overwhelmingly inactive. They were not created by women wanting to hook up with married men. They were static profiles full of dead data, whose sole purpose was to make men think that millions of women were active on Ashley Madison.

Granted, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for men whose primary interest was cheating on their wives, but this sort of scam is an unconscionable preying on the lonely and the desperate.

I’ve had to look this up twice in the last three months, so I figure others have probably run into this problem on occasion.

For the past couple of months I have been coping with an incredibly frustrating problem. My files in the File Open dialog box mysteriously started appearing in order of the “Last Modified” date, instead of in alphabetical order….

Here’s what you do: go into Windows Explorer and open a folder such as My Documents. Now choose View|Details. Along the top of the file listing area, you see Name, Type, Size, Modified. If you click any one of these, it will change how your files are sorted in the list.

Now here’s the part that made Windows save this sorting information everywhere. Hold down the Ctrl key and click the X in the upper right-hand corner of the Window to close it.

It works. The crazy thing about this is that Microsoft barely lets you do anything without asking for confirmation. Do you REALLY want to quit? Are you sure? Do you REALLY want to save over that file? Are you sure? But if you happen to hit a key while you’re doing something else, well, OBVIOUSLY that is something that can never happen by accident and CLEARLY there is no reason to confirm this obscure, but universal settings change that will fundamentally alter how you interact with every file in every folder every time you want to open one.

Over the years, I have learned that assuming Apple is evil and Microsoft is stupid is a remarkably reliable metric in dealing with their operating systems.

As you can probably tell by my use of the old Blogger template, I am not inclined to make change simply for its own sake. Few site redesigns actually improve anything; I prefer a more evolutionary approach.

With that in mind, VPIT has come up with another tweak that may, or may not, improve your VP experience. Instructions follow:

You may have noticed that the comments at Vox Popoli are now numbered sequentially.  This is useful both for remembering your stopping point in a thread and referring to individual comments when you reply.

As an additional convenience, VPIT is experimenting with a Clever Browser Trick that will convert a simple reference to the number of a previous comment into a permalink to that actual comment.  You don’t have to know any HTML to make it work; just refer to the comment number like this:

@42

This should work naturally in naturally-written text, e.g.:


Vox @137, I cannot agree that you have definitively proven that SJWs subsist solely on carrots and their toenail clippings.

Nota Bene:  Because Blogspot’s commenting system is clownishly poor in features, it is impossible to consistently number comments when some of them get spammed. That is, if comment 17 is by a troll and is sent to spam, what was previously comment 18 will become comment 17.

For the love of all that bleeps and bloops, stop whining about spell-checker mistakes and autocorrect errors in your comments already! It’s considerably more annoying for the rest of us to read the inevitable follow-up post explaining that of course you know how to spell whatever word you just misspelled, it’s just that whatever device or software you are using introduced the error without you noticing it before hitting the blue button, than it is to simply skim past the misspelled word itself.

Drawing everyone’s attention to your claim that you really know how to spell a word that you observably didn’t know how to spell correctly is simple pride and vanity, and worse, it’s completely misplaced vanity.

Here’s why. It doesn’t make you look any less stupid to be knowingly using a device that regularly introduces errors than it does to make the occasional spelling error or typo in the first place. In fact, it makes you look at least twice as stupid, because first, either you don’t know how to turn autocorrect off or you actually rely on it. And second, given how often these errors are introduced, you are probably making more spelling mistakes due to using it than you would if you simply relied on your own spelling capabilities.

If you use a spellchecker, that’s fine, but then own it. If it screws up, it’s on you. Deal with it already and stop talking about the stupid things. To quote the VFM, WE DON’T CARE.

UPDATE: Same thing for double-comment errors. We already assume you didn’t intend to repeat the comment. Don’t make matters worse by adding a SECOND unnecessary comment to it. No apology is required.