Philipp Lenssen

The most interesting aspect of the backstory is that there presumably was only one person repeatedly trying to update the Wikipedia page with news of the reporters' abduction, residing somewhere in Southern Florida. Since the news haven't been reported in mainstream media, one has to wonder what other sources of information did s/he have, and ?why? was it so important to have this particular thing appearing out in the open? - ianf ⌘

*sigh* encyclopedias shouldn't try to hide the truth or is there a 'except sensitive current events' aspect to Wikipedia. Particular countries may have laws that override that but should these sorts of safety concerns be handed directly from the newspaper to another information source - shouldn't the police be involved in a case of public safety :-( I appreciate the effectiveness but the approach feels wrong. - immaterial

Another reason why I don't trust such "good censorship" is that it helps governments spread lies. If we should hide the truth for the good, why not distort it a little for the best? See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol... - Jérôme Flipo

"approach feels wrong" - might be, but then you shouldn't equate encyclopedia with Wikipedia. First is by-design carefully now-and-again-updated, weighted source(s) of cumulative knowledge; the other a bucket of instant opinion disguised as information and verified solely by possible concurrent presence of opposite opinion. In this case the NYT team knew right from the start what they... more... - ianf ⌘

Jérôme, aren't you confusing occasional police crime-fighting tactic (if a novel one) with some government-led campaign to mislead the public for its own political/ social reasons? [Administrivia: also post print-version urls whenever possible, they open and render much faster; e.g. <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol...>] - ianf ⌘

Ianf, many political campaigns against freedom of speech pretend to fight crime (recent example http://www.nytimes.com/2009...). I'd like to know which argument Wikipedia's administrators (could have) used to silence the truth without publicly admitting that the reporter was kidnapped. - Jérôme Flipo

You're correct about moral ambiguities involved in any sting operation (of which the Moscow one was an instance), and wider risks –gradual greater public acceptability of, etc– stemming from them. However, the step from that to "silencing the truth" seems to me quite large. The truth in itself does not ask to be disseminated and meted out to everyone. I thought the NYT article outlined... more... - ianf ⌘

Is Wikipedia going to be providing this service to everybody who gets kidnapped or only to American journalists? - Adewale Oshineye

@ianf I think you'll fine wikipedia is more accurate than paper based encyclopedias in scientific tests - I can't remember where, but I should be able to find it if you like. I'm not sure if I dislike the idea of a Police conspiracy to mislead the public more or less than a Government one but then I personally don't trust either (although only the police have directly lied about events I've observed, petty situation though it was) - immaterial

Many hide them -- gmail does not load them for example, at least by default. Also, I hate tracking dots in emails. - John Mueller

there's no standard for read receipts / tracker images / etc (though there is 'the way microsoft does it') :-( depends on which email client really - immaterial

John, they may be turned off by default (rightly so), but I might want to give FF mails the permission to show them... - Philipp Lenssen

I'd probably prefer it to be a browser thing where you can set it to show password while typing on a per account basis, although that's horribly overcomplicated :-/ - immaterial

I guess browsers could just redefine what they do with the "password" attribute. The W3C, while usually talking semantics only and leaving the implementation details to the user agent, does mention a specific implementation guideline though: "Like "text", but the input text is rendered in such a way as to hide the characters (e.g., a series of asterisks)." (http://www.w3.org/TR...) - Philipp Lenssen

You could create a bookmarklet to convert password fields to text fields like this: javascript:void((function(){var%20p=document.getElementsByTagName("input");for(var i=0;i<p.length;i++){if(p[i].type=="password"){p[i].type="text"}}})()) - Tony Ruscoe

Best of two worlds - a "reveal" control next to a pass•••••• field. - ianf ⌘

There are few things worse than a gratuitous password field. - Gabe

Cool. - Onur Gündüz

Although the iPhone can view text files, it can't view this. I'm guessing that's a mime type thing or perhaps the file is always pushed as an attachment to force download...? - Tony Ruscoe

Tony: interesting. Yes, we set Content-Disposition: attachment on all attachments to prompt download. Didn't realize that wouldn't work on iPhones. We will discuss how to work around the problem. - Bret Taylor

how you did that? - yalnızlık paylaşılmaz..

My jailbroken iPhone gave me the option to download or play this file. Play opened up YouTube! Haha. - Simon Wicks

The file is stored at (Amazon S3) friendfeed-media.com by the way (which does not have a robots.txt so should be theoretically indexable to a bot going into downloads). Some other images at Friendfeed are too now stored at that location. For some reason clicking on my avatar pic shows i.friendfeed.com but clicking on Bret Taylor's pic shows friendfeed-media.com. Edit: perhaps Bret's pic was newly uploaded since the server move was deployed. - Philipp Lenssen

Bret, thanks for the clarification. That's what I figured but wasn't near my PC to check. I guess there's no way around that unless you change that header when serving the files to iPhones. MP3s work fine because the iPhone can play those... - Tony Ruscoe

What about that ? http://www.epikone.com/blog... Never tried... - Stanislas Jourdan

Your grandfather wants to watermark his subdomain? I'm getting a little frightened. :) - Matt Cutts

How many different recipients does he have? He could add a random parameter for each recipient and then feed it through a URL shortening service to get the stats when each one clicks through. (Or even just embed Google Analytics code and use that to report on the parameter usage.) - Tony Ruscoe via fftogo

I suspect the list has something below 30 people. Yes perhaps I should suggest using the Google Analytics snippet for starters, and even without parametrized URLs, see how far that kind of feedback serves his needs. Did not think of that. Thanks! - Philipp Lenssen

Matt: I hope that's a good thing :) - Philipp Lenssen

Given 30 people and >1 pages, I don't think a simple tracking solution will really make much sense. Creating 30 individual URLs per page manually is a lot of work, even if it's just an incremental counter. In the end, I bet it's enough to use Analytics to count the number of users :-) - John Mueller