Monthly Archives: February 2013

Just the Facts

Local news sites are notorious for low signal-to-noise ratios.  The news content is good, but that’s often crowded out by excessive ads, Flash videos, runaway JavaScript, and animated GIFs. These things make 90s websites look clean and elegant. I get seasick visiting them.

My typical antidote has been to just stick to RSS, and let blockers like Chrome’s Click to Play squelch things when I have to visit the site.  But the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) recently broke their RSS feeds while at the same time expanded their JavaScript and floating div monstrosities. What’s a guy to do when he just wants to read the latest Falcons and Georgia Tech news?

Well, I took the nuclear solution and went with lynx.  Yes, lynx: the old text mode browser. Whenever I want to read content from the AJC or similar news sites, I just fire it off from the command line and browse away. It works well, and I can do a quick news check in no time. Hopefully, the AJC won’t start disallowing or punishing lynx use.

EMV Day Now

When it comes to consumer technologies, we in the US often let the rest of the developed world “leap frog” us, frequently with our own innovations.  The main culprits are typically our size and social adoption curves.  When you have an installed base of familiar and comfortable (but old) technologies numbering in the hundreds of millions, transition takes awhile.  So we’re stuck with broad use of anachronistic things like CDMA cell phone networks, Windows XP, checks, and skimmable mag stripe credit cards.  In payments, where adoption is key, it often takes significant financial and regulatory incentives to bring in the new.

As card fraud escalates, US payment networks are stepping up incentives to migrate to chip-embedded credit and debit cards using the Europay-Mastercard-Visa (EMV) standard.  For example, Visa’s new October, 2015 fraud liability shift (from issuer to merchant) for non-EMV transactions provides the looming punitive “stick,” while their recently-announced common debit solution and Technology Innovation Program (TIP) provide some “carrots.”  But that’s all “network push” with little “consumer pull.”  Hopefully, as more EMV cards roll out in the US, consumers will value the extra security, and competitive pressure will motivate issuers to send out those new cards quickly.  EMV doesn’t solve all card fraud problems, but it’s a step worth taking.  The costs of fraud affect us all, and it’s time we caught up with the rest of the world.