Do not track... the end of free services?

NyTimes put up an article about the ongoing attempts to improve online privacy.

Welp. While in principle I think that privacy is important, and people have a right to it, I don't think people are going to like the alternative.

Google, yahoo, facebook, all those service people use for free and love, are supported by advertising. Targeted advertising even. And that only works because of some amount of user tracking.

So, what will happen if/when tracking becomes impossible thanks to mandatory "do not track" buttons? These companies providing the services need to switch to another revenue model. With tracking out of the window, monetising data is out of the question. As is targetted advertising... So we're left with primitive advertising(and more ad coverage on pages to cover for lower rates!?), or for pay services.

Is this helping anyone? I don't think so.

There are already ways to disable tracking. Disable your cookies, disable flash cookies/datastore. But this isn't really a place government should in any way be getting involved with. Increased consumer awareness could be good. Allow them to choose. People who are comfortable with being tracked in exchange for a service can continue, and people who would prefer to pay for the service can go ahead in peace. Simply removing tracking as an option altogether is just a good way to kill off free services.

Be part of the problem, or the solution

Well, I'm still alive.

I've just decided that unless I'm actually going to write an opinionated rant about something it's not going to be very interesting so I'm not really updating about whatever latest book I've read or am reading(though "The elements of computing systems" is awesome so far!)

Anyway, today, a little bit of a rant.

I *hate* Shift-JIS.

We're in the era of unicode now, or at least should be. It can represent any character you can think of, is fully ascii compatible, well supported in all development API's, and yet so many places are still using ancient artifacts from the past.

I work at a Japanese company so unfortunately, I have to deal with Shift-JIS and EUC-JP a lot. Generally in the context of turning them into UTF-8. Whether it's taking search queries and figuring out their encoding or dealing with buggy source code because someone thought it would be a good idea to mix encodings in varying source files, encodings other than unicode upset me a lot.

Apparently some big shops still haven't entered the modern era either. Try loading a UTF-8 encoded csv file with japanese in it into excel.

Garbage!

Thanks Microsoft. It's kind of sad because overall excel is a good product. Anyway, OpenOffice(or LibreOffice now that a lot of the devs ran from oracle) loads em great. And it gives you an option to select encoding if you do decide to use one of this dinosaur age encodings(I'm sure there's a setting for this somewhere but I don't use excel anymore and the people that reported the problem to me couldn't find one, which means neither will the vast majority of users).

So, when our software puts out CSV files for customers, how do we encode them?

In Shift-JIS. It makes me hurt. But what can we do when the vast majority of people use Excel? What does one do in a situation like this?