About three weeks ago I gave in: I turned on Firefox’s Tracking Protection feature. Last week I installed 1Blocker on my iPhone. Until now, I’d avoided ad- and tracker-blocking software. I felt uncomfortable hiding that which provided sites’ revenues. Looking under the hood at sites I regularly visit, however, I realise now that I’ve been a fool to hold out for so long.

I have two aims with both Tracking Protection and 1Blocker:

A few weeks ago, we switched an API in our synchronizing database for Android to use the builder pattern. You can see the implementation. The long and short is that our external API went from:

PullReplication pull = new PullReplication();
pull.source = /* remote database URL */;
pull.target = /* local database */;
Replicator pullReplicator = ReplicatorFactory.oneway(pull);

to the cleaner:

Replicator pullReplicator = ReplicatorBuilder.pull()
    .from(/* remote database URL */)
    .to(/* local database */)
    .build();

The primary gain was that we reduced the API’s “surface area” significantly. We did this by going from having three classes whose names vaguely suggested their combined usage – PullReplication, ReplicatorFactory and Replicator – to two classes whose names spell out a clear relationship: ReplicatorBuilder and Replicator.

A lot of times people talk about how face-to-face communication is high bandwidth, but let’s just say that in a lot of cases, that face-to-face communication can be a crutch. You can just throw bandwidth at the problem as opposed to actually using the bandwidth you have efficiently.

A thought-provoking point from an interview with Joe Mastey on the FogBugz blog.

Microsoft’s Wi-Fi Sense appears a bit scary for anyone running a wi-fi network. Once a user has joined your network and not opted out of sharing it, the network and its access details are sent to Microsoft for use by everyone in that user’s contact list:

For networks you choose to share access [to all your Outlook, Skype or Facebook contact list] to, the password is sent over an encrypted connection and stored in an encrypted file on a Microsoft server, and then sent over a secure connection to your contacts’ phone if they use Wi-Fi Sense and they’re in range of the Wi-Fi network you shared. Your contacts don’t get to see your password, and you don’t get to see theirs.

To me, it seems obvious that patents in my industry — software — are destructive. The Economist agrees, and makes some suggestions, in Time to fix patents.

Patents are supposed to spread knowledge, by obliging holders to lay out their innovation for all to see; they often fail, because patent-lawyers are masters of obfuscation. Instead, the system has created a parasitic ecology of trolls and defensive patent-holders, who aim to block innovation, or at least to stand in its way unless they can grab a share of the spoils. An early study found that newcomers to the semiconductor business had to buy licences from incumbents for as much as $200m. Patents should spur bursts of innovation; instead, they are used to lock in incumbents’ advantages.