Ground rules for acceptable ads online

The following is an edit of a piece originally written in November 2015.

The pinnacle of non-intrusive online ads were the original Google search ads. They were out of the way, clearly marked as ads - and hence could be visually filtered out. They were pure text, so could be neatly included as elements on the rendered page. And they were always targeting an INTEREST. Not an individual.

I will take that as the minimum acceptable advertising behaviour. I'm not implying it's perfect, but at least we set a clear set of ground rules. With that in mind, my ideal, non-intrusive ads mechanism builds on the following rules:

• Ads must never be inline to page content.
• Even when clearly out of the way, ads must not be allowed to mimic page content; they must be clearly marked as ads.
• Text only.
• I might accept an image within the ad, provided it was always served from the content provider's system.
• As an extension to previous point: if the served image size would exceed a notable fraction of the page size, it must not be included in the output.
• No user tracking of any kind.
• No third-party javascript. Ever.
• At most 15% of display real estate allowed to be used by ads. Including the padding in the UI. (It all counts as space denied from content.)
• Not allowed to affect page content load times. Ad material must be included at the end of the page code. If your service pushes ads from internal and separate system, hard timeouts must be imposed: if the internal system cannot serve an ad within an allotted time, the frontend must never be forced to wait. You just missed an ad impression. Tough.
• If clicking an ad takes a user through a bounce page, all identifiable information from the user must be stripped. Bounce page or redirect must not impose any further page loading delay.
• No beacons.

Breaking even one of the rules automatically disqualifies you.

If you, as an advertiser, find these rules unacceptable - well, then we are in mutual disagreement. I find your ads equally unacceptable and will treat them as a form of cancer.

However, as a genuine service to the user... please allow the users to search for ads that have been displayed to them. Preferably by display context. I would be glad to return to a subject at a later date and search for something I remember seeing earlier.

The above set of rules is still not ideal, but everything that behaved according to them would at least be palatable.

Random musings, part [REDACTED]

Software is like a diamond ...

... the better it glistens, the more edges there are.

... the toughest substance on planet, yet can shatter from a single impact.

... creating one can destroy your tools.

... no matter how well it wears, it'll still burn.

Another blog post at $dayjob

So I wrote another one at work. After explaining to various parties how and why password cracking attempts happen, I felt it was prudent to write the whole thing down for future reference outside the corporate walls.

With that in mind, your passwords have almost certainly been compromised

TL;DR: use high-entropy passwords, a password manager, and proper 2-Factor authentication.

DC4420 Presentation: Intended Consequences

Faithful to habits, I found myself with a presentation at dc4420. Lessons of usability and search for sanity gave rise to a talk on how deal with conflicting auditing demands.

The talk was geared towards industry long-timers who have, for reasons only marginally in their control, found themselves appeasing externalities and ticking boxes. I wanted to highlight that hope is not lost.

You can find the slides here: Intended Consequences

Evolution and progression of debugging prowess

When things break in mysterious ways, developers tend to go through a familiar series of increasingly demanding steps. As experience, skills and even personal networks grow, we can find ourselves diving ever further in the following chain:

1. "It must be in my code." -- hours of debugging
2. "Okay, it must be somewhere in our codebase." -- days of intense debugging and code spelunking
3. "It HAS TO be in the third party libraries" -- days of issue tracker excavations and never-before-enabled profiling runs
4. "It can't possibly be in stdlib..." -- more of the same, but now profiling the core runtime libraries
5. "Please let this not be a compiler bug" -- we become intensely familiar with mailing list archives
6. "I will not debug drivers. I will not debug drivers. I will not debug drivers."
7. "I don't even know anyone who could help me figure out the kernel innards."
8. "NOBODY understands filesystems!"
9. "What do you mean 'firmware edge case'?"
10. "Where is my chip lab grade oscilloscope?"

How far have you found yourself?

Engineering challenges at Smarkets

A few days ago I posted a long-in-the-making article about the common engineering problems and constant challenges at the $dayjob blog. There are a number of repeating themes and questions that come up when doing interviews, so I figured I might as well answer them all in one place, and with sufficient detail.

After all, why not?

DC4420 Presentation: Infrastructure Design For Professionally Paranoid

I gave a surprisingly long presentation in April at the dc4420 monthly event. What was supposed to be at most 40'ish minutes followed by short Q&A ended up taking more than an hour thanks to lively discussion during the different segments.

This was an overview of infrastructural design constraints for a betting exchange, especially focused on finding practical ways to address the regulatory demands. At the cross-section between gambling and FinTech the environment comes with some fairly unique externally imposed requirements.

The slides are a revised version of the presentation material, designed as better suited for distribution.

You can find the slides here: Infrastructure Design for the Professionally Paranoid

DC4420 Presentation: size_t Does Matter

I gave a short presentation in October at the dc4420 monthly event. The talk was about the simple theory and practice behind hash extension attacks.

You can find the slides here: size_t Does Matter

BBC on the Finnish Phoenix

Well that was unexpected. BBC just quoted me.