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Unwarranted Takedown

A few days ago Microsoft, in what is probably the silliest action they’ve taken in a while now, took down 22 domains belonging to dynamic DNS company noip.com. We know ’cause we use their services at Cosmical. Their move, against a service provider of this sort, is unprecedented and somewhat dangerous from a legal perspective; their argument was that hosts using the dynamic DNS services of noip.com were spreading malware and engaged in illegal activity. Instead of engaging with noip.com to disable those hosts and block those accounts, they opted to go to (US) Federal Court and get warrant seizing…

Fira Sans and Fira Mono

After many years of using Inconsolata Hellenic on my linux and OS X boxes as the monospace font of choice for development, I switched to Fira Mono, commissioned by Mozilla for their Firefox OS and designed by Erik Spiekermann. Inconsolata might have been one of the best looking monospace fonts I've ever seen – and the fact that it was free made it an insanely great choice – but it was time for a change. Oh and one more thing, Fira has full support for (monotonic) Greek.

Go and Javascript.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Python is being replaced by Go. I don’t have a lot of information to back up this prediction except that most of the positive articles I read about Go are written by Python developers, and a lot of them say that they are now actively migrating their code base from Python to Go. I don’t see as much enthusiasm for Go from developers using statically typed languages, probably because of Go’s antiquated type system (which is still a big step up from Python, obviously).

Υπερίων & η αγορά της Ευρυζωνικότητας

Ξαναγυρίζω σε ένα θέμα για το οποίο έχω γράψει αρκετά. Προ μερικών ετών, σε ένα άρθρο μου έγραφα για το ΣΑΠΕΣ, πλέον Υπερίων, το σύστημα της ΕΕΤΤ για την καταγραφή της πραγματικής ταχύτητας σύνδεσης ανα την ελληνική επικράτεια. Η ιδέα είναι πολύ απλή: γράφεσαι με το email σου και πραγματοποιείς, μέσω του δικτυακού τόπου του Υπερίων, μετρήσεις της ταχύτητάς της σύνδεσής σου. Προφανώς η υπηρεσία είναι δωρεάν, όμως και φοβερά χρήσιμη, τόσο για την ΕΕΤΤ, που εν γένει έχει συμβολικό ρόλο στην Ελλάδα, αν κρίνουμε από τα χάλια της ευρυζωνικής συνδεσιμότητας όχι μόνον της χώρας εν γένει αλλά και κεντρικών…

Broadband matters.

A 10% increase in fast broadband penetration can result in between 0.25% and 1.38% growth in a country's gross domestic product (GDP), research by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) suggests, as well as a 3.6% increase in efficiency.

Apple UX Regressions

These past few years have been a somewhat turbulent time for Apple. Its market dominance in the smartphone race diminished, its profits holding strong, but investor and analyst confidence evaporated, its once infallible strategy, product line, image and appeal gone and its appeal lacklustre compared to the past. The post-Steve Jobs Apple gradually shifted its culture as new executives took the reigns and old ones departed. Much publicised was Tim Cook’s change regarding the company’s relationship with analysts and shareholders with the company giving out dividends for the first time in many years, after Steve Jobs steadfastly refused to do…