Out with the old, in with the new. This site is now a more maintainable Mezzanine instance instead of my Rails 2.x CMS.
Back in March, I complained about a crowded notification drawer, and hey, look, they fixed it. (Even if any given app isn't on board with this yet, hello apktool/baksmali, bye bye notification icon.) So, clearly I should complain more often. :-)
So, hands up if your notification bar looks like this…
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Over the past month or so, the "nymwars" have become the thing Google+ is most known for among my circle of friends. This is a problem of Google's own making: they are suspending profiles based on naive heuristics about "real names" (actually typical two part western names), and demanding government ID to reinstate them. The names policy they claim to be enforcing says you should use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you
, but it is both possible and common for this to be entirely different from the name the government calls you. Furthermore, the verifiers apparently lack even basic training in ID verification, which allows frivolous reporting of profiles and trivial reinstatement for the true trolls/imposters (who will think nothing of faking an ID).