#bad defaults

[let-me-say-no]

[let-me-say-no]

What is this blog?

This blog will document cases of antagonistic technology, specifically when services (apps, programs, websites or any other piece of technology you can think of) make it hard, or impossible for you to do what you want, instead of what they want. Especially when it comes to features that either decrease user privacy, or move the user towards using a service by the creator instead of a competing service. It’s my view that technology should always help the user and not get in the way of user’s choice.

Specific examples of this type of antagonistic technology are:

* When the technology hides the “no” button under a group of menus (#hard to say no)

* When the technology is set up with defaults that are probably not what the average user would have set if given the choice (#bad defaults)

* When the “no” button is worded as a “perhaps later” or similar (#can’t say no)

* When a feature is hard/impossible to disable (#hard to disable feature)

Please use the submit/ask buttons to submit your own examples of antagonistic technology.

[kaieffingleng]

Goddamn it Tumblr if I want to reblog something as a link I will fucking tell you.

Hear that? That silence? THAT IS THE SOUND OF ME NEVER TELLING YOU THAT I WANT TO REBLOG IT AS A LINK BECAUSE I NEVER WILL BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE STUPID.

[sqldump]

MongoDB Cursor Timeout

When using the MongoDB Java Driver, if you have long running operations that require you to keep a cursor open, you'll end up with a MongoException that says "oops, the cursor timed out" after about 10 minutes of activity.

The Mongo docs say that cursors timeout due to inactivity, but as of driver version 2.11.1, I've had cursors timeout after 10 minutes even though documents were being fetched from the cursor continuously. Turns out, the fix to keep the cursor alive is surprisingly easy.

cursor.addOption(com.mongodb.Bytes.QUERYOPTION_NOTIMEOUT);