Can you actually prevent an app from using one or more of those permissions? Like can I give it permission to my camera but not to the call log?

There is no official support for this AFAIK. Some 3rd party ROMs like Cyanogenmod have this functionality built in, though, and if you root your phone there are apps like "Permissions Denied" that you can run to do this.

I'd assume the reason Google is somewhat hesitant to offer this officially is that many apps don't deal well with this -- some do degrade gracefully, while others end up throwing task-ending exceptions because the app code just never planned for not being able to do some task which requires permissions declared in the manifest.

There is a simple solution for managing permissions for poorly built apps: serve them empty or fake data.

Every app already has to consider the case of GPS being unavailable indoors, the contact list only having one person (yourself) in it, or the camera picture being black in darkness.

Yes, that is a very good idea.

I'm sure some apps will fail anyway because they just never expected a contact list of 0 entries, but the list should be much smaller in that situation (mostly limited to those who do virtually no QA).

Sounds like a huge time investment and you risk bricking your phone? Doesn't seem worth it.

I have always wondered why Google doesn't add this feature. Creeping up the ladder of permissions is a problem in Android, and the user's choice is all or nothing. This can become a bad choice: Add a permission, or lose access to the data an app is keeping for you.

It would be easy enough for developers to catch security exceptions that Google would find little or no developer fall-off due to a requirement like this.

No. Only on some custom Android builds.

There was a site, I can't find it now, that had the anonymized question data for sale but I think it was $20K or in that ballpark. Also I think they do license the data to universities upon request. E.g. siepr.stanford.edu/system/files/shared/Piskorski-SIEPR.pdf

To be fair, from what I recall while I was there, the blog was also instead of paying for a PR firm and having Sam going on morning talk shows that didn't really hit our demographic or help our growth much. So once we got bought the need for it did decrease a lot.

I heard there is a book containing a lot of similar information coming out though.

Have they participated in any more? It seems like one off investments by giant PE firms probably aren't helpful to any startup that doesn't already have a personal connection to those firms.

Why are graylists that horrible? All it does is require the sending server to retry 5 minutes later; I don't see how that would have any impact on a business unless they are in the habit of being on the phone with new customers and asking them to send an email at the same time.

Assuming the sending server does that. Maybe it takes a few hours. Maybe it doesn't. Small businesses can be a mess, and you can't say "well, your customers suck" when the client complains about how greylisting is working for him.

I've seen many poorly written web form handlers that try to do SMTP themselves, and that clearly don't ever attempt to retry graylisted failures...

Huh? I know lots of people who have bank accounts in other currencies. Any taxes due on them obviously have to be paid in USD but there's no inherent law against it afaik.

Really, which bank? Is it a true foreign currency account, or based on that currency's index. Personally interested.

Offhand, HSBC and the Royal Bank of Canada in Canadian currency. Pretty sure you can open an investment account with Interactive Brokers in multiple currencies although that's not a true bank account.

You might have to go to one of their foreign branches to do it though. I don't know if you can just show up at a branch in Iowa (for example) and they would know how/be able to open an account denominated in another currency.

I changed my mail server to accept . instead of +'s so now the emails I generate work through pretty much any validation.

I've also done that and I've just recently added _ to the mix, which I think is particularly devious and wholeheartedly recommend.

These (the dot and underscore separators) are a great solution, because when the spam-happy-marketroids try to get the webdevs to intentionally implement broken email address validation, they can point out all the corporate email addresses which are by-policy of the form "[email protected]"…

Yeah, so much for RFC2822. Oh well, apparently, some spammers are clever enough to grep the emails with "+" and throw away the obvious additional portion.

The author of that rfc should be shoot. Of course nobody obeys a standard which requires you to handle comments in email addresses.

I'm not sure I understand. Which part of that RFC are you responding to?

Good luck changing that in the US. If you got waiters subject to the normal minimum wage then there might be potential. Hopefully you don't take your dislike of a system out on someone forced to work within it.

Given you can get 1Gbps from Cogent for ~1K/mo (at least that's the price I heard last time they were having a sale) that works out to $0.003/GB, so both are making a massive amount of profit.

How can I get $0.003/GB? Can I do it with a single dedicated server or do I need my own data center?

Contact your local cogent rep. If your dedicated server is in a building with a cogent feed you can probably get a line to it. I'm not sure their current non sales pricing and that might require a 10Gbps commit.

So why are you a shareholder? Or why haven't you attempted to change the policies from long term thinking to quarterly thinking like most companies these days?