kevincox

Because every three letter acronym means more than one thing. There are only 17 576 TLA so they are going to be heavily duplicated.

You should almost always spell out acronyms on the first use.

That's good to know. But at this point I really don't want to support this.

Wow, that site is cancer. Multiple popups, dismissing navigates away from the article.

My wife's last name was Wang. She was planning on taking her husband's last name her whole life. Joke's on her.

It's not really though. They just used the screen from the pregnancy test and replaced all of the other hardware.

As much as I hate it, I'm 90% sure that they did some analysis (probably 10 years ago now) and found that there are enough people that don't properly configure their computer that IP location is actually a better indicator than the Accept-Language header.

...which of course perpetuates the problem.

The fact is that it depends and it is a bit confusing for people not familiar. But it isn't hard to get used to.

+8Q, Paris isn't specific enough. There are multiple +8Q inside Paris. It can also be a bit risky to make short codes like this especially with larger cities as different maps may put the city in different spots.

What does work is +8Q Eiffel Tower which is useful for something like "Meet me here by the Eiffel Tower" or "I'm right here" when you are texting someone you are meeting and you know you are close but can't see each other.

So you end up with a few common options:

• +8Q Eiffel Tower We are pretty close together but need to get the exact spot.
• V75V+8Q Paris, France For exact spots around a known area.
• 8FW4V75V+8Q For fully qualified with no reference needed.

And a few less useful options:

• 8FW4V7+ This large part of a city.
• 8FW4+ This part of the country.
• 8F+ This area of the world.

If I was designing the system I don't think I would have done this "trailing zeros assumed" approach. Because IMHO for day-to-day use V75V+ Would be more useful as a shortcut for ????V75V+ rather than the actual V75V????+ showing a rough location on a human scale (in this case the Eiffel Tower park is pretty clearly targeted) rather than an area larger than a city. But that is really the only complaint I have.

The problem is that only your heaviest users are going to pay to remove the ads, so it doesn't make sense to price the subscription at any sort of average user. You need to slide the price point way up the distribution just to break even.

While Plus Codes are less memorable they are very easy to share verbally. Especially since you only need city + a few characters to be unambiguous. They are very useful any time you need to share a specific location (GPS-style)

This is Parkinson's Law.

If you generalize it a bit it is "consumption expands to fit available resources".

Oof, that is really not a good look. This should have been clearly disclosed and probably with a per-notification for the patch release.

There are a few main benefits.

1. For hardware-backed keys they can't be stolen aside from physically stealing the hardware. So unless your machine has malware there is no way for an attacker to authenticate using them.
2. Even for software keys the site you authenticate to doesn't learn enough to impersonate you. For example if for some reason your bank leaked some logs with PW + MFA someone could use that to log in as you (although admittedly short timeouts on MFA validity makes that window very small).
3. The browser ensures that you only authenticate to the correct domain. So it prevents phishing. (Although a password manager that only fills into the correct domain also accomplishes this.)

So I think if you are using unique passwords with an automated password manager the effective benefit is quite small. However for the "average computer user" who likely has less than 5 passwords that they use for everything it forces a pretty high base level of security.