Website notifications are a blight. I never want a website to be able to notify me about updates; these messages are interruptive, and like the vast majority of app notifications, they tend to be part of some marketing team’s growth strategy rather than a conduit to actually useful information.
An important designation that should never have been necessary at all. Notable that a memorial sign for Emmett Till was repeatedly stolen and shot. The sickness is ongoing. #Equality [Link]
When I was fifteen, I ran a little “e-zine” called Spire that was distributed on the cover CDs of various real, paper magazines. I thought it was pretty cool, and that nobody could possibly have known that it was run by a fifteen-year-old. (In retrospect, it was pretty obvious.) I
One reason of many why open sourced protocols are more secure: backdoors can't be kept hidden and abused by manufacturers and state actors. This was a serious breach and had the potential to destabilize nations. Secret and proprietary never means more secure. #Technology [Link]
Every time a billionaire makes a boneheaded social media decision, a Mastodon community gets its wings. #Technology [Link]
One of the problems with decentralized networks is that really bad stuff can traverse across them. The fediverse has a child sexual abuse material problem. Filtering it out does not solve the core problem. How can the fediverse be a good actor here? #Technology [Link]
Utterly heartbreaking. #Health [Link]
It's an interesting grift in a way: VC-subsidized startups changed an incumbent industry enough that its existing companies began to think that these new ideas were good business. But they never were, and it ate them from the inside. #Media [Link]
How many American cities operate like this, either explicitly or in spirit? The answer is not going to be a small number. #Democracy [Link]
I don't think the web is dying, but it's certainly not novel anymore - and you can't depend on its breadth alone to gain an audience. This is yet another call for "niche" publications - i.e., outlets that know who they&
Stories like this make me wonder if we'll ever get to a point where governments stop trying to backdoor encryption. Freedom from surveillance is a necessary prerequisite for free speech; observation always creates a chilling effect. These efforts aren't about fighting crime. This is about power.
For a group of people that talks a lot about voter fraud, the Republican Party do seem to enjoy setting up the conditions to commit it. #Democracy [Link]