Werd I/O

Something I've long suspected is often the case: the founder of a data privacy firm also ran dozens of the people search services the firm was set up to remove people from for a fee.

"Onerep’s “Protect” service starts at $8.33 per month for individuals and $15/mo for families, and promises to remove your personal information from nearly 200 people-search sites. Onerep also markets its service to companies seeking to offer their employees the ability to have their data continuously removed from people-search sites." #Technology

"Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is building an investor group to acquire ByteDance’s TikTok, as a bipartisan piece of legislation winding its way through Congress threatens its continued existence in the U.S."

Come on. This is brazen.

Whatever you think of TikTok, I'm not excited about the idea that the US can force a sale of an internet service because it's under the control of another company. It seems to me that this undermines the effectiveness of the internet itself: the idea that anyone can reach anyone.

"There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China," Mnuchin said. Sure - they have the Great Firewall. We don't. We're supposed to be something different. #Technology

"The House bill, then, is an acknowledgment that algorithmic curation of feeds is a powerful feature that can have a major influence on individuals and society. It at least makes the point that allowing a foreign company, under its own government’s influence, to have some level of control of the algorithm, is a potential danger for domestic security."

I'm honestly troubled by the Tiktok legislation. I think Evan has a partial solution here: decoupling platforms from curation algorithms seems important.

I think there's also a lot to be said for not allowing any platform to get this big, regardless of national origin. If any company is big enough for its curation algorithm to influence national security, isn't that a problem? We saw Facebook influence multiple elections in worrying ways. I'd rather see lots of smaller platforms, linked with common protocols. And I'd support legislation designed to help prevent a small number of platforms from dominating our media consumption. #Technology

"We almost never never actually teach people how to use the ordinary tools of business communication in more effective ways. So, I'm gathering some advice that I regularly share with people, in hopes that this helps you get your messages across more effectively."

This is brilliant: something I wish was part of every computer science curriculum (and every MBA and just about everything else). Perhaps it can be?

I've been thinking a lot about how to help engineers be better storytellers, and these fundamentals are a core piece of this puzzle. There's more, of course, but you can never go wrong by making your writing concrete and ensuring you keep its audience in mind. #Technology

"It would not be worth all that to make a game that is a single stupid joke. And I like games that are single stupid jokes, and so I guess I have spent a few years in the hopes that I can let more people make more of them."

Everything about this is lovely. #Technology

This is kind of a disingenuous statement from Apple, but also an example of why "consumer harm" as currently defined is not the best yardstick for anti-trust.

It's notable that Apple is calling Spotify out specifically here, with a side order of snark for the European Commission allegedly overreaching by choosing to "enforce the DMA before the DMA becomes law".

But as well-written as the argument is, it doesn't pass the sniff test. For example, this is not true: "When it comes to doing business, not everyone’s going to agree on the best deal. But it sure is hard to beat free." It's not a free deal - in-app purchases carry a 30% surcharge.

The EU is broadly a good thing for competition and for open markets; Apple has been a walled garden. Forcing it to be more open will, indeed, benefit consumers. #Technology

"That is sort of the original spirit of the internet. [...] What if we made no money? What if money wasn’t even something we were thinking about?"

A lovely tribute to TinyLetter, which was shut down recently after 14 years. It was founded by Philip Kaplan - aka Pud - who has been insanely productive for the decades since he started FuckedCompany. He's described as an entrepreneur, which he is, but everything he's made has been in his own style, under his own rules.

The author here notes that "writers could express their weirdest selves", which seems completely in keeping with that spirit. I wish more of the internet could be that. #Technology

A pretty good example of clear, transparent communication about product decisions that might not please everyone - particularly when the userbase culture is heavily steeped in open source.

I respect this: "Right now, the core of Tapestry is closed source. We have put some components up on GitHub and are also fully documenting an open API to that proprietary core. Teaching is a part of that openness."

Tapestry should be an interesting app. I'm excited to try it. #Technology

Buffer continues to lead by example: extraordinarily transparent and willing to share information about its ups and downs. I wish more startups (and founders) would think this way.

Not only is writing well thinking well, but there's nothing to be lost by sharing in this way. It's a way to get feedback, but also to very clearly share the way they think with prospective customers and future employees.

Buffer seems to have a renewed interest in communicating in this way, and I'm grateful for the example.

And also, there's this:

"Another important shift taking place is the advent of decentralized social networks, including the Fediverse. We believe the efforts being made towards open standards for social networking are important for the Internet and the world, and we were one of the fastest to move to support Mastodon in early 2023." #Technology

"When it was his time to leave, McKay swapped out his existing profile picture for one that resembled an angrier version of Slackbot’s actual icon. He also changed his name to “Slackbot.”" Genius.

Serious talk: this is actually a pretty common trick. You can't change your name to Slackbot in Slack, because the bot is already there, but you can use a unicode character that's visually indistinguishable from an "o". Malware and crypto scammers do something similar all the time. You'd think there would be better mitigations.

But whatever. This is hilarious. Nice work. #Technology

The Markup found that Instagram is removing content about Israel and Palestine:

"Our investigation found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, erratically suppressed hashtags, and denied users the option to appeal when the company removed their comments, including ones about Israel and Palestine, as “spam.”"

"[...] As TechCrunch has detailed, the platform’s moderation system seems to disproportionately suppress Palestinian users. The Markup found a few accusations of supporters of Israel feeling suppressed, but did not identify more sweeping evidence through our reporting or testing."

When these platforms become large enough to be a de facto public square, as Instagram, Facebook, and X certainly are, their moderation policies disproportionately affect public perception. It's one reason why I prefer open protocols like the fediverse, with smaller communities that each can have different moderation policies, which in aggregate offer greater choice.

As reported here, people who want to shed light on the perspectives and lived experiences of people on one side of a conflict wind up using euphemisms instead of the names of a people in order to avoid getting their content banned or deleted. That's not the kind of information source that sits at the heart of a healthy, democratic culture. #Technology

"The prospect of this data, including Near’s collection of location data from sensitive locations such as abortion clinics, being sold off in bankruptcy has raised alarms in Congress." As it should - although, of course, fire sales are not the only way this data gets sold and transferred.

When a business goes under, its assets are usually put on the market, either to a sole acquirer or piecemeal. For a data broker, those assets include personal information for potentially millions of people.

The only real way to stop this is to prevent it from having been gathered in the first place. Putting controls on data transfers in a fire sale is good, but preventing it from being aggregated and centralized is better. Otherwise, inevitably, it will be misused at some point during its life. #Technology

"The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European Convention on Human Rights."

This renders some of the EU's own proposed legislation illegal. More importantly, client-side scanning and backdoors become illegal in themselves, making it harder for vendors from anywhere to include those features, lest they fall foul of the law with EU users. #Technology

A glimpse into a surprising design problem created by constitutional monarchy: the need to update the crown in your logo when a new King has taken the throne.

"On each accession, the monarch will choose a Royal Cypher, or symbol to represent their personal authority. You can see the Royal Cypher in many places, for example post boxes, on police and military uniforms or on the side of official buildings."

The longer I've been away from the UK, the more surreal this kind of thing has become. I will say, though, that the new crown looks a little less like a loaf of bread that's collapsed in the oven, so there's something a bit pleasing about that. #Technology

"My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money. Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong."

Strongly co-signed. Sure, I have a bias: around a decade of my career in total has been spent working directly on open source projects. But throughout doing that work, I encountered people who felt that because I was releasing my work in the open, I didn't have a right to earn a living. I reject that entirely.

I agree with every part of the argument presented in this post. If people can't be paid to work on open source, only people with disposable time and income will get to do so. The result is software that skews to people from wealthier demographics who don't have families, or that can't be sustainably maintained - and I don't think that's what we want at all.

There are people who say "we need universal basic income!" or "the solution is to get rid of money entirely!" and that's lovely, in a way, but people need to eat today, not just in some future post-capitalist version of the world. #Technology

It's hard to read this without feeling like the social contract of the web is falling apart.

And when social agreements fall apart, that's when we start having to talk about more rigid, enforced contracts instead. As the piece notes:

"There are people on both sides who believe we need better, stronger, more rigid tools for managing crawlers. They argue that there’s too much money at stake, and too many new and unregulated use cases, to rely on everyone just agreeing to do the right thing."

I think it's inevitable that we'll see more regulation and a more locked-down web. Probably, past a certain point, this was always going to happen. But I'll miss the days of rough consensus and working code. #Technology

Catnip for me: the first post in a new blog that tells the story of building Slack from the ground up, by two of its former employees.

This was surprising to me, although I guess I don't really know why: "We used the tried and true LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). We were all deeply familiar with these conventional tools, and Cal and the Flickr team had defined a framework for building out and scaling web applications using them (called flamework for Flickr framework)." #Technology

"[The ACLU] publicly challenged the school district in a statement to media outlets stating that it has filed a public records request seeking more information about the district’s decision to [a firm] to track student attendance and tardiness by having students place their fingers on a biometric scanner."

So many questions: how anyone thought this was a good idea to begin with; how the data is stored and processed; whether this is legal; what the software company providing this platform could possibly be thinking. Nipping this in the bud feels like a good idea. #Technology

The BBC extends its Mastodon experiment for another six months: "We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub, the underlying protocol of Mastodon and the Fediverse."

The BBC's approach has been great: transparent, realistic, and well-scoped. I suspect we'll see more media entities exploring ActivityPub as the year progresses - not only because of Threads, but as activity as a whole on the social web heats up. #Technology

"Threads users will be allowed to follow accounts that post political content, but the algorithm that suggests content from users you don't follow will not recommend accounts that post about politics."

It's not clear to me what the definition of "politics" encompasses here. Is it just literal party / election politics? Does it include discussions about equal rights, which would disproportionately hit users from underrepresented groups?

Adam Mosseri says that he wants to create a "less angry place", but what about the topics where people are right to be angry? #Technology

A characteristically great review from Molly White of Chris Dixon's disclosure-free shilling of blockchains as a way to save the web. Read, written, owned.

I do think there are some areas where blockchain is unfairly maligned: it introduced the idea of decentralization to a much wider audience, and it's the only community that has made widespread use of identity in the browser.

But this kind of shilling - particularly without disclosures - is out of date and unnecessary. What would serve the conversation is an open, good faith discussion of the possible options that doesn't go out of its way to dismiss technologies in active use as being dead. Otherwise what you're left with is the impression that rather than serving a higher calling to save the web, the author is looking for technologies he can make a lot of money from. #Technology

"In order to be able to choose their own browser, people must be free to download it, easily set it to default and to continue using it – all without interference from the operating system. Windows users do not currently enjoy this freedom of choice."

What's interesting to me is that this is very similar to the tactics that got Microsoft into hot anti-trust water a few decades ago. And here it is again: research that shows Microsoft is prioritizing its Edge browser in Windows. New browser, same dark pattern. #Technology

"NYT is using the open source Ruffle as their Flash emulator. I hope other news outlets follow. It’s great to see my favorite visualizations working again."

A lovely way to keep interactive archives alive.

A little-known, but perhaps obvious, fact about newsrooms is that a lot of the interactive features you see embedded in articles and on news websites are just static webpages. Upgrading these can be painful if they've used out of date JS libraries and so on, to the extent that sometimes they just aren't ever changed.

I like the idea of using web components with a central newsroom-specific library to get around this. In this case, a newsroom could update individual components and have all static interactive pages that use them update at the same time, without necessarily having to rebuild the page itself. #Technology

"Despite their idealist manifesto and their Bill of Rights, I don’t believe they could ever truly be in partnership with their community once they were taking large amounts of venture funding."

This is a key challenge with social networks that try and work with a different model: unless they're forced to be open (which, eg, Mastodon is), it's always possible for an acquirer to roll back their good intentions and do something else if it's profitable. It's also often possible for investors to remove the CEO in order to better serve a return to their fund.

The result is that these networks are hard to pay for. Decentralized networks have some advantage because they don't have to pay for infrastructure, but there's still a question about how the development team can be compensated (and therefore how to make development sustainable).

Lots to learn from in this case study. #Technology

"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality."

SEO as an industry has made search engines much worse to use. People are essentially spamming the web, which undermines the signals search engines are supposed to use to determine relevancy and quality. The result is junk - which, in turn, inspires more junk in order for pages to rank higher than the junk that already exists. And so and so on until you get a junky race to the junky bottom.

And generative AI will make it all even worse. #Technology