That broken tech/content culture cycle:

Double down on funding the worst voices on your platform. Call it “free speech”, and make sure that nobody internally points out that truly defending free speech would have entailed protecting those early marginalized creators who made your platform credible in the first place. Definitely misuse “free speech” as a rhetorical bludgeon against people who are pointing out that you are both amplifying and sponsoring content, not merely making it available. Resolutely refuse to be intellectually honest about the difference between merely providing a platform to all, vs. making editorial decisions to promote and subsidize content that you have control over.

The Slackware Linux Project: Slackware Release Announcement:

Well folks, in spite of the dire predictions of YouTube pundits, this morning the Slackhog emerged from its development den, did *not* see its shadow, and Slackware 15.0 has been officially released - another six weeks (or years) of the development treadmill averted.

My favorite Linux distro has updated, and remains

systemd

free thank goodness.

Daring Fireball: From the Department of Grading on a Curve:

So it runs very hot and very loud and the battery doesn’t last 4 hours in typical use. The Verge’s score: 8.5/10. The Aristocrats!

Google Slides is Actually Hilarious | by Laura Javier | Feb, 2022 | Medium:

Perhaps like you, I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable foundational decisions made ages ago that worshipped at the shrine of PowerPoint and which have never since been revisited, but now, after having had to use it so much in the past year, I believe that Google Slides is actually just trolling me.

This just hurts my Keynote loving soul, to the point where PowerPoint might be a better option.

Daring Fireball: Spotify Is Acquiring Two Major Podcast Surveillance Ad Tech Platforms:

Spotify isn’t just trying to become the biggest name in podcasting (which has heretofore been, but may no longer be, Apple). They’re trying to usurp podcasting as we know it — one of the last and brightest bastions of the open, simple, private, transparent internet — and turn it into a privately-owned, gated, complicated, invasive, utterly closed platform. Spotify is trying to do to podcasting what Facebook did to “having your own website”.

DSHR’s Blog: EE380 Talk:

I'm David Rosenthal. I worked with James Gosling on CMU's Andrew project in the early 80s. I was a DE with him at Sun later in the 80s working on window systems including X, and file systems. I quit to be employee #4 at Nvidia where Curtis Priem and I did the basic I/O architecture, then was an early employee at Vitria, the second company of founders of Tibco. Before I start talking about cryptocurrencies, I should stress that I hold no long or short positions in cryptocurrencies, their derivatives or related companies; I am long Nvidia. Unlike most people discussing them, I am not "talking my book".

Cryptocurrencies' roots lie deep in the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the cypherpunks. Libertarianism’s attraction is based on ignoring externalities, and cryptocurrencies are no exception.

Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3:

Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than I am the latest NFT drop.

Also – cards on the table here – I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy.

Even strictly on the technological level, though, I haven’t yet managed to become a believer. So given all of the recent attention into what is now being called web3, I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing.

jwz: The Web3 Fraud:

After all, a programmer doing the most basic test of a web3 prototype is going to need to get the cryptocurrency, spend the cryptocurrency, and any application will require all users to get the cryptocurrency as well. If this gets abandoned quickly due to the inevitable technical failure "web3" still accomplished its goal of getting more suckers in and extracting their money.

So in the end web3 is a con job, a technological edifice that is beyond useless as anyone who attempts to deploy a real application will quickly discover.

More on Roblox’s exploitation of children | Boing Boing:

Last year, People Make Games released a thorough expose of the company's practices. Roblox "pressured us to delete it", says presenter Quintin Smith. So they dug deeper, talking to employees and others, and today published a follow-up report.

I think the overall pitch - Roblox is currently a libertarian dream where there is 0 oversight or moderation, where the worst practices are amplified, and there can be no meaningful accountability.

USBefuddled: Untangling the Rat’s Nest of USB-C Standards and Cables - TidBITS:

USB-C was supposed to be the last cable you would ever need. It hasn’t worked out that way.

Orgdown - the Interesting Feedback Phase so Far:

The reddit posting was a different thing altogether. The feedback was bad to very bad with only a few positive bits here or there. There was no discussion on the idea at all, just the topic on the choice of the name. When I got heated and wrote that I'd probably prefer to take the project offline, somebody wrote:

This is why we can’t have nice things. The FOSS community tends towards toxic at times, and that can drown out anyone trying to add new things…

Tiny Emulators:

A huge variety of tiny emulators for vintage systems to run right from your browser.

Launch: Vinegar - And a Dinosaur:

YouTube5 was a Safari extension back when Flash was still a thing and hated by everyone. It replaced the YouTube player (written in Flash) with an HTML

I’ve had a creeping distaste for the Youtube site experience for a while, to the point that I’d grab videos to offline to watch them and then delete them over spending time with their video player. This extension fixes that. Worth every penny.

App Store link here

Google ‘colluded’ with Facebook to bypass Apple privacy • The Register:

The alleged Jedi Blue partnership between Google and Facebook, outlined in the initial complaint, is explained in more detail in the latest filing. The two companies, it's said, have been working closely to help Facebook "recognize users in auctions and bid and win more often."

“For example, Google and Facebook have integrated their software development kits (SDKs) so that Google can pass Facebook data for user ID cookie matching,” the amended complaint says. “They also coordinated with each other to harm publishers through the adoption of Unified Pricing rules…"

Don’t be… Something? That sounds familiar, but who was it about…

OLD VIDEO GAME ADVERTISEMENTS: Posts tagged rpg:

Being the DRI of Your Career – Accidentally in Code:

What does it mean to be the DRI of your career? To me, 5 things:

Expect less from your job and more from your career. Learn from feedback. Own your professional development. Distinguish what your employer rents versus what they buy. Build your support system.

90’s Computer Book Covers - Imgur:

So many of these I haandled, if not read…

websites from hell: Massive HTML abuse of all sorts…

Facebook is the AOL of 2021 | ZDNet:

Then one day, someone smart built a new technology that didn't require people to sign away their information. Now, people could meet anyone they wanted and talk about whatever they wanted, not just what Facebook or its competitors said was okay. People felt more relaxed, too, because even though there were ads, people could meet up in Cyberspace without every single action they took being used to fuel an advertising machine.

This thought terrifies Facebook, but they already have the backup plan where they’re the Cyberspace that noone can escape… Where they’re the app store, the advertising, the provider of everything… They’re building it through their Oculus Quest products and there’s really little on the horizon that is attempting to compete there… And the “platforms” that are closest to competing are Fortnite and Roblox, both horrendous in their own rights.

A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps | Ars Technica:

I have tried nearly every stage of this, hoping to see Google bring back something like the “golden age” of federated, open-standards communication of it’s original Google Talk (RIP). I don’t think Google is capable of that thinking anymore, and it poisons every interaction I have with their products.

The Google Talk saga is a case in point. It feels like it's for a company that doesn't exist today. When Google Talk launched, there was an assumption that Google would dominate messaging, because back then, Google was seen as a disrupter and a company that put effort behind the new markets it entered. Today, no one assumes Google will be successful in a new market. And it's because of what we outlined here, a list of so many low-effort projects.

Netflix Rolling Out Spatial Audio Support - MacRumors:

Netflix is rolling out support for Spatial Audio on the iPhone and the iPad, based on reports shared by MacRumors readers and on Reddit. A Netflix spokesperson also confirmed to MacRumors that the rollout is underway.

More of this please…

Have an iPhone? Here’s why you shouldn’t close apps | Boing Boing:

People have told me I should shut down apps on my phone to conserve the battery charge and improve performance. But this video says the phone's operating system is designed to manage open apps to optimize memory, performance, and battery charge and that I should let it do its thing. The only time to close an app, according to this video, is when the app is frozen or is not running properly.

The embedded Youtube video link

Daring Fireball: Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope:

All of these features are fairly grouped together under a “child safety” umbrella, but I can’t help but wonder if it was a mistake to announce them together. Many people are clearly conflating them, including those reporting on the initiative for the news media. E.g. The Washington Post’s “never met an Apple story that couldn’t be painted in the worst possible light” Reed Albergotti’s report, the first three paragraphs of which are simply wrong1 and the headline for which is grossing misleading (“Apple Is Prying Into iPhones to Find Sexual Predators, but Privacy Activists Worry Governments Could Weaponize the Feature”).

Not surprisingly, this is the first really good, non-hyperbolic summary of everything Apple announced they’re doing on the topic.

• On-device, in the Messages app, neural analysis of images for possible sensitive content sent or recieved... If the user is under 12, parents can opt-in to recieve a warning, over 12 the user can be notified but parents won't be... And none of this is ever reported to any kind of authories, nor is any content sent to Apple or anyone else.

• Likewise on-device updates to Siri and Search around sensitive content, with the same kind of parental opt-in notifications for under 12 users, or just the users otherwise, similar to above.

• Most misunderstood... CSAM image fingerprint comparisons. Not sending images, not even scanning content of images, but creating a verifiable hash of images which can be compared with fingerprints in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) systems... And if enough of those match the MCMEC system triggering a human review of those fingerprints for confirmation, before finally potentially raising further alarms. These cryptographic hashes, depending on the algorythm, should be entirely unique to any given image and so should be worse than lottery odds of ever creating a single false positive that a photo in your library matches a sensitive image in the NCMEC database, much less enough to trigger further action.

These seem to be exteremely well thought out, best compromise answers to really difficult problems and by far the most pprivacy forward answers of anyone in the tech world so far.

CWE - 2021 CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses:

The 2021 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE™) Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses (CWE Top 25) is a demonstrative list of the most common and impactful issues experienced over the previous two calendar years. These weaknesses are dangerous because they are often easy to find, exploit, and can allow adversaries to completely take over a system, steal data, or prevent an application from working. The CWE Top 25 is a valuable community resource that can help developers, testers, and users — as well as project managers, security researchers, and educators — provide insight into the most severe and current security weaknesses.

To create the 2021 list, the CWE Team leveraged Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE®) data found within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Vulnerability Database (NVD), as well as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores associated with each CVE record. A formula was applied to the data to score each weakness based on prevalence and severity.

via - bleepingcomputer.com via - /.

usb-c cable colour codes:

USB-C was supposed to be the answer to the chaos that is charge and data cable compatibility. And to an extent it was. It unified ports and reduced the amount of cables and chargers I need to travel with. The cables themselves, however, turned out to be a mess. They come in many varieties with obtuse names, confusing markers, and unclear compatibility rules. Yet they all look exactly the same.