Internet

The global cybersecurity disaster that consisted of yesterday’s critical vulnerabilities in the PHP project is a good moment to talk about the natural life cycle of open source projects. There are cases where it may be better to shut things down.

Google search as a product feels like it’s dying. No idea what’s happening there anymore.

I learned a bunch of stuff about passkeys here and I continue to be validated in my decision not to use them. It’s very complicated and opaque and the ‘just trust me bro‘ from the various proponents who are employed by large tech companies is not an adequate guarantee.

A really simple bit of digital activation in Zohran Mamdanis’ communication which is one of many parts that make him so effective.

I joke that staying off X was Woke 1.

I totally missed Foursquare being acquired. I think that’ll mean game over for Swarm and the platform sooner rather than later.

Turns out that “obesity of the mind” is an old term, but I guess we’re bringing it back.

Facebook is a massive scam farm these days and why should that be allowed?

A strong argument written in German against the privatization of social media as a problem inflicted on us by unaccountable profit seeking corporations.

A secure LLM system cannot be given write access to any important endpoints. That’s the basic first principle of AI security at the moment.

Why would anybody pay attention to what a German court says about something digital? The country has no idea and is behind by decades. Was the ruling delivered by fax machine?

This is a really clean update for Mastodon with a well communicated set of changes. One of the things that I think caused a lot of grief is mixing up messages with normal posts so I’m glad they now fixed that.

Here’s an idea: I think video documentation of extremely risky behaviour (parkour, rooftopping etc.) and self-harm (mutilation, mukbang, ana) should be banned on all the major video platforms.

A fun thought experiment about something I ask myself regularly as well: Is the world’s dependence on Whatsapp not entirely insane?

Has the Bluesky moment passed already? I’m finding myself spending more time on Mastodon these days.

A bit on Deutschlandfunk about the sizable group of people in Germany who do not use the internet.

Het is lastig te beschrijven hoe belangrijk en consequent Karin Spaink en haar schrijven waren voor Nederland en voor de digitale wereld waarin ook ik opgegroeid ben.

Using Postgres logical replication to stream a video call through the database is a brilliant hack that displays both the power of the database and of standard web applications.

Some interesting stats from Comma about what goes into building and operating a data center of your own. A good data point to start thinking about when it may make sense to do something like this.

It’s obvious that international platforms will need to support international writing. The world is a big place and ASCII hasn’t been enough for a while now.

Surprising how quick and affordable it can be to crawl a billion webpages.

Reducing kids’ exposure to the internet and social media is something that’s very tempting for governments who want to control and surveil everything that happens online.

A thorough teardown what it takes to build a startup (almost) entirely on European infrastructure. It’s possible but not at all easy yet.

RSS is a hero technology that silently powers a lot of the web and will probably play a much bigger role still.

France leads the way enforcing the real laws that we have against abuse against the American platforms. Let’s push for many more governments to follow suit.

This is the kind of thing that needs to get X shut down. It’s vile and criminal.

Graven in de oude artikelen van dit blog doet me ook wat oude dingen nazoeken met een “Hè, wat is daarmee gebeurd?”

Being regulated out of existence should not be near the top of the worries of anybody working on AI at X.

A very useful and necessary list by the FT of who’s behind all the awfulness emanating from the X1 website.

It’s very cool to read how a capable web designer, like Anh here, leverages a static site generator for creative purposes.

After having kicked out Wordpress and moved to a Hugo generated static site, next up are two other useless subscriptions that aren’t doing anything other than costing me money:

I’ve gone similarly deep on Dioxus more than a year ago as one of the candidate technologies (along with Leptos, Svelte and Gleam) for the long awaited new frontend for Cuppings.

The number of sources of authoritative information is indeed limited enough that the proposal of cryptographically tagging verified output is not that outlandish.

And with that we are over to a new blogging system. It’s not exactly because blogging is still a thing, but I use this site as a personal content store providing backing for the things that I share. Having it under my control and in markdown is useful.

Musk’s attacks on British politics have been bizarre to witness. Imagine the richest man in the world waging an influence operation trying to put the far right in power in your country.

Both placing these ads and serving them should be illegal in any reasonable market/democracy.

The quality on every Meta property is low and people are there mostly because they can’t leave due to the network effect. This is market failure and it couldn’t hurt for Europe to bring down the hammer here.

Love to see this being in 2025 and Germany still hasn’t figured out how to get an adequate amount of bandwidth to everybody in the country. Maybe they’ll never figure it out.

It’s always been my feeling that TLS has unacceptable collateral damage in how it breaks the web for normal people. That’s considered a bit of a crank opinion, but I’m definitely not the only person who feels that way.

At some point you have to ask yourself how many predators work at Meta. They seem hell bent on targeting children. You don’t have to be a predator to work at Meta but it helps.

Subway Takes is publishing episodes they filmed in Berlin’s U-Bahn, and the results are both amusing and unexpectedly revealing.

Meta’s push towards sexualised chatbots for children is very concerning and nobody should let their kids use any of Zuckerberg’s platforms unsupervised.

Not the first time Meta created racy bots and it will probably not be the last unless Taylor Swift sues them. I guess they do need to get more talent in to create things that are actually useful.

Perplexity lost its momentum almost a year ago and everything they’ve been doing since has been stuff like this. It takes some effort to stand out as a bad actor in a field like this, but here they are.

Lots of people are going to have a problem with the truth going forward, so get those Wikipedia backups handy and start thinking about how to host it in a more distributed and resilient way.

The scientists are all on Bluesky which is understandable given the war on science and truth taking place on Twitter.

A pretty good explanation of all the weird acronyms that make modern e-mail infrastructure absolutely inscrutable.

I think Facebook rolled back their block of Pixelfed but they’re right to be spooked. Showing a bunch of pictures in a stream hardly seems like a technological challenge. And what are all the people working at Instagram doing other than figuring out novel ways to track you and serve you ads?

Brazil still remembers that it’s a state with state power and has found a delightful habit of pouncing on social media sites. Other states should follow suit.