Internet

The disappearance of Page and Brin is one of the weirder and more foreboding things. You have to wonder whether we will ever hear from them or anybody similarly rich ever again.

The story about Dutch national cyber scammer Rian van Rijbroek written up in full like is done here is amazing and priceless.

Not very surprisingly Airbnb these days is a willing platform for criminal behavior.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1180283203052961792

An incisive profile on the life of an Instagram influencer.

All online metrics are a fraud.

It is true that Goodreads is a deeply broken website but right now it is the only place that we have that has a critical mass of readers on it.

An interesting reversal here where I once said that any application could be delivered through the chat medium, now Kevin Kwok signals a tendency for one chat platform to permeate all applications.

https://twitter.com/alper/status/1124042550053150723?s=11

I love TikTok but it is a very large application with very little checks.

Berlin is finally thinking of fixing its totally and utterly broken website. That’s good news but a shame that we have had to use this monstrosity for the past ten years.

Maybe after this New Yorker exposé, Joi Ito will finally resign?

A thorough and humane treatment of alt-right memetic history and 8chan with its associated chans.

Europe will need its own cloud, but talking will not make it so.

Cloudflare is setting a high bar for post-mortem writing but if you want to get started with this, the only parts you really need are: What went wrong & What are we doing about it.

Too aggravating to even read this entire thing. I’ll have to get it together soon to delete my facebook account. Though I’ll still be locked into Instagram and Whatsapp then, so I think it would be best indeed if those services would be broken up.

Are people paying the Medium article ransom?

I’ve stopped using Instapaper for a long time now, but I’m still reading longreads. Let me explain how.

About password managers:

Tooling has become so good and so empowering that like in this tweet, many commerce ‘startups’ that are really struggling to hire and retain dev teams (and then utilize them to their potential) would be much better served using Airtable, Zapier and Pipedrive until they break.

Set aside all of the obvious outcry, I haven’t seen a single argument yet that explains how encrypted communications are compatible with state power.

Swisher is doing good work here on Facebook/Fakebook but her handling of the worst of technology is still astonishingly softball given what is happening.

“Changes to one team’s service may be implemented by another team who needs the enhanced capability by what is called an Away Team. This team works on the Home Team’s code to add what it needs according to established engineering standards and then leaves that code in good order to be maintained by the Home Team who owns the service, with help when needed.”

Many years ago I suggested building in async facilities into Django. I got ridiculed for that both for technical feasibility (rightly) and necessity (short-sightedly). Now finally we have a proposal to build those features into the framework that demonstrates the same need and that can be implemented.

Usually it’s not for a good reason but still, it’s nice to see my grand-boss Dror on television regularly explaining cybersecurity to the German public.

Deze Nederlandstalige app van Juf Jannie belooft puzzels voor kinderen vanaf 2 jaar aan te bieden maar de interactie en gebruiksvriendelijkheid zijn erbarmelijk slecht.

Even given that this is an amazing job description, you don’t often see companies describing themselves as a ‘socio-technical system’. This is a great way to show off both your care and your depth of thinking.

The newsworthy thing about the Accenture/Hertz story is not that they failed to deliver but how badly they failed and that they are getting sued for it. Getting something that’s not very good for far too much money is an accepted part of doing business with consultancies of that size.

“Everyone else, money manager big or small, met with him virtually, over Zoom. When Yuan flew to New York for the IPO, it was just his eighth work trip in five years.”

The men I work with are not the geniuses of Menlo Park, the ones who retreated to garages and emerged with hardware that changed the world. They’re ensemble actors in an industry that favors singular greatness. They have not made fortunes or founded startups but have benefited from their proximity and physical resemblance to those who have.

Zoom is an excellent video-conferencing app which turns out to be built on some technical excellence of its own (running WASM encoders and decoders in the browser).

The best thing about ContraPoints is that she gives the most charitable possible treatment to in this case Gender Critical people (the other time it was Incels) and then still rips them for all that they are.

I didn’t think I’d live to hear one, but WIDI is a German language podcast (by Igor and a different Johannes) about technology that adds a unique perspective and a more systemic approach to the mix. If they manage to keep it niche, this will be a must listen for a German language audience.

Facebook did a half-hearted push towards a more messaging focused experience during the conversational boom, but didn’t manage to make any inroads and abandoned the effort. Whatsapp could have been the beachhead but with the original leadership and vision gone, nothing interesting will happen there. Instagram (also without original leadership) is slowly being turned into sludge by whatever PMs Facebook has left.

Everybody can thank Facebook for the techlash that is happening now. Elizabeth Warren: “I’m sick of freeloading billionaires.”

The origin story of Notion is pretty wild but all of the recipes in it for deep collaboration and radical iteration make a lot of sense. When I briefly tried out Notion, I was struck very much by how tight both its vision and its execution were.

I didn’t think I would be working with MISP, a threat intelligence platform written in PHP but now I am and here you can read a bit more about the various things we’re doing with it.

The people gathered at city hall that night saw Oakland’s DAC as an extension of the tech-fueled gentrification that was pushing poorer longtime residents out of the city.

I was at the 2016 Bot Summit in London a couple of weeks ago. I did my best to capture salient points from every talk in a tweet. Here are all of them in order.

I’ve been running a live open streetmap edits view as a screen saver for a couple of years now and it never fails to draw the attention from people in the room (whether they know what OSM is or not). The OSM visualization is pretty cool and really comes to life when it is displayed full screen. It is also a great way to see a part of the world you might not have known existed. I used to browse atlases when I was a kid, so this is me indulging in virtual travel again.

As of right now I’m frightfully behind on my Latour MOOC. What I have been doing instead is reading up old articles in my Instapaper. One such is this interview with Dutch sociologist/philosopher Willem Schinkel in Vrij Nederland. It’s good to read a fresh Dutch thinker who seems to understand things (and who also is in with Latour). Calling Geert Wilders a proto-fascist and the Netherlands a museum are only a couple of the ringers in there.

So it turns out I’ve fallen immensely behind with the weeknotes over here, but we did start writing them at the new office now, which should make up for something. Those live at http://kantberlin.tumblr.com/ currently.

There is no thing as an anonymized dataset. Anybody propagating this idea even tacitly is doing a disservice to the informed debate on privacy. Here’s a round up with some recent cases.

In Conversation: Jaron Lanier and James Bridle On Who Owns the Future? from The School of Life on Vimeo.

There are some interesting similarities between a recent proposal commissioned by the French government and the book out by Jaron Lanier just now “Who Owns The Future?”

It seems to be not completely obvious how to host a website on heroku while at the same time also maintaining e-mail delivery. You would think that this is a very common situation and it would be well documented but unfortunately it is not.

My small project during Swhack was to create a django version of a delegated voting system partially inspired by Liquid Feedback and the manyfold problems that system has 1. In particular that it is written on such an esoteric stack 2 that it is near impossible to get running without root on a Linux machine and let’s not even discuss the maintenance. What is even worse is that it makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to join the project and contribute to it significantly.

Besides the immense amount of things we did over at Hubbub last week, I also spent a lot of time doing various other things which sort of amazed me to be honest.

So this Saturday Jan Lehnardt and I are having a small hackathon here in Berlin in remembrance of Aaron Swartz and to in one small way continue doing the work that needs to be done on the internet, in government and especially where those two meet.

I followed the last CCC from a distance reading the Twitter fallout and keeping track of the live streams while getting work done in an empty Berlin. Besides the various controversies playing out, there were some good talks. What I found to be the best of the event was “Long live the protocoletariat” by Eleanor Saitta (@dymaxion) and Smári McCarthy (@smarimc) about a topic that is very near to the things I am thinking about: institutions and networks and all of the opportunities and problems associated with them. The presentation in the first thirty minutes of this video is well worth watching. Pull quotes below are paraphrases.