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MySpace inspired a generation of teenagers to learn how to code. We have Dark Mode now, but where did all the glitter go?
During the internet of 2006, consumer products let anyone edit CSS. It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet
lost its soul.
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I agree entirely with Jarred: in discouraging people from having their own web presences and in locking-down our shared social spaces online, we’re making the Web feel increasingly
flat, soulless, and – dare I say is – joyless. MDX seems really cool, but I’m not yet convinced that it alone solves the underlying problem of
content creators feeling that they should (or must) use dry, boring silos for the things they produce rather than their own space (in which they’d be able to express their personalities
and the personality of the things they were sharing). It may well lower the barrier to producing interactive personal sites a little (as well as having other applications, I’m sure!),
but we’re going to need more than that to drag people away from Facebook, Medium, Twitter and the like.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yht_zE_mT7U
4-minute explanation of where we’re “at” with Brexit, with the usual clarity that the IIB folks provide. Nice.
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Dan's reposted.
Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web
activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed i…
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Since 2016, Facebook has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy by installing the iOS or Android “Facebook Research” app.
Facebook even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. The program is administered through beta testing services Applause, BetaBound and uTest to cloak Facebook’s
involvement, and is referred to in some documentation as “Project Atlas” — a fitting name for Facebook’s effort to map new trends and rivals around the globe.
…
I figured we’d been almost a day since Facebook were last in the news for privacy and ethics-related concerns (earlier this week,
earlier still), so we must’ve been due more coverage. This time, it’s about Facebook’s latest tack in trying to understand the
teen market that it’s failing to penetrate as well as it once did, and the fact that it’s been paying young adults and children to proxy all of their traffic through Facebook’s servers
including setting up their phones to allow Facebook to break their encryption so that it can understand how they’re using them.