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Oh my god it’s coming to get me! More images in the original article.
Did You Know That Animals Eating Strawberries Look Terrifying?
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Author: Dan Q
Apple just killed Offline Web Apps while purporting to protect your privacy
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On the face of it, WebKit’s announcement yesterday titled Full Third-Party Cookie Blocking and More sounds like something I would wholeheartedly welcome. Unfortunately, I can’t because the “and more” bit effectively kills off Offline Web Apps and, with it, the chance to have privacy-respecting apps like the prototype I was exploring earlier in the year based on DAT.
Block all third-party cookies, yes, by all means1. But deleting all local storage (including Indexed DB, etc.) after 7 days effectively blocks any future decentralised apps using the browser (client side) as a trusted replication node in a peer-to-peer network. And that’s a huge blow to the future of privacy.
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Like Aral and doubtless many others, I was initially delighted to see that Safari has beaten Chrome to the punch, blocking basically all third-party cookies through its Intelligent Tracking Protection. I don’t even routinely use Safari (although I do block virtually all third-party and many first-party cookies using uMatrix for Firefox), but I loved this announcement because I knew that this, coupled with Google’s promise to (eventually) do the same in their browser, would make a significant impact on the profitability of surveillance capitalism on the Web. Hurrah!
But as Aral goes on to point out, Apple’s latest changes also effectively undermines the capability of people to make Progressive Web Applications that run completely-offline, because their new privacy features delete the cache of all offline storage if it’s not accessed for 7 days.
PWAs have had a bumpy ride. They were brought to the foreground by Apple in the first place when Steve Jobs suggested that something-like-this would be the way that apps should one day be delivered to the iPhone, but then that idea got sidelined by the App Store. In recent years, we’ve begun to see the concept take off again as Chrome, Firefox and Edge gradually added support for service workers (allowing offline-first), larger local storage, new JavaScript interfaces for e.g. cameras, position, accelerometers, and Bluetooth, and other PWA-ready technologies. And for a while I thought that the day of the PWA might be drawing near… but it looks like we might have to wait a bit longer.
I hope that Google doesn’t follow Apple’s lead on this particular “privacy” point, although I’m sure that it’s tempting for them to do so. Offline Web applications have the potential to provide an open, simple, and secure ecosystem for the “apps” of tomorrow, and after several good steps forwards… this week we took a big step back.
Death Leaping from Man to Man
Gratitude
In these challenging times, and especially because my work and social circles have me communicate regularly with people in many different countries and with many different backgrounds, I’m especially grateful for the following:
- My partner, her husband, and I each have jobs that we can do remotely and so we’re not out-of-work during the crisis.
- Our employers are understanding of our need to reduce and adjust our hours to fit around our new lifestyle now that schools and nurseries are (broadly) closed.
- Our kids are healthy and not at significant risk of serious illness.
- We’ve got the means, time, and experience to provide an adequate homeschooling environment for them in the immediate term.
- (Even though we’d hoped to have moved house by now and haven’t, perhaps at least in part because of COVID-19,) we have a place to live that mostly meets our needs.
- We have easy access to a number of supermarkets with different demographics, and even where we’ve been impacted by them we’ve always been able to work-around the where panic-buying-induced shortages have reasonably quickly.
- We’re well-off enough that we were able to buy or order everything we’d need to prepare for lockdown without financial risk.
- Having three adults gives us more hands on deck than most people get for childcare, self-care, etc. (we’re “parenting on easy mode”).
- We live in a country in which the government (eventually) imposed the requisite amount of lockdown necessary to limit the spread of the virus.
- We’ve “only” got the catastrophes of COVID-19 and Brexit to deal with, which is a bearable amount of crisis, unlike my colleague in Zagreb for example.
Whenever you find the current crisis getting you down, stop and think about the things that aren’t-so-bad or are even good. Stopping and expressing your gratitude for them in whatever form works for you is good for your happiness and mental health.
Four of those people will die
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Excellent 45-second illustration of the compounding effect of your individual actions on viral spread. Stay at home, people.
Pineapple
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Fellow pineapple-pizza lovers of the world, unite! Let us rise up against those who oppose us, and especially against those freaks who like anchovies on their pizza.
Homeschooling While Working From Home During a Global Pandemic Bingo
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Local
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How are you doing? Are you holding up okay?
It’s okay if you’re not. This is a tough time.
It’s very easy to become despondent about the state of the world. If you tend to lean towards pessimism, The Situation certainly seems to be validating your worldview right now.
I’m finding that The Situation is also a kind of Rorschach test. If you’ve always felt that humanity wasn’t deserving of your faith—that “we are the virus”—then there’s plenty happening right now to bolster that opinion. But if you’ve always thought that human beings are fundamentally good and decent, there’s just as much happening to reinforce that viewpoint.
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Jeremy shares some great tips on seeing the best in humanity and in the world as we work through the COVID-19 crisis. Excellent.
“Down A Bit From Tromsø”
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The season’s final episode of Two of These People are Lying ends with a brilliant and unintentional twist.
Hashcard
As an intermittent geohasher, I was saddened when the xkcd forum hack lead to the loss of the Geohashing Wiki, so I worked to bring it back from the dead. This was great, and I’ve enjoyed making use of it in the few expeditions I’ve found time for since then. But I did it mostly for me; I wanted the wiki back. If other people felt the benefit, that was a nice side-effect.
But today my heart was filled with joy when today I received a postcard – a hashcard, no less – from fellow hasher Fippe, whose expedition to Lüneburg last week brought him past the famous town hall shown in the postcard, as evidenced by his photo from the site.
A delightful bonus to my day.
Note #16899
In these complicated times, this is how I get my groove on.
Here’s What a Googol-to-One Gear Ratio Looks Like
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To celebrate being alive for a billion seconds, Daniel Bruin built a machine with 100 gears with a 10-to-1 gear ratio…meaning that the overall gear ratio is a googol-to-one. (A googol is 1 with 100 zeros.)
To turn the last gear in this train one full revolution, you’d need to turn the first gear
10,
By my estimation, that’s enough gearing to allow you to winch the entire solar system, by hand, with ease. Assuming you can find a tow hitch on it somewhere.
IndieWebCamp London “Group Photo”
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Group picture @indiewebcamp London! #IndieWeb We had a good time “meeting” #Online during #COVID19
I’d hoped to attend IndieWebCamp London but after it got cancelled on account of Covid-19 we still managed to make it happen as a virtual meetup.
Note #16868
Remotely attending #indiewebcamp London 2020 (after Covid-19 kept us from meeting in person) and hacking on some note/checkin-posting tools.
Uplifting Diverse Genders: Beyond “Women and Non-Binary”
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Some organizations are beginning to take steps to be more inclusive by outlining in their mission statement that they welcome both women and non-binary people. However, this approach only scratches the surface of the needs for inclusion of diverse genders. While it’s certainly a good start, I’m here to discuss why the language of “Women and Non-Binary” can be problematic and how we can do better.
If your goal is to uplift marginalized genders, stating that your opportunity is open to “Women and Non-Binary people” has two important pitfalls:
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- Including non-binary people in feminine coded spaces perpetuates the misconception that all non-binary people identify with aspects of femininity.
- Focusing only on non-binary people and women leaves out trans men, who are often overlooked and need just as much support.
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Quinn Crossley acknowledges how good it is to have spaces for specific marginalised genders and how it’s even better to ensure that non-binary genders are considered too, but then they go even further by making four further recommendations, as follows:
- Remove gendered terms from your group’s name.
- Avoid language that lumps non-binary people in with a binary gender.
- Be specific about who is included in your mission statement.
- Use inclusive language when communicating with group members.
These are really great, and I’d recommend that you go read the original article (even if you have to put up with Medium’s annoying popups) if you’re looking for a fuller explanation of the arguments. What’s especially valuable about them, to me, is that they provide a framework for thinking differently about non-binary inclusion, as well as examples from which you can derive action points for your own groups. They’re all relatively-easy ideas to implement, too: if you’ve already got a moderately-inclusive group, you can make just a few minor tweaks to your stated values and your organisational language and reach a whole other level.
(Quick confession: I still don’t get the appeal of “folxs”, though; “folks” already felt to me personally to be completely free of gender. This might just be another one of those things I haven’t gotten my head around yet, though, like how – and I say this speaking as a bisexual person – there’s somehow necessarily always a difference between bisexuality and pansexuality.)