Dan Q

Kind: Reposts

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.

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Pineapple

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Pineapple on pizza?! What is wrong with you?!

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.

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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.

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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,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000 times.

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.

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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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  1. Including non-binary people in feminine coded spaces perpetuates the misconception that all non-binary people identify with aspects of femininity.
  2. 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:

  1. Remove gendered terms from your group’s name.
  2. Avoid language that lumps non-binary people in with a binary gender.
  3. Be specific about who is included in your mission statement.
  4. 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.)

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Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers

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Android number pad

Using <input type="text" inputmode="numeric" pattern="[0-9]*"> allows for a degree of separation between how the user enters data (“input mode”), what the browser expects the user input to contain (type equals number), and potentially how it tries to validate it.

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I’ve sung the praises of the GDS research team before, and it’s for things like this that I respect them the most: they’re knowing for taking a deep-dive user-centric approach to understanding usability issues, and they deliver valuable actionable answers off the back of it.

If you’ve got Web forms that ask people for numbers, this is how you should be doing it. If you’re doing so specifically for 2FA purposes, see that post I shared last month on a similar topic.

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Bypassing AppProtocol Prompts

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Starting in Edge 82.0.425.0 Canary, a new flag is available.

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Edge Canary showing an "Always allow [this website] to open links of this type..." checkbox

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This is a good move; a relatively simple innovation that’s sure to help end-user security. If you can’t see what’s different above without following the link through to the original article, here’s the short version: an upcoming version of Edge will allow you to authorise a specific site to open a particular application to handle a link… without having to compromise by choosing either to (a) see the security dialog every single time (which teaches users to “just click OK”) or (b) allow the dialog to be suppressed for links that open a particular application (which makes it easier for bad guys to make poisonous links).

So you’ll be able to, for example, say “slack.com can open Slack for me, but other websites have to ask”. Nice.

I hope that other browser manufacturers follow suit, especially on mobile where the web/web-launched-native-app boundary has never been fuzzier.

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Dutch PM Mark Rutte Tells Public Not to Shake Hands Over Coronavirus and Then Shakes With Colleague

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Love this video: the Dutch PM reminds everybody not to shake hands with one another… then turns and shakes somebody’s hand. Then realises his mistake and initiates even more bodily contact by way of apology.

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There’s Really No Easy Way to Say ‘I Was Stabbed’

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The first thing people usually want to know is what getting stabbed feels like. The answer is that it feels like getting punched really hard. Or at least, I assume it’s what getting hit feels like. I’ve never been punched. I have been stabbed six times.

I’ll back up. And I’ll try not to make this too writerly, but I’m fighting my instincts. I wanted to add a quote from an Auden poem about suffering, but I desisted. Please admire my restraint.

You have to understand, this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Wellington. It doesn’t happen in most places, but it especially doesn’t happen in a small city in New Zealand, in a park, at 11:30 a.m.

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I go back and forth. It wasn’t that bad, I tell myself. It could have been much worse, people have survived much worse. And then I look at my scars, still red and new, and I think: But it was pretty bad, wasn’t it? It is possible I could have died. What if I hadn’t had my phone? If I hadn’t met someone on the path? I could have bled out somewhere between the trees. But of course, it’s useless to think about what-ifs. What if he had stabbed me in the heart? What if I hadn’t gone to the park at all? What if I died in a car crash tomorrow? It’s a pointless exercise.

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Author Emma Berquist writes about her experience of the (extremely unusual) incident she was involved in, of being stabbed by a stranger in a park in Wellington. An inspiring personal story.

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A Trip Through New York City in 1911

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With help from a neural network, Denis takes original cinematography of New York City in 1911 and uploads it as an cleaned, upscaled, high-framerate, colourised YouTube video. It’s pretty remarkable: compare it to the source video to see how much of a difference it makes: side-by-side, the smoothness of the frame rate alone is remarkable. It’s a shame that nothing can be done about the underexposed bits of the film where contrast detail is lacking: I wonder if additional analysis of the original print itself might be able to extract some extra information from these areas and them improve them using the same kinds of techniques.

In any event, a really interesting window-to-history!

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BingO Bakery

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Don’t understand why Web accessibility is important? Need a quick and easily-digestible guide to the top things you should be looking into in order to make your web applications screenreader ready? Try this fun, video-game-themed 5 minute video from Microsoft.

There’s a lot more to accessibility than is covered here, and it’s perhaps a little over-focussed on screenreaders, but it’s still a pretty awesome introduction.

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