Dan Q

Kind: Reposts

Rehabilitating Google AMP: My failed attempt

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

This article is a follow-up to my article “Why Google AMP is a threat to the Open Web”. In the comments of that article I promised I’d soon provide a follow-up, and for reasons I’ll get into, that has not been possible until now – but now I’m finally providing it.

Back in February I wrote an article saying how I believed Google AMP has been imposed on the web by Google as a ‘standard’ for developing fast webpages, and my dismay about that. Google apparently developed this as an internal project without any open collaboration, and avoiding the W3C standardization processes. Google made implementation of Google AMP a requirement to show at the top of the search results for common news searches.

To many of us open web folk, Google’s AMP violated the widely held principle of search engines not putting bias into search results, and/or the principle of web standards (take your pick – it would not be bias if it was a standardized approach that the wider web community had agreed upon).

…

You know how I feel about AMP. I’m not alone, and others are doing a pretty good job of talking to Google about our concerns. Unfortunately, Google aren’t listening.

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

#youbroketheinternet So We Got Tracked Anyway

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Did you install EFF’s brilliant Privacy Badger or any other smart HTTP Cookie management tool? Or did you simply pick the privacy preference in your browser that ignores all third-party cookies? Did many websites you visit annoy you with permission-to-use-cookies pop-ups because of European legislation?

Guess what, it’s all been useless.

Hamburg university researchers have examined closely how web browsers implement so-called TLS session resumption and how the top million popular websites make use of that feature. They found that 80% of websites make a correct use, unsuitable for tracking repeat visitors — just resuming an existing session within the last ten minutes.

Unfortunately though, Google is present on 80% of these websites in form of Analytics, Fonts or other third-party inclusions. And among 10% of sites that do not respect reasonable resumption times, Google sticks out as one of the most greedy ones — it allows for a web browser to stay offline for over a day, and still be recognized as the same web browser the next day. Considering that it is nearly impossible to surf the web without accessing some Google content, this means that Google can track all your surfing habits without any need for HTTP Cookies!

As Facebook isn’t as pervasively present in all of the web, it went even further. It is enough for you to visit any website bearing a Like button every second day to allow Facebook to profile you, even if you never dreamt of logging into that service. Could it be our researchers just caught these companies with their hands deep in the cookie jar (pun intended)? For how long have they been collecting user data this way?

…

Somewhat conspiracy-theory-like take on an actual, real privacy issue: the fact that TLS makes tracking pretty easy even without cookies. If you thought my 301-based cookieless tracking was clever, this is cleverer. And harder to detect, to boot.

Repost posted at UTC on .

1 mention

SHE BON : Sensing the Sensual

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

I don’t know if this is genius or insanity, but either way it’s pretty remarkable. Lost my shit at “pop girl”. Lost it again at “I can poke the nipple”.

It takes a true engineer to think to themselves, “Hey, I wonder if I could use technology to tell me when I’m feeling aroused? That sounds like a useful project.” I love it.

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

CSS Border-Radius Can Do That? | IO 9elements

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

TL/DR: When you use eight values specifying border-radius in CSS, you can create organic looking shapes. WOW. No time to read it all ?— we made a visual tool for you. Find it here.

Border Radius tool

Introduction

During this year’s Frontend Conference Zurich Rachel Andrew talked about Unlocking the Power of CSS Grid Layout. At the end of her talk, she mentioned something about an old CSS property that got stuck in my head:

“The Image is set round just by using the well-supported border-radius. Don’t forget that old CSS still exists and is useful. You don’t need to use something fancy for every effect.” — Rachel Andrew

Shortly after I heard this talk, I thought that you certainly could create more than just circles and started to dig deeper into what can be done using border-radius.

…

That’s really cool. I had a quick play and made this gold ‘shield’ award:

You Win A Prize!

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

Letter of Recommendation: Escape Rooms

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

Think of all the ways you already insert pleasurable, circumscribed bursts of risk into your life. Maybe you watch horror movies, consume hot sauce, jaywalk. Maybe you pursue casual sex or steal Splenda packets from Starbucks or treat the speed limit as a cute suggestion. An escape game is like stacking these things atop one another and rounding out the itinerary with a medium-scary roller coaster. The panic is real even if the pressure is an illusion. You won’t die or get stuck in the 1980s if you fail to escape; an employee will simply unlatch the door and let you out with a “Better luck next time.”

…

As a big fan of escape rooms and the gaming experience they represent, I really enjoyed this NYT piece.

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry…

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.

I’m still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I’d be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of shit on day one.

This will be a super slow burn that goes back many years. I’ll continue to add to over the next couple of days. I’ll preface it with a bunch of backstory and explain what I had left behind, which made me more unhappy about the culture I had come into.

I spent most of my early career working for two radical sister non-profit orgs. I was the only designer working on anywhere from 4-5 different products at the same time. All centered around activism and used by millions of people.

It’s how I cut my teeth. Learned to be the designer that I am today. Most importantly, the people I worked for are imho some of the greatest people on the planet. Highly intelligent, empathetic, caring, and true role models for a young me. I adore them.

You might not know who they are, but if you’re reading this then you have definitely seen their work. Maybe OpenCongress, or Miro, or maybe Amara which is Vimeo’s partner transcription service. Definitely Fight for the Future, our internet defenders, which was shortly after me.

I married the love of my life in 2008, started a family, and at some point realized that I simply needed to make a better living. No matter how prolific, non-profits usually can’t provide the type of income that you need for a growing family with huge ambitions.

So as I gained visibility – via @dribbble – I started to field recruiters and consider new opportunities. Mostly little startups. I interviewed at one (Rockmelt) and they passed on me (hi, @iamxande ?).

Got an email from Kickstarter (hi, @amotion ?). Schlepped to New York and wasted days of time to be passed on by their founders. Then they unfollowed me on twitter. At least I ate some deli. ?

Then Google reached out. I remember that ”holy shit” moment. “Me!? Are they kidding?? The schmuck who tested out of high school and dropped out of college??” They told me I’d interview to work on Chrome. I was over the moon. I remember Manda tearing up. God I love her.

They gave me a little bit of time for a design exercise. You can see it here in all it’s dated glory: morganallanknutson.com/google/ Click and hold for the overlay. More schlepping from LA and an interview at their silly college-like campus. I was a nervous wreck.

The process felt very haphazard. At one point a front-end dev with a bow-tie grilled me on CSS and asked some super dumb questions. My advocate (a sweetheart named Peter) seemed to be rushing people through, quelling their fears. I still appreciate his belief in me to this day.

I felt like I had done ok. The last two interviews that I failed at were real shots to the heart. I took this one incredibly seriously. I wanted this job so badly. I wanted to prove I was worthy.

Weeks went by and I heard nothing. I accepted the inevitable and started responding to other recruiters. It was ok. I wasn’t joining the big leagues. I could play triple-A ball for longer. As long as I got up to SF where the opportunities were.

I took a gig with a failing news startup (lol) called Ongo (hi, @bethdean ?). They got me up here. I guess it was a bit of a Hail Mary for them. In a couple of months I knocked out more work than they could have built in a year with their eng team. Then…

Google got back in touch almost 3-4 months after the interview (who does this??).

I got the job.

To be continued…

…

If you ever thought that Google+, despite its laudable aims, was rolled out like a shitstorm… image what it must have been like behind the scenes. Actually, image no more – read this thread for a taste of the full horror.

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

The peculiar history of the Ordnance Survey

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

The history of the organisation known as OS is not merely that of a group of earnest blokes with a penchant for triangulation and an ever-present soundtrack of rustling cagoules.

From its roots in military strategy to its current incarnation as producer of the rambler’s navigational aid, the government-owned company has been checking and rechecking all 243,241 sq km (93,916 sq miles) of Great Britain for 227 years. Here are some of the more peculiar elements in the past of the famous map-makers.

…

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

The Ruby Story

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

By 2005, Ruby had become more popular, but it was still not a mainstream programming language. That changed with the release of Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails was the “killer app” for Ruby, and it did more than any other project to popularize Ruby. After the release of Ruby on Rails, interest in Ruby shot up across the board, as measured by the TIOBE language index:

It’s sometimes joked that the only programs anybody writes in Ruby are Ruby-on-Rails web applications. That makes it sound as if Ruby on Rails completely took over the Ruby community, which is only partly true. While Ruby has certainly come to be known as that language people write Rails apps in, Rails owes as much to Ruby as Ruby owes to Rails.

…

As an early adopter of Ruby (and Rails, when it later came along) I’ve always found that it brings me a level of joy I’ve experienced in very few other languages (and never as much). Every time I write Ruby, it takes me back to being six years old and hacking BASIC on my family’s microcomputer. Ruby, more than any other language I’ve come across, achieves the combination of instant satisfaction, minimal surprises, and solid-but-flexible object orientation. There’s so much to love about Ruby from a technical perspective, but for me: my love of it is emotional.

×

Repost posted at UTC on .

1 mention

Matreon: The Patreon Platform for Emotional Labor

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Dear Guy Who Can’t Read The Room:

Hello and thank you for attempting to engage in an unsolicited conversation with me! In order to ensure our interaction is productive and enriching for both parties, I invite you to join my Matreon. For just a few dollars a month, you can continue to approach me with whatever the hell is on your mind regardless of context or appropriateness, and I will continue to do the emotional labor required to respond without calling you a privileged, myopic dipshit.

Since you’re obviously the most important person in the universe and everything should cater to your needs, I’ve created a number of exciting options that you can take advantage of. You know, like you take advantage of the way that women are culturally trained to be sweet and helpful when you fart words in their direction.

…

You know what: there are probably guys who’d pay for this and would then use their doing so as an illustration that women “need men to (financially) support them”.

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it’s old and unloved

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

When Firefox 64 arrives in December, support for RSS, the once celebrated content syndication scheme, and its sibling, Atom, will be missing.

“After considering the maintenance, performance and security costs of the feed preview and subscription features in Firefox, we’ve concluded that it is no longer sustainable to keep feed support in the core of the product,” said Gijs Kruitbosch, a software engineer who works on Firefox at Mozilla, in a blog post on Thursday.

…

Not a great sign, but understandable. Live Bookmarks was never strong enough to be a full-featured RSS reader, and I don’t know about you but I haven’t really made use of bookmarks for a good few years, let alone “live” bookmarks, but the media are likely to see this (as El Reg does, in the article) as another nail in the coffin of one of the best syndication mechanisms the Web ever came up with.

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

C64 showing coloured barsNow, it’s Saturday morning and you’re eager to try out what you’ve learned. One of the first things the manual teaches you how to do is change the colors on the display. You follow the instructions, pressing CTRL-9 to enter reverse type mode and then holding down the space bar to create long lines. You swap between colors using CTRL-1 through CTRL-8, reveling in your sudden new power over the TV screen.

As cool as this is, you realize it doesn’t count as programming. In order to program the computer, you learned last night, you have to speak to it in a language called BASIC. To you, BASIC seems like something out of Star Wars, but BASIC is, by 1983, almost two decades old. It was invented by two Dartmouth professors, John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz, who wanted to make computing accessible to undergraduates in the social sciences and humanities. It was widely available on minicomputers and popular in college math classes. It then became standard on microcomputers after Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the MicroSoft BASIC interpreter for the Altair. But the manual doesn’t explain any of this and you won’t learn it for many years.

One of the first BASIC commands the manual suggests you try is the PRINT command. You type in PRINT "COMMODORE 64", slowly, since it takes you a while to find the quotation mark symbol above the 2 key. You hit RETURN and this time, instead of complaining, the computer does exactly what you told it to do and displays “COMMODORE 64” on the next line.

Now you try using the PRINT command on all sorts of different things: two numbers added together, two numbers multiplied together, even several decimal numbers. You stop typing out PRINT and instead use ?, since the manual has advised you that ? is an abbreviation for PRINT often used by expert programmers. You feel like an expert already, but then you remember that you haven’t even made it to chapter three, “Beginning BASIC Programming.”

…

I had an Amstrad CPC, myself, but I had friends with C64s and ZX Spectrums and – being slightly older than the author – I got the opportunity to experiment with BASIC programming on all of them (and went on to write all manner of tools on the CPC 464, 664, and 6128 models). I’m fortunate to have been able to get started in programming in an era when your first experience of writing code didn’t have to start with an examination of the different language choices nor downloading and installing some kind of interpreter or compiler: microcomputers used to just drop you at a prompt which was your interpreter! I think it’s a really valuable experience for a child to have.

×

Repost posted at UTC on .

1 mention

“Stop Thinking About Consent: It Isn’t Possible and It Isn’t Right”

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

For a philosopher, Helen Nissenbaum is a surprisingly active participant in shaping how we collect, use, and protect personal data. Nissenbaum, who earned her PhD from Stanford, is a professor of information science at Cornell Tech, New York City, where she focuses on the intersection of politics, ethics, and values in technology and digital media — the hard stuff. Her framework for understanding digital privacy has deeply influenced real-world policy.

In addition to several books and countless papers, she’s also coauthored privacy plug-ins for web browsers including TrackMeNot, AdNauseum, and Adnostic. Nissenbaum views these pieces of code as small efforts at rationalizing a marketplace where opaque consent agreements give consumers little bargaining power against data collectors as they extract as much information, and value from this information, as they can. Meanwhile, these practices offer an indefinite value proposition to consumers while compromising the integrity of digital media, social institutions, and individual security.

…

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

People don’t change

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Fundamentally, people haven’t changed much in tens of thousands of years. If ancient Egyptians had smartphones, you know full well that they’d have been posting cat pictures too. What can we learn from this and how should we look at our role when developing front-end Web experiences?

Repost posted at UTC on .

No comments

The Rise and Demise of RSS

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

There are two stories here. The first is a story about a vision of the web’s future that never quite came to fruition. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development.

In the late 1990s, in the go-go years between Netscape’s IPO and the Dot-com crash, everyone could see that the web was going to be an even bigger deal than it already was, even if they didn’t know exactly how it was going to get there. One theory was that the web was about to be revolutionized by syndication. The web, originally built to enable a simple transaction between two parties—a client fetching a document from a single host server—would be broken open by new standards that could be used to repackage and redistribute entire websites through a variety of channels. Kevin Werbach, writing for Release 1.0, a newsletter influential among investors in the 1990s, predicted that syndication “would evolve into the core model for the Internet economy, allowing businesses and individuals to retain control over their online personae while enjoying the benefits of massive scale and scope.”1 He invited his readers to imagine a future in which fencing aficionados, rather than going directly to an “online sporting goods site” or “fencing equipment retailer,” could buy a new épée directly through e-commerce widgets embedded into their favorite website about fencing.2 Just like in the television world, where big networks syndicate their shows to smaller local stations, syndication on the web would allow businesses and publications to reach consumers through a multitude of intermediary sites. This would mean, as a corollary, that consumers would gain significant control over where and how they interacted with any given business or publication on the web.

RSS was one of the standards that promised to deliver this syndicated future. To Werbach, RSS was “the leading example of a lightweight syndication protocol.”3 Another contemporaneous article called RSS the first protocol to realize the potential of XML.4 It was going to be a way for both users and content aggregators to create their own customized channels out of everything the web had to offer. And yet, two decades later, RSS appears to be a dying technology, now used chiefly by podcasters and programmers with tech blogs. Moreover, among that latter group, RSS is perhaps used as much for its political symbolism as its actual utility. Though of course some people really do have RSS readers, stubbornly adding an RSS feed to your blog, even in 2018, is a reactionary statement. That little tangerine bubble has become a wistful symbol of defiance against a centralized web increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations, a web that hardly resembles the syndicated web of Werbach’s imagining.

The future once looked so bright for RSS. What happened? Was its downfall inevitable, or was it precipitated by the bitter infighting that thwarted the development of a single RSS standard?

…

I’ve always been a huge fan of RSS, and I use it for just about everything (I’ll even hack-it-in to services that don’t supply it natively, just to make them fit around my workflow). But even I’ve got to admit that – outside of podcasts – it’s not done well at retaining mainstream appeal, especially after the death of Google Reader. Right now, most people seem content to get their updates from their social media circles, and take a manual approach (ugh) to reading content in the few other places that matter to them. That’s problematic for all kinds of reasons, and I’m perfectly happy to be one of those old fuddy-duddies who likes his web standards open and independent!

Repost posted at UTC on .

1 comment