My 12th favourite and my 27th favourite YouTubers just did a collaboration and it’s brilliant. Also: I totally knew seven out of the twelve terms Dr
Doe brought to the table and would have been able to guess at least one more (as well as, of course, knowing what TomSka meant by his
British slang), so this video made me feel clever.
Last year, Robin Varley and his friend Sergio thought it would be an
amusing challenge to pedal the 50-odd mile gap between Brixton and Brighton using only London’s colloquially-named Boris Bikes. The trip lasted just over 10 hours, including a
brief photo op with Gatwick police, and set the
pair back a modest sum of 40 GBP.
This year Robin enlisted the help of fellow adventure-seeker Magnus Mulvany, and while the duo kept the alliterative theme of the campaign they opted for a significantly more
daunting circuit.
Cyberattacks don’t magically happen; they involve a series of steps. And far from being helpless, defenders can disrupt the attack at any of those steps. This framing has led to
something called the “cybersecurity kill chain”: a way of thinking about cyber defense in terms of disrupting the attacker’s process. On a similar note, it’s…
Bruce proposes a model to apply the cybersecurity kill chain to the problem of thwarting information operations of the types that we’re seeing day-to-day in the cyberwar landscape. Or
at least, to understand it. Interesting reading, but – and call me cynical – I don’t know if it’s possible to implement some of the kill-stops that would be required to produce
a meaningful barrier.
Applied mathematics at its… best? After predicting statistically that it would take 400-500 packets of Skittles before you’d expect to find the same permutation of colours, an
experiment finds empirical backing for this answer at pack number 464.
This week on Twitter, Maxime Euzière asked why people choose large frameworks over vanilla JS. There are quite a few reasons. Some of them are really valid. Many of them aren’t.
Here are the ones I see most often (with commentary). Vanilla JS is harder. No, it’s often not. Modern vanilla JS has taken many…
Like many people who were already developing for the Web when Javascript first reared its (ugly) head, I would later be delighted when libraries like Prototype and later jQuery would arrive and start doing the “heavy lifting” for me. Not having to do DOM parsing or (especially) Ajax the “long way” (which was particularly long given
the workarounds that needed to be done for cross-compatibility) was a huge boon and made it possible for me to write applications that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to.
But in recent years, I’ve really been enjoying “vanilla” JS. As a language, JavaScript has really grown-up lately, and with modern (and evergreen) browsers dominating the
landscape, everybody benefits from these new features relatively soon after they become available. Of course, it’s still important to see any JavaScript as a progressive
enhancement that not everybody will experience, but it’s still true, now, that the traditional barriers to writing excellent
code in the language are rapidly evaporating.
I no longer add jQuery to a project as a matter of course (and in fact I think it’s been over a year since I deliberately added it to a new project), and that’s great.
He announced yesterday his new secondary Twitter account, @TailsteakAD
(the “AD” is for “After Dark”) and was delighted from the very top tweet onwards:
That’s the spirit.
Anyway: a short while later I found a 20-page comic he’d made called The Escape Room: read it on
Twitter or via Threadreader. It might be exactly the comic you’ve always been
looking for, assuming that the comic you’ve always been looking for combines B/D, gay sex, and escape room puzzle mechanics.
NSFW, obviously.
Suddenly I feel like the escape rooms I go to aren’t quite as good as I thought.
At last week’s Rocky Mountain Poly Living conference in Denver, Leanna Wolfe — a poly
anthropologist and sexologist active in the movement almost since its birth in the 1980s — spoke on what she called the three historical stages of polyamory in Western culture.
Her Stage 1 was mostly male-centric (my paraphrase). She described it as running through the Oneida Colony and other utopian communities of the 19th century through the free-love
beliefs and attitudes that exploded in the 1960s.
Stage 2 has been what we call the modern poly movement: strongly feminist in its origins and growth, born in the mid-1980s and running until more or less now. Its founders,
organizers, media spokespeople, bloggers, podcasters, book authors and opinion leaders have been mostly women (the ratio by my count is about 3 to 1). Its ideology has been
gender-egalitarian, communication-centric, and consent-based since before consent culture was a thing. Like Stage 1, Stage 2 has been something of a counterculture that sees itself
apart from mainstream society.
The current Stage 3 is the mainstreaming of consensual non-monogamy (CNM) in its many forms, including polyamory, into the general culture. This shift is well under way and bodes to
take over the conversation in coming years — for better and for worse, as I’ve been speechifying about since 2008.
…
Does this make those of us who’ve been doing polyamory for ages “poly hipsters”?
The Bodleian Digital Comms team is no stranger to developing out of the ordinary content. Want to represent all of the varied and gruesome deaths in Shakespeare in a fun and
engaging way? We’re on it!
We manage almost all of the Libraries’ public facing digital ‘stuff’, from our main websites to social media and digital signage. When we tot it all up, it’s over fifty websites, a
similar number of blogs, the full range of social media platforms, more than twenty digital screens, a handful of interactive experiences a year, plus…well, not actually a partridge
in a pear tree, but there areunicorns in arks.
From ambush to war crimes, a chance to delve into death in Shakespeare’s works, and to think about how it differed from
the reality
Whatever the platform, our team’s focus is on finding ways to engage the Libraries’ audiences — whether students, researchers, tourists or those around the globe who can’t actually
visit in person — with our work and our collections.
From a G7 meeting of interior ministers in Paris this month, an “outcome document“:
Encourage Internet companies to establish lawful access solutions for their products and services, including data that is encrypted, for law enforcement and competent authorities
to access digital evidence, when it is removed or hosted on IT servers located abroad or encrypted, without imposing any particular technology and while ensuring that assistance
requested from internet companies is underpinned by the rule law and due process protection. Some G7 countries highlight the importance of not prohibiting, limiting, or weakening
encryption;
There is a weird belief amongst policy makers that hacking an encryption system’s key management system is fundamentally different than hacking the system’s encryption algorithm.
The difference is only technical; the effect is the same. Both are ways of weakening encryption.
The G7’s proposal to encourage encryption backdoors demonstrates two unsurprising things about the politicians in attendance, including that:
They’re unwilling to attempt to force Internet companies to add backdoors (e.g. via legislation, fines, etc.), making their resolution functionally toothless, and
More-importantly: they continue to fail to understand what encryption is and how it works.
Somehow, then, this outcome document simultaneously manages to both go too-far (for a safe and secure cryptographic landscape for everyday users) and not-far-enough (for law enforcement
agencies that are in favour of backdoors, despite their huge flaws, to actually gain any benefit). Worst of both worlds, then.
Needless to say, I favour not attempting to weaken encryption, because such measures (a) don’t work against foreign powers, terrorist groups, and hardened criminals and (b)
do weaken the personal security of law-abiding citizens and companies (who can then become victims of the former group). “Backdoors”, however phrased, are a terrible idea.
Who’s for a rewatch of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the “correct” order, before Endgame? No?
The thinking behind this infographic (and in particular the shuffling of Ant-Man and the Wasp behind Infinity War) is like an even bigger, possibly-nerdier
variant of the kind of thinking that lead to Star Wars – Machete Order.
Fair enough – well last year Magnus, our good friend Sergio and I hitch-hiked from Brick Lane (London) to Twatt (Orkney, Scotland) 766 miles way. We did it in 32 hours thanks to the
generous nature of the people that helped out – including drivers, a pilot and a ferry service (thanks again, you amazing humans!!).
We raised 4 x our intended amount and arrived back in London with time to spare and, frankly, a hankering to do it all over again.
So like Shackleton, Fiennes and Thomas Stevens before us, on the 19th April 2019 Magnus and I – dressed in lime green morph suits – will depart Lyme Regis, Dorset on Lime Bikes
(Google them, they’re awesome) For Limekilns, Scotland – 500 miles away (sadly Sergio won’t be joining us for this one)
As with last year, we’re raising for the Campaign Against Living Miserably.
Unlike last year we’re working in association with Lime Bike, who have given us their full support for this trip – so a massive thank you to Conor and the UK team for endorsing us
two idiots!
This time around, he and his friend Magnus are riding Lime e-bikes from Lyme Regis, which is almost as far South as you can get in mainland UK, to
Limekilns, which is on the “other” side of the Firth of Forth (where the wildlings live). Like Challenge Robin II, there was a fuck-up with the trains and I
had to drive him from Oxford to Lyme Regis, but at least I got to find a couple of geocaches while I was down there (one, two).
Anyway: you can follow his adventure via Instagram, but what you really ought to do is go donate money to the cause: or if he’s heading broadly your way: offer him a bed for the night so he doesn’t have to
kip in a tent while his batteries charge in the nearest friendly pub.
It is impossible to answer all of these questions simply. They can, however, be framed by the ideological project of the web itself. The web was built to be open, both technologically
as a decentralized network, and philosophically as a democratizing medium. These questions are tricky because the web belongs to no one, yet was built for everyone. Maintaining that
spirit takes a lot of work, and requires sometimes slow, but always deliberate decisions about the trajectory of web technologies. We should be careful to consider the mountains of
legacy code and libraries that will likely remain on the web for its entire existence. Not just because they are often built with the best of intentions, but because many have been
woven into the fabric of the web. If we pull on any one thread too hard, we risk unraveling the whole thing.
…
A great story about how Firefox nearly broke tens of thousands of websites by following standards, and then didn’t. tl;dr: Javascript has a messy history.
We here at unlike kinds decided that we had to implement Google AMP. We have to be in the Top Stories section because otherwise we’re punted down the page and away from potential
readers. We didn’t really want to; our site is already fast because we made it fast, largely with a combination of clever caching and minimal code. But hey, maybe AMP would speed
things up. Maybe Google’s new future is bright.
It isn’t. According to Google’s own Page Speed Insights audit (which Google recommends to check your performance), the AMP version of articles got an average performance score of 87.
The non-AMP versions? 95. (Note: I updated these numbers recently with an average after running the test 6 times per version.)
…
I’ve complained about AMP before plenty – starting here, for example – but it’s even harder to
try to see the alleged “good sides” of the technology when it doesn’t even deliver the one thing it was supposed to. The Internet should be boycotting this shit, not drinking
the Kool-Aid.
The “polyromantic comedy” series You Me Her opens its fourth
season tonight (Tuesday April 9) at 10 on AT&T’s Audience Network. There is no other show like it on television.
Season 1 was about a troubled couple who, independently, fell for the same third person by way of comic flukes: a novelty gimmick. But creator/producer John Scott Shepherd soon
realized that the show was onto something bigger. Season 2 began straight off with the three together in a serious, all-around polyamorous relationship, and things have grown from
there.
Life, of course, hasn’t been easy for them. Tonight’s opening of Season 4 is titled “Triangular Peg, Meet Round World.” Season 5 is already scheduled for 2020.
…
Joy! I loved the first three seasons of You Me Her, admittedly while – during the first couple of seasons at least – simultaneously bemoaning how long it took the characters to
learn lessons that my polycule(s) solved in far shorter order. I was originally watching it with Ruth and JTA but they lagged and I ran ahead, and I really enjoyed this first episode of season 4
too.
Recently, Google officially launched Android 9 Pie, which includes a slew of new
features around digital well-being, security, and privacy. If you’ve poked around the network settings on your phone while on the beta or after updating, you may have noticed a new
Private DNS Mode now supported by
Android.
This new feature simplifies the process of configuring a custom secure DNS resolver on Android, meaning parties between your device and the websites you visit won’t be able to snoop
on your DNS queries because they’ll be encrypted. The protocol behind this, TLS, is also responsible for the green lock icon you see in your address bar when visiting websites over
HTTPS. The same technology is useful for encrypting DNS queries, ensuring they cannot be tampered with and are unintelligible to ISPs, mobile carriers, and any others in the network
path between you and your DNS resolver. These new security protocols are called DNS over HTTPS, and DNS over TLS.
…
Bad: Android Pie makes it harder (than previous versions) to set a custom DNS server on a cellular data connection.
Good: Android Pie supports DNS-over-TLS, so that’s nice.
