The amazon dash is a pinnacle of modern web design. It’s one of the most intrusive, complex, and resource-dependent devices we’ve introduced into our homes, yet it appears as a simple
oval with a single button for a single use. The use is absurdly narrow: the button will have a picture of Tide detergent, and when you press the button, Tide detergent is sent to your
door.
Barely a week goes by between the times that I discover some horrifically over-engineered “solution” on the Internet. Amazon’s Dash buttons are terrible: disposable (plastic)
single-purpose computers that could so easily have been made into something “more” – more-versatile, more-open, more-configurable, more-flexible. Indeed: people have been doing exactly that kind of thing! But the vanilla Dash button remains little more than selling you
convenience (and not much convenience, if we’re honest) in exchange for more and more of your feeling of digital freedom. Yet another example of what replaced the Web we lost…
By hiding the technical processes, and simplifying the onboarding and engagement of their services, Amazon can continually reinforce your depression for a profit— and you can get
name-brand laundry detergent faster.
Also, can I just take a moment to point out how awesome Zach’s website is. Not only is it the perfect example of how fun and weird the Internet can be and having a mixture of fascinating and curious content, it’s also available via dat:// for those of you who’ve got some love for the datbaseiverse.
Every morning, Lena Forsen wakes up beneath a brass-trimmed wooden mantel clock dedicated to “The First Lady of the Internet.”
It was presented to her more than two decades ago by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, in recognition of the pivotal—and altogether
unexpected—role she played in shaping the digital world as we know it.
Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically
every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native
Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.
…
While I’m not sure that it’s fair to say that Lena “remained a mystery” until now – the article itself identifies several events she’s attended in her capacity of “first lady of the
Internet” – but this is still a great article about a picture that you might have seen but never understood the significance of nor the person in front of the lens. Oh, and it’s
pronounced “lee-na”; did you know?
The choice of this encoding has made ASCII-compatible standards the language that computers use to communicate to this day.
Even casual internet users have probably encountered a URL with “%20” in it where there logically ought to be a space character. If we look at this RFC we see this:
Column/Row Symbol Name
2/0 SP Space (Normally Non-Printing)
Hey would you look at that! Column 2, row 0 (2,0; 20!) is what stands for “space”. When you see that “%20”, it’s because of this RFC, which exists because of some bureaucratic
decisions made in the 1950s and 1960s.
…
Darius Kazemi is reading a single RFC every day throughout 2019 and writing up his understanding as to the content and importance of each. It’s good reading if you’re “into” RFCs and it’s probably pretty interesting if you’re just a casual Internet historian.
For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the
form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced.
…
…the only way back from suspension is to “confess and repent,” she says, even if you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. “Amazon doesn’t like to see finger-pointing.”
Suppose you have a competitor on Amazon Marketplace. Based on this article, the following strategies are pretty much fair game and are likely to result in immediate suspension of your
competitor’s account:
Posting fake reviews favouring your competitor’s products, then reporting your competitor for manipulating reviews.
Making a copyright claim against your competitor’s username, even though you’d never used it before.
Buying your competitor’s product, setting fire to it, photographing it, and claiming that it did that by itself and is thus unsafe for sale.
Amazon don’t like controversy, so they always side against the seller. A great illustration as to why it’s dangerous when we let companies (like Amazon) have the power of
judiciaries without the responsibilities of democracies.
Julianne Aguilar | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (2,894 words)
Once upon a time, in 1999, when the internet was small, when it came through your phone and not just on your phone, when the first browser war had not yet been won, when you had to
teach yourself a few lines of code if you want…
Once upon a time, in 1999, when the internet was small, when it came through your phone and not just on your phone, when the first browser war had not yet been won,
when you had to teach yourself a few lines of code if you wanted to exist online, when the idea of broadcasting your real name for anyone to see was unthinkable — in those early days,
before Twitter revolutions, before Facebook Live homicides, when the internet was small and most people didn’t understand it, and only the nerds hung out there — even
then, it was already happening.
Official Post from Rob Sheridan: That goober you see above is me as a nerdy high school kid in my bedroom in 1998, being interviewed on TV for a dumb website I made. Allow me to
explain.20 years ago this month, an episode of the TV show Ally McBeal featured a strange animated baby dancing the cha-cha in a vision experienced by the
That goober you see above is me as a nerdy high school kid in my bedroom in 1998, being interviewed on TV for a dumb website I made. Allow me to explain.
20 years ago this month, an episode of the TV show Ally McBeal featured a
strange animated baby dancing the cha-cha in a vision experienced by the show’s titular
character. It immediately became an unlikely pop culture sensation, and by the tail end of the 90s you couldn’t pass a mall t-shirt kiosk or a Spencer’s Gifts without seeing corny
merchandise for The Dancing Baby, or “Oogachaka Baby” as it was sometimes
known. This child of the Uncanny Valley was an offensively banal phenomenon: It had no depth, no meaning, no commentary, no narrative. It was just a dumb video loop from the internet,
something your nerdiest co-worker would have emailed you for a ten-second chuckle. We know these frivolous bite-sized jokes as memes now, and they’re wildly pervasive in popular
culture. You can get every type of Grumpy Cat merchandise imaginable, for example, despite the property being nothing more than a photo of a cranky-looking feline with some
added text. We know what memes are in 2018 but in 1997, we didn’t. The breathtaking stupidity of The Dancing Baby’s popularity was a strange development with online origins that had
no cultural precedent. It’s a cringe-worthy thing to look back on, appropriately relegated to the dumpster of regrettable 90s fads. But I have a confession to make: The Dancing Baby
was kinda my fault.
…
Internet memes of the 1990s were a very different beast to those you see today. A combination of the slow connection speeds, lower population of “netizens” (can you believe we used to
call ourselves that), and the fact that many of the things we take for granted today were then cutting-edge or experimental technologies like animated GIFs or web pages with music means
that memes spread more-slowly and lived for longer. Whereas today a meme can be born and die in the fraction of a heartbeat that it takes for you to discover them, the memes of 1990s
grew gradually and truly organically: there was not yet any market for attempting to “manufacture” a meme. If if you were thoroughly plugged-in to Net culture, by the time you
discovered a new meme it could be weeks or months old and still thriving, and spin-off memes (like the dozens of sites that followed the theme of the Hampster Dance) almost
existed to pay homage to the originals, rather than in an effort to supplant them.
I’m aware that meme culture predates the dancing baby, and I had the privilege of seeing it foster on e.g. newsgroups beforehand. But the early Web provided a fascinating breeding
ground for a new kind of meme: one that brushed up against mainstream culture and helped to put the Internet onto more people’s mental maps: consider the media reaction to the
appearance of the Dancing Baby on Ally McBeal. So as much as you might want to wrap your hands around the throat of the greasy teenager in the picture, above, I think that in a
way we should be thanking him for his admittedly-accidental work in helping bring geek culture into the sight of popular culture.
And I’m not just saying that because I, too, spent the latter half of the 1990s putting things online that I ought to by right have been embarassed by in hindsight. ;-)
hen I was very young, before I was on the internet — even before the internet was really a thing you could “go on” — I would dial into BBSs (bulletin board systems). BBSs were kind of
like private, micro-internets that people set up in their
houses. You had to use a dial-up modem to connect to them, and the people who were in charge of these networks (usually just some random technology enthusiast) could shut them off or
boot you at any time. I got booted a lot when I was kid, because I was curious and annoying and all the things I am today but way less savvy about it. Once a guy who ran a BBS called
my house to complain to my mother that her son had been snooping around in places he wasn’t supposed to go — I don’t remember what I was after, but I’m sure he had a very good reason
to be angry.
Here’s why I mention this: What I was doing online, in a virtual space, had real-world repercussions. It was real. What I was doing was real. That guy who complained about me was
real. And I realize now that I never treated or experienced the internet like some other thing — as if the physical world were “real” and what happened on the internet was something
less. That was where my real life was. That’s where I was, as a person.
The internet was the most real thing to me that I’d ever had in my life, before my wife and my daughter; my job, my house, my things. Its existence helped to form the basis of my
worldview, my politics, my obsessions. It gave me tools to talk and create in ways that would have been impossible in another age. But it was never not reality. I wish the rest of the
world had always seen it this way…
This is going to be a really short post, but for someone it could save an hour of life.
So, you’ve nothing to do and you’ve decided to play around with IPv6 or maybe you’re happened to be an administrator of a web service
that needs to support IPv6 connectivity and you need to make your nginx server work nicely with this protocol.
First thing you need to do is to enable IPv6 in nginx by recompiling it with --with-ipv6 configure option and
reinstalling it. If you use some pre-built package, check if your nginx already has this key enabled by running nginx
-V.
Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from those three tech giants (respectively, GOOG,
FB, AMZN). Not much has changed, and quite literally the user interface and features on those sites has remained mostly untouched. However, the underlying dynamics of power on the Web
have drastically changed, and those three companies are at the center of a fundamental transformation of the Web.
It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.
Internet activity itself hasn’t slowed down. It maintains a steady growth, both in amount of users and amount of websites…
Earlier this week, the Spanish government raided the Barcelona office of the PuntCat Foundation, the company that administers the .cat domain, and arrested one of its senior
executives.
PuntCat means “dot cat” in Catalan, the language spoken in the Catalonian region of Spain as well as places in France, Andorra, and Italy. The office was raided because Catalonia
hopes to hold a referendum on October 1 to decide if it should secede from Spain, and in an effort to quash the referendum, the government of Spain ordered puntCat to “block all .cat
domain names that may contain any kind of information about the forthcoming independence referendum,” according to a press release from the foundation.
This is an astonishing attempt at censorship by a member of the E.U. but, unfortunately, that aspect is going largely uncovered because the media is idiotically obsessed with cats…
In the speech in which she committed to keep governing despite calls to stand down, the prime minister made reference to extending powers for the security services. Those powers –
which include regulation of the internet and forcing internet companies to let spies read everyone’s private communications – were a key part of the Conservative campaign, which failed to
score a majority in the House of Commons.
If you’re a web developer and you haven’t come across the Google AMP project yet… then what
stone have you been living under? But just in case you have been living under such a stone – or you’re not a web developer – I’ll fill you in. If you believe Google’s elevator
pitch, AMP is “…an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all… consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms.”
I believe that AMP is fucking poisonous and that the people who’ve come out against it by saying it’s “controversial” so far don’t go remotely
far enough. Let me tell you about why.
When you configure your website for AMP – like the BBC, The Guardian, Reddit, and Medium already have – you deliver copies of your pages written using AMP HTML and AMP JS rather than
the HTML and Javascript that you’re normally would. This provides a subset of the functionality you’re used to, but it’s quite a rich subset and gives you a lot of power with minimal
effort, whether you’re trying to make carousels, video players, social sharing features, or whatever. Then when your site is found via Google Search on a mobile device, then instead of
delivering the user to your AMP HTML page or its regular-HTML alternative… Google delivers your site for you via an ultra-fast precached copy via their own network. So far, a mixed bag, right? Wrong.
Google’s stated plan to favour pages that use AMP creates a publisher’s arms race in which
content creators are incentivised to produce content in the (open-source but) Google-controlled AMP format to rank higher in the search results, or at least regain parity, versus their
competitors. Ultimately, if everybody supported AMP then – ignoring the speed benefits for mobile users (more on that in a moment) – the only winner is Google. Google, who would then
have a walled garden of Facebook-beating proportions around the web. Once Google delivers all of your content, there’s no such thing as a free and open Internet any more.
So what about those speed increases? Yes, the mobile web is slower than we’d like and AMP improves
that. But with the exception of the precaching – which is something that could be achieved by other means – everything that AMP provides can be done using existing technologies. AMP
makes it easy for lazy developers to make their pages faster, quickly, but if speed on mobile devices is the metric for your success: let’s
just start making more mobile-friendly pages! We can make the mobile web better and still let it be our Web: we don’t need to give control of it to Google in order to shave a few milliseconds off the load time.
We need to reject AMP, and we need to reject it hard. Right now, it
might be sufficient to stand up to your boss and say “no, implementing AMP on our sites is a bad idea.” But one day, it might mean avoiding the use of AMP entirely (there’ll be browser
plugins to help you, don’t worry). And if it means putting up with a slightly-slower mobile web while web developers remain lazy, so be it: that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make to
help keep our web free and open. And I hope you will be, too.
Like others, I’m just hoping that Sir Tim will feel the
urge to say something about this development soon.
All secure crypto on the Internet assumes that the DNS lookup from names to IP addresses are insecure. Securing those DNS lookups therefore enables no meaningful security. DNSSEC does
make some attacks against insecure sites harder. But it doesn’t make those attacks infeasible, so sites still need to adopt secure transports like TLS. With TLS properly
configured, DNSSEC adds nothing…
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing…
Have you ever wondered why every major web browser identifies itself as “Mozilla”? Wonder no longer…
As you’re no-doubt aware, Home Secretary Theresa May is probably going to get her way with her “snooper’s
charter” by capitalising on events in Paris (even though that makes no sense), and before long, people working for
law enforcement will be able to read your Internet usage history without so much as a warrant (or, to put it as the UN’s privacy chief put it, it’s “worse than scary”).
Or as John Oliver put it, “This bill could write into law a huge invasion of privacy.” Click to see a clip.
In a revelation that we should be thankful of as much as we’re terrified by, our government does not understand how the Internet works. And that’s why it’s really easy for
somebody with only a modicum of geekery to almost-completely hide their online activities from observation by their government and simultaneously from hackers. Here’s a device that I
built the other weekend, and below I’ll tell you how to do it yourself (and how it keeps you safe online from a variety of threats, as well as potentially giving you certain other
advantages online):
It’s small, it’s cute, and it goes a long way to protecting my privacy online.
I call it “Iceland”, for reasons that will become clear later. But a more-descriptive name would be a “Raspberry Pi VPN Hotspot”. Here’s what you’ll need if you want to build one:
A Raspberry Pi Model B (or later) – you can get these from less than £30 online and it’ll come with an SD card that’ll let it boot Raspbian, which is the Linux
distribution I’ve used in my example: there’s no reason you couldn’t use another one if you’re familiar with it
A USB WiFi dongle that supports “access point” mode – I’m using an Edimax one that cost me under a fiver – but it took a little hacking to make it work – I’ve heard
that Panda and RALink dongles are easier
A subscription to a VPN with OpenVPN support and at least one endpoint outside of the UK – I’m using VyprVPN because
I have a special offer, but there are lots of cheaper options: here’s a great article about
choosing one
A basic familiarity with a *nix command line, an elementary understanding of IP networking, and a spare 20 minutes.
From here on, this post gets pretty geeky. Unless you plan on building your own little box to encrypt all of your home’s WiFi traffic until it’s well out of the UK and
close-to-impossible to link to you personally (which you should!), then you probably ought to come back to it another time.
Here’s how it’s done:
1. Plug in, boot, and install some prerequisites
Plug the WiFi dongle into a USB port and connect the Ethernet port to your Internet router. Boot your Raspberry Pi into Raspbian (as described in the helpsheet that comes with
it), and run:
If, like me, you’re using an Edimax dongle, you need to do an extra couple of steps to make it work as an access point. Skip this bit if you’re using one of the other dongles I listed
or if you know better.
Get OpenVPN configuration files from your VPN provider: often these will be available under the iOS downloads. There’ll probably be one for each available endpoint. I chose the one for
Reyjkavik, because Iceland’s got moderately sensible privacy laws and I’m pretty confident that it would take judicial oversight for British law enforcement to collaborate with
Icelandic authorities on getting a wiretap in place, which is the kind of level of privacy I’m happy with. Copy your file to /etc/openvpn/openvpn.conf and edit it: you may find that you
need to put your VPN username and password into it to make it work.
sudo service openvpn start
You can now test your VPN’s working, if you like. I suggest connecting to the awesome icanhazip.com and asking it where you are (you can use your
favourite GeoIP website to tell you what country it thinks you’re in, based on that):
curl -4 icanhazip.com
Another option would be to check with a GeoIP service directly:
curl freegeoip.net/json/
4. Set up your firewall and restart the VPN connection
Unless your VPN provider gives you DNAT (and even if they do, if you’re paranoid), you should set up a firewall to allow only outgoing connections to be established, and then restart
your VPN connection:
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i tun0 -m conntrack --ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i tun0 -j DROP
sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables.nat.vpn.secure"
sudo sh -c "echo 'up iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.nat.vpn.secure' >> /etc/network/interfaces"
sudo service openvpn restart
5. Configure your WiFi hotspot
Configure bind as your DNS server, caching responses on behalf of Google’s DNS servers, or another DNS server that you trust. Alternatively, you can just configure your DHCP clients to
use Google’s DNS servers directly, but caching will probably improve your performance overall. To do this, add a forwarder to /etc/bind/named.conf.options:
forwarders {
8.8.8.8;
8.8.4.4;
};
Restart bind, and make sure it loads on boot:
sudo service bind9 restart
sudo update-rc.d bind9 enable
Edit /etc/udhcpd.conf. As a minimum, you should have a configuration along these lines (you might need to tweak your IP address assignments to fit with your local network – the “router”
and “dns” settings should be set to the IP address you’ll give to your Raspberry Pi):
start 192.168.0.2
end 192.168.0.254
interface wlan0
remaining yes
opt dns 192.168.0.1
option subnet 255.255.255.0
opt router 192.168.0.1
option lease 864000 # 10 days
Enable DHCP by uncommenting (remove the hash!) the following line in /etc/default/udhcpd:
#DHCPD_ENABLED="yes"
Set a static IP address on your Raspberry Pi in the same subnet as you configured above (but not between the start and end of the DHCP list):
sudo ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.1
And edit your /etc/network/interfaces file to configure it to retain this on reboot (you’ll need to use tabs, not spaces, for indentation):
Right – onto hostapd, the fiddliest of the tools you’ll have to configure. Create or edit /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf as follows, but substitute in your own SSID, hotspot password, and
channel (to minimise interference, which can slow your network down, I recommend using WiFi scanner tool on your mobile to find which channels your neighbours aren’t using, and
use one of those – you should probably avoid the channel your normal WiFi uses, too, so you don’t slow your own connection down with crosstalk):
Hook up this configuration by editing /etc/default/hostapd:
DAEMON_CONF="/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf"
Fire up the hotspot, and make sure it runs on reboot:
sudo service hostapd start
sudo service udhcpd start
sudo update-rc.d hostapd enable
sudo update-rc.d udhcpd enable
Finally, set up NAT so that people connecting to your new hotspot are fowarded through the IP tunnel of your VPN connection:
sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward"
sudo sh -c "echo net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 >> /etc/sysctl.conf"
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o tun0 -j MASQUERADE
sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables.nat.vpn.secure"
6. Give it a go!
Connect to your new WiFi hotspot, and go to your favourite GeoIP service. Or, if your VPN endpoint gives you access to geographically-limited services, give those a go (you’d be amazed
how different the Netflix catalogues are in different parts of the world). And give me a shout if you need any help or if you have any clever ideas about how this magic little box can
be improved.
