Bruce Lawson's personal site

It’s the last Reading List of 2016. Happy Consumerfest!

• CSS Grid! – FAQ and some links by glamorous Eric Meyer
• What next for CSS Grid Layout? by Rachel Andrew
• Responsive Image Breakpoints Generator useful for the occasional image, by cloudinary. There’s also an API.
• The (Not So) Secret Powers Of The Mobile Browser
  By Stéphanie Walter
• sw-toolbox – The Chrome team’s collection of service worker tools for offlining runtime requests
• People disable JavaScript
• The European Accessibility Act covering banking services, e-books, e-commerce, amongst others
• Introducing the WebVR API in Chrome for Android
• position:sticky is back in Chrome – joining Firefox and Safari
• Simpler web payments: Introducing the Payment Request API – it’s now in Microsoft Edge
• The long-run poverty and gender impacts of mobile money – Mobile money (M-PESA) lifted 2% of Kenyan households out of poverty. Especially true for female-headed households
• Mobile Money Practices in Zimbabwe (12 MB PDF) – Mobile money in hyperinflation, population w low banking penetration
• ‘Blockchain was meant for Africa’ – “We have a lot of problems ranging from corruption and fraud. We now have a technology that could alleviate some of these problems.”
• We say we don’t hate our audiences. Our mobile strategies suggest otherwise.
• When everything’s important, nothing is! – Paul Lewis tests how various frameworks prioritise resource downloading, and discovers Server-Side Rendering isn’t a magic bullet.
• EU data retention ruling goes against UK government – UK government’s “Snoopers Charter” (Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act) is against UK law because it’s indiscriminate; “EU judges said communications data could only be retained if it was used to fight serious crime.”

• Proven Tactics to Avoiding Shopping Cart Abandonment
• Virgin Media are hijacking your router – again! – “Virgin Media are trying to resell your internet access. Worse still, they appear to be doing it without users’ permission.” by Terence Eden
• Standards body warned SMS 2-factor authentication is insecure and nobody listened
• Fun hacks for faster content -“Using iframes and document.write to improve performance”. yes, you read that right. By mad scientist, Jank Architect.
• Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 19 – HTML Form Validation, IDB fixes and more
• Browsers, not apps, are the future of mobile – some good comments, too
• Observations on São Paulo, in four apps – “How smartphones have changed daily life in Brazil’s biggest city” by Peter Gasston
• [Insert Clickbait Headline About Progressive Enhancement Here] by Aaron Gustafson
• Yes, progressive enhancement is a fucking moral argument – ” I’m sick of developers thinking they’re the pinnacle of things. I’m sick of the lack of empathy that’s a core part of our industry.” by Charlie @sonniesedge
• New Zealand passport robot tells applicant of Asian descent to open eyes – test your software with real people.
• ‘The underbelly of the internet’: How content ad networks fund fake news
• Partnering to Help Curb the Spread of Terrorist Content Online – YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter collaboration
• Tech Companies Delay Diversity Reports to Rethink Goals – “industry struggles to show progress in adding more women and minorities to their ranks.”
• Fears of China tech bubble as expert warns of ��disaster’ from investment explosion
• idea mic drop – “Own the watercooler chat in 2017 with this buzzworthy marketing campaign generator. You can thank us in your awards acceptance speech.”

My first Reading List since leaving Opera, and it’s a biggie!

• Progressive Web Apps Simply Make Sense – nice article by Jason Grigsby that I missed when it first came out in Sept.
• Official Progressive Web Apps Manifest explainer co-written by little old me!
• Fixing an SVG Animation Vulnerability – Mozilla Security Blog. Firefox users: update your browser.
• Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum – “Silicon Valley’s biggest failing [is] lack of empathy for those whose lives are disturbed by its technological wizardry” by Om Malik. A much better expressed version of my rant on disruption-worship.
• The UK now wields unprecedented surveillance powers �� here’s what it means 29 Nov 2016. Benjamin Franklin, 11 Nov 1755: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
• Introducing simultaneous “nirvana�� JavaScript debugging for Chrome and Node.js in VS Code by Kenneth Auchenberg.
• JavaScript books by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer – “All of my books are free to read online and will remain so forever!”
• Nokia-branded mobile phones are on sale, once again “the range is limited to some pretty basic models, but that should change when Android-powered smartphones and tablets are added soon.”
• W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality – workshop report.
• WebVR 1.0 available in Firefox Nightly – joining Samsung and experimental Chromium. Coming soon to a browser near you …
• JavaScript is not an enemy of accessibility! – by Marco Zehe
• Stranger Danger: Fixing vulnerabilities in npm package – excellent video by Guy Podjarny of Snyk (28 mins)
• The Coming Revolution in Email Design
• Transforming a Culture – by Gerry McGovern. Loads of good stuff in here, including “Nothing better illustrates an organization-centric, old model culture than the proliferation of PDFs on a website”.
• Ericsson Mobility Report – “The number of mobile subscriptions now exceeds the world’s population.” 7.5bn mobile subscriptions globally, of which ~4.125bn (55%) are smartphones.
• Freedom on the Net 2016 – “Internet freedom around the world declined in 2016 for the sixth consecutive year. Two-thirds of all internet users � 67 percent � live in countries where criticism of the government, military, or ruling family are subject to censorship”. Caveat: there are suggestions that the report is somewhat biased; see @lucideer’s replies to my original tweet.
• Leave your phone at the door: side channels that reveal factory floor secrets – “if you place a phone near a manufacturing device (CNC mill or 3D printer in the demonstrated attacks), or even just make a phone call to someone standing near one of those machines on the factory floor, then you can gather enough information from the phone sensors to reconstruct the object being fabricated!”
• Kryptowire discovers mobile phone firmware that transmitted personally identifiable information without user consent or disclosure – Some Android devices “actively transmitted user and device information including the full-body of text messages, contact lists, call history with full telephone numbers, unique device identifiers including the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) and the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI).”
• Efficient representation for Web formats – “EXI is a format that sends an efficient data stream of parse events that can have noticeable, measurable savings in CPU, memory and bandwidth. Test results have consistently shown EXI advantages for XML, HTML, and now CSS/JavaScript minify, over gzip and zip formats.”
• The Guardian has moved to HTTPS – “It allows us to take advantage of emerging technologies, such as service workers, web notifications, ��add to homescreen’ prompts and offline web pages.”
• Intro to Webpack by Kimberley Cook
• What is Net Neutrality? from Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
• Fintech startup MC Payment raises $3.5m to move into Thailand – wonder if there’s room for e-wallet/ cashless payments in Thailand. (At some point, I really should publish an article I’ve been drafting on paying for stuff on the web in Thailand.)
• Why Deadlines Need to Drop Dead – “Burnouts can be extremely dangerous … unrealistic expectations are the #1 challenge developers face” by Eric Elliott
• Analysis: Why Ebook Sales Fell In 2015, And Students Prefer Printed Books
• The secret life of a clickbait creator: lousy content, dodgy ads, demoralised staff – interesting anonymous story about working in a clickbait factory
• Growth Hacking for Assholes – on Medium, of course.
• GCHQ Numberwang script – Er….
• goat.se – stock up on Swedish goat cheese. For your lemon party.