- Opinion piece o’the week: React: Why I have a problem with React the library and spend a lot of time talking to my therapist by the inimitable Charlie Owen
- Writing a Web Monetized Game “In my game, Goblin Farmer, you get your in-game money from Web Monetization micropayments.”
- Google proposes new privacy and anti-fingerprinting controls for the web
- The scale of the problem is enormous’: Apple flexes strong anti-tracking stance
- Hi, Alexa. How Do I Stop You From Listening In On Me? – Protecting your privacy on Alexa, Siri and Google Home. (PSA: if you say “my leg hurts”, Alexa starts listening to you.)
- New & Experimental CSS Tools in Firefox – 18 minute presentation at SFHTML by Victoria Wang. Some very cool work here that makes Firefox an indispensable tool for developing modern websites.
- Google finds ‘indiscriminate iPhone attack lasting years’ “attackers were using 12 separate security flaws in order to compromise devices. Most were bugs within Safari … Simply visiting the hacked site was enough for the exploit server to attack your device, and if it was successful, install a monitoring implant. Once on a person’s iPhone, the implant could access an enormous amount of data, including (though not limited to) contacts, images and GPS location data. It would relay this information back to an external server every 60 seconds”
- Empathy and innovation: How Microsoft’s cultural shift is leading to new product development – a deaf engineer at Microsoft pioneered the “blur background feature. She always asked her parents to turn off the lights to help her focus better on their faces. Then she created software to do it.
- The loom and the thresher: Lessons in technological worker displacement
Bit of a plug: I’m co-curating and MCing JSCamp – a one-day JavaScript conference in Bucharest, Romania on 24th of September. It’s the conference I want to attend – not full of frameworks and shinies, but full of funny, thought-provoking talks about making the Web better. The speaker line-up is cosmic, maaaan. Bucharest is a lovely city, based on Paris, accommodation and food is cheap and it’s and very easy to get to from anywhere in Europe. Come along, or tell your friends! Or both! (And no, I’m not on a percentage!)
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- Ruffle is an Adobe Flash Player emulator written in the Rust programming language. Ruffle targets both the desktop and the web using WebAssembly.
- npm Pulls Malicious Package that Stole Login Passwords – “computers that had this package installed or running should be considered “fully compromised because it deployed an executable for Windows operating system.”
- Midyear ADA Web & App Accessibility Lawsuit Report – “The rate of lawsuits filed in federal courts related to website and app accessibility has now hit a rate of one-an-hour, that’s 8 a day, 40 per week and set to be on pace for over 2,000 lawsuits again this year.”
- A Potential Privacy Model for the Web: Sharding Web Identity (part of Chromium’s Improving privacy and security on the web)
- Stop the Open Data Bus, We Want to Get Off “Anonymised” data: “re-identification of individuals in the Myki public transport dataset … We demonstrate the ease with which we were able to re-identify ourselves, our co-travellers, & complete strangers” (PDF)
- Why bother with What Three Words? by Uncle Tezza. I take his point, but think he’s being overly harsh; I’ve found W3W to be useful when meeting someone in a large area, e.g. picking my daughter up at a festival etc. There are, however, free alternatives
- The Planet Needs a New Internet – “the internet as a wholeincluding the energy used to power data centers, networks, and individual devices, as well as the energy used during the manufacturing of those devicesis responsible for about 7 percent of global electricity consumption”
- Google Is Tightening Its Grip on Your Website – “If I use AMP, I tie my fate to Google’s whims.”
- evolt.org Browser Archive 20 Years Old = “At launch browsers.evolt.org contained 80 different browsers.”
- By the End of This Century, the Global Population Will Start to Shrink – “The fertility rate is falling in every country on the planet… “The brain is the most important reproductive organ. Once a woman is socialized to have an education and a career, she is socialized to have a smaller family. There’s no going back.
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Draft Proposal – +3000 to Success Criterion 6.1.1
Bit of a plug: I’m co-curating and MCing JSCamp – a one-day JavaScript conference in Bucharest, Romania on 24th of September. It’s the conference I want to attend – not full of frameworks and shinies, but full of funny, thought-provoking talks about making the Web better. The speaker line-up is cosmic, maaaan. Bucharest is a lovely city, based on Paris, accommodation and food is cheap and it’s and very easy to get to from anywhere in Europe. Come along, or tell your friends! Or both! (And no, I’m not on a percentage!)
Want my reading lists sent straight to your inbox? Sign up and Mr Mailchimp will send it your way.