Reading List 323
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi Browser, who employ me and don’t moan about me reading stuff. Using Vivaldi can increase your gorgeousness by up to 78.6 IGUs (ISO Gorgeousness Units).
- $700bn delusion: Does using data to target specific audiences make advertising more effective? Latest studies suggest not – is tracking-based surveillance advertising any better than traditional contextual ads?
- No, EU competition policy was not responsible for global IT chaos – “You have to admire Microsoft’s PR people for their cynicism… they are not-so-subtly letting the media know that the REAL baddie in Friday’s global IT outage was not CrowdStrike, nor poor security design of Windows, but… the European Commission’s DG Competition!”
- Readability: The Optimal Line Length – “The optimal line length for body text is 50–75 characters” (quite a wide range, then)
- Getting To The Bottom Of Minimum WCAG-Conformant Interactive Element Size by Eric Bailey
- New Class Action Lawsuit against AccessiBe – A small business believed AccessiBe’s marketing claims that its overlay would make their site accessible. The firm still got sued by a blind person who said the website was not accessible. The firm’s lawsuit says that AccessiBe violated the law by claiming that its product makes websites accessible. Case continues.
- the of S syntax in :nth-child() – e.g.,
li:nth-child(even of :not([hidden])) - FTC Issues Orders to Eight Companies Seeking Information on Surveillance Pricing – “aimed at helping the FTC better understand the opaque market for products by third-party intermediaries that claim to use advanced algorithms, artificial intelligence and other technologies, along with personal information about consumers—such as their location, demographics, credit history, and browsing or shopping history—to categorize individuals and set a targeted price for a product or service.”
- Fit-to-Width Text: A New Technique – For the love of Darwin, will the CSS Working Group just make text-fit: width or text-fit: min(10em, 100%) work already, if only so that nice Mr Komarov doesn’t thrill and simultaneously make me queasy with his CSS hackery!?!?
- Google halts its 4-plus-year plan to turn off tracking cookies by default in Chrome – A brief history of Google’s ideas, proposals, and APIs for cookie replacements.
- Third Party Cookies Must Be Removed “third-party cookies are harmful to the web and must be removed” – say W3C Technical Architecture Group, co-incidentally 2 days after Google announced it wouldn’t deprecate them, after all.
- Related: Digital Profiling in the Online Gambling Industry – “limited browsing of 37 visits to gambling websites led to 2,154 data transmissions to 83 domains controlled by 44 different companies that range from well-known platforms like Facebook and Google to lesser- known surveillance technology companies like Signal and Iovation, enabling these actors to embed imperceptible monitoring software during a user’s browsing experience.” (from exec summary)
- Related: Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal – “Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine.”
- The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz – “Two of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capitalists make the case for backing Trump: that their ability to make money is the only value that matters.”
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)