Reading List 328
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- Aria-activedescendant is not focus – by Sarah Higley
- Sustainable Futures: Funding the Web Ecosystem – this State of the Browser talk by Stephanie Stimac keeps running through my brain (with transcript)
- Privacy, PWAs, Protecting People … and Pianos – In this second episode of the For a Better Web podcast, Bruce chats with John Ozbay, founder of Cryptee, a privacy-preserving photo and notes Progressive Web App from Estonia
- Choosing a Masonry Syntax in CSS – What makes something a ‘grid’, and what’s at stake? asks Miriam Suzanne
- Zorin OS – a Linux desktop, based on Ubuntu, with a UI designed for Windows/ Mac users. I installed it on an old Dell machine running Windows 10 that cost me £85 from eBay, and my mum was up and running with Libre Office and Zoom in one hour.
- Where web components shine – and where they don’t. By Dave Rupert
- Reference Target for Cross-Root ARIA – Reference Target is a feature to enable using IDREF attributes such as for and aria-labelledby to refer to elements inside a component’s shadow DOM, while maintaining encapsulation of the internal details of the shadow DOM. The main goal of this feature is to enable ARIA to work across shadow root boundaries
- The Elephant in the Room in Google’s Antitrust Trials – “it’s time to face the elephant in the room, and require Google to spin off YouTube into an independent entity positioned to be a market counterweight. This would be a win-win-win-win: for advertisers, publishers, competitors, and consumers. And it would kick one leg out from under the stool that props up Google’s internet monopoly, which has done too much market damage in too many ways for way too long.”
- Chromium’s influence on Chromium alternatives – “I don’t think most people realize how Firefox and Safari depend on Google for more than “just” revenue from default search engine deals and prototyping new web platform features.”
- Apple will let everyone set new default phone and messaging apps with iOS 18.2 – not just geo-fenced to EU, which is relief to non-EU devs and testers. Let’s have all the EU improvements go global!
- It’s time for a fairer, more competitive app ecosystem – my old chums at open Web Advocacy have co-signed a letter to MEPs asking them to hold Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta (Facebook) and Bytedance (TikTok) accountable under DMA
- Bad News: We’ve Lost Control of Our Social Media Feeds. Good News: Courts Are Noticing. – “Our legal system is starting to recognize this shift and hold tech giants responsible for the effects of their algorithms — a significant, and even possibly transformative, development that over the next few years could finally force social media platforms to be answerable for the societal consequences of their choices.” (Julia Angwin, seemingly free to read)
- The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data – “Babel Street’s LocateX platform also allows customers to track individual mobile users by their Mobile Advertising ID or MAID, a unique, alphanumeric identifier built into all Android and Apple mobile devices … [This] allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics… then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.”
- U.S. Finally Restricts Sale Of Location Data To Foreign Adversaries, But We’re Still Too Corrupt To Pass A Basic Internet-Era Privacy Law – “The U.S. needs comprehensive internet-era privacy laws that hold companies and executives accountable for lax security and privacy standards”
- Digital Divinity: Ancient traditions meet modern technology – fabulous article including Muslim 3D, a video game designed to fight Islamophobia; building robot elephants for Hindu temples; the world’s first 3D-printed temple .. and more! Boomshanka
- git-blame-someone-else – “This changes not only who authored the commit but the listed committer as well”
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)