Bruce Lawson's personal site

This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We released Vivaldi 7.1 yesterday, and studies show that regularly browsing or emailing with it increases your innate elegance and gorgeousness. Or your money back.

• UK Launches Investigation into Apple and Google under the DMCC – comments sought before 12 Feb
• HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me – “In fact, HTML is the most significant computing language ever developed. Underestimate it at your peril”
• Build for the Web, Build on the Web, Build with the Web by Harold “Cheeky” Roberts
• The Cyber-Cleanse: Take Back Your Digital Footprint – “This is a user-friendly guide to retrieving your digital life from the Tech Giants.”
• Free Our Feeds – “Save Social Media From Billionaire Capture”
• How to disable Google Gemini in your Google Workspace – by Jan Lehnardt
• Mad at Meta? Don’t Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data – how to change your settings so Zuck’s hate-filled genocidal panopticon snoops less
• CSS attr() gets an upgrade – “You can now use attr() with any CSS property—including custom properties—and it can parse values into data types other than string”. Huzzah!
• Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out? – “Without a choice to opt in, the beatings will continue until AI adoption improves or users find that pesky opt-out option”
• So, you want to push a web platform feature? by Yoav Weiss (ex-Chrome, now Shopify)
• The UK’s AI turbocharged transformation: A masterclass in buzzword bingo – by Glenn Sturgess
• The UK bends the knee to the tech bros (again)
• Knowing less about AI makes people more open to having it in their lives – new research – “People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.”
• The dark side of India’s mined e-waste for battery minerals – “Abrar is one of more than 50,000 informal workers, including women and children, who make a living sifting through thrown-out goods to recover valuable materials that can be recycled and eventually reused in modern technologies.”
• I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers – Ten out of ten for the headline. No notes.
• SATAN EXPLAINS #HTML using DEATH METAL – Content Warning: contains swearing. And Satan. And HTML. (Youtube link)

Reading list 333 – halfway to 666! This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. Try Vivaldi: studies show that regularly browsing or emailing with Vivaldi increases your innate elegance and gorgeousness. Or your money back.

• Open Web Advocacy 2024 in Review – “If there’s one key takeaway from 2024, it’s this: advocacy works. When those who love what makes the web amazing come together, we can achieve wonders!” (I’m giving myself a little pat on the back for my small part in this)
• The people should own the town square – “we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual”
• Big tech is picking apart European democracy, but there is a solution: switch off its algorithms – “The EU must break big tech’s manipulation machine … A secret Facebook study reported in 2016 that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools … our recommendation systems grow the problem”.”
• FTC Catches up to #accessiBe – “The Federal Trade Commission will require software provider accessiBe to pay $1 million to settle allegations that it misrepresented the ability of its AI-powered web accessibility tool to make any website compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines”
• Google and CEO Sundar Pichai under fire for sending Americans’ data to China in new national security complaint – “Google’s Real-Time Bidding (RTB) system dominates online advertising … Google has known for at least a decade that its RTB technology broadcasts sensitive data without any security”
• Nokia’s slide deck reaction to the iPhone launch^[PDF]
• Principles Of Web Accessibility – “A set of high-level guiding principles for approaching web accessibility”. A great, non-technical little article by Heydon’t Pickering.
• The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell (part 1: Mastodon ↔️ Pixelfed) – Elena Rossini “introduce[s] the Fediverse to “regular people,” encouraging them to try out one or more of its networks, allowing them to experience social media away from the walled gardens of Big Tech (and also away from surveillance capitalism and intentional data mining for AI training)”
• The Browser Choice Alliance – “There was a time when Microsoft understood that the key to its success as a digital platform company was “developers, developers, developers,” … Now, the Browser Choice Alliance represents a number of third party developers who have found that Microsoft’s focus may have shifted.”
• Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location – “Some of the world’s most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement.”
• Roadblocks to Competition: Investigate Google’s Non-Compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act – Duck Duck Go calls on the European Commission to launch three non-compliance investigations around Google’s obligations under the EU’s Digital Markets Act
• RAAM 1 framework for assessing the accessibility of mobile apps “published by the Luxembourg Government, has been translated into English. It contains 107 testing procedures grouped in 15 themes”
• Former-EU leaders: breaking up Google’s adtech monopoly is vital for democracy – Eighteen former European presidents and prime ministers have written to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen urging the Commission to pursue a structural separation of Google’s adtech business.
• I just tried earbuds that let me control things with my mind — and it could be a game changer for accessibility
• Fediverse starter pack directory/ generator
• Apple to face court over claims it overcharged UK users on App Store – “Class action alleges company is abusing its dominant position in the app market and 30% fee breaches laws”
• Meta’s fact-checking changes are just what Trump’s FCC head asked for – “The company is ditching third-party fact-checking after Brendan Carr sent Mark Zuckerberg veiled threats about it. Convenient!”
• Internal documents reveal Commission fears over Microsoft dependency – “European Commission officials fear that their heavy reliance on Microsoft constitutes a clear breach of EU data rules, according to internal Commission documents”
• Not every user owns an iPhone – “I’m going to utilise Rum Archive’s fantastic dataset to hopefully paint a picture of why this is important.”
• Reckoning: Frontend’s Lost Decade – Big Al Russell gives a great talk. 1 hour, YouTube
• Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects. A nice alternative to Microsoft.
• Europe Calling ‘Hostile Takeover? – How tech billionaires are undermining our democracies & what the EU can do – recording of Monday’s event, starring Prof. Shoshana Zuboff (author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’), Alexandra Geese (MEP), my chum Robin Berjon
• AMD, you infected my PC with zombies! – “found an army of process zombies nibbling on my computer’s memory, and that a buggy AMD GPU driver was responsible (and it seems that Microsoft put the broken driver on my machine using Windows Update)”
• Public Domain Image Archive – its search is crap, but ‘Infinite view’ is a pleasant way to pass some time
• How South African men are changing the course of American democracy – article from a South African newspaper

(Last Updated on 17 January 2025)

I’d pretty much stopped using Twitler, due to fascism (Musk’s, not mine) and moved to @brucelawson on Mastodon (where you can sign up for free). The Fediverse is a more natural place for me; as I said in Vivaldi’s 2024 round-up podcast

the kind of people who seem to have kicked off the early Web, probably before I got on the Web in the year 2000, seem to have moved to the Fediverse and the same sort of spirit of openness, hacking for good, hacking something that is designed to work together rather than designed to silo, seems back.

But after Elon Musk called my local Member of Parliament (who worked for the Women’s Aid Federation before she was a MP) a “rape genocide apologist”, and called for her to be jailed, I didn’t want any of my content to remain on his site. But I didn’t want to delete my account, thereby allowing someone else to take it over and pretend to be me to remaining followers, and I didn’t fancy manually deleting 110,630 tweets.

So I requested a 2GB zip file of all my tweets and then downloaded Cyd, made by Micah Lee, and which is free if you just want to delete all public tweets and replies. It bypasses the crippled Twitter API:

Cyd doesn’t use the API. Cyd works by scrolling through X’s website and clicking buttons on your behalf. Everything that Cyd does, you could do yourself with nothing more than a web browser and an infinite amount of time. X can’t cut off API access to stop you from controlling your data with Cyd.

The first attempt at uploading the Twitter archive failed, but I retried and everything worked. It ran for a few hours, and no Tweets remain (except one explaining why I left). It felt a bit sad removing 17 years of ephemeral brain farts, but my conscience won’t allow me to let Elrond Muff make a single penny from me.

If I can be bothered, I could use Tweetback, as Stuart did, to convert the zipped archive into a self-hosted Twitter archive. But I’m not sure there’s any point for my stale musings-in-the-moment. (You can also use the Wayback Machine for a Twitter archive.)

Farebadly, Twitler. Vive le Fediverse!

Happy New Year, Gentle Reader!

• Never Forgive Them – “You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value… I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else.”
• Net neutrality eviscerated by appeals court ruling
• Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too) – “Native apps are a pain for everyone involved. Developers pay hefty app store fees, jump through approval hoops, and juggle multiple platform versions. Users? We’re stuck with constant updates, wasted storage space, and apps that don’t even work on all our devices.”
• ARIA in HTML – hot off the press! It’s as glamorous as me in new boots and manties, so read it!
• A progress update on reading-flow – “aims to solve the issue where the source (and therefore tab) order of a page gets disconnected from layout when using CSS grid layout or flexbox”. Available to try in Chrome Canary.
• Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos (2 Jan 2025) and Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks (3 Jan 2025). I’m old enough to remember December 2024 when Apple said ^[PDF] “Apple’s high standards for privacy and security are what set us apart… We will never abandon our bedrock commitment to our users’ privacy and security”.
• Government Internet Shutdowns Cost $7.69 Billion in 2024 – “Our annual report analyzes every major intentional internet shutdown in 2024”
• Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers – “It undermines a long tradition of designing and building infrastructure in the public interest.”
• The Google Antitrust Ruling: Proposed Remedies – Alex Moore (Open Web Advocacy) discusses with Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell (Igalia)
• W3C Advisory Committee Elects Technical Architecture Group – TL;DR: Hadley Beeman, Marcos Cáceres, Sarven Capadisli and Xiaocheng Hu join continuing TAG participants, Daniel Appelquist, Matthew Atkinson, Dapeng (Max) Liu, Tristan Nitot, Martin Thomson and Jeffrey Yasskin.
• Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 – I’m no LLM-fanboi, but Simon Willison is a sensible chap whose judgement I trust
• What’s the best way to protect banking apps on Android? – Tezza Eden investigates
• WCAG 3 December 2024 Update & Thoughts from the Co-Chairs
• Online Safety Act’s obligations spark concern among small site owners (UK)
• State of Linux on the MacBook Pro 2016 & 2017 – troubleshooting hints if things aren’t working correctly
• Congo files criminal complaints against Apple in Europe over conflict minerals
• My Interview with Linda DeMartino, the Voice You Hear in Otis Elevator Cabs by an elevator geek