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’re self-funded, with no external investors demanding we turn fascist or send them your data, and studies show that regularly browsing or emailing with it increases your innate elegance and gorgeousness. Or your money back.

• Decoding CSS Selectors: :has(:not) vs :not(:has) by Kilian Valkhof
• Police Behaving Badly ^[PDF] – “Police officers and employees misusing access to police database now account for over half of all cybercrime prosecutions in the UK. The harms this can cause are considerable. Yet police continue to call for encryption to be weakened to allow for greater access to communication data” – Alice Hutchings, Director, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, Cambridge University.
• Navigating the web platform – “As a web developer, navigating the web platform isn’t always easy. Here are ways to keep track of what you can use, of what’s new in web browsers, and ways you can influence the development of the platform by making your voice heard.”
• Magento Credit Card Stealer Disguised in an <img> Tag
• These (still) aren’t the SCs you’re looking for – Pattypoo Lauke on understanding and interpretation of WCAG’s normative text. Captioned YouTube video. “Note that the talk overran and ended prematurely…”
• Trump has free rein over Dutch government data – “The Netherlands relies heavily on American IT service providers such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon for the storage of government data”. I bet the UK does, too. And many others.
• Apple Exec Admits 27 Percent App Store Fee was Likely a Violation of Court Order – I’m shocked. And stunned. Maybe shucked and stoned, too.
• Save The A.I. – “Artificial Intelligence is facing a crisis: humans are consuming far too many precious resources that AI needs to thrive”
• Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip carves new path for quantum computing – This Microsoft announcement about their new quantum computing chip that uses quantum particles called Majoranas to place 8 topological qubits on a chip designed to scale to one million is pretty cool. And, for a marketing spiel, it does a good job of dampening hype and managing expectations for future applications of the tech. More of this, please, Microsoft, and less AI and underhand tactics to undermine competitors.
• “A calculator app? Anyone could make that.” – “What I’m about to tell you is the greatest calculator app development story ever told.”

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’re self-funded, with no external investors demanding we turn fascist or send them your data, and studies show that regularly browsing or emailing with it increases your innate elegance and gorgeousness. Or your money back.

• The Digital Markets Act: Europe’s Digital Competitiveness at Stake – a joint open letter to EU bigwigs, co-signed by Vivaldi
• Tech firms, publishers and Which? raise fears over new boss at competition regulator – I had a meeting with my MP, Jess Phillips, last Friday to raise my (and Vivaldi’s) concerns
• Apple Resumes Advertising on X – fun fact: the ASCII code for “X” is “88”. Strange co-incidence.
• Tech continues to be political – “And the politics aren’t looking great”. A really good personal article by Miriam Suzanne
• The Atkinson Hyperlegible Next™ Font – 2025 edition of the very nice highly-legible font made by the Braille Institute, free for personal and commercial use
• Open letter to EU ^PDF – “Europe must not be bullied by the likes of Musk and Trump into weakening its DSA and DMA enforcement. At the same time, the actions taken by X and Meta are a stark reminder of how vulnerable Europe is in our dependency on the largest online platforms … Now is the time to double down on EU tech sovereignty. This is not a clash between the EU and the US, but rather an attack from Big Tech against everyone else.” – a really great open letter to EU from EDRi and chums.
• Groundbreaking BBC research shows issues with over half the answers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants – “Conducted over a month, the study saw the BBC test four prominent, publicly available AI assistants”
• What We’re Fighting For – “We do not “use” the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user.”
• The Protesters’ Guide to Smartphone Security
• Why the ‘none of the above’ checkbox pattern worries me by Adam Silver, who wrote the best book on HTML form design ever.
• Revisiting CSS Multi-Column Layout – multicol in a world of :has(), calc() and clamp(). By Andy Clarke
• Transitioning Top-Layer Entries And The Display Property In CSS – by Brecht De Ruyte
• AltStore pokes the bear – “The first ‘Apple approved’ porn app for iPhone is rolling out in Europe, via AltStore PAL’s alternative iOS app marketplace” – or is it “Apple approved”, but by Schrodinger’s Cat?
• iconic.app – Free, “do wtf you want with” pixel-perfect icons. New icons added every week.
• Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads -‘the free apps you install and use collect your precise location with timestamp and send it to some 3rd-party companies’. What could possibly go wrong while ICE agents are hunting people?
• Role Reverser is a tiny utility that will replaces unsemantic HTML and ARIA roles with the simpler native HTML elements.
• Elon Musk email to X staff: ‘we’re barely breaking even’ -“The Wall Street Journal reports banks are close to selling some of the $13 billion in debt they took on while helping Musk buy Twitter in 2022.”
• Top AI Investor Says Goal Is to Crash Human Wages – “What a noble vision”
• AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism – “It’s embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.”

Last Friday I had a meeting with the UK’s Minister for Safeguarding, Jess Phillips MP. (She’s not actually my Minister, but she is my constituency MP). I wanted to talk to her about my concerns that the current government are being bewitched by the snake-oil of Artificial Intelligence salesmen, and also my deep worries that the Prime Minister and Chancellor plan to hamstring the Competition and Markets Authority’s investigation into Big Tech, just as the CMA finally gained statutory powers to deal with anti-competitive over-reach.

The UK’s Head of Money, Rachel Reeves, recently ousted Marcus Bokkerink, the highly-respected Chair of the CMA. He was immediately replaced by Doug Gurr, who headed up Amazon UK where workers had to piss in bottles rather than go to the toilet during their shifts.

The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said

This government has a clear plan for change – to boost growth for businesses and communities across the UK. As we’ve set out, we want to see regulators including the CMA supercharging the economy with pro-business decisions that will drive prosperity and growth, putting more money in people’s pockets.

What really worries me is that Big Tech has enchanted the upper echalons of government with tales of streets paved with AI gold and environmentally lovely data centres springing up all over the UK, employing thousands of happy and lavishly-compensated British workers (all of whom clutch plastic bottles of yellow liquid). Then they said “Wouldn’t it be sad, Keir, if we had to build those data centres in Moldova instead – because your evil regulators stopped us napalming our competitors and strip-mining UK citizens’s data?”.

It would be rude of me to report more of our conversation, as it was a private meeting. But given that MP Jessie P (to user her street handle) is still getting death threats because Elon Musk told terrible lies about her to his squillion fans on X, it’s reasonable to assume she’s not a fan of Broligarchs or an unquestioning cheerleader for Big Tech.