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 just released Vivaldi 7.2, which The Register called “noticeably quicker than alternatives including Chrome and Brave”. So try it, unless you enjoy having a browser that’s like a data-mining tortoise.

• UK Regulator’s Final Verdict: Apple’s Browser Engine Ban Harms Competition – Nearly 4 years after I thought speaking to the CMA about Apple would be a fun lockdown project, a historic decision. We’ve written it up in full, and thanks to all the orgs and individual devs who helped us.
• EU Cracks Down on Apple for Anti-Competitive Behavior – Here’s What Apple Told Us in Response – TL;DR: “Boo hoo, nasty regulators, poor us, security … sob”
• Devs: draw your line – Remy Sharp notes “Facebook and TikTok had been given access to read what medication I’m on by the development team responsible for the Pharmacy2U web site.”
• Let’s knock down social media’s walled gardens – Sir Uncle Timbo writes “I envisioned the web as a place for the shared benefit of all — by reclaiming our data we can make that happen”
• Hands on with Ghost’s New ActivityPub Beta The more the merrier in the Social Web!
• Understanding the European Accessibility Act (EAA) by Léonie Watson
• Minding the gaps: A new way to draw separators in CSS – an interesting proposal from the Microsoft CSS folks
• Extracting content from an LCP “protected” ePub – by Terence Eden
• Popping preconceived popover ponderings – Scott O’Hara on how the popover attribute is just one ingredient in making accessible popups. It does a lot, but not everything you might need. that’s on purpose.
• Online Safety Act – In which an ethical erotica producer blocks UK visitors from listening to audio: “As per the Online Safety Act, text is not in scope but audio is. You are legally allowed to read the stories I write here without verifying your age, and I am legally allowed to show them to you … However the UK government has decided that it would be harmful to children if you were also allowed to hear them as audio … Deliberately breaking accessibility features on my website ranks among the most depressing things I have ever done.”
• Invoker Commands Future (Explainer) – outlines potential future enhancements to Invoker Commands.
• Docs: Opensource alternative to Notion or Outline – a collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales, “the result of a joint effort led by the French 🇫🇷🥖 (DINUM) and German 🇩🇪🥨 governments”
• Y Combinator urges the White House to support Europe’s Digital Markets Act – “YC argues in the letter that the DMA opens up key avenues to create opportunities for American startups in AI, search, and consumer apps, and prevents Big Tech companies from boxing out smaller ventures.”
• Data Broker Brags About Having Highly Detailed Personal Information on Nearly All Internet Users – “The advertising industry is immensely powerful, and disturbingly opaque.”
• Ban behavioural data extraction for advertising – UK citizens are invited to sign this Parliamentary petition.
• Google Being Forced To Sell Chrome is Not Good for the Web – “Google does all kinds of shitty stuff. They are surely the worst offenders of user surveillance on the web. Let’s not let them off the hook on that. Let’s see the DOJ get involved in that stuff. But forcing a sale of Chrome is not the way” writes Chris Coyier
• A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda – “An audit found that the 10 leading generative AI tools advanced Moscow’s disinformation goals by repeating false claims from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network 33 percent of the time”
• Become an irreplaceable 10x developer in 30 seconds flat – “Introducing rust-stakeholder – a CLI tool that generates absolutely meaningless but impressive-looking terminal output to convince everyone you’re a coding genius without writing a single line of useful code.”

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 big news: UK investigation says Apple and Google are ‘holding back’ mobile browsers – That’s the UK’s competition regulator’s conclusion in its final decision after investigating the mobile ecosystem. Who knew? Me, that’s who. A detailed blogpost next week when I’ve digested the 700 pages of the report and annexes.
• The Opt Out Project – “Yes, you can live a modern, digitally connected, twenty-first century life online without Big Tech. You don’t have to trade your personal data for “free” services. It’s not (always) technically difficult, and you don’t have to live in a cave. I’ve done it, and you can too!”
• Jan Penfrat (EDRi) – For a Better Web – in which I interview Jan Penfrat of European Digital Rights about their work to tame Big Tech so it serves people, rather than the other way round.
• Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino – It’s seldom that I agree with Apple chief fanboy Gruber, but this startling post hits the iNail on the iHead.
• Introducing command and commandfor – “The following HTML sets up declarative relationships between the button and the menu which lets the browser handle the logic and accessibility for you. There’s no need to manage aria-expanded or add any additional JavaScript.” YES!
• How to improve the design of a donation funnel: fun, thoughtful, and backed by science – by my old Barnardo’s colleague, Angelika
• The iPad’s “Sweet” Solution – “some of the best apps I’m using – the ones with truly desktop-class layouts and experiences – aren’t native iPad apps. They’re web apps”, writes a contributor to macstories.
• Using & Styling the Details Element – the 2025 way.
• Deafening Commission silence with no credible EU-US data oversight left – TL;DR: 90% of EU companies transfer data to and from the US, Trump fired Democrat members of the US Data Protection oversight board, so it’s now unable to formally make decisions.
• Smile Like Zuck! – Turn on your webcam and let a robot judge how accurately you can duplicate Mark Zuckerberg’s warm, human smile.

Today is the first anniversary of the Digital Markets Act coming into force in the EU, which means that, astrologically, the DMA is a Pisces.

According to Google’s AI generated search results, “Pisces are open to giving second chances and believe in the power of change”, so that might explain why Microsoft and Apple are still allowed to get away with screwing over other vendors’ browsers on Windows and iOS.

But also “Pisces are able to see beyond the surface to the truth of things”, so let’s hope the Commission listens to Vivaldi, Open Web Advocacy and the The Browser Choice Alliance so we see some actual enforcement against Big Tech in the coming months.

“Users of Windows were free to choose their preferred browsers, app stores, and software solutions before the DMA made it a requirement.” says Microsoft in its 2025 Compliance report published today.

What it really means is “You can choose your own browser. We’ll try to persuade you not to; we’ll try to scare you; we’ll try to make it difficult to make it default; we’ll nag you from widgets to return to Edge; we’ll wrap “links” in windows search and widgets in a microsoft-edge pseudo-protocol that can only be opened in our Edge browser, and we’ll try to reset your defaults every update. But you can definitely choose..”

Last week, I had a colonoscopy after abnormal results from the routine poo-in-a-postcard test that the marvellous National Health Service send to every middle-aged person for bowel cancer screening.

The prep was unpleasant; bland food, no fruit or vegetables for 3 days before hand, no food after 1pm the day before, and two laxative drinks at 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. to make sure your bowels are entirely clean for maximum visibility. I haven’t been so empty since I backpacked around India 30 years ago and ate some bad chicken.

I was a bit nervous beforehand, so to amuse/ distract myself I instructed my local instance of Stable Diffusion to generate an image of “A pixar/ disney style character named Bott-E-Peepa, that is a cheerful friendly colonoscope about to explore someone’s bowels”. Its very first attempt was of a one-eyed bulbous purple-headed thing about to go into my anus, which isn’t my sort of thing (each to their own):

A subsequent generation produced this cheerful yellow incarnation of Bott-E-Peepa, clutching his equivalent of a light sabre, called his “Polyp-Snippa”:

The reality was nothing like this, however. It was a long (very long!) finger-width tube with a device that looked like a PlayStation controller for wiggling it around my interior. The procedure was weird but painless (they gave me fentanyl –thanks, Canada!). It was also very interesting: I watched the scope’s progress around my own magnified bowel on screen in vibrant colour, with a running commentary from the very friendly gastroenterologist named Dr Mottershead (who will always be Dr Motörhead to me).

He discovered some polyps, which are growths on the inside of the bowels that can, over the course of years, turn cancerous. I was able to watch as, from an aperture of the colonoscope, a wire noose appeared, then lassooed the base of the polyp. It then tightened and an electric current was passed through it to cut off the Polyp and cauterise the wound. There are no nerves in the polyps, so I felt nothing. I was then instructed to push it out by moving my gut “as if to break wind” and out plopped the polyp. Then another aperture squirted water to wash the area.

Because the polyps were large (2 cms) they went to the lab for testing (in a bottle; they didn’t roll squishily over there by themselves like The Blob). And then I walked over to the recovery room where a nurse checked my blood pressure, removed the canula from my arm and gave me loads of chocolate biscuits and a cup of coffee before they let me go home. I estimate the colonoscopy took about 45 minutes, and I was in the hospital for 3 hours from admission to discharge.

I’m happy to report that a week later the hospital called yesterday to say no cancer was found. To keep an eye on it, I’ll be called in 3 years for another fun investigation up my bum. While I wouldn’t recommend a colonoscopy as a leisure experience, it didn’t hurt, all the staff were professional and did everything they could to make it as pleasant as it could be. I didn’t even have a bruise where they inserted the canula.

And, of course, it didn’t cost me a penny. May the spirit of Clement Atlee bless and preserve the National Health Service.