Reading List 333
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
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)