Reading List 338
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.”
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)