Reading List 343
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 7.5 today, so try it, unless you enjoy having a browser that’s like a panopticon sloth.
- Link of the Month: Digital sovereignty can’t be bargained away – “The European Commission has tools, public support and a mandate to act on Big Tech. Trading that away for short-term calm would be a costly mistake … Enforcing the EU’s laws, reclaiming a fair share of the value extracted by monopolies, breaking them up to unfreeze markets and using the proceeds to invest in our digital infrastructure could be exactly the kind of economic reset Europe needs” by Robin Berjon
- PNG is back! – A new PNG spec was just released! Now with added HDR, Animation and EXIF support. As resurrected by W3C with reps from Adobe, Apple, BBC, Comcast / NBCUniversal, Google, MovieLabs. Work has already begun on the next two PNG spec updates. “After 20 years of stagnation, PNG is back with renewed vigor!”
- Meta and Yandex are de-anonymizing Android users’ web browsing identifiers – “Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device”
- Web Bucks – Brian Kardell looks at the current developments in web micropayments/ microtransactions
- Proton joins suit against Apple for predatory practices that harm developers and consumers (Note: my employer, Vivaldi, and Proton have a business relationship: Proton VPN is built into Vivaldi Desktop)
- Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation
- Applications that Create PDFs & Accessibility Output
- China breaks RSA encryption with a quantum computer, threatening global data security – Encryption is dead. And at the same time, not dead.
- Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI – The Dutch city thought it could break a decade-long trend of implementing discriminatory algorithms. Its failure raises the question: can these programs ever be fair?”
- Microsoft Could Repeat its Teams Strategy, this time with Bing and Edge – “LinkedIn—a designated core platform under the DMA—is growing at just 8%. At this rate, Search and News could soon outpace LinkedIn in revenue, while remaining outside the scope of DMA enforcement … This helps explain Microsoft’s incentive to push cloud, search, browser, and advertising services as aggressively as possible before new regulatory oversight catches up. The stakes are high.”
- The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is today proposing to designate Google with ‘strategic market status’ (SMS) in general search and search advertising.
- Microsoft making billions from alleged unlawful processing of data for advertising, lawsuit alleges – “Irish Council for Civil Liberties has brought the action claiming Microsoft operates an advertising business, through its “Xandr” platform”
- Google’s Hotseat Hypocrisy – OWA note from this week’s Google DMA compliance workshop. (My long diary of the day is coming early next week)
- British Browser Boiz in Brussels! Fun at Microsoft’s DMA compliance meeting – my long diary of the day in Brussels with the Beast of Redmond
- Up the kriek: Apple gets punchy in Brussels DMA compliance workshop – my long diary of the day with Cupertino Standard Oil
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)