Reading List 356
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’ve just released Vivaldi 7.9, adding UI Auto-hide and Follower Tab on Desktop, and on Mobile we released two levels of tabs, beautiful images, Safari import and Desktop Mode.
- The Value of z-index – a systematic approach to z-index numbering, to avoid magic numbers
- Digital Markets Act: MEPs demand timely action and resilience against external pressures – can’t happen too quickly, if you ask me. (Go on, ask me…)
- Meanwhile… Inside the far-right network targeting Europe’s digital rules – “The Trump administration and a network of far-right think tanks are increasingly targeting the EU’s digital regulations and rules on content moderation. Far-right MEPs have taken over these narratives, while tech companies are hoping to exploit the opportunity.”
- Top ten Figma betrayals by David Bushell
- Germany makes Open Document Format mandatory as the standard format for documents within its sovereign digital infrastructure (along with PDF/UA, accessible PDF)
- Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta’s $2B Lobbying for Invasive Age Verification Tech – Meta’s $2B campaign to force Apple and Google into building surveillance systems for age verification while exempting its own platforms. Will nobody think of the children?!?!?
- North Carolina Man Pleads Guilty To Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence – He used Slop-generators to create hundreds of thousands of “songs”, and bots to stream those slongs billions of times, collecting $8m in royalties. It’s the perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism: burning forests to generate fake songs to stream by robots that can’t hear, endlessly, while artists starve.
- Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website – “a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google’s machine learning model thinks they should see instead.”
- This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts – WebinarTV hosts 200,000 “webinars.” A Zoom call you may thought was private might be one of them.
- 🚨Schadenfreude klaxon!🚨 Elon Musk’s X advertising boycott lawsuit dismissed by US judge
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)