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Dickhead of the Week: Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri
Link to: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/11/instagram-pushes-back-on-apples-ios-ad-tracking-change.html
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RFC8890: The Internet Is for End Users
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has published RFC8890, The Internet is for End Users, arguing that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should ground its decisions in what’s good for people who use the Internet, and that it should take positive steps to achieve that.
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The Guy I Almost Was (1998)
An online graphic novel about a young man's coming of age in the California cyberculture of the early 1990s.
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US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M
I was shocked to learn that the US had no plan to deal with a pandemic, and had not even done basic things like stockpile enough surgical masks or an adequate supply of testing equipment (or at least the ability to produce the testing equipment rapidly.) Some people say this is
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Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
This is a translation/guest post by Riku Merikoski. The original can be found here (in Finnish). All mistakes due to translation are my fault. On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical hap…
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Sharrows, the bicycle infrastructure that doesn’t work and nobody wants
They seem dangerous and they are
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A US Visa in 937 Days
Here's the complete timeline of events. From my first denial to travel to the US until I eventually received a tourist visa. And then I can't go anyway. December 5-11, 2016 I spent a week on Hawaii with Mozilla - my employer at the time. This was my 12th visit to the US over a … Continue reading a US visa in 937 days →
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The social obligation to be bad at things
This page has moved to https://drmaciver.com/notebook/2020/02/the-social-obligation-to-be-bad-at-things/ .
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How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
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Costco Capitalism
Can consumers at Costco really have their free sample and eat it too?
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Sonos is spying on me (and you)
I recently decided to get a wireless speaker for our Kitchen. Sonos seems like an obvious choice these days. The sound quality and aesthetics were very appealing. So I ordered a Sonos One SL speaker. In terms of sound quality and looks, I was very pleased. I’m not an audiophile but the sound quality seemed…
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FCC Proposes to Fine Wireless Carriers $200M for Selling Customer Location Data
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation’s four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers’ location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data. While the fines would be among…
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Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now
by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman NOTE FROM IAN: The expert risk communication team of Lanard and Sandman has given me permission to post their very well-considered reply to my question of them just
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Omni Group Layoffs
Omni’s been around for almost 30 years, and I hope it’s around for another 30. It’s one of the great Mac and iOS shops — they will sing songs about Omni, at maximum volume, in the great halls.
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What Happens Next? Covid-19 Futures, Explained with Playable Simulations
an interactive guide
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Yahoo, AOL results biased in favor of parent company Verizon’s websites
Verizon Media’s search engines promises “unbiased” search results, but serves results clearly favoring the company’s media websites over competitors.
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iOS 13's Music App Sucks
iOS 13’s Music App gets worse as iOS gets better.
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We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
A conversation with Matt Stoller about the new antitrust case and the real reason you should care about corporate monopolies
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We need young programmers; We need old programmers
The software industry loves young people, but old-timers serve an important purpose, too.
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The Tech Monopolies Go Vertical
Some classic (non-aggregation) monopolization!
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Signs you're following a fake Twitter account
Nixintel Open Source Intelligence & Investigations2020277 points149 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
The challenge of dealing with fake accounts that spread disinformation is probably one of the greatest challenges facing the large social media companies. Most methods used to detect fake Twitter a…
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The AMA is a tax-exempt hedge fund and licensing corporation
The American Medical Association is not a charitable organization. The American Medical Association is not an educational organization. The American Medical Association is a tax-exempt hedge fund and licensing corporation, designed from the ground up to enrich its executives and serve its own bureaucratic interests…
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We’ve built a towering pile of shite
This a rant, written at midnight, after battling software errors. Set your profanity filters accordingly. I despair over the state of software engineering - specifically, stability. We seem to have lost the understanding that computers are there to do the hard work for us. And I don't think we ever believed in a…
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