Web development trends 2020

Here are some web trends for 2020:

Responsive web design in 2020 should be a given because every serious project that you create should look good and be completely usable on all devices. But there’s no need to over-complicate things.

Web Development in 2020: What Coding Tools You Should Learn article gives an overview of recommendations what you learn to become a web developer in 2020.

You might have seen Web 3.0 on some slides. What is the definition of web 3 we are talking about here?
There seems to be many different to choose from… Some claim that you need to blockchain the cloud IOT otherwise you’ll just get a stack overflow in the mainframe but I don’t agree on that.

Information on the web address bar will be reduced on some web browsers. With the release of Chrome 79, Google completes its goal of erasing www from the browser by no longer allowing Chrome users to automatically show the www trivial subdomain in the address bar.

You still should target to build quality web site and avoid the signs of a low-quality web site. Get good inspiration for your web site design.

Still a clear and logical structure is the first thing that needs to be turned over in mind before the work on the website gears up. The website structure for search robots is its internal links. The more links go to a page, the higher its priority within the website, and the more times the search engine crawls it.

You should upgrade your web site, but you need to do it sensibly and well. Remember that a site upgrade can ruin your search engine visibility if you do it badly. The biggest risk to your site getting free search engine visibility is site redesign. Bad technology selection can ruin the visibility of a new site months before launch. Many new sites built on JavaScript application frameworks do not benefit in any way from the new technologies. Before you go into this bandwagon, you should think critically about whether your site will benefit from the dynamic capabilities of these technologies more than they can damage your search engine visibility. Well built redirects can help you keep the most outbound links after site changes.

If you go to the JavaScript framework route on your web site, keep in mind that there are many to choose, and you need to choose carefully to find one that fits for your needs and is actively developed also in the future.
JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you’re not alone… a chunk of pros also feel JS is ‘overly complex’

Keep in mind the recent changes on the video players and Google analytics. And for animated content keep in mind that GIF animations exists still as a potential tool to use.

Keep in mind the the security. There is a skill gap in security for many. I’m not going to say anything that anyone who runs a public-facing web server doesn’t already know: the majority of these automated blind requests are for WordPress directories and files. PHP exploits are a distant second. And there are many other things that are automatically attacked. Test your site with security scanners.
APIs now account for 40% of the attack surface for all web-enabled apps. OWASP has identified 10 areas where enterprises can lower that risk. There are many vulnerability scanning tools available. Check also How to prepare and use Docker for web pentest . Mozilla has a nice on-line tool for web site security scanning.

The slow death of Flash continues. If you still use Flash, say goodbye to it. Google says goodbye to Flash, will stop indexing Flash content in search.

Use HTTPS on your site because without it your site rating will drop on search engines visibility. It is nowadays easy to get HTTPS certificates.

Write good content and avoid publishing fake news on your site. Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy,

Think to who you are aiming to your business web site to. Analyze who is your “true visitor” or “power user”. A true visitor is a visitor to a website who shows a genuine interest in the content of the site. True visitors are the people who should get more of your site and have the potential to increase the sales and impact of your business. The content that your business offers is intended to attract visitors who are interested in it. When they show their interest, they are also very likely to be the target group of the company.

Should you think of your content management system (CMS) choice? Flexibility, efficiency, better content creation: these are just some of the promised benefits of a new CMS. Here is How to convince your developers to change CMS.

html5-display

Here are some fun for the end:

Did you know that if a spider creates a web at a place?
The place is called a website

Confession: How JavaScript was made.

Should We Rebrand JavaScript?

2,361 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Harper’s:
    Over 150 journalists, academics, and writers sign a letter criticizing what they see as narrowing boundaries of debate and increasing self-censorship

    A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
    https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

    Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump

    The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

    This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Too little, too late: Facebook’s Oversight Board won’t launch until ‘late fall’
    https://tcrn.ch/3faSkpU

    Facebook has announced that the limp “Oversight Board” intended to help make difficult content and policy decisions will not launch until “late fall,” which is to say, almost certainly after the election. You know, the election everyone is worried Facebook’s inability to police itself will serious affect.

    Reply
  3. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Mike Isaac / New York Times:
    An independent audit commissioned by Facebook harshly criticizes the company, arguing that some of its decisions were “significant setbacks for civil rights” — An independent audit faulted the social network for “vexing and heartbreaking decisions” that affect its users — and potentially the November elections.

    Facebook Decisions Were ‘Setbacks for Civil Rights,’ Audit Finds
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/technology/facebook-civil-rights-audit.html

    An independent audit faulted the social network for “vexing and heartbreaking decisions” that affect its users — and potentially the November elections.

    Facebook has not done enough to fight discrimination on its platform and has made some decisions that were “significant setbacks for civil rights,” according to a new independent audit of the company’s policies and practices.

    In a 100-page prepublication report, which was obtained by The New York Times, the social network was repeatedly faulted for not having the infrastructure for handling civil rights and for prioritizing free expression on its platform over nondiscrimination. In some decisions, Facebook did not seek civil rights expertise, the auditors said, potentially setting a “terrible” precedent that could affect the November general election and other speech issues.

    “Many in the civil rights community have become disheartened, frustrated and angry after years of engagement where they implored the company to do more to advance equality and fight discrimination, while also safeguarding free expression,” wrote the auditors, Laura W. Murphy and Megan Cacace, who are civil rights experts and lawyers. They said they had “vigorously advocated for more and would have liked to see the company go further to address civil rights concerns in a host of areas.”

    Reply
  4. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Free Press:
    After meeting between leaders of Facebook, ADL, Free Press, NAACP, and Color Of Change, boycott organizers are unconvinced meaningful change will occur — WASHINGTON — On Tuesday afternoon, leaders of four of the organizations coordinating the #StopHateForProfit advertising boycott met …

    #StopHateForProfit Sees No Commitment to Action at Meeting Between Campaign Leaders and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg
    https://www.freepress.net/news/press-releases/stophateforprofit-sees-no-commitment-action-meeting-between-campaign-leaders

    On Tuesday afternoon, leaders of four of the organizations coordinating the #StopHateForProfit advertising boycott met with top executives from Facebook, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg, CPO Chris Cox, VP for Global Affairs and Communications Nick Clegg and others.

    Facebook called for the meeting, attended by Free Press Co-CEO Jessica J. González, NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson, Color Of Change President Rashad Robinson and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, amidst the ongoing boycott. Nearly 1,000 companies have agreed to pause advertising with the social-media giant in response to Facebook’s failure to curtail the spread of hate and disinformation across its platform.

    During the meeting, the campaign’s leaders discussed the comprehensive set of demands put forth by the boycott effort. These include hiring a C-Suite level executive with civil-rights expertise to evaluate company products and policies with regard to discrimination, bias and hate; submitting to regular and transparent third-party audits of identity-based hate and misinformation; and changing the company’s “community standards” so they are in sync with the policy recommendations made by the Change the Terms initiative, which Free Press co-founded.

    Facebook’s leadership also announced their plans to release the final section of the company’s civil-rights audit, which they claimed takes a deeper look into Facebook’s practices and progress on a wide range of racial-justice issues. González did not receive a copy of the audit prior to the meeting. The last time Facebook released an update on its civil-rights audit, in July of 2019, the company declined to adopt many of the auditor’s recommendations.

    Reply
  5. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Richard C. Moss / Ars Technica:
    A retrospective on a nearly 25-year history of Flash, as Adobe prepares to officially end support and distribution of Flash Player in December 2020 — Before Flash Player sunsets this December, we talk its legacy with those who built it. — Few technologies have yielded such divisive and widespread passion as Flash.

    The rise and fall of Adobe Flash
    Before Flash Player sunsets this December, we talk its legacy with those who built it.
    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/the-rise-and-fall-of-adobe-flash/

    Whichever side of the love-hate divide you land on, there’s no denying the fact that Flash changed how we consume, create, and interact with content on the Web. For better and worse, it helped shape the Internet of today.

    But now, after roughly 25 years, Flash is finally nearing its end. In less than six months—December 2020—Adobe will officially end support and distribution of Flash Player, the browser plugin we all associate most strongly with the technology. And already, months ahead of this end-of-life switch, Flash has been disabled in most Web browsers (often flagged as a security risk should you choose to override the default settings). Even Google Chrome, long the browser of choice for Flash content, will soon remove Flash Player.

    Technically speaking, the technology will live on. The Flash authoring tool is part of Adobe Animate, while the rendering engine is included in Adobe AIR—which will be handed over to enterprise electronics company Harman International for ongoing maintenance, as it’s still widely used in the enterprise arena. But it’s safe to say that, after a decade in decline, Flash as we know it is about to say goodbye.

    Reply
  6. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Haluatko paremmaksi kirjoittajaksi? Nappaa tästä mukaasi kymmenen työkalua, jotka tuplaavat kirjoittamisesi tehon. #kirjoittajakoulu

    https://kirjoittajakoulu.fi/kirjoittaja-parhaat-tyokalut/

    Reply
  7. Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.checkout.fi/vinkkipankki/7-vinkkia-verkkokaupan-perustamiseen?cmpid=.yapankki..huom.facebook%2Binstagram.social.CoF+fresh+vk+hahmot+140720_CoF+Expert+roundup+7+vinkkia+1ac.CoF+roundup+7+vinkkia&utm_campaign=5f0d89340c6b7961dd2b9a08&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&hsa_ad=6236147079013&hsa_acc=913308552080583&hsa_cam=6236146979613&hsa_grp=6236146992013&hsa_net=facebook&hsa_src=fb&hsa_ver=3

    Reply
  8. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Web Blox (Scratch modification)
    https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/Web_Blox_(Scratch_modification)

    Web Blox is a Scratch modification that is intended to make web programming easier. It allows users to program in a wide variety of web languages including HTML (4 and 5), PHP, ASP, XML, RSS, PEARL, JavaScript, CGI, and CSS.

    Reply
  9. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Somemainonnan ammattilaistyökalut – opiskele ainakin nämä viisi asiaa
    Mitä sinun kannattaa tietää somemainonnan ammattilaistyökaluista?

    https://www.digimarkkinointi.fi/blogi/somemainonnan-ammattilaistyokalut

    Reply
  10. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Google launches the Open Usage Commons, a new organization for managing open-source trademarks
    https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/08/google-launches-the-open-usage-commons-a-new-organization-for-managing-open-source-trademarks/

    Google, in collaboration with a number of academic leaders and its consulting partner SADA Systems, today announced the launch of the Open Usage Commons, a new organization that aims to help open-source projects manage their trademarks.

    To be fair, at first glance, open-source trademarks may not sound like it would be a major problem (or even a really interesting topic), but there’s more here than meets the eye. As Google’s director of open source Chris DiBona told me, trademarks have increasingly become an issue for open-source projects, not necessarily because there have been legal issues around them, but because commercial entities that want to use the logo or name of an open-source project on their websites, for example, don’t have the reassurance that they are free to use those trademarks.

    https://openusage.org/

    Reply
  11. Tomi Engdahl says:

    10 Things I Regret About Node.js – Ryan Dahl – JSConf EU
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3BM9TB-8yA

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deno_(software)
    Deno is a runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript that is based on the V8 JavaScript engine and the Rust programming language. It was created by Ryan Dahl, original creator of Node.js, and is focused on productivity.[

    Reply
  12. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Tee kevyt hakukoneoptimoinnin auditointi näillä vinkeillä
    https://www.digimarkkinointi.fi/blogi/hakukoneoptimoinnin-auditointi

    Tutki näillä vinkeillä, mitä verkkosivustollasi voisi parantaa, jotta saisit lisää orgaanista kävijäliikennettä, liidejä tai kauppaa!

    Reply
  13. Tomi Engdahl says:

    WHAT DOES CANCEL CULTURE MEAN?
    https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/cancel-culture/

    Cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.

    When something is canceled, it is nulled, ended, voided. Done, over, no longer wanted, like a TV show or subscription. This sense of cancel is the basic idea behind the slang meaning of canceling a person. When a person is canceled, they are no longer supported publicly.

    Canceling spread as a term and phenomenon in the public consciousness with the #MeToo Movement , as major public figures—from Harvey Weinstein to Matt Lauer to Louis C. K. and R. Kelly—were getting canceled due to credible allegations of sexual violence in their past. Other figures were getting canceled for past racist and anti-LGBTQ remarks, such as Shane Gillis and Kevin Hart, respectively.

    Think the ‘Cancel’ Mobs Can’t Get Any Worse? Think Again
    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/27/think_the_cancel_mobs_cant_get_any_worse_think_again.html

    America is in the midst of one of the great moral panics in our nation’s history. If we don’t stand up for our nation’s core values, the situation could get even worse – and soon. If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last three weeks, you’ve probably noticed the organized campaigns to get college and even high school students expelled or denied admission based on their political views. You’ve also seen gleeful mobs celebrating as Americans lose their jobs for running afoul of someone’s momentary political obsessions.

    In every sector of American society, people are having their careers destroyed to the pitiless baying of the “woke” masses. It’s happening in business.

    It’s happening in journalism. New York Times editor James Bennet, a liberal, was fired for publishing an op-ed by a sitting Republican senator advocating for a military response to nationwide rioting — a position the majority of Americans agreed with.

    It’s happening in entertainment, in academia, and pretty much anywhere someone can be found who is not sufficiently supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement.

    It’s even happening to people who didn’t do anything at all. An L.A. Galaxy soccer player was forced to resign because his wife tweeted that rioters should be shot. A lawyer in San Francisco was fired because his wife was rude to a man she thought was spray-painting BLM propaganda on a building that wasn’t his (it was).

    On Monday, the panic reached what one can only hope will be its peak when a San Diego Gas and Electric employee lost his job for “making a white supremacist hand gesture.”

    What America is going through right now is not merely another, more intense round of “cancel culture.” We’re now in the midst of a full-force, totalitarian remolding of our society, one that seeks to place the petty resentments of an outraged minority of leftist activists above everything else in American life. Because of their willingness to riot, loot, and assault anyone they perceive to be insufficiently sympathetic to their cause, leftists are able to bully ordinary people into submission. As a result, television shows such as “Cops” and “Live PD,” classic films such as “Gone With the Wind,” and iconic brands such as Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Buttersworth, and Uncle Ben’s rice are consigned to the “dustbin of history.”

    Reply
  14. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The Ultimate Guide to Fixing and Troubleshooting the Most Common WordPress Errors (65+ Issues)
    https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-errors/

    Reply
  15. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Discover Forgotten Trends in Web Design
    Web Design Museum exhibits over 1,600 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1991 and 2006.
    https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/

    Reply
  16. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Accessibility means taking disabilities into account in digital service design. So far, it has generally been a blind spot for us designers. But with new EU regulations, the times are slowly changing for the better.

    In his new blog post, our UX Designer Joona offers insights on why this is so important and how it’s going to make the internet a better place for a staggering number of people.

    MAKING DIGITAL PRODUCTS ACCESSIBLE – WHY AND HOW
    https://blog.taiste.fi/en/making-digital-products-accessible-why-and-how?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=promotedpost&utm_campaign=website&utm_content=accessibility

    Many of us have disabilities that greatly affect everyday life. Accessibility means creating digital services that take this into account, making them usable for a larger number of people.

    Reply
  17. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Staying one step ahead of the competition is crucial for business success in all industries, and telecommunications is not an exception. Here are the key KPIs telecoms should closely monitor to make sure they remain competitive in today’s market.

    https://blog.adverity.com/12-kpis-telecoms-should-monitor-stay-ahead-of-the-competition?utm_campaign=EN+%7C+Telco+%7C+Traffic&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&hsa_acc=100437940101357&hsa_cam=6190981873952&hsa_grp=6194484471952&hsa_ad=6194484472352&hsa_src=fb&hsa_net=facebook&hsa_ver=3

    By closely monitoring these KPIs, decision makers at telecoms can make better, data-driven decisions and help the company to lead in the marketplace. Here are 12 selected KPIs that marketers and business decision makers should be monitoring and sharing across the business to make timely decisions based on quality data, and secure growth.

    Reply
  18. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Uudelleenohjausten avulla varmistat, että asiakkaasi löytävät sivuillesi myös sivustouudistuksen tai sivuston URL-rakenteen muutosten jälkeen. Samalla varmistat sen, että sivusi eivät putoa pois Googlen indeksistä.

    Uudelleenohjaukset ovat mm. verkkosivu-uudistuksen yhteydessä yksi kriittisimmistä asioista.

    Lue napakka tietopaketti blogistamme, niin opit, milloin ja miten uudelleenohjauksia tulee käyttää.

    Missä tilanteissa tehdään uudelleenohjauksia ja miksi?
    https://www.digimarkkinointi.fi/blogi/uudelleenohjaukset?utm_medium=social-paid&utm_source=facebook%2Binstagram&utm_campaign=SDM+%7C+Remarketing+%7C+Automaattinen+postauksien+buustaus&utm_content=SDM+%7C+Remarketing+%7C+Automaattinen+postauksien+buustaus+-+Blogibuustaus+%7C+Remarketing+%7C+Sivuk%C3%A4vij%C3%A4t+180d+-+Link+Post+-+&utm_id=5f1698c8b847aa28a3449ae4

    Reply
  19. Tomi Engdahl says:

    ‘Publisher’ Google ordered to pay $40k in damages for defaming Melbourne lawyer after court ruling
    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-30/google-ordered-to-pay-40k-in-damages-for-defaming-lawyer/12201180

    Google has been ordered to pay $40,000 in damages to a Melbourne lawyer after a Supreme Court of Victoria ruling found the internet giant was a publisher, and had defamed the man.

    Google had argued the automation of its search engines meant it was not a publisher

    The case centred on articles and images published by The Age newspaper in 2004, after Mr Defteros was charged with conspiracy over the murder of Carl Williams and other underworld figures.

    The charges were dropped the following year, but Mr Defteros had surrendered his practising certificate for three years.

    Mr Defteros argued that in 2016 and 2017, searches on Google continued to turn up articles and hyperlinks to web material that defamed him, including an entry in the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

    During a trial last year, Google’s lawyers had argued it was not the publisher of the material and it had not defamed Mr Defteros.

    It submitted that the automation of its search engines meant it was not an intentional communicator of words or images, particularly if a user clicked through to another website.

    Justice Richards rejected this in her ruling today.

    “The Google search engine … is not a passive tool,” she wrote in her 98-page judgement.

    “It is designed by humans who work for Google to operate in the way it does, and in such a way that identified objectionable content can be removed, by human intervention.

    “I find that Google becomes a publisher of the search results that its search engine returns to a user who enters a search query”

    Reply
  20. Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://restofworld.org/2020/facebook-international-content-moderators/
    Content moderators recently won a lawsuit for $52 million against Facebook alleging mental trauma. But their colleagues in Asia were left out of the settlement.

    Reply
  21. Tomi Engdahl says:

    You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/30/you-must-not-do-your-own-research-when-it-comes-to-science/?utm_campaign=forbes&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_term=Valerie/#2ef72c16535e

    “Research both sides and make up your own mind.” It’s simple, straightforward, common sense advice. And when it comes to issues like vaccinations, climate change, and the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, it can be dangerous, destructive, and even deadly. The techniques that most of us use to navigate most of our decisions in life — gathering information, evaluating it based on what we know, and choosing a course of action — can lead to spectacular failures when it comes to a scientific matter.

    The reason is simple: most of us, even those of us who are scientists ourselves, lack the relevant scientific expertise needed to adequately evaluate that research on our own. In our own fields, we are aware of the full suite of data, of how those puzzle pieces fit together, and what the frontiers of our knowledge is. When laypersons espouse opinions on those matters, it’s immediately clear to us where the gaps in their understanding are and where they’ve misled themselves in their reasoning. When they take up the arguments of a contrarian scientist, we recognize what they’re overlooking, misinterpreting, or omitting. Unless we start valuing the actual expertise that legitimate experts have spent lifetimes developing, “doing our own research” could lead to immeasurable, unnecessary suffering.

    Reply
  22. Tomi Engdahl says:

    “The growing role of major technology companies in moderating online content poses a risk to free expression and other fundamental rights, 15 human rights and digital rights organizations said today in a letter to Nick Rasmussen, the new executive director of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT).”

    Tech Firms’ Counterterrorism Forum Threatens Rights
    15 Rights Groups Call for Transparency, Safeguards
    https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/30/tech-firms-counterterrorism-forum-threatens-rights

    The growing role of major technology companies in moderating online content poses a risk to free expression and other fundamental rights, 15 human rights and digital rights organizations said today in a letter to Nick Rasmussen, the new executive director of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT).

    The rights groups expressed concern that government participation in the new Independent Advisory Committee of the forum, which includes the world’s biggest social media platforms, increased risks of extra-legal censorship. The groups also criticized the forum’s persistent lack of transparency and its insufficient focus on the protection of human rights, an essential component of countering terrorism. They warned that the forum’s structure marginalizes civil society participation.

    Reply
  23. Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://gitlab.com/remigirard28/MollyEskam-Linux

    Installing this distribution will transform your computer into a website (with SSL) that can be published on the internet (www.mollyeskam.net as default template).

    Reply
  24. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Absentee Ownership: How Amazon, Facebook, and Google Ruin Commerce Without Noticing
    https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/absentee-ownership-how-amazon-facebook

    Amazon’s algorithm goes crazy, and Facebook accidentally weaponizes Chinese counterfeiters during the Black Lives Matter protest.

    Reply
  25. Tomi Engdahl says:

    What brands need to do if they want to break up with Facebook
    https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/01/what-brands-need-to-do-if-they-want-to-break-up-with-facebook/?tpcc=ECFB2020

    With more than 90 major advertisers and counting announcing plans to dump Facebook, a significant question lingers: Where will brands go next for their digital marketing needs?

    The case for the breakup is clear: Brands want to distance themselves from third-party business practices that do not align with their values. Specifically, they are disenchanted by what even some members of Congress are calling Facebook’s “lackadaisical” approach to enforcing community standards, allowing an epidemic of paid political misinformation and hate speech to persist on the user-driven platform.

    Reply
  26. Tomi Engdahl says:

    You can code this colorful, real-time animated fractal in only 32 lines of Javascript code!

    https://slicker.me/fractals/animate.htm?fbclid=IwAR0oobA8On2PzRYmezC8M6aNVo9KoldgpDDijEH6zAfSjKRalDSxRDcsxeM

    Reply
  27. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Adobe’s plans for an online content attribution standard could have big implications for misinformation
    https://tcrn.ch/30ltMpj

    Adobe’s work on a technical solution to combat online misinformation at scale, still in its early stages, is taking some big steps toward its lofty goal of becoming an industry standard.

    The project was first announced last November, and now the team is out with a whitepaper going into the nuts and bolts about how its system, known as the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), would work. Beyond the new whitepaper, the next step in the system’s development will be to implement a proof-of-concept, which Adobe plans to have ready later this year for Photoshop.

    “We think we can deliver like a really compelling sort of digestible history for fact checkers, consumers, anybody interested in the veracity of the media they’re looking at,” Parsons said.

    Adobe highlights the system’s appeal in two ways. First, it will provide a more robust way for content creators to keep their names attached to the work they make. But even more compelling is the idea that the project could provide a technical solution to image-based misinformation. As we’ve written before, manipulated and even out-of-context images play a big role in misleading information online. A way to track the origins — or “provenance,” as it’s known — of the pictures and videos we encounter online could create a chain of custody that we lack now.

    “… Eventually you might imagine a social feed or a news site that would allow you to filter out things that are likely to be inauthentic,” Parsons said. “But the CAI steers well clear of making judgment calls — we’re just about providing that layer of transparency and verifiable data.”

    The end solution will use techniques like hashing, a kind of pixel-level cross-checking system likened to a digital fingerprint. That kind of technique is already widely in use by AI systems to identify online child exploitation and other kinds of illegal content on the internet.

    “… You could grab any asset, drag it into this tool and see the data revealed in a very transparent way and that sort of divorces us in the near term from any dependency on any particular platform,” Parsons explained.

    For the photographer, embedding this kind of data is opt-in to begin with, and somewhat modular. A photographer can embed data about their editing process while declining to attach their identify in situations where doing so might put them at risk, for example.

    Reply
  28. Tomi Engdahl says:

    According to our survey, there is a huge lack of tech skills across the creative industry.

    Is the creative industry equipped to work with emerging technologies?
    https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/creative-skills-report-are-we-equipped-enough-to-work-with-emerging-technologies-digital-300720?utm_source=adobeskillfacebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=intsocial

    Although the majority of creatives are keen to learn about new technologies (and clients demand they do), the lack of skills across the industry is alarmingly low. So, how do you and your team get started?

    In the creative industry, companies are often highly familiar with the search for elusive, never-thought-of-before ideas. Away from traditional creative outcomes, emerging technologies offer a rare opportunity to access these unimaginable ideas, to bring them to life, or even push the concept further.

    On paper it seems logical for a creative company to invest time into developing future-facing skills, whether it’s VR and AR, AI and robotics, 3D modelling and printing, or even the so-called Internet of Things. It appears to be a smart business move too, as when surveying creatives from over 60 of Europe’s leading creative studios, agencies and brands, 54 per cent believe that a workable knowledge of emerging technologies would be the most helpful thing for attracting new clients. However, and possibly alarmingly, nearly half (47 per cent) of our respondents admitted to not feeling equipped to work with any emerging technologies whatsoever.

    Reply
  29. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Facebook removes troll farm posing as African-American support for Donald Trump
    https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-removes-troll-farm-posing-african-american-support-donald-trump-n1236056

    Facebook also removed hundreds of fake accounts linked to conservative media outlet The Epoch Times.

    Facebook removed hundreds of accounts on Thursday from a foreign troll farm posing as African-Americans in support of Donald Trump and QAnon supporters. It also removed hundreds of fake accounts linked to conservative media outlet The Epoch Times that pushed pro-Trump conspiracy theories about coronavirus and protests in the U.S.

    Facebook took down the accounts as part of its enforcement against coordinated inauthentic behavior, which is the use of fake accounts to inflate the reach of content or products on social media.

    Reply
  30. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Mozilla warns more Firefox website breakage to come because devs just aren’t checking for SameSite snafus
    UK govt portal among those borked
    https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/06/mozilla_samesite_breakage/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

    Mozilla on Wednesday warned that an ongoing change in the way Firefox handles browser cookies may interfere with websites – and urged web developers to test their code.

    The transition, backed by other browser vendors, has to do with the SameSite attribute, which is used to declare how browsers should handle cookies.

    Described in a 2016 specification, the SameSite attribute allows web apps to state that cookies should not be sent with cross-site requests – requests from a third-party origin (domain). With three possible values – SameSite=None; SameSite=Lax; and SameSite=Strict – it provides a defense against cross-origin information leakage and cross-site request forgery attacks.

    At the start of the year, Google said it had begun a gradual rollout of a change to the default behavior of the SameSite attribute in Chrome 80 and sounded the alarm that some sites might not function properly. The change is simply that if undeclared, Chrome will assume a SameSite value of Lax instead of None.

    Since web developers haven’t traditionally set this attribute, the change in the default setting was expected to cause problems. The Lax setting is only a bit more restrictive than None, but it’s enough to prevent some websites from functioning properly

    Reply
  31. Tomi Engdahl says:

    “On August 5, 2020, the U.S. mounted a systematic attempt to splinter the global Internet.”

    Trump and Pompeo: Stop the Internet, we want to get off
    https://www.internetgovernance.org/2020/08/07/trump-and-pompeo-stop-the-internet-we-want-to-get-off/

    On August 5, 2020, the U.S. mounted a systematic attempt to splinter the global Internet. It released a policy that tries to leverage US information services providers to force the rest of the digital economy to indiscriminately exclude Chinese businesses. The US “Clean Path” initiative, announced in April of this year, was designed to pressure European carriers to avoid purchasing 5G equipment from Huawei and ZTE, in order to establish China-free communications paths between the US and its embassies in foreign countries. The new initiative does not seem to be confined to protecting government communications, however. Pompeo claims to be protecting “our citizens’ privacy and our companies’ most sensitive information” by eliminating interoperation with any and all Chinese providers.

    Secretary Pompeo’s broader “Clean Network” initiative is a watershed in US Internet policy. It embraces national barriers to Internet connectivity. It signals to every nation, not just China, that any foreign internet-based service provider, including American ones, should be considered a national security threat. It completely abandons WTO-based free trade agreements for telecommunications equipment and services.

    The day after Pompeo’s bombshell policy announcement, two executive orders were released banning specific apps, one on TikTok the other on WeChat.

    Cynical use of national emergency laws
    Portraying TikTok as a threat to national security barely passes the giggle test. Numerous data breaches reliably attributed to Chinese state actors have occurred since 2010. Some of them, notably the Office of Personnel Management and Equifax hacks, successfully exfiltrated large amounts of incredibly sensitive data about US citizens and government officials.

    none of these breaches relied on the victims’ use of Chinese apps, equipment vendors or handsets. The risk of sensitive data being exposed is inherent in the digital economy and is not linked to the national origin of any vendors in the supply chain.

    As an ironic testimony to the American double standard here, the day after the US Executive Orders banned TikTok and WeChat apps on the grounds that they threaten the privacy and security of nation’s citizens and businesses, the Wall Street Journal reported that “A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide.”

    Is it a new Cold War?
    As we predicted a few months ago, the US has chosen to make the global information economy the key battleground in the US-China conflict.

    This is not a Cold War. While construed as a security threat, the U.S. split with China is almost entirely about economics; or more precisely, about the long term political effects of economic competition. As best we can interpret the US government’s actions, it fears that if China obtains a strong foothold in globalized markets for information and communications technology, it will become a peer in the international arena

    What is the goal?
    As far as we can tell, the only real goal of insisting that all businesses connected to China are agents of the Communist Party is to isolate and cripple Chinese ICT industries. The purpose of that crippling process, presumably, is to maintain the U.S. lead in high-tech industries and continued US dominance of the capability for globalized surveillance. This nationalistic, zero-sum take on technological development and innovation sees the digital economy as an extension of the military; any improvement in China’s capability detracts from the U.S.’s capabilities and power. (Apparently, it is the U.S., not China, that believes in civil-military fusion).

    Reply
  32. Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/majordomo/permalink/10160586324649522/

    Awesome tips for accessibility in this remote-learning era. Share, download, save!

    Also: These steps help everyone!! A colleague today mentioned how, in two sections of the same course offered in the same semester several years ago, one section had a sort of closed captioning for one deaf student in the class (on a reader-board above the chalkboard), while the other did not have it. In the class with the captioning, the average student grade for all students was one full letter higher.

    Reply

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