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.
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.
2,361 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
In today’s digitally driven world, a corporation’s website is crucial. It serves as a business’ first point of contact with consumers, potential investors and job seekers, for whom authenticity has become increasingly important.
How The World’s Biggest Businesses Are Using Their Websites To Communicate With Stakeholders
https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthatodd/2020/09/30/how-the-worlds-biggest-businesses-are-using-their-websites-to-communicate-with-stakeholders/?ss=leadership-strategy&utm_source=FBPAGE&utm_medium=social&utm_content=3795417434&utm_campaign=sprinklrForbesMainFB#148f8f6a6a60
In today’s digitally driven world, a corporation’s website is crucial. It serves as a business’ first point of contact with consumers, potential investors and job seekers, for whom authenticity has become increasingly important. This year, many organizations have been using their websites to share, as transparently as they can, the steps they have been taking to safeguard employees and customers during the Covid-19 pandemic, while others have used them to share their stances on important issues, such as climate change and social justice.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Americans Remain Distrustful of Mass Media
https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrustful-mass-media.aspx
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
9% in U.S. trust mass media “a great deal” and 31% “a fair amount”
27% have “not very much” trust and 33% “none at all”
The percentage with no trust at all is a record high, up five points since 2019
At a time when Americans are relying heavily on the media for information about the coronavirus pandemic, the presidential election and other momentous events, the public remains largely distrustful of the mass media. Four in 10 U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” (9%) or “a fair amount” (31%) of trust and confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly,” while six in 10 have “not very much” trust (27%) or “none at all” (33%).
Gallup first asked this question in 1972 and has continued to do so nearly every year since 1997. Trust ranged between 68% and 72% in the 1970s, and though it had declined by the late 1990s, it remained at the majority level until 2004, when it dipped to 44%. After hitting 50% in 2005, it has not risen above 47%.
in 2016, a steep decline in Republicans’ trust in the media led to the lowest reading on record (32%).
Republicans’ trust has not recovered since then, while Democrats’ has risen sharply. In fact, Democrats’ trust over the past four years has been among the highest Gallup has measured for any party in the past two decades. This year, the result is a record 63-percentage-point gap in trust among the political party groups.
While majorities of Democrats have consistently expressed confidence in the media since 1997, this has not been true of independents since 2004. Republicans’ last majority-level reading for trust in the media was in 1998.
Bottom Line
Americans’ confidence in the media to report the news fairly, accurately and fully has been persistently low for over a decade and shows no signs of improving, as Republicans’ and Democrats’ trust moves in opposite directions. The political polarization that grips the country is reflected in partisans’ views of the media, which are now the most divergent in Gallup’s history.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sara Fischer / Axios:
Google will pay publishers $1B+ through 2023 to create and curate high-quality journalism for the new Google News Showcase, starting in Germany and Brazil — Google will pay publishers more than $1 billion over the next three years to create and curate high-quality journalism for a new set …
Google will spend $1 billion to pay publishers for news showcase
https://www.axios.com/google-will-spend-1-billion-to-pay-publishers-for-news-showcase-501feeae-0e3e-4822-8711-1c64052e27f1.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://kampanja.zeckit.com/blogi/keraa-referenssit-talteen-ja-erotu-eduksesi
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.rakettitiede.com/tietosuojaseloste
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter Says You Cannot Tweet That You Hope Trump Dies From COVID
“Content that wishes, hopes or expresses a desire for death, serious bodily harm, or fatal disease against an individual is against our rules.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3zynw/twitter-says-you-cannot-tweet-that-you-hope-trump-dies-from-covid
President Trump has coronavirus, a disease that has killed more than 205,000 people in the United States on his watch. He is widely reviled by roughly half the country on account of his often negligent and sometimes cruel policies on the pandemic, social justice, and immigration, among others. Some unknowable percentage of those people want him to die from the disease, and more than a handful of them have already explicitly said they hope the President dies from coronavirus on Twitter.
Twitter told Motherboard that users are not allowed to openly hope for Trump’s death on the platform and that tweets that do so “will have to be removed” and that they may have their accounts put into a “read only” mode. Twitter referred to an “abusive behavior” rule that’s been on the books since April.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to block targeted advertising on Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-to-block-ad-tracking-facebook-instagram-twitter-google
Wherever you go online, you’re being followed by the spectre of targeted ads. You’ll never be able to stop them fully, but there are some steps to take
Targeted advertising is big business. 98 per cent of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising; in the first three months of 2019 alone, this equated to $14.9 billion and was up 26 per cent year-on-year – an increase that is primarily driven by Instagram.
Google collected $30.7bn and Twitter $787 million, respectively, in ad revenue for the same three months. Facebook, Google and Twitter approach advertising slightly differently, but their success comes down to the same thing: targeting.
Targeted advertising makes sure you see adverts that are supposedly relevant to your interests. Data based on your gender, age and income, or psychographic traits including attitudes and interests is used to put specific adverts in front of your eyes.
Facebook, Google and Twitter will look at your activity, location and searches over time to predict your preferences and show you relevant ads and banners from third parties.
They do not sell your data directly, but they do sell access to you. If you’re searching for a flight on Skyscanner then you might immediately see airline or hotel deals when visiting Facebook or Youtube. It always feels creepy.
To block annoying ads and banners from popping up on your sidebar, you could download ad-blocking extensions to clean up your browser. But unless you are willing to unplug from social media and search engines, there is little you can do to stop them (and other companies) from tracking you entirely. Facebook’s Pixel, which is used to track behaviour across the web, appears on more than eight million websites and even follows people who don’t have Facebook accounts.
However, there are some ways to control what ads you see and how they are targeted to you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/majordomo/permalink/10161166764339522/
Wondering, how do you all read articles that you don’t feel like paying subscriptions for?
Me: View page source > scroll through scripts > finds article > fuck your profiteering plunder campaign.
I think this is one reason why misinformation is running rampant. People see a headline, click the link only to have a paywall show up. People want to know so they google the article and click the link that displays more information without really checking the validity/reputation of the site.
Use different browsers and different devices when the number of free articles is used on some.
Using “private browsing” helped to get past on many paywalls.
On some sites you could read only start, but copy content on web browser and pasting to other software like text editor gives whole article text.
I just find it on a different website. If no other site has it, it’s probably not worth reading
PiHole maybe your answer
Disable Javascript for the site it’s on, works > 75% of the time for me.
I just disable any type of overlays and redirects on the page with the article I wish to read. 99.9% of the time that’s all that a pay wall is.
There’s also an Extension called “Stylish” which lets you write custom CSS to be injected into sites based on a URL pattern.
So you can use that to hide elements blocking the content, remove height/scroll restrictions on elements containing the content, etc.
Bypass Paywalls web browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s new logos are bad
https://tcrn.ch/3nmkC5r
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sisäministeriön ja poliisin kampanja kannustaa nuoria miettimään
sosiaalisen median keskustelukulttuuria ja vihapuheen vaikutuksia
https://www.poliisi.fi/tietoa_poliisista/tiedotteet/1/1/sisaministerion_ja_poliisin_kampanja_kannustaa_nuoria_miettimaan_sosiaalisen_median_keskustelukulttuuria_ja_vihapuheen_vaikutuksia_93843?language=fi
Sisäministeriö ja Poliisihallitus ovat käynnistäneet nuorille
suunnatun sosiaalisen median kampanjan, jonka tarkoituksena on
kannustaa nuoria pohtimaan sosiaalisen median keskustelukulttuuria ja
vihapuheen vaikutuksia lähipiirissä ja laajemmin yhteiskunnassa.
Tomi Engdahl says:
With both a DNS-over-HTTP client and potentially a DNS-over-QUIC in the browser and serving advertisements over QUIC, there is a good chance that the world will see unblockable advertisements in the near future.
https://blog.chromium.org/2020/10/chrome-is-deploying-http3-and-ietf-quic.html?m=1
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sexualized onions: Facebook lifts ban on Newfoundland advertisement for seeds
https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/mobile/sexualized-onions-facebook-lifts-ban-on-newfoundland-advertisement-for-seeds-1.5136498
Facebook has reversed its decision to prevent a seed company in Newfoundland from using a photo of a pile of onions, which the social media giant had deemed “overtly sexual.”
McLean said he was setting up ads for the onion seeds when he got an error response back from the site.
“A couple of them came back with errors, and I looked into it further to see what the error was, and for the onion photo it said that it was overtly sexual,” he said.
McLean said there was nothing sexual about the ad for the Walla Walla sweet onion seeds. A photo on the packaging shows several whole onions piled in a wicker basket and a few sliced onions in the foreground.
“There was something about the round shapes being next to each other that set off some trigger,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Yahoo Groups to shut down for good on December 15, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/yahoo-groups-to-shut-down-for-good-on-december-15-2020/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0h&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook
Nineteen-year-old discussion board to shut down for good after Verizon effectively killed the service last year.
Yahoo Groups, one of the last vestiges of the old Yahoo web properties, will shut down on December 15, 2020, when Verizon plans to take the groups.yahoo.com website offline for good.
Nonetheless, despite its long-tenured history, the Yahoo Groups service, which launched 19 years ago in 2001, had fallen to the wayside across the years and slowly lost most of its once-massive userbase to newer services like Reddit, Google Groups, and Facebook Groups.
Verizon, which never had a plan to revive the service, cited “a steady decline in usage over the last several years,” began phasing it out last year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Browser Makes Tiny Office Suite
https://hackaday.com/2020/10/13/browser-makes-tiny-office-suite/
There’s a recent craze of people living in tiny houses of 400 square feet down to as little as 80 square feet. Maybe [zserge] was thinking about that and created a very tiny office suite in which each tool weighs in at less than 1K. If you are guessing you couldn’t squeeze much functionality in C or C++ code or even assembly, you’d be right. The language of choice? HTML and JavaScript. So while the code is small, it relies on a pretty big piece of software. On the other hand, you have a browser open right now, so the incremental cost of using these tools is very small.
world smallest office suite
https://zserge.com/posts/awfice/
Awfice – the world smallest office suite
https://github.com/zserge/awfice
Awfice is a collection of tiny office suite apps:
a word processor, a spreadsheet, a drawing app and a presentation maker
each less than 1KB of plain JavaScript
each is literally just one line of code
packaged as data URLs, so you can use them right away, without downloading or installing
you can also use them offline
but they can’t store their state, so whatever you type there would be lost on page refresh
which can be also sold as a “good for your privacy” feature
this project is only a half-joke, I actually use a few Awfice apps as quick scratchpads.
the only way to save your job is to save a HTML or send it to the printer/print to PDF.
Tomi Engdahl says:
world smallest office suite
https://zserge.com/posts/awfice/
https://github.com/zserge/awfice
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2017/05/13/javascript-art-is-in-the-url/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2018/07/07/tiny-websites-have-no-server/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
WordPress debuts a tool that can take blog posts, including accompanying images and videos, and post them as Twitter threads automatically
WordPress can now turn blog posts into tweetstorms automatically
https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/13/wordpress-can-now-turn-blog-posts-into-tweetstorms-automatically/
The new feature will allow you to tweet out every word of your post, as well as the accompanying images and videos, the company says. These will be automatically inserted into the thread where they belong alongside your text.
To use the tweetstorm feature, a WordPress user will first click on the Jetpack icon on the top right of the page, then connect their Twitter account to their WordPress site, if that hadn’t been done already.
The option also supports multiple Twitter accounts, if you want to post your tweetstorms in several places.
Once Twitter is connected, you’ll select the account or accounts where you want to tweet, then choose the newly added option to share the post as a Twitter thread instead of a single post with a link.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg:
Activists worry about misinformation disrupting African elections, driven by high Facebook usage, as social media companies operate with little oversight
Online Disinformation Campaigns Undermine African Elections
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-13/disinformation-campaigns-on-facebook-twitter-google-undermine-african-election
Some governments use social media to dominate the narrative around campaigns.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Propaganda, Censorship, and Surveillance are attributes of the same underlying aspect: Monopoly and Centralised Control.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e506
All three problems have the same effective solution: Break up the monopolies.
Why is this?
What’s the fundamental connection between monopoly and control? Control is about maximising desired outcome to applied effort. In monopoly, there is a central focus of influence: the monopolist
Tomi Engdahl says:
Canva design platform actively abused in credentials phishing
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/canva-design-platform-actively-abused-in-credentials-phishing/
Free graphics design website Canva is being abused by threat actors to
create and host intricate phishing landing pages.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shots fired! WordPress’s Matt claims Jamstack’s marketing is ‘not intellectually honest’ in debate with Netlify’s Matt
End of the WordPress era? No, we’re aiming for 50% of web, says founder
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/13/wordpress_matt_vs_netlify_matt/
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has engaged in a war of words with the Jamstack community on the merits of the latter’s emerging new architecture for web applications.
Jamstack – where JAM stands for “JavaScript, APIs and HTML Markup” – is an architecture based on deploying web applications as static files, retrieving dynamic content from APIs such as those published by microservices. Developers typically use a static site generator such as Next.js, Gatsby, Hugo, or Jekyll. Page load time is quicker because no web server is required, especially when used in conjunction with a content delivery network (CDN).
Advocates of Jamstack are convinced that it is the future of web applications, but Matt Mullenweg, creator of the ever-popular WordPress blogging and content management platform, has spoken out against it.
The face-off had some odd aspects. Jamstack is an architecture, but WordPress is an application, and while Mullenweg was happy to be an advocate for “not Jamstack”, much of the time he fell back on the status of WordPress and its official hosting site, WordPress.com.
Biilmann spoke about the reliability of Jamstack sites versus “monolithic” applications like WordPress: although some microservices may fail, a static site can never really go down completely. He said that Jamstack sites were more secure because a buggy plug-in could not compromise an entire site. In addition: “There’s a model where you start decoupling the part that might be an admin UI from the part that might be a content UI from the part that might be your actual front end layer,” he said. With Jamstack, the admin part is not exposed to regular users at all.
“Last time I checked, about 90 per cent of major security incidents infected WordPress,” said Biilmann. “It’s not the best track record.”
On security, Mullenweg said that the key issue was making updates “frequent and easy” and that Jamstack, which typically uses “dozens of NPM packages” for building sites, has “the same issues that you have over plugins”. Mullenweg claimed that the auto-update built into WordPress means that “we can get 70 to 80 per cent of WordPress sites on the latest version within a few weeks.”
He went on to suggest that most security issues were with poorly maintained self-hosted WordPress sites. “Every modern WordPress host has ways to run untrusted plugins and protect people. If you look at sites on WordPress VIP, if you look at WordPress.com, there’s not security issues there.”
On the matter of performance, Mullenweg claimed that Jamstack “is not intellectually honest in its marketing. If serverside performance were the biggest problem for web performance, sure, but Google and everyone else says that’s only 10 to 20 per cent of what happens. Where performance really matters is client side… I think the best thing you can do for performance is be completely dynamic but put a caching CDN in front of it. Cloudflare two days ago announced WordPress integration.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Streisand effect is a social phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information, often via the Internet.
Attempts to suppress information, but instead of that information being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
In news now:
Twitter, Facebook censor Post over Hunter Biden exposé
https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/facebook-twitter-block-the-post-from-posting/
Both Twitter and Facebook took extraordinary censorship measures against The Post on Wednesday over its exposés about Hunter Biden’s emails — with Twitter baselessly charging that “hacked materials” were used.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Silvia Amaro / CNBC:
France and Netherlands call for EU regulation to control market power of Big Tech gatekeepers; EU says it’s working on criteria, not a “hit list of companies”
France and the Netherlands call for tough EU powers to curb Big Tech
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/15/france-and-the-netherlands-want-stronger-eu-rules-against-the-big-tech.html
In a joint document, the two countries suggested that an EU authority should be able to control the market position of these large tech platforms.
In the eyes of the French and the Dutch governments, the EU should stop these firms favoring their own services to the detriment of other businesses.
And impose an obligation to share specific data.
France and the Netherlands have proposed stricter EU rules to oversee large technology firms, such as Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon.
In a joint document, seen by CNBC and due to be sent to the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, the two countries suggested that an EU authority should be able to control the market position of these large tech platforms.
“Our common ambition is to design a framework that will be efficient enough to address the economic footprint of such actors on the European economy and to be able to ‘break them open,’” Cédric O, the secretary of state for digital transition in France, said in a statement.
“Access to data, to services, interoperability … these are efficient tools that we should be able to use, with a tailor-made approach, in order to tackle market foreclosure and ensure freedom of choice for consumers,” he added.
The EU, arguably at the forefront of regulation in this space, has intensified talks regarding Big Tech and the competitive landscape over the last 12 months. In addition to pursuing anti-trust investigations on some of the largest firms, the Commission is also working on data protection rules.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
The FCC has no jurisdiction over Section 230, which was explicitly written to deny the FCC any authority over websites
Blatant Hypocrite Ajit Pai Decides To Move Forward With Bogus, Unconstitutional Rulemaking On Section 230
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201015/11555145508/blatant-hypocrite-ajit-pai-decides-to-move-forward-with-bogus-unconstitutional-rulemaking-section-230.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Senate Republicans say the Judiciary Committee will issue a subpoena to Jack Dorsey about Twitter’s blocking of a New York Post article
Senate to Subpoena Twitter CEO Over Blocking of Disputed Biden Articles
Move by GOP lawmakers on Judiciary Committee follows social-media platform’s decision to limit sharing of New York Post report
https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-to-subpoena-twitter-ceo-over-blocking-of-new-york-post-articles-on-bidens-11602777128?mod=djemalertNEWS
The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to issue a subpoena on Tuesday to Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey after the social-media company blocked a pair of New York Post articles that made new allegations about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which his campaign has denied.
The subpoena would require the Twitter executive to testify on Oct. 23 before the committee, according to the Republicans who announced the hearing.
GOP lawmakers are singling out Twitter because it prevented users from posting links to the articles, which the Post said were based on email exchanges with Hunter Biden, the Democratic candidate’s son, provided by allies of President Trump. Those people in turn said they received them from a computer-repair person who found them on a laptop, according to the Post.
The Wall Street Journal hasn’t independently verified the Post articles.
“This is election interference, and we are 19 days out from an election,”
Thursday evening Twitter’s legal and policy chief, Vijaya Gadde, said the company would change how it enforces certain content rules, citing “significant feedback” on how it handled recent articles from the New York Post.
“We will no longer remove hacked content unless it is directly shared by hackers or those acting in concert with them,” she wrote, saying that Twitter instead would seek to put such material in context. “We believe that labeling Tweets and empowering people to assess content for themselves better serves the public interest.”
Twitter and Facebook Inc. separately took steps to limit the distribution of the Post articles published Wednesday on their platforms.
While Facebook didn’t prevent users from sharing the articles, it flagged the content for its third-party fact-checkers to review, a step that reduces the likelihood they will appear in users’ news feeds.
Twitter blocked users from posting links to the Post articles, initially citing a potential violation of its rules regarding hacked materials. The company later said the content also violated its policies on displaying private information like email addresses and phone numbers without a person’s permission.
The Biden campaign challenged the Post’s reporting.
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story,” spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani—whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported—claimed to have such materials,” he said, referring to the president’s personal lawyer whom the Post said acquired the emails.
The Post published a new article Thursday about Hunter Biden from what it said was the trove of emails it obtained.
The Senate’s subpoena of Mr. Dorsey escalates a long-running battle between Republicans and social-media companies, which conservatives see as biased in favor of liberal viewpoints.
Vijaya Gadde / @vijaya:
[Thread] Twitter updates Hacked Materials Policy, says it won’t remove content unless shared by hackers themselves and will label tweets instead of block links — Over the last 24 hours, we’ve received significant feedback (from critical to supportive) about how we enforced our Hacked Materials Policy yesterday. After reflecting on this feedback, we have decided to make changes to the policy and how we enforce it.
https://twitter.com/vijaya/status/1316923549236551680
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg:
Ajit Pai says FCC will start a rulemaking to clarify the meaning of Section 230, and social media doesn’t have “special immunity denied to other media outlets” — – Agency chief says it will conduct rulemaking Trump sought — Analysts question authority of agency to issue regulations
Trump Foes Fume Over Timing of FCC’s Efforts to Rein In Twitter
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-15/fcc-to-move-on-trump-plan-to-weaken-social-media-legal-shield
A U.S. Federal Communications Commission decision to review a liability shield for Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. fulfills the wishes of President Donald Trump and his conservative allies, yet has prompted questions about the agency’s authority and political motivations.
With less than three weeks before the American election, the FCC’s Republican Chairman, Ajit Pai, said the agency would seek to “clarify” the platforms’ exemptions from liability for how they handle users’ posts. That would fulfill an executive order issued in May by Trump to rein in Big Tech after Twitter started to fact-check the president’s posts.
“Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech,” Pai said in a statement announcing his move. “But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters.”
The announcement came hours after Senate Republicans demanded the chief executive officers of Facebook and Twitter explain steps their sites took to limit the distribution of a controversial New York Post article concerning Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Twitter and Facebook said they did it because of questions about the article’s accuracy and use of hacked material.
Section 230 Question
Trump also cried foul, tweeting that “If Big Tech persists, in coordination with the mainstream media, we must immediately strip them of their Section 230 protections.”
Yet analysts are divided over whether the FCC even has the authority to rewrite crucial language known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that shields the platforms from liability.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NBC News:
YouTube bans conspiracy theory content, such as QAnon or Pizzagate, that justifies “real-world violence”, but stops short of banning QAnon content outright — YouTube said Thursday that it would no longer allow content that targets individuals and groups with conspiracy theories …
YouTube bans QAnon, other conspiracy content that targets individuals
YouTube said it would be enforcing the updated policy immediately and plans to “ramp up in the weeks to come.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/youtube-bans-qanon-other-conspiracy-content-targets-individuals-n1243525
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Pierce / Protocol:
Pew: 92% of all tweets since last November were made by 10% of users, 69% of whom were Democrats; Trump’s was the most-mentioned account followed by YouTube’s
Democrats tweet more than Republicans, but Trump dominates everything
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/democrats-tweet-more-than-republicans-but-trump-dominates-everything
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fake news is a tiny fraction of our news diet. Check out #6 in our new podcast series, Radio Spectrum. An interview with @_JenAllen of @MITSloan re “Evaluating the Fake News Problem at the Scale of the Information Ecosystem” @RadioSpectrum1
Fake News Is a Huge Problem, Unless It’s Not
https://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/telecom/internet/fake-news-is-a-huge-problem-unless-its-not
Microsoft researchers take a look at how much fake news is out there and who is consuming it
A report in 2018 commissioned by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee centered its attention on the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy arm of Russia’s intelligence services. The report offers, to quote an account of it in Wired magazine, “the most extensive look at the IRA’s attempts to divide Americans, suppress the vote, and boost then-candidate Donald Trump before and after the 2016 presidential election.”
Countless hours of research have gone into identifying and combating fake news. A recent study found more than 2000 articles about fake news published between 2017 and 2020.
Nonetheless, there’s a dearth of actual data when it comes to the magnitude, extent, and impact, of fake news.
For one thing, we get news that might be fake in various ways—from the Web, from our phones, from television—yet it’s hard to aggregate these disparate sources. Nor do we know what portion of all our news is fake news. Finally, the impact of fake news may or may not exceed its prevalence—we just don’t know.
Steven Cherry [[COPY]] Jenny, Wikipedia defines “fake news” as “a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media.” The term made its way into the online version of the Random House dictionary in 2017 as “false news stories, often of a sensational nature, created to be widely shared or distributed for the purpose of generating revenue, or promoting or discrediting a public figure, political movement, company, etc.” Jenny, are you okay with either of these definitions? More simply, what is fake news?
Jennifer Allen Yeah. Starting off with a tough question. I think the way that we define fake news really changes whether or not we consider it to be a problem or the magnitude of the problem. So the way that we define fake news in our research—and how the academic community has defined fake news—is that it is false or misleading information masquerading as legitimate news.
Jennifer Allen Yes. So I think, again, the extent to which people are misinformed, I think that we can look to the mainstream news. And, you know, for example, it’s overwhelming coverage of Trump and the lies that often he spreads. And I think some of the new work that we’re doing is trying to look at the mainstream media and its potential role and not reporting false news that is masquerading as true.
Steven Cherry So people complain about people living inside information bubbles. What your study shows is fake news, if it’s a problem at all, is really the smallest part of the problem. A bigger part of the problem would be false news—false information that doesn’t rise to the level of fake news. And then finally, the question that you raise here of balance when it comes to the mainstream media. “Balance”—I should even say “emphasis.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fake News Is a Huge Problem is Fake News?
For one thing, we get news that might be fake in various ways—from the Web, from our phones, from television—yet it’s hard to aggregate these disparate sources.
What study shows is fake news, if it’s a problem at all, is really the smallest part of the problem. A bigger part of the problem would be false news—false information that doesn’t rise to the level of fake news.
https://www.facebook.com/48576411181/posts/10158807557006182/
Tomi Engdahl says:
BLATANT CENSORSHIP: THE GREAT YOUTUBE PURGE
https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/blatant-censorship-the-great-youtube-purge
A massive YouTube purge has taken place. Several channels have been removed from the platform proving truth is treason in the empire of lies.
Censorship in any and all forms is immoral all the time.
“Censorship is to society what cancer is to the body.” –Brian, High Impact TV
“Those who burn books today will be burning bodies tomorrow,” Brian says. Make no mistake, this is digital book burning. It’s time to come together and stand up for basic fundamental human rights. This is extremely serious, and it’s no exaggeration to say so.
After Brainwashing People For Decades, MSM and Governments Are Losing Control of People
This blatant censorship says one thing: the mainstream media and the controllers who pull the strings are scared. If they weren’t terrified of us, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to shut any of us up. The truth will prevail regardless.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Protect Your Website: 10 Security Holes You Need to Care About
https://pentestmag.com/how-to-protect-your-website-10…/
#pentest #magazine #pentestmag #pentestblog #PTblog #website #protection #security #vulnerabilities #cybersecurity #infosecurity #infosec
Tomi Engdahl says:
QUIC! IETF sets November deadline for last comments on TCP-killer spawned by Google and Cloudflare
Next comes all the joy and laughter of the standards process
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/26/quic_last_call_ietf/
The Internet Engineering Task Force has set November 16th, 2020, as the final date for comment on Quick UDP Internet Connections, the would-be TCP-killer that Google and Cloudflare have offered up as part of HTTP/3.
QUIC’s backers point out that TCP is chatty and therefore imposes long round-trip times on traffic. Which is never welcome, but especially undesirable on wireless networks.
By using a flavor of TLS (Transport Layer Security) over the internet’s UDP protocol instead of the customary TCP, QUIC can bust some bottlenecks that can happen when a TCP connection loses packets. QUIC therefore makes it possible for a client and server that have never connected to send data without any round trips between the devices.
The result is faster-loading web pages – which explains why Google backed QUIC – and more elegant internetworking – which explains why Cloudflare likes it.
As the IETF explains here, Last Call status represent “the final stage of open community review”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
There are 4.5 billion internet users in the world. Every minute, millions of dollars are bought online and 150,000 FB messages are distributed.
Source:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/every-minute-internet-2020/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Washington Post:
Study of ~200K US Internet users: Facebook users read more polarized news as they spend more time on the service, and the impact is 5X greater for conservatives
Opinions
Facebook serves as an echo chamber, especially for conservatives. Blame its algorithm.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/26/facebook-algorithm-conservative-liberal-extremes/
When Mark Zuckerberg appears at a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday, he will no doubt be asked about Facebook’s content moderation policies. He may face important questions about how Facebook decides when content is not merely misleading, but outright false and harmful. An equally important question lawmakers may not ask — but should — is how Facebook’s algorithms shape the news and information that users consume.
Zuckerberg has recently denied that Facebook is a right-wing echo chamber. Instead, he claimed that the content that gets the most visibility on Facebook is “the same things that people talk about in the mainstream.” But Zuckerberg also admits that “it’s true that partisan content” attracts more likes, comments and shares. Those are precisely the signals that lead Facebook algorithms to push polarizing partisan content into people’s Facebook feeds.
Zuckerberg’s public comments have dodged a crucial question: What effect does Facebook have on the political slant of the news and information its users read? Our peer-reviewed research shows that the more time someone spends on Facebook, the more polarized their online news consumption becomes. What’s more, we find Facebook usage is five times more polarizing for conservatives than for liberals. This evidence suggests Facebook indeed serves as an echo chamber, especially for its conservative users.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What were the biggest changes for European privacy in 2020? Here’s a concise overview of how the EU privacy landscape changed over the year, including new regulations, controversial court rulings, and conflicts with major internet platforms.
The state of privacy in Europe: what changed in 2020?
https://cybernews.com/editorial/the-state-of-privacy-in-europe-what-changed-in-2020/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=rm&utm_content=privacy_europe_change&fbclid=IwAR11zqiyywJQsIgHeFimKKj6TS0nMqV51rB18ik3KCdJ4u4DSNBMTYfl0xg
Tomi Engdahl says:
This Website Simulates The Pain Of Loading The Internet In The ’90s
https://www.iflscience.com/technology/this-website-simulates-the-pain-of-loading-the-internet-in-the-90s/
If you are old enough (and lucky enough) to have had the Internet in the nineties, you probably have the ringing sound “pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkackingkackingkackingtshchchchchchchch cch ding ding ding” seared into your mind for all time.
For those too young, that was the noise of you dialing into the Internet. It was the first step of the painful process of attempting to view a website, any website.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloudflare Offers ‘Isolated’ Cloud-Based Browser, Plus a Network-as-a-Service Solution
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/10/17/2326236/cloudflare-offers-isolated-cloud-based-browser-plus-a-network-as-a-service-solution?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Cloudflare has released the beta of its new “browser isolation” service, which runs a web browser in the cloud,
Cloudflare wants to run your web browser in the cloud
By Anthony Spadafora 16 October 2020
Web-based threats can’t affect your system or network if they’re isolated in the cloud
https://www.techradar.com/in/news/cloudflare-wants-to-run-your-web-browser-in-the-cloud
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Windows 10 Update Permanently Removes Adobe Flash
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/10/28/2122254/new-windows-10-update-permanently-removes-adobe-flash?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Microsoft has released a Windows update that removes Adobe’s Flash Player before it reaches end of support on December 31, 2020. ZDNet reports:
Update KB4577586 is part of Microsoft’s effort to follow through with plans it announced along with Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Mozilla in 2017 to end support for Flash by December 2020. The Flash-removing update is available for all supported versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server, as well as Windows 8.1.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Maailmassa on 4,5 miljardia nettikäyttäjää. Joka minuutti netissä ostetaan miljoonalla dollarilla ja jaetaan 150 000 FB-viestiä.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Haitallinen ja laiton sisältö verkossa: Parlamentin toimintasuunnitelma
https://www.oikeusmedia.uutisparkki.com/2020/10/30/haitallinen-ja-laiton-sisalto-verkossa-parlamentin-toimintasuunnitelma/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Last week’s antitrust lawsuit against Google is the first big challenge to a tech company’s dominance since 1998. What could a successful lawsuit mean? Will anything change in the short term?
The Google antitrust lawsuit: what happens next?
https://cybernews.com/editorial/the-google-antitrust-lawsuit-what-happens-next/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=rm&utm_content=google_antitrust&fbclid=IwAR3G7nfxoVpBsHHEYvOm0A0BddOr6X6iJdvDUDe02bGk9IFqfEaNvKAy-zI
Tomi Engdahl says:
Web Vitals – Googlen uusien metriikoiden vaikutukset verkkosivuihin
https://blogi.meom.fi/web-vitals-googlen-uusien-metriikoiden-vaikutukset-verkkosivuihin
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/21/eu-parliament-backs-tighter-rules-on-behavioural-ads/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://markosaric.com/cloudflare-analytics-review/
Tomi Engdahl says:
How video streaming works on the web: An introduction
https://gist.github.com/de385e629f0ec1f82e2621464abc538d
Note: this article is an introduction to video streaming in JavaScript and is mostly targeted to web developers. A large part of the examples here make use of HTML and modern JavaScript (ES6).
The need for a native video API
From the early to late 2000s, video playback on the web mostly relied on the flash plugin.
This was because, at the time, there was no other mean to stream video on a browser. As a user, you had the choice between either installing third-party plugins like flash or Silverlight, or not being able to play any video at all.
To fill that hole, the WHATWG began to work on a new version of the HTML standard including, among other things, video and audio playback natively (read here: without any plugin). This trend was even more accelerated following Apple stance on flash for its products.
This standard became what is now known as HTML5.
Thus HTML5 brought, among other things, the tag to the web.
This new tag allows you to link to a video directly from the HTML, much like a tag would do for an image.
This is cool and all but from a media website’s perspective
, using a simple img-like tag does not seem sufficient to replace our good ol’ flash:
we might want to switch between multiple video qualities on-the-fly (like YouTube does) to avoid buffering issues
live streaming is another use case which looks really difficult to implement that way
and what about updating the audio language of the content based on user preferences while the content is streaming like Netflix does?
Thankfully, all of those points can be answered natively on most browsers, thanks to what the HTML5 specification brought. This article will detail how today’s web does it.
The “Media Source Extensions” (more often shortened to just “MSE”) is a specification from the W3C that most browsers implement today. It was created to allow those complex media use cases directly with HTML and JavaScript.
Those “extensions” add the MediaSource object to JavaScript. As its name suggests, this will be the source of the video, or put more simply, this is the object representing our video’s data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://github.com/scastillo/not-youtube-dl
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/10/12/facebook-users-interacting-with-misinformation-way-more-now-than-in-2016-study-finds/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Poikkeusvuosi on muuttanut verkkokäyttäytymistä pysyvästi – Pysytkö muutoksessa mukana?
https://markkinointiakatemia.fi/blogi/poikkeusvuosi-on-muuttanut-verkkokayttaytymista-pysyvasti-pysytko-muutoksessa-mukana/