Web development trends 2020

2,200 Comments

1. April 8, 2022 at 3:41 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Epic Games believes the Internet is broken. This is their blueprint to fix it.
   https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/09/28/epic-fortnite-metaverse-facebook/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_6

   To Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, people are tired of how today’s Internet operates. He says the social media era of the Internet, a charge led by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, has separated commerce from the general audience, herding users together and directing them to targets of the company’s choosing rather than allowing free exploration.

   “Now we’re in a closed platform wave, and Apple and Google are surfing that wave too,” Sweeney said. “As we get out of this, everybody is going to realize, ‘Okay we spent the last decade being taken advantage of.’”

   For years now, he has eyed a solution: the metaverse. And steadily, over several years, Epic has been acquiring a number of assets and making strategic moves with the goal of making Sweeney’s vision for the metaverse a reality.

   The simplest way to define the metaverse is as an evolution of how users interact with brands, intellectual properties and each other on the Internet. The metaverse, to Sweeney, would be an expansive, digitized communal space where users can mingle freely with brands and one another in ways that permit self-expression and spark joy. It would be a kind of online playground where users could join friends to play a multiplayer game like Epic’s “Fortnite” one moment, watch a movie via Netflix the next and then bring their friends to test drive a new car that’s crafted exactly the same in the real world as it would be in this virtual one. It would not be, Sweeney said, the manicured, ad-laden news feed presented by platforms like Facebook.

   “The metaverse isn’t going to be that,” Sweeney said. “A carmaker who wants to make a presence in the metaverse isn’t going to run ads. They’re going to drop their car into the world in real time and you’ll be able to drive it around. And they’re going to work with lots of content creators with different experiences to ensure their car is playable here and there, and that it’s receiving the attention it deserves.”

   People using the Internet in the 1990s via companies like America Online will recall how the Internet has evolved from logging in over phone lines to check their email, chat in real time over AOL Instant Messenger and perhaps check a website or bulletin board discussion before logging off. Today’s always-online, smartphone-centric culture of curated feeds revolves around social media and monetization through advertising, a dynamic Sweeney believes various companies have exploited to their benefit and the detriment of users.

   Sweeney believes platforms like Google and Apple have similarly grown in size while contributing to what he sees as a devolution of the Internet. He refers to the economic ecosystems created by the Silicon Valley giants as “walled gardens,” a term that came up frequently during Epic’s mostly unsuccessful antitrust lawsuit against Apple.

   Even as Sweeney and Epic pursue their metaverse dream, it’s one shared by a number of massive, tech-centric companies. One of them is the same that Sweeney decried for the current state of the Internet. Facebook’s Zuckerberg recently said he hopes that users stop thinking of Facebook as a social media company and more of a metaverse company.

   Months before Zuckerberg’s announcement, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was among the first American tech executive to refer to his company’s offerings as part of an “enterprise metaverse.” Chinese conglomerate Tencent, whose holdings include everything from social media apps to stakes in Hollywood studios, has also accelerated its efforts.

   The shared ambitions of these giant corporations set the stage for a high-stakes race to craft the metaverse. And Epic sees itself as well positioned in the pack.

   The Washington Post interviewed a variety of executives, developers and stakeholders at Epic Games to discuss its vision for the metaverse. The messaging from Epic Games and its companies is clear: What Sweeney and his colleagues want to create is a marked departure from modern social media platforms. And the company believes it is well suited to realize its metaverse vision through its own technologies and series of acquisitions. But there remain significant obstacles, seemingly outside of Epic’s control, that present formidable barriers to Sweeney’s aspirations.

   At the core of Epic’s metaverse vision is a change in how people socialize on the Internet. Sima Sistani, co-founder of the video chat social network Houseparty that was acquired by Epic in 2019, believes interactions will move away from “likes,” comments and posts about people’s personal lives and toward more complex interactions where users share and participate in experiences across various services.

   “If the last generation is about sharing, the next generation of social is going to be about participating,” said Sistani, who has held positions at Tumblr and Yahoo before starting Houseparty. “Maybe I didn’t call it the metaverse then, but that’s what it is. It’s people, interactive experiences, coming together and moving from one experience to another, having this shareability to move beyond walled gardens.”

   Sistani’s description closely resembles the innate, interactive nature of video games, which offer more ways to engage with brands and other users than simple ad-filled timelines.

   “We’ve seen this happen in the past,” Sistani said. “I come from a media background, and people moved from traditional media to social media. And this new generation is moving from social media to games. That’s where they’re having these conversations. That’s where it’s beyond the ‘like,’ beyond the news feed. And that, that’s the metaverse.”

   That community interaction is a central concept of the metaverse and how it evolves the Internet from the social media era.

   “What exists right now, it’s based on algorithmic feeds that are driven by ad revenue, not a model,” Sistani said. “That instantly takes you into polarized worlds. If you are putting joy at the center of what you’re doing, and not ads, and the goal is collaboration, the goal is fun, the goal is participating, making new friends, those are just super different incentives and motivations.”

   The Internet of creators

   Epic’s tool kit is well suited for creating the kind of collaborative and fun experiences Sistani describes. Long before “Fortnite” took the world by storm, a 1998 game made by Sweeney himself debuted and became a centerpiece of Epic’s business. The game was titled “Unreal,” and it was powered by what is now known as Unreal Engine.

   The game was titled “Unreal,” and it was powered by what is now known as Unreal Engine.

   Unreal Engine is used by at least 7 million people, especially game developers, around the world, but it is also heavily used outside of the video game industry. The most famous and recent example is how it powers the sets and backdrops of TV shows like “The Mandalorian.”

   Part of Epic’s strategy for the metaverse will require a continual stream of content creation to keep users engaged. To that end, Epic is making Unreal Engine as accessible as possible to novices.

   Epic sees those creators as another cornerstone in constructing the metaverse. The desire to shift “Fortnite” to a more creator-friendly business model was discussed at length during Epic’s trial with Apple. That pivot would also mirror an ongoing Internet trend.

   In the last decade, Internet culture has evolved to embrace and be driven by tens of millions of content creators all over the world. The most popular have used their massive audiences to attract lucrative deals that have turned many from creators into influencers, the personalities that shape pop culture.

   “Some of the top entertainment people in the world today are not found in Hollywood,”

   Video game personalities have become a new tier of celebrity class, sometimes dwarfing traditional celebrities.

   Facebook may be the leading social network, but the New York Times reported in July the company is playing catch-up in courting creatives in its spaces, which include Instagram. This effort included trying to lock well-known video game personalities on Twitch and YouTube into contracts to stream exclusively on Facebook.

   Real obstacles to a virtual world

   If video game worlds can be considered buildings of interactivity, Epic Games has been one of the biggest providers of construction materials thanks to the widespread use of Unreal Engine. Now Sweeney wants to help build bridges between those buildings.

   For years, Unreal Engine has been used by a number of different industries outside of video games.

   “I think [Epic] is a unique company because we’ve always served both the consumer audience and the developer audience, and we’ve built our business on the synergy between the two,” Sweeney said. “It’s the same position to build an ecosystem. It’s both great for consumers and for developers and to avoid the kind of pitfalls which turn consumer ecosystem companies into overlords that exert too much power.”

   Critics may point to the prospect that Epic Games itself is a walled garden for the moment, much like the companies Sweeney has pilloried. Sweeney acknowledges this. Outside of log-ins using various other services like Microsoft or social media, Epic’s own storefront, the Epic Games Store is still a closed-off marketplace.

   Sweeney pointed out that even if the last year of quarantine accelerated the acceptance of persistent online worlds operating like our real one, there’s a host of standards and practices that need to be ironed out to create any kind of metaverse, not unlike how government-funded researchers in 1986 formed the Internet Engineering Task Force to formally develop and promote Internet standards.

   “You need an entire suite of standards, and the Web is based on several,” said Sweeney, citing such factors like HTML becoming the standard file format for displaying web browser pages. “The metaverse will require a lot of them, file formats for describing a 3-D scene, networking protocols for describing how players are interacting in real time. Every multiplayer game has a networking protocol of some sort. They don’t all agree, but eventually they ought to be lined up and made to communicate.”

   And therein lies Sweeney’s biggest challenge in realizing his vision. While Epic could weave a kind of metaverse out of its many creations and others built on Unreal Engine, it would not be “The metaverse” that Sweeney and others envision until the barriers between some of the world’s biggest brands are broken down.

   “I think the real force that’s going to shape the metaverse into an open platform is the power of all the brands to participate in it,” Sweeney said.

   Sweeney said he’s optimistic and hopeful that the Internet’s next evolution may return to the spirit of cooperation — and the fear of monopoly — that drove the AIM alliance of 1991, the landmark agreement between Apple, IBM and Motorola to standardize personal computer technology.

   “You’re going to have hundreds of industries entering this, each one cognizant of the need to protect their brand,” Sweeney said. “I think that’s going to be the ultimate checks and balance system in a way that it was not in the social media revolution. … I think that’s going to lead to very robust development in the way the Internet was.”

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2. April 11, 2022 at 10:58 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Choire Sicha / New York Magazine:
   The New York Times’ policy is right: Twitter, where anecdotes are mistaken for data, offers feedback on journalists’ value but can instill self-censorship — Today, New York Times honcho Dean Baquet ordered a company-wide “reset” in how his staff should think about Twitter.

   Journalism’s Twitter Problem Is the Journalists
   https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/new-york-times-journalists-are-terrible-on-twitter.html

   Today, New York Times honcho Dean Baquet ordered a company-wide “reset” in how his staff should think about Twitter. Mostly, he’d like them to never look at it again.

   You can see why. Most of the people who work for him are very bad at being on Twitter, and their tweets truly are just not good. And then their bosses are so obsessed with Twitter too, and on edge about it. A cycle of humiliation ensues. They spend all that money on editors and then people just write stuff willy-nilly online? Whatever for?!

   Twitter looms prominently for journalists because it’s how they get jobs, distribute their work, and make friends. Twitter also helps journalists feel and be seen inside a system that will otherwise make them feel invisible.

   Reporters in general are anxious, and the structure of their workplace feeds that. At the Times in particular they are often starved for information and kept in eternal suspense about their status in the organization.

   If you get little real feedback on your value, why wouldn’t you seek it elsewhere? If you’re worried no one will know you’re alive, where else will you remind them? Twitter. Plus, sometimes the jokes are good.

   There are bigger consequences. Reporters confuse their Twitter audience for the actual world. For obvious reasons (Caucasity), most of these reporters are on the joyless, scold-y White Twitter, which is the opposite of all this. And a small minority of people create most of the tweets one sees, part of a feedback loop that can diminish how journalists think about schools, work, business, and the pandemic. Twitter is where anecdotes are mistaken for data.

   There’s a meme, certainly popular inside the Times, that Twitter instills some kind of self-feeding censorship. Baquet might hate this most of all; he despises fearfulness. Last month, the reporter Sarah Hepola wrote an essay for The Atlantic about her long-standing fear of what she dramatically called the “public execution chambers of social media.”

   At least, I won’t. I took the Twitter app off my phone months ago. Never felt better. Someday, with enough gumption or money, I’ll go full Selena Gomez and never go online again. Maybe I won’t be invited onto podcasts! What bliss.

   I truly hate to admit when management is right. But if you can afford it, just know that logging off Twitter feels better than all the admiration of your peers. Besides, our bosses will never find us over on the actually good platforms (yes, I mean BeReal).

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3. April 11, 2022 at 10:58 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   BeReal Is the App Challenging Instagram’s Pursuit of Perfection
   The social media platform is blowing up on university campuses everywhere – and for good reason.
   https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp94w/what-is-bereal-app

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4. April 11, 2022 at 11:07 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   The Things I’m Afraid to Write About
   https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/writing-controversial-opinions-journalism/627014/

   Fear of professional exile has kept me from taking on certain topics. What gets lost when a writer mutes herself?

   I’d spent the past five or so years watching celebrities, pundits, friends, and internet randos fall from grace for reasons as varied as sharing dumb jokes, making clumsy writing errors, accidentally showing their dong, and expressing controversial (though often widely held) opinions in the public execution chambers of social media. There had been more grievous allegations, of course—rape, pedophilia, physical abuse. But so many of these spectacles could be grouped under a more mundane heading. You can call it cancel culture. You can call it justice. All I know is that I hated it, and for five years, I kept very quiet about it.

   Everyone kept quiet (save for the brave few who did not). My writer friends and I huddled backstage at panels in green rooms filled with chocolate-chip cookies and veggie platters, whispering about everything we couldn’t say out there, in the scary beyond. During the resistance movement of 2016, a friend’s book about feminism got dropped in part because her feminism wasn’t the right kind for the Trump era. In the pandemic madness of 2021, a journalist friend who enjoyed sounding off on science and homeopathy decided to stay the hell away from COVID. All around me, people were folding. Not that project, not that story, not that controversy.

   The reasons were simple, at least for me. Careerism. Fear. A nagging sense that I did not know enough about any given controversy to weigh in publicly (though that never stopped so many others).

   The unwritten rule of elite media tribes seemed to be this: You spout the company line, or you shut up. And that’s why, midway through a career built on speaking out, I shut up.

   A writer’s life is financially precarious. A single woman’s life, also precarious. There were the pressing matters of rent, exorbitant insurance, and the occasional glitter heels. I simply could not gamble with my future. “I’m not going to die in that ditch today,” I often said to a like-minded friend when we spoke about these scandals, which was daily, both of us getting in a lather because the topics were so rich. Consent, complicity, moral trespass, power dynamics. This was the stuff of doorstop novels, and yet people were working it out in 280 characters dashed off in line at Trader Joe’s.

   Privately, I worried I was wrong. That was another reason for the silence.

   One of the great mistakes of our moment is being deemed “on the wrong side of history.” But has anyone read ahead in the book so they know how future generations will see this stuff? If so, can they please tell me, so I can choose my stance accordingly? Gender, sex, morality. Everything is guesswork.

   I understood such moral panics to be the product of generational hand-wringing and the religious right, which was then gaining ground. And so it came as an unwelcome surprise to watch the intolerance that my liberal friends once decried on the censorious right flood to our side of the street. Public scolding, all-caps hyperbole, a stubborn refusal to understand another point of view—intolerance, once perceived as a conservative problem, was fully bipartisan now.

   From 2015 to 2021, my private conversations were some of the best I’ve ever had. Taboo subjects have always been delectable, but suddenly we were living in a time when so much that was once considered fair game for discussion (education, biological differences, the benefits of policing) had become dangerous. Phone dates with writer friends in other parts of the country stretched to two and three hours as we worked out essays we would never write, toggling between outrage, despair, and armchair cultural analysis of the latest dustup.

   . Every once in a while, I’d get a head of steam about some scandal, and I’d start a big-swing essay only to bench myself a few days later. Not gonna die in that ditch today.

   I grew so deeply uncomfortable, so roiled with shame, that I began plotting new careers. How long does it take to become a therapist? Can you actually support yourself as an Uber driver? I applied to pick up groceries for Instacart, and each time I scrolled through the latest batch (seven items, two miles away), I was seized with the fear that I’d fail at that too. What if I picked up the groceries and I got the wrong ones? What if I had to substitute strawberries for raspberries and the customer didn’t like strawberries? I was screwed.

   In the end, I did what I have done for the past 25 years whenever I hit some crisis in my career. I kept going.

   The tragic result is a disturbed public forum where it often seems like no adults are in the room. Prickly issues that deserve a full airing are being treated as settled law. A human life is morally complex, filled with ambivalence and uncertainty, and accepting the quickly assembled dogma of social-media feeds lets us bypass messier realities that we ignore at our own peril. Staying silent as writers in this fractured world is understandable, maybe even wise; it’s also a disservice—to society, the career we fought so hard to claim, and ourselves. Nobody wants the bad guys to get away with it. But in silencing our own moral compass and strongly held beliefs, we’re hanging ourselves out to dry, rendering our wisdom and insight useless. We’re missing the chance to learn. To listen.

   So this is my resolution as I trudge from this dark place: to speak out more. Not to engage in callouts, or scolding, or eye rolls, which are not my style, but to express my own deep ambivalence, my own point of view on subjects that matter to me. Not because anyone asked for it, but because this is the career I’ve chosen, and if I’m not doing that, then what are we doing here? I suspect I will lose followers (I don’t have that many), but perhaps I will gain self-respect, which I’ve been sorely lacking lately. That might be why I’ve so desperately sought the validation of people on Twitter I’ve never even met. I still wanted it both ways: the respect and admiration of strangers without the hard work of earning that respect. I wanted people to love me without really knowing me, which isn’t love. It’s projection.

   Maybe I’ll write something great this year. Maybe I’ll write something lousy.

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5. April 11, 2022 at 11:08 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Financial Times:
   The Guardian will test a paywall in its news app for a sample of regular users as it explores the best pricing approach; The Guardian’s website will remain open — Media group says it is committed to free-access journalism as financial position strengthens
   https://www.ft.com/content/81d361fe-fa81-4223-8321-a872168c91e3?sharetype=blocked

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6. April 11, 2022 at 11:08 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Hannah Murphy / Financial Times:
   Sources: to diversify its revenue, Meta is exploring ideas like “creator coins” for Instagram influencers and “social tokens” to reward meaningful contributions
   https://www.ft.com/content/50fbe9ba-32c8-4caf-a34e-234031019371

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7. April 12, 2022 at 11:18 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   PEN America:
   US public schools banned 1,145 book titles between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022; 98% of the bans departed from guidelines meant to protect students’ rights

   Banned in the USA: Rising School Book Bans Threaten Free Expression and Students’ First Amendment Rights
   https://pen.org/banned-in-the-usa/

   Book bans in public schools have recurred throughout American history, and have long been an issue of concern to PEN America, as a literary and free expression advocacy organization. Over the past nine months, the scope of such censorship has expanded rapidly. In response, PEN America has collated an Index of School Book Bans, offering a snapshot of the trend. The Index documents decisions to ban books in school libraries and classrooms in the United States from July 1, 2021 to March 31, 2022.

   Today, state legislators are introducing — and in some cases passing — educational gag orders to censor teachers, proposals to track and monitor teachers, and mechanisms to facilitate book banning in school districts. At the same time, the scale and force of book banning in local communities is escalating dramatically. In recent years PEN America has typically encountered a handful of such cases each year. The findings in this report demonstrate a profound increase in both the number of books banned and the intense focus on books that relate to communities of color and LGBTQ+ subjects over the past nine months.

   It is not just the number of books removed that is disturbing, but the processes–or lack thereof–through which such removals are being carried out.

   What is a school book ban?

   PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a previously accessible book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.

   Are school boards following their policies?

   Analyzing the 1,586 bans listed in the Index, PEN America found that the vast majority (98%) involved departures of various kinds from best practice guidelines designed to protect students’ First Amendment rights. School authorities in many cases have made opaque or ad hoc decisions, in some cases circumventing existing policies.

   Across the Index as a whole, just 4% of the 1,586 individual book bans have been the result of processes that began with the filing of formal challenges to library or classroom materials by community members. The other 96% of bans in the Index were initiated by school administrators or board members, in a wide range of ways, sometimes in response to comments from community members at board meetings, and rarely with the requisite written forms that most district policies officially require. These forms are important in that they require the complainant to demonstrate familiarity with the book as whole and to specify their objections in terms that can be reviewed. They are intended to guard against reliance on innuendo, unarticulated prejudices, assumptions, misunderstandings, outside pressure, or conjecture as a basis to ban books. In the words of the NCAC, such written forms help reviewers “assess the complainants’ judgment and motives.”

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8. April 12, 2022 at 11:19 am

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Omar Abdel-Baqui / Wall Street Journal:
   Elon Musk appears to have deleted some tweets critical of Twitter and its leadership; Musk liked a tweet saying he was “told to play nice and not speak freely” — Elon Musk appears to have deleted some tweets taking aim at Twitter Inc. amid his decision not to join the social-media company’s board of directors.

   Elon Musk Deletes Tweets Criticizing Twitter After Deciding Against Joining Board
   Tesla CEO and Twitter’s largest shareholder ‘liked’ a tweet suggesting he was ‘told to play nice and not speak freely.’
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-deletes-tweets-criticizing-twitter-after-deciding-against-joining-board-11649681150?mod=djemalertNEWS

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9. April 13, 2022 at 2:44 pm

   Tomi Engdahl says:

   Colour picker
   https://www.google.com/search?q=color+%23b0100c&rlz=1C1GCEU_fiFI946FI952&ei=nUVMYqqoOt2Exc8P47SekAE&ved=0ahUKEwjq6pWKhf32AhVdQvEDHWOaBxIQ4dUDCA4&uact=5&oq=color+%23b0100c&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EANKBAhBGABKBAhGGABQ5wpY5wpgxQxoAHAAeACAAWWIAcoBkgEDMi4xmAEAoAECoAEBwAEB&sclient=gws-wiz

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10. April 13, 2022 at 2:45 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.timeanddate.com/stopwatch/

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11. April 13, 2022 at 2:45 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    CSS Color Codes
    https://www.quackit.com/css/css_color_codes.cfm

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12. April 14, 2022 at 4:07 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Uutismedialla tärkeä rooli kamppailussa väärää tietoa vastaan
    https://www.helsinki.fi/fi/uutiset/demokratia/uutismedialla-tarkea-rooli-kamppailussa-vaaraa-tietoa-vastaan

    Uutismedian ja journalismin merkitys demokratialle korostuu entisestään kriisiaikoina. Vaikka digitaaliset alustat ovat mullistaneet mediamarkkinoita kaikkialla, tutkimus osoittaa, että uutismedialla on edelleen vahva asema ja sen rooli erityisesti harhaanjohtavan tiedon torjumisessa nähdään korvaamattomana.

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13. April 15, 2022 at 10:47 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Trump’s Truth Social app branded a disaster
    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60922717

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14. April 15, 2022 at 12:28 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    OpenBB wants to be an open source challenger to Bloomberg Terminal
    https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/30/openbb-wants-to-be-an-open-source-challenger-to-bloomberg-terminal/

    Anyone who has worked in the financial services sector will at least be aware of Bloomberg Terminal, a research, data and analytics platform used to garner real-time insights on the financial markets. Bloomberg Terminal has emerged as something of an industry standard, used by more than 300,000 people at just about every major financial and investment-related corporation globally — but it costs north of $20,000 per user each year to license, a fee that is prohibitively high for many organizations.

    This is something that OpenBB has set out to tackle, by democratizing an industry that has been “dominated by monopolistic and proprietary incumbents” for the past four decades — and it’s doing so with an entirely open source approach.

    After launching initially last year as an open source investment research terminal called Gamestonk Terminal, the founding team, Didier Lopes, Artem Veremey, and James Maslek, were approached by OSS Capital to make an investment and build a commercial company on top of the terminal.

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15. April 15, 2022 at 2:48 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.hostingpalvelu.fi/blogi/kotisivujen-nopeus-miksi-se-on-tarkeaa-ja-miten-parantaa-sita/

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16. April 15, 2022 at 8:03 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    The concepts of “person” or “people” are not gender-neutral despite being gender-neutral terms, according to a new study. An analysis of over 630 billion words published online shows that these concepts are more often used when talking about men than when talking about women.
    https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/genderneutral-words-like-person-and-people-actually-have-a-male-bias/

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17. April 16, 2022 at 7:11 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://idafram.fi/toitamme/verkkomainonta-tuplasi-myynnin/

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18. April 16, 2022 at 7:32 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://www.hostingpalvelu.fi/blogi/5-vinkkia-google-nakyvyyden-kasvattamiseen/

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19. April 16, 2022 at 7:32 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WooCommerce

    https://woocommerce.com/posts/woocommerce-pricing/

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20. April 17, 2022 at 8:10 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    If you purchase via links on our site, we may receive affiliate commissions.

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21. April 17, 2022 at 5:41 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    DuckDuckGo removes search results for major pirate websites
    YouTube-dl also appears to be gone.
    https://www.engadget.com/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-sites-204936242.html

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22. April 17, 2022 at 7:15 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    The Web Foundation is taking on deceptive design
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/23/deceptive-design-patterns-project/

    The Web Foundation‘s Tech Policy Design Lab is working on an interesting-looking project to counter deceptive design — aka dark patterns* — with the goal of producing a portfolio of UX and UI prototypes which it hopes to persuade tech companies to adopt and policymakers to be inspired by as they fashion rules to make the online experience less exploitative of web users.

    The Design Lab was launched last year to be the “action arm” of a wider Web Foundation initiative, announced back in late 2018 — when the not-for-profit digital access group proposed a “Contract for the Web” ahead of the 30th anniversary of World Wide Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention.

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23. April 17, 2022 at 8:56 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Open source project Tea is brew2 for web3
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/23/open-source-project-tea-is-brew2-for-web3/

    Howell infamously tweeted about being rejected for a job at Google because he couldn’t answer a niche technical question by hand despite the fact that “90% of [Google’s] engineers” use the software he wrote. Since that 2015 tweet, compensation for open source developers has remained a hot-button issue, and popular developer platform GitHub launched a feature in 2019 that allows users to send tips to their favorite open source coders.

    Howell sees the rise of new projects in the web3 space as an opportunity to reshape how these open source developers are compensated for their work. To that end, he just announced the launch of a new venture called Tea that he co-founded alongside three fellow engineers, which he says will help reward open source programmers for their contributions to web3 projects. In a nod to Homebrew, Tea referred to itself as “brew2 for web3” in its announcement.

    Howell explained that volunteer open source programmers who create software that ends up being widely used often face pressure to iterate and troubleshoot the code they created without compensation for doing so. He cited the example of a cybersecurity vulnerability found in the popular Log4J open source tool, which, when discovered, prompted users to direct “quite a lot of hatred and anger” to the original developers.

    “They fixed the bug, but they pointed out quite fairly that no one sponsors their project or gives them any money in [exchange for] their free time,” Howell said.

    Open source developers often build a product or tool because they themselves need it, and they choose to share it for free with the broader community. Howell said this was his original motivation in launching Homebrew.

    “When an open source developer gives [their code] to the community, it becomes a vital part of the machinery that runs the internet, like a tower of blocks … suddenly, they’re obligated to maintain these things, or they’re breaking the internet,” he added.

    Through digital contracts, Tea aims to distribute value to open source devs in what Howell likened to a “loyalty scheme,” wherein sponsors of open source projects can receive perks such as special access to the project developers in return for their investment.

    Its product will automate the process for companies and individuals who use open source software to sponsor its developers. Howell hopes that Tea can play a role in helping the web3 ecosystem evolve in a direction more supportive of open source developers than the internet itself, or web2, did.

    “For 80 to 90% of most web2 companies, their stack is open source. They contribute a bit, they feel bad about it, but they have no good system for distributing that value to all of the open source they use. The amount of manpower that this would take is astronomical,” Howell said. “So here we are, proposing this new way of automating it for them to enough of an extent that they can actually help the ecosystem that they depend upon.”

    Tea’s value seems to lie in its ability to guarantee security and reliability to users of open source software projects, who in turn will be incentivized to compensate developers on Tea for those assurances. The software developed with Tea will remain free for users — a core tenet for much of the open source community — while developers will be able to earn compensation for their work indirectly, Howell said. This means that even if a sponsor doesn’t directly back a particular project, Tea’s “inflationary mechanism” will assess each project’s popularity within the community and allocate rewards proportionally across the Tea ecosystem.

    A developer who wants to participate in receiving rewards would complete their project and register it to a “graph,” or database, maintained by Tea. The graph will also register any dependencies the project relied on to be built, Howell explained.

    Once a project is built, Tea creates a new security layer that will notify both the users and owners of that project if something in its stack ends up being broken, he added.

    Those participating in the Tea ecosystem can reward developers by purchasing utility tokens associated with each project, which will give the participants access to special agreements with the project’s developers. For example, a token holder could be granted a license agreement in which the developers could guarantee they will provide ongoing support for the project.

    Tea will also feature a “slashing” mechanism, wherein control of a project can be transferred from one developer to another in the event that the project needs urgent support and its creator is unwilling or unable to provide it after a designated grace period, according to Howell.

    “We’re building this decentralized graph for open source, and we’re going to offer that to everybody,” Howell’s co-founder Tim Lewis told TechCrunch.

    “There are famous examples of open source developers yanking their packages from the internet, which caused development trouble, and sometimes, it’s kind of pernicious in the damages caused. While I respect the desire and freedom [of the developer] to do such things, we think the open source ecosystem is more important than one person’s bad day. So our graph is an immutable, decentralized and fundamentally much more secure way for open source to be stored in reference,” Lewis said.

    Reply
24. April 20, 2022 at 11:33 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    David Pierce / The Verge:
    Brave browser introduces De-AMP, a feature which bypasses Google-hosted AMP pages and takes users straight to the original website — Yet another nail in the AMP coffin — Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered …

    Brave is bypassing Google AMP pages because they’re ‘harmful to users’
    Yet another nail in the AMP coffin
    https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/19/23032776/brave-de-amp-google-browser?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

    Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users straight to the original website. “Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether,” Brave said in a blog post. “And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP / Google code from being loaded and executed.”

    Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn’t mince words about its stance toward Google’s version of the web. “In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large,” Brave’s blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google even more knowledge of users’ browsing habits, confuses users, and can often be slower than normal web pages. And it warned that the next version of AMP — so far just called AMP 2.0 — will be even worse.

    De-AMP: Cutting Out Google and Enhancing Privacy
    https://brave.com/privacy-updates/18-de-amp/

    Reply
25. April 20, 2022 at 11:33 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    New York Times:
    A timeline of warnings from investors over the past decade about a tech startup bubble that never burst; instead of a collapse, things got bubblier — The venture capitalists are sounding the alarm. At posh conferences, they buzz about falling valuations for start-ups.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/19/technology/tech-startup-bubble.html

    Reply
26. April 22, 2022 at 11:01 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
    In a speech on disinformation, Obama said social media firms’ design choices contribute to polarization, and called for more transparency and Section 230 reform — – Former President Barack Obama criticized social media companies for contributing to polarization through design choices on their platforms.

    Obama calls for tech regulation to combat disinformation on social media
    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/21/obama-calls-for-tech-regulation-to-combat-disinformation-on-internet.html

    Former President Barack Obama criticized social media companies for contributing to polarization through design choices on their platforms.
    “The very design of these platforms seems to be tilting us in the wrong direction,” Obama said on Thursday.
    Congress should consider reforms to Section 230, he said, and tech firms should “be required to have a higher standard of care when it comes to advertising on their site.”

    watch now
    VIDEO02:27
    Former Pres. Obama takes on disinformation, says it could get worse with AI

    Former President Barack Obama said on Thursday that the spread of disinformation online is harming American democracy, and the tech industry needs regulation and legislation to address the problem.

    “The very design of these platforms seems to be tilting us in the wrong direction,” Obama said at a Stanford Cyber Policy Center event.

    “I might never have been elected president if it hadn’t been for websites like — and I’m dating myself — MySpace, Meetup and Facebook, that allowed an army of young volunteers to organize raise money, spread our message,” Obama said. “That’s what elected me.”

    But the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley was less tense at the time. Things changed dramatically in 2016, following the election of Donald Trump as president and the revelation of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal.

    Obama said he’s “not convinced that wholesale repeal of Section 230 is the answer.” President Joe Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, advocated for such a policy during his campaign for the White House, though most Democrats have taken less extreme positions.

    Many conservative lawmakers have accused social media companies of censoring on the basis of ideology, though the platforms have denied this and said they simply enforce their community guidelines. Obama indicated that free speech arguments have severe limitations.

    “I’m pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist,” Obama said. “The First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter, any more than it applies to editorial decisions made by the New York Times or Fox News. Never has. Social media companies already make choices about what is or is not allowed on their platforms and how that content appears. Both explicitly through content moderation and implicitly through algorithms. The problem is we often don’t know what principles govern those decisions.”

    ‘Tell the meat inspector’

    Obama advocated for increased transparency around the design of tech platforms, likening the concept to a proprietary meatpacking method.

    “They don’t have to reveal to the world what that technique is. They do have to tell the meat inspector,” he said. “In the same way, tech companies should be able to protect their intellectual property while also following certain safety standards that we as a country, not just them, have agreed are necessary for the greater good.”

    Obama said internet companies aren’t solely responsible for the polarization that’s ripped through society.

    “What social media platforms have done though, thanks to their increasing market dominance and their emphasis on speed, is accelerate the decline of newspapers and other traditional news sources,” he said.

    Obama appealed to tech companies and their employees directly, acknowledging the difficulty in advancing legislation.

    “It’s a chance for companies to do the right thing. You’ll still make money, but you’ll feel better,

    Reply
27. April 22, 2022 at 2:31 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    What is ‘Web3’? Here’s the vision for the future of the internet from the man who coined the phrase
    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/20/what-is-web3-gavin-wood-who-invented-the-word-gives-his-vision.html

    Gavin Wood, founder of blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies, coined the term “Web 3.0” in 2014, laying out his vision of the future of the internet.
    For Wood, Web3 is truly decentralized and a more democratic version of the current internet — one that is not dominated by a handful of huge players like Amazon and Microsoft as it is today.
    Wood said that while cryptocurrencies have become popular, Web3 may not rely heavily on cryptocurrencies.

    Computer scientist Gavin Wood coined the term “Web 3.0” in 2014, laying out his vision for the future of the internet.

    The phrase, also shortened to “Web3,” has become an internet buzzword recently with high-profile technologists, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, debating the meaning of the term.

    Wood, who is one of the co-founders of Ethereum and founder of blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies, spoke to CNBC on an episode of the “Beyond the Valley” podcast to discuss his Web3 vision.

    What’s wrong with the current web?

    Proponents call Web3 a decentralized version of the internet — one that is not dominated by a handful of powerful players such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

    Web1 started off with the idea of an open and decentralized internet, but Web2 — the internet we know today — led to the birth of trillion dollar technology companies that have a strong influence over the internet and own a lot of the infrastructure the web is built on.

    “The big problem with this is … sort of the same thing as placing all your eggs in one basket, if something goes wrong with one of these services, you know, the service is suddenly unavailable for an awful lot of people,” Wood told CNBC’s “Beyond the Valley” podcast.

    “Furthermore, the keyword here is trust. We’re having to trust the people behind the services. We’re having to trust the owners of the companies that run the service … And so yeah, we kind of managed to architect ourselves into this, somewhat like dystopian version of what the world could be.”
    So what is Web3?

    For Wood, Web3 is truly decentralized and a more democratic version of the current internet.

    “Web3 is really sort of an alternative vision of the web, where the services that we use are not hosted by a single service provider company, but rather they’re sort of purely algorithmic things that are, in some sense, hosted by everybody. So it’s like, it’s very peer to peer, right? … The idea being that all participants sort of contribute a small slice of the ultimate service,” Wood said.

    “And thus, no one really has any advantage over anyone else … not in the same sense, at least as, as you know, when you, for example, go to Amazon or you go to eBay or Facebook, where the company behind the service really has absolute power over what it is that they do in providing the service.”

    Web3′s key terms and tech

    Blockchain is a key technology behind Web3. It is most-often associated with the cryptocurrency bitcoin and is the technology that underpins it. The bitcoin blockchain is a public ledger of activity of the bitcoin network. But bitcoin is not owned by a single company or person and it is not issued by a central authority like a central bank. Instead, it is decentralized and the network is maintained by a global group of people running specialized computers.

    So blockchain is a key technology and decentralization an important phrase.

    Web3 is based on the idea of a “trustless” model. Right now, we have to trust companies to deliver the service they promise. But if Web3 products and services are built on blockchains and are decentralized then you’d only have to trust the underlying algorithm to deliver that product.

    That carries its own risks of course.

    What could a Web3 version of Twitter look like?

    Wood gave the example of a Web3 version of Twitter which he said would give more users control over their posts and make verifying identities easier, for example.

    “So it’s much harder for someone to like, fake my identity, because we have … cryptographic-based proofs that I have done this, and only I could possibly have done this,” Wood said.

    “We have probably elements of sort of greater, like freedom of speech … in the sense that the system isn’t going to inherently have gatekeepers that in the same way that you know, there are Twitter employees that act effectively as gatekeepers to the system.”

    Where does cryptocurrency come into this?

    Web3 advocates suggest cryptocurrencies will play a key role in the future of the internet. An example could be where there is a Web3 application that runs on a certain blockchain that uses a specific digital coin.

    For example, services that run on the Ethereum blockchain may require ether-based digital tokens.

    here have been thousands of virtual currencies that have popped up over the past few years. But Wood said that Web3 the way he envisions it, may not rely heavily on cryptocurrencies.

    “I suspect that currency will continue to play a role in services. But I think … overall, we’re going to start seeing services be delivered without the need to use tokens,” Wood told CNBC.

    How will regulation work?

    So if a Web3 service is built on the same theory of decentralization as bitcoin, how will regulators approach it?

    For now, countries around the world are still trying to figure out how best to regulate cryptocurrencies and related technologies. Web3 is a part of that conversation.

    Wood suggests it will be difficult for authorities to regulate the Web3 services themselves. Instead, it could be in an app’s “own self interest” in terms of their product to bring in rules that align with regulators, Wood said.

    He added that regulators might look to regulate the “users of the service rather than the service itself.”

    Will it be the end of tech giants?

    Web3 advocates suggest that with Web3, the power of technology giants could be challenged.

    However, those same companies like Microsoft and Twitter are also investing in Web3.

    Wood said it will be “hard to make a dent … in these Goliaths” but he likened their potential plight to Microsoft in the late 2000s and into the coming years.

    “It didn’t matter that you were running the Windows operating system, or authoring your document in Microsoft Word … we use the web as a platform, and the web could be used on any operating system,” Wood said.

    “Ultimately … I would hope that Web3, fulfils the needs of the future in a way that can never really be fulfilled by these centralized service providers,” he added.

    Reply
28. April 23, 2022 at 5:45 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    EU:ssa päästy sopuun netti­lain tiukennuksista – syyniin muun muassa viha­puhe ja dis­informaatio https://www.is.fi/digitoday/art-2000008769599.html

    Reply
29. April 24, 2022 at 3:01 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Google, Meta, and others will have to explain their algorithms under new EU legislation
    The Digital Services Act will re-shape the online world
    https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/23/23036976/eu-digital-services-act-finalized-algorithms-targeted-advertising

    The EU has agreed on another ambitious piece of legislation to police the online world.

    Early Saturday morning after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover for non-compliance.

    “The DSA will upgrade the ground-rules for all online services in the EU,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. “It gives practical effect to the principle that what is illegal offline, should be illegal online. The greater the size, the greater the responsibilities of online platforms.”

    The DSA shouldn’t be confused with the DMA or Digital Markets Act, which was agreed upon in March. Both acts affect the tech world, but the DMA focuses on creating a level playing field between businesses, while the DSA deals with how companies police content on their platforms. The DSA will therefore likely have a more immediate impact on internet users.

    Although the legislation only applies to EU citizens, the effect of these laws will certainly be felt in other parts of the world, too. Global tech companies may decide it is more cost-effective to implement a single strategy to police content and take the EU’s comparatively stringent regulations as their benchmark.

    Reply
30. April 25, 2022 at 7:42 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Twitter accepts Elon Musk’s $44B acquisition offer
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/twitter-accepts-elon-musks-43b-acquisition-offer/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook

    Tesla CEO Elon Musk is infamous for using Twitter to tease and tease out various ideas he has about his business interests, cryptocurrency, politics and life in general, but today it looks like he’s making good one of the biggest of his musings. Twitter has announced that it has accepted Musk’s offer to acquire the publicly-traded company at $54.20/share, valuing the social media platform at $44 billion.

    Moments after the news broke that Twitter trading was halted, the company issued a press release confirming that it was accepting Musk’s offer to take the social network private.

    https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elon-musk-to-acquire-twitter-301532245.html

    Reply
31. April 26, 2022 at 6:12 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Jack Dorsey says Elon Musk “is the singular solution I trust”
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/jack-dorsey-says-elon-musk-is-the-singular-solution-i-trust/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook

    Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and current Block Head, has weighed on how he feels about Elon Musk buying Twitter. In a tweet thread that starts out with a link to Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place,” Dorsey said that “in principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company, however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”

    Reply
32. April 26, 2022 at 6:16 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Alright Elon, don’t fuck it up
    https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/alright-elon-dont-fuck-it-up/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook

    Elon Musk’s quest to buy Twitter came to a close today with a win for the technology mogul. Regardless of what we might have thought when Twitter was busy circling its wagons with a poison-pill defense against takeover the deal is done, and, well, here we are.

    So, Elon, don’t fuck it up.

    Twitter is not perfect and never has been. I haven’t always agreed with the company’s product choices or policy decisions. But what Twitter has mostly done during its life is keep its time-series feed accessible while working to conserve as much room for speech as possible while working on the spam issue. It’s worked.

    The remit ahead of Elon is to somehow carve a path forward that makes the platform even more enticing to more folks. Some of what the company’s new owner had to say in his announcement sounds fine — “[making] Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans” — but it’s not a perfect list.

    Reply
33. April 26, 2022 at 7:02 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Ukraine War Prompts Europe’s New Emergency Rules for the Internet https://www.wired.com/story/europe-digital-services-act/
    The Digital Services Act has granted the European Commission unprecedented power over tech companies in times of war.

    Reply
34. April 26, 2022 at 10:36 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Brad Stone / Bloomberg:
    Elon Musk’s Twitter bid is a political takeover to control one of the world’s largest megaphones and impose his libertarianism on moderation and misinformation — Behind Elon Musk’s increasingly likely takeover of Twitter is the status of former President Donald Trump’s suspended account.

    Twitter Would Elevate Elon Musk to New Media Mogul Status
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-04-25/elon-musk-s-twitter-and-what-it-means-for-donald-trump-tweets

    Behind Elon Musk’s increasingly likely takeover of Twitter is the status of former President Donald Trump’s suspended account. But first…

    Musk has made it clear that his primary goal in buying Twitter is to support unfettered expression and reduce user bans or takedowns of individual tweets. “It’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech,” he said during an interview this month at the TED conference. “Twitter has become kind of the de-facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

    Though his own record of tolerating speech that is critical of his interests is decidedly mixed, Musk added: “A good sign as to whether there is free speech is: Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? If that is the case, then we have free speech.”

    Looming behind this seemingly laudable objective is the fate of the notorious Twitter account of a certain former American president and likely future presidential candidate. Twitter, as you recall, permanently banned Donald Trump from the service on Jan. 8, 2021, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” after the Capitol riots.

    Musk has said he prefers to stay out of politics, but there are good reasons to suspect a Musk-owned Twitter would reactivate President Trump’s account. Beyond saying at TED that he wants to be “very cautious with permanent bans,” Musk applauded the former president two years ago when Trump supported Tesla’s plans to reopen a California car factory during the Covid-19 lockdown. And in a few recent tweets, Musk appears to embrace the right-wing, Fox News-bingeing perspective on various cultural flashpoints. (“The woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable,” Musk tweeted last week.)

    These are all reasons why, as Politico wrote, conservatives have embraced Musk as their Twitter savior.

    Musk has also been a major donor to the American Civil Liberties Union. The group has written about the overriding advantages of preserving political speech by all candidates to help voters and courts make more informed decisions.

    Conservatives embrace Elon Musk as their Twitter savior
    Republican lawmakers jump at the potential for an owner of the social media platform who would allow for few, if any, restrictions on speech.
    https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/14/conservatives-elon-musk-twitter-00025447

    Conservatives are heralding Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter as a salve for years of feeling slighted and sidelined by the platform for their political views.

    The Tesla CEO and self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist” has offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion — a potential takeover that could lead to more controversial content allowed on the site, and be a boon for Republicans who allege Twitter censors their views.

    Reply
35. April 29, 2022 at 6:35 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    IETF Publishes RFC 9116 for security.txt’ File https://www.securityweek.com/ietf-publishes-rfc-9116-securitytxt-file
    The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has published RFC 9116 for the security.txt file, whose goal is to make it easier for researchers to responsibly disclose the vulnerabilities they find.

    IETF noted that RFC 9116 has an “Informational” status and it will not become an actual internet standard.

    RFC 9116 published for security.txtA security.txt file should be placed in a location where it is easy to find — the root or /.well-known/ directories are recommended — and it should include information on the organization’s vulnerability disclosure process.

    Reply
36. May 1, 2022 at 8:28 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    “Our European visitors are important to us.”
    I get actual means: Our European visitors are NOT important to us.

    Reply
37. May 2, 2022 at 7:38 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    You Can Now Ask Google to Remove Your Phone Number, Email or Address from Search Results https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/04/you-can-now-ask-google-to-remove-your-phone-number-email-or-address-from-search-results/
    Google said this week it is expanding the types of data people can ask to have removed from search results, to include personal contact information like your phone number, email address or physical address.

    Reply
38. May 2, 2022 at 10:31 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Käyttääkö yrityksesi Internet Exploreria? Nyt tuli kiire!
    https://etn.fi/index.php/13-news/13503-kaeyttaeaekoe-yrityksesi-internet-exploreria-nyt-tuli-kiire

    Microsoft lopettaa tuen vanhalle Internet Explorer -selaimelleen kesäkuun 15. päivä. Ilmeisesti osa organisaatioista on yhä riippuvainen IE:stä, sillä Microsoft kehottaa nyt yrityksiä vaihtamaan modernimpaan selaimeen ennen kesäkuun puoliväliä.

    Microsoftin mukaan yrityksen pitää laatia pikaisesti oma suunnitelma IE:n eläköittämiseen. Ensimmäinen askel on IE-moodi Microsoft Edge -selaimessa, jota tarvitaan IE-riippuvaisten saittien käyttämiseen. Mikäli ongelmia ilmenee – ilmeisesti niitä on laajasti – Microsoft kehottaa ottamaan yhteyttä App Assure -tiimiinsä.

    Sen jälkeen, kun on testattu, että eri palvelut toi,ivat MS Edgellä IE-moodin avulla, pitää organisaatiossa päättää IE policy- eli käyttöoikeuksista luopumista. Tähänkin Microsoft tarjoaa yrityksille tukea.

    Don’t wait for June 15th! Set your own IE retirement date.
    https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/don-t-wait-for-june-15th-set-your-own-ie-retirement-date/ba-p/3298143

    Reply
39. May 2, 2022 at 3:27 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Facebook’s New Nightmare—Is It Time To Delete Your Account?
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2022/04/28/facebooks-new-nightmare-is-it-time-to-delete-your-account/?utm_campaign=socialflowForbesMainFB&utm_medium=social&utm_source=ForbesMainFacebook&sh=7b1d81056b33

    Facebook has been under fire recently, with explosive whistleblower allegations and continuing regulatory headaches.

    Motherboard published the leaked document written by Facebook privacy engineers in the social network’s Ad and Business Product Team, in full.

    “We’ve built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.)

    “You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) … and it flows … everywhere. How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?”

    Another highlight in the document reads: “We can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose.’ And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect us to do.”

    The problem with the leaked Facebook document
    So what’s the problem with this? Privacy regulation such as the EU Genereal Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—which is thought of as the “gold standard” for people’s data protection rights—stipulates that data must be collected for a specific purpose. In other words, it can’t be collected for one reason, and then reused for something else.

    The latest Facebook document shows the social network faces a challenge in complying with this, since it appears to lack control over the data in the first place.

    “Not knowing where all the data is creates a fundamental problem within any business but when that data is personal user information, it causes huge privacy headaches and should be dealt with immediately,” says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET.

    A spokeswoman at Facebook owner Meta denies that the social network falls foul of regulation. “Considering this document does not describe our extensive processes and controls to comply with privacy regulations, it’s simply inaccurate to conclude that it demonstrates non-compliance.

    “New privacy regulations across the globe introduce different requirements and this document reflects the technical solutions we’re building to scale the current measures we have in place to manage data and meet our obligations.”

    Time to delete Facebook?
    Facebook saw a decline in user numbers for the first time this year—which have since recovered slightly—as its data-hungry practices become more clear to all.

    At the same time, Facebook has been hit hard by Apple’s App Tracking Transparency features, which allow people to prevent ad tracking on their iPhone. However, these features don’t prevent Facebook from collecting first party data—the data you provide to it on its site.

    Reply
40. May 2, 2022 at 3:27 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    “New Nightmare” lol. This is nothing new at all. It’s been going on for years. Google and the cellular providers have almost always done it.

    Reply
41. May 2, 2022 at 3:37 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    The Digital Accessibility Index found that Ireland’s top five grocery retail websites were classified as inaccessible based on an EU directive.

    A new report released today (27 April) claims that 72pc of leading Irish companies do not have websites that are considered accessible for people with disabilities.

    https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/irish-websites-digital-accessibility-index-disabilities

    Reply
42. May 3, 2022 at 2:32 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Mobiilisivut eivät ole mitään pieniä
    https://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2022/05/03/mobiilisivut-eivat-ole-mitaan-pienia/

    Mobiilisivujen koko on kymmenkertaistunut kymmenessä vuodessa arvidaan Aalto-yliopiston tekemässä selvityksessä. Onneksi muutamat verkkokaupat ovat jo ymmärtäneet, että vähemmän on enemmän, sanoo tutkimusta vetänyt professori Jukka Manner.

    Aalto-yliopiston tutkijat selvittivät 1000 suositun verkkosivun koon ja erot samassa kategoriassa jopa yli kymmenkertaisia. Professori Jukka Manner selvitti tutkimusryhmänsä kanssa myös sivustojen energiankulutusta.

    ”Kymmenessä vuodessa verkkosivujen koko on kolminkertaistunut ja mobiilisivujen koko jo kymmenkertaistunut. Tämä on ympäristön kannalta huolestuttavaa, sillä mobiiliverkossa tapahtuva datan siirto kuluttaa erittäin paljon energiaa ja lisää koko yhteiskunnan sähkönkulutusta’’, sanoo Jukka Manner.

    Ennusteiden mukaan ICT-alan osuus maailman energiankulutuksesta kasvaa reiluun viidennekseen jo tämän vuosikymmenen loppuun mennessä. Yksi syistä on verkkosivujen määrän ja koon huima kasvu.

    Analyysissä ladattiin 1 000 suositun suomalaisen verkkopalvelun etusivu ja lisäksi eri kategorioiden suosituimpia etusivuja. Mukana oli esimerkiksi mediasivuja, yliopistojen sivuja, suurimpien yritysten sivuja ja valtionhallinnon sivuja.

    Mittaukset tehtiin heinäkuussa 2021 Googlen kehittämällä avoimen lähdekoodin Lighthousella, jolla sivuista saadaan dataa, kuten resurssien koot kuten kuvat,

    Reply
43. May 3, 2022 at 2:33 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Analyysi suosituista Suomessa käytetyistä verkkosivuista
    https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/114010

    Reply
44. May 3, 2022 at 2:35 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Mobiilisaitin koko keskimäärin 2,4 megatavua
    https://etn.fi/index.php/13-news/13513-mobiilisaitin-koko-keskimaeaerin-2-4-megatavua

    Aalto-yliopistossa on selvitetty tuhannen suomalaisen verkkosivuston kokoa. Professori Jukka Mannerin vetämässä tutkimuksessa selvisi, että mobiilisaitti on kooltaan keskimäärin 2,4 megatavua. Tietokoneelle tehty sivusto on keskimäärin 2,7 megatavun kokoinen, joten ero on käytännössä olematon.

    Takavuosina, erityisesti netin alkuaikoina, sivustoja optimoitiin mahdollisimman kevyiksi. Esimerkiksi kuvia käsiteltiin mahdollisimman kevyiksi, sillä kaista oli erittäin pieni luonnonvara. Kymmenessä vuodessa mobiilisaittien koko on kymmenkertaistunut.

    Kyse ei ole mistään triviaalista ongelmasta. Ennusteiden mukaan ICT-alan osuus maailman energiankulutuksesta kasvaa reiluun viidennekseen jo tämän vuosikymmenen loppuun mennessä. Yksi syistä on verkkosivujen määrän ja koon huima kasvu, sanoo tietotekniikan professori Jukka Manner.

    - Kymmenessä vuodessa verkkosivujen koko on kolminkertaistunut ja mobiilisivujen koko jo kymmenkertaistunut. Tämä on ympäristön kannalta huolestuttavaa, sillä mobiiliverkossa tapahtuva datan siirto kuluttaa erittäin paljon energiaa ja lisää koko yhteiskunnan sähkönkulutusta.”

    Sivujen keskimääräinen koko oli noin 2,7 Mt tietokoneella, 3,4 Mt vieritetyllä tietokoneella, 2,4 Mt mobiililla ja 3,1 Mt vieritetyllä mobiililla. Mobiilisivut ovat siis jo lähes tasoissa perinteisten sivujen kanssa.

    Kuituverkossa, johon tietokone on usein yhdistetty, siirretyn bitin energiankulutus on vielä kohtuullinen. Sen sijaan mobiiliverkko, jota Suomessa käytetään paljon, kuluttaa energiaa jopa tuhat kertaa enemmän. Esimerkiksi kahden tunnin huippulaadukkaan 4K-resoluution elokuva mobiiliverkon kautta katsottuna kuluttaa sähköä saman verran kuin vaikka saunan lämmittäminen tai 20 kilometrin ajaminen sähköautolla.

    Manner korostaa, että sivujen kokoa ja energiankulutusta voidaan pienentää merkittävästi esimerkiksi käyttämällä jpg-kuvaformaattien sijasta png-kuvia, tarkastelemalla kuvien tarkkuutta ja huolehtimalla, ettei sivulla ole käyttämätöntä dataa JavaScript-tiedostoissa.

    Vaikka suurin osa sivuista oli lähellä koon keskiarvoa, joukossa oli myös selvästi pienempiä ja selvästi suurempia sivuja. Raskaimman yrityssivun koko perinteisessä verkkomuodossa oli yli 17 Mt, keveimmän vain 1 Mt. Yliopistojen suurin mobiilisivu oli 7,1 Mt, pienin vain 700 KB. Suurimpien kaupunkien kohdalla erot olivat vieläkin isommat, pienin sivu oli 1,2 Mt ja suurin jopa 61 Mt.

    Reply
45. May 4, 2022 at 12:21 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Reporters Without Borders:
    Reporters Without Borders publishes the 2022 edition of the World Press Freedom Index; the press freedom situation is “very bad” in a record 28 countries

    RSF’s 2022 World Press Freedom Index : a new era of polarisation
    https://rsf.org/en/rsfs-2022-world-press-freedom-index-new-era-polarisation

    The 20th World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reveals a two-fold increase in polarisation amplified by information chaos – that is, media polarisation fuelling divisions within countries, as well as polarisation between countries at the international level.

    The 2022 edition of the World Press Freedom Index, which assesses the state of journalism in 180 countries and territories, highlights the disastrous effects of news and information chaos – the effects of a globalised and unregulated online information space that encourages fake news and propaganda.

    Within democratic societies, divisions are growing as a result of the spread of opinion media following the “Fox News model” and the spread of disinformation circuits that are amplified by the way social media functions. At the international level, democracies are being weakened by the asymmetry between open societies and despotic regimes that control their media and online platforms while waging propaganda wars against democracies. Polarisation on these two levels is fuelling increased tension.

    The invasion of Ukraine (106th) by Russia (155th) at the end of February reflects this process, as the physical conflict was preceded by a propaganda war.

    Media polarisation is feeding and reinforcing internal social divisions in democratic societies such as the United States (42nd), despite president Joe Biden’s election. The increase in social and political tension is being fuelled by social media and new opinion media, especially in France (26th).

    The trio of Nordic countries at the top of the Index – Norway, Denmark and Sweden – continues to serve as a democratic model where freedom of expression flourishes

    The situation is classified as “very bad” in a record number of 28 countries in this year’s Index, while 12 countries, including Belarus (153rd) and Russia (155th), are on the Index’s red list (indicating “very bad” press freedom situations) on the map. The world’s 10 worst countries for press freedom include Myanmar (176th), where the February 2021 coup d’état set press freedom back by 10 years, as well as China, Turkmenistan (177th), Iran (178th), Eritrea (179th) and North Korea (180th).

    New way of compiling the Index

    Working with a committee of seven experts* from the academic and media sectors, RSF developed a new methodology to compile the 20th World Press Freedom Index.

    The new methodology defines press freedom as “the effective possibility for journalists, as individuals and as groups, to select, produce and disseminate news and information in the public interest, independently from political, economic, legal and social interference, and without threats to their physical and mental safety.” In order to reflect press freedom’s complexity, five new indicators are now used to compile the Index: the political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context, and security.

    https://rsf.org/en/index

    Reply
46. May 6, 2022 at 10:03 am

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    This Surprisingly Responsive Website Is Hosted on an HP 200LX Palmtop From the Early ’90s
    https://www.hackster.io/news/this-surprisingly-responsive-website-is-hosted-on-an-hp-200lx-palmtop-from-the-early-90s-eb7c2d9a2c84

    Able to serve around a half million visitors per day, this palmtop is pushing more data than its creators could have ever dreamed.

    Reply
47. May 6, 2022 at 12:29 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    ToFu, MoFu & BoFu – Use the Right Content to Optimize Conversion Rate
    https://www.gwebpro.com/tofu-mofu-and-bofu-use-the-right-content-to-optimize-conversion-rate/

    Customers usually weigh several factors before they make a buying decision. It’s not like they’ll see your advertising and instantly make a purchase. To have them make the jump from initial interest to purchase, you’ll need to understand the three stages of the sales funnel (ToFu, BoFu and MoFu).

    Let’s learn how to create content for these inbound marketing stages and optimize the conversion rate.

    Middle of the funnel (MOFU)
    https://snov.io/glossary/middle-of-the-funnel-mofu/#aoh=16514090674979&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=Julkaisija%3A%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fsnov.io%2Fglossary%2Fmiddle-of-the-funnel-mofu%2F

    TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU stand for three different stages of the buyer’s journey: top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel. During each stage, specific content is shared to move the prospect further through the sales funnel and close the deal without being too intrusive.

    37 ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu Content Types for Your Sales Funnel Stages
    https://www.webascender.com/blog/27-tofu-mofu-and-bofu-content-types-for-your-sales-funnel-stages/

    Reply
48. May 6, 2022 at 1:05 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Googlen Universal Analytics poistuu käytöstä – mitä seuraavaksi?
    https://www.hopkins.fi/google-universal-analytics-kayttajan-vaihtoehdot-webinaari/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paidsocial&utm_campaign=webinaari-uapoistuu-liikenne&utm_content=pagepost&fbclid=IwAR2kCO2RVe1A8pKlvHO-BabeaZqCd_SGnuxuqEIt2nKq1q4HFrVFLwup3Ko

    Kannattaako Google Universal Analyticsiä enää käyttää? Mitä tilanteesta pitää tietää? Mitä konkreettisia vaihtoehtoja markkinoijalla on?

    Google on ilmoittanut sulkevansa Universal Analyticsin ja Universal Analytics 360:n vuonna 2023.

    Aikaraja on tiukka: Universal Analytics lopettaa datan keräämisen 1.7.2023. Siksi analytiikka on päivitettävä ensi tilassa, jotta kesällä 2023 käytössäsi olisi vertailudataa 12 kuukauden ajalta.

    Reply
49. May 6, 2022 at 1:08 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    Matti Mörttisen kolumni: Somettuminen on uusi suomettuminen
    Jokaisella aikakaudella on syntinsä, ja uusi sukupolvi avaa aina aiemmat synnit kaikkien kauhisteltavaksi, kirjoittaa Mörttinen.
    https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12267545

    Reply
50. May 6, 2022 at 1:20 pm

    Tomi Engdahl says:

    https://contractbook.com/blog/why-pdfs-are-bad-for-business-and-what-you-should-do-instead

    Reply