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.
2,217 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Parler was jubilant about Kanye West buying it. Then the problems started.
An email to so-called VIPs for the site raised a couple questions; among them: Do the VIPs know that they’re VIPs?
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2022/10/20/parler-was-jubilant-about-kanye-west-buying-it-then-the-problems-started-00062716
Tomi Engdahl says:
Meta shares plunge 24% to the lowest price since 2016
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/10/27/meta-stock-falls-23percent-on-earnings-miss-analyst-downgrades.html
KEY POINTS
The parent company of Facebook reported its second straight quarterly decline.
Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses its VR headsets, lost over $9 billion in the first three quarters.
Morgan Stanley, Cowen and KeyBanc downgraded Meta on Thursday, citing increased spending.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/27/a-collection-of-websites-that-look-like-desktops/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Musk Now Gets Chance to Defeat Twitter’s Many Fake Accounts
https://www.securityweek.com/musk-now-gets-chance-defeat-twitters-many-fake-accounts
Twitter’s unending fight against spam accounts is now a problem for new owner Elon Musk, who pledged in April to defeat the bot scourge or “die trying!”
He later cited bots as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. Now that the billionaire has completed the deal, he’s faced with the task of delivering on his promise to clean up the fake profiles that have preoccupied him and bedeviled Twitter since long before he expressed interest in acquiring it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sources: Elon Musk told Twitter engineers to work on a Vine reboot that may be ready by the end of 2022; Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 and shut it down in 2016 — Elon Musk has instructed Twitter engineers to work on a Vine reboot that could be ready by year end, multiple sources tell Axios.
Scoop: Musk team working to reboot Vine this year
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/31/vine-tiktok-twitter-musk-team-reboot
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/05/jack-dorsey-speaks-twitter-layoffs/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.hackster.io/news/google-launches-its-second-openmpw-free-silicon-chip-program-on-globalfoundries-180nm-node-7c740ddc7f15
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://idafram.fi/toitamme/uusia-asiakkaita-48-tehokkaammin/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://idafram.fi/ajankohtaista/google-data-studio-on-nyt-looker-studio/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://boksi.com/fi/asiakastarinat/luhta-sportswear-company
Tomi Engdahl says:
Please stop making Discord servers for things that shouldn’t be Discord servers
By Lauren Morton published May 16, 2022
I need everyone to stop making servers for game mods and wikis and indie games.
https://www.pcgamer.com/please-stop-making-discord-servers-for-things-that-shouldnt-be-discord-servers/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_medium=social
Now that Discord has made itself the de facto gaming hangout space and is pushing for ubiquity in all online communities, it may feel like whatever you’re organizing has to have a server for folks to join.
I promise it doesn’t. Please don’t start a Discord server if you are:
An overworked indie game dev without a community manager.
A modder who already has an account on NexusMods or ModDB.
A new Twitch streamer still learning to moderate your chat while live.
Using it as an alternative to a wiki for a game. Please no.
Reading patch notes in a chat log where every single message is highlighted with the equal importance of an @everyone tag, makes me want to scream.
Bug report channels are chaos: developers and modders get flooded with complaints about bugs, then discussions of the bug, and then 10 more people reporting the same bug. If you’ve ever been annoyed by duplicate issue threads on Reddit or a forum, know that Discord is far worse.
Back in 2015, Twitch livestreamers were some of the earliest adopters of Discord as a community space for their fans. I
We were all so fed up with Skype and Facebook groups and subreddits that Discord felt magical. It doesn’t anymore: in 2022, your livestream probably doesn’t need a server, either. Everyone watching is already in their own 41 servers, and getting any of them to treat yours as their main social space is a more difficult pitch than ever.
Discord servers are not forums
“Discord replaces forums” is just three words to start a fight with me.
Even if you’ve never seen someone learn about internet toxicity in real time, you’ve almost certainly been in a server where the owner forgot to take away permissions for members to @everyone in chat, leading to a nightmare surge of notifications. Maybe you’ve seen an overwhelmed server owner break under the pressure and nuke their entire community server, booting everyone and wiping entire channels.
Even after witnessing so many slip ups, I find it difficult to draw hard lines around what shouldn’t be a server.
Mods don’t need Discord servers
Indie games can have chaotic, unmanaged servers, but some have publishers handling that aspect
Twitch streamers don’t necessarily need a Discord server either
If you’re dead-set on making a Discord server for a project that doesn’t for sure need one, I’m begging you to use a few tricks to keep it manageable. Consider making the majority (or all) of your channels read-only. If this is a glorified billboard, no need for everyone to chime in. Enable the two-factor authentication requirement for anyone with moderation powers. No more hacker mutinies, please.
And for the love of all that is holy: skip the #memes channel.
Tomi Engdahl says:
elon musk teki tyhmemmän tempun?
potki puolet twitterin ihmisistä pois.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Sources: Elon Musk pitched charging most or all Twitter users a subscription; internal estimates: the new Blue could lose the company ~$6/user/month in the US — Will he go through with it? PLUS: Botched layoffs, how the new Blue could lose money, and more
Musk discusses putting all of Twitter behind a paywall
Will he go through with it? PLUS: Botched layoffs, how the new Blue could lose money, and more
https://www.platformer.news/p/musk-discusses-putting-all-of-twitter
If Friday brought massive layoffs to Twitter, Monday brought fresh evidence that the company will never be the same. Musk has discussed putting the entire site behind a paywall, Platformer has learned. Meanwhile, the company is scrambling to lure back employees who it laid off mere hours ago, and some workers say the economics behind its soon-to-relaunch Twitter Blue subscription could actually lose the company money.
All of this took place against the backdrop of a company that still has yet to hear anything official from Musk, via email or a companywide meeting. As Monday began, after losing thousands of their colleagues days earlier, many employees didn’t know who their managers are.
Meanwhile, Musk’s increasingly erratic leadership, coupled with his habit of tweeting in eye-watering bad taste, gave many current and former employees I spoke with a sinking feeling about the future of their company.
Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Source: Twitter is telling advertisers the site added 15M+ mDAUs since the end of Q2, “crossing the quarter billion mark”; Musk also tweeted user numbers are up — Twitter’s daily user growth hit “all-time highs” during the first full week of Elon Musk owning the platform …
Twitter tells advertisers that user growth is at ‘all-time highs’ under Elon Musk / But will that be enough for advertisers to come back?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23445476/elon-musk-twitter-user-growth-all-time-high-advertisers
Jonathan Vanian / CNBC:
Early Twitter investor Chris Sacca says Elon Musk is “alone right now and winging this” and needs people around him willing to “speak some truth to power” — – Venture capitalist Chris Sacca was one of Twitter’s first investors and an early user.
Twitter early investor Chris Sacca says Elon Musk is ‘alone right now and winging this’
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/07/twitter-investor-chris-sacca-says-elon-musk-is-alone-right-now.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Pierce / The Verge:
An interview with YouTube Shorts Director of Product Management Todd Sherman on UI challenges as YouTube rolls out the TikTok competitor to its TV apps — YouTube Shorts is working. That much Todd Sherman knows for sure. Sherman, the product manager behind YouTube’s endless-scrolling …
YouTube Shorts are coming to your TV — and taking over the platform / Merging short-form and long-form YouTube is how Shorts wins, but doing it without complicating and wrecking the rest of the app won’t be easy.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23444530/youtube-shorts-tv-app-tiktok
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elon Musk’s response to fake verified Elon Twitter accounts: a new permanent ban policy for impersonation
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/6/23443871/elon-musk-twitter-permaban-impersonation-parody
Tomi Engdahl says:
Web Scraping – Is It Legal and Can It Be Prevented?
https://www.securityweek.com/web-scraping-it-legal-and-can-it-be-prevented
Web scraping is a sensitive issue. Should a third party be allowed to visit a website and use automated tools to gather and store information at scale from that website? What if that information includes personal data? What does the law say? Can it be prevented? This is what we’ll discuss.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is the use of automation to collect data from websites. In effect, it is little different to a person visiting a website to see what can be discovered – except the use of bots makes it thousands of times quicker and more efficient across many more sites.
It is rarely, if ever, ad hoc. The organization conducting the scraping knows what information is being sought, and which sites should be visited. Examples include ecommerce sites seeking to learn competitive pricing and/or holiday season campaigns. Real Estate agencies might scrape other agencies to learn what properties are being sold, where and for what price.
“Web scraping is the extraction of website information,” explains Nick Rago, field CTO at Salt Security. “While web scraping has valid business purposes, such as research, analysis, and news distribution, it can also be used for malicious purposes, such as sensitive data mining.”
The scraped data is often in html format. This is sent to another application that converts it into a format suitable for analysis, such as a spreadsheet. A frequent purpose is to obtain information about competitors to allow the development of more competitive projects or offerings. There is, then, a clear business incentive to do so. But is it legal?
Legal or illegal
There is no clear statement on whether web scraping is legal or illegal – it is a sensitive issue that currently lacks comprehensive legal regulation or a clear industry consensus. Denas Grybauskas, head of legal at Oxylabs (a Lithuanian company providing proxies and specializing in web scraping) comments, “Web scraping is relatively new and thus shares the same problem with other new technologies – regulation is developing a lot slower than the technology itself.”
The media led with headlines such as ‘Web scraping is legal’. This is an over-simplification. What the court ruled is that it is not illegal under CFAA – and even this, frankly, could be overturned if the Supreme Court takes a different view. There may also be different regulations in different jurisdictions – both at state level within the US, and most certainly at the international level with regulations such as GDPR.
“From an EU data protection perspective, the collection and processing of photographs and related information has no legal basis. The data protection principles are not respected, and data subjects cannot exercise their rights. But with no physical presence in the EU, Clearview AI does not seem to be concerned by the unenforceable decisions of the DPAs.”
The French data protection agency, CNIL, announced a €20 million (approximately $19.5 million) fine on Clearview on Thursday, October 20, 2022. Last year, CNIL ordered Clearview to stop processing personal data, but has not had a response.
The legal/illegal balancing act
It isn’t possible to say whether web scraping is legal or illegal. It depends on the method of scraping, the data scraped, the purpose of the scraping, and the jurisdiction concerned.
Aleksandras Sulzenko, the product owner at Oxylabs, seeks to navigate the lack of clear regulations on two fronts – which he describes as infrastructure and usage. The ‘infrastructure’ is basically the proxies he uses to deliver the service. He uses residential proxies, but only where the owner knows and consents to the usage and is rewarded for it.
‘Usage’ is the actual scraping. His primary concern is to do no harm to the website being scraped. So, he has three priorities: “We limit the rate of the requests to avoid causing any traffic harm; we go through extensive KYC procedures to be confident that our solution is only being used for legitimate purposes; and we only scrape publicly accessible data.”
On the last, this means he doesn’t allow customers to scrape data that sits behind a login, and that means he effectively avoids any possible conflict with CFAA in the US because nothing can be construed as hacking.
Defending against web scraping
While ‘legal’ web scraping is widely used in business, it remains a sensitive issue. This is most obvious where personal data is scraped. LinkedIn, for example, is basically a professional CV showpiece – so users of LinkedIn are actively advertising their personal details. Having those details collected and collated en masse, and then sold to strangers is less appealing.
Clearview’s image scraping in the US is similar. Social media users post photos and selfies because they want to be known and recognized. But having those images scraped and sold on to third parties, including law enforcement, so that they can be recognized in realtime in different locations by image recognition camera systems is not so welcome.
Web scraping is widespread in many different industry sectors. It’s just an aspect of doing business. Where the scraping process is designed to be ‘low and slow’, the ‘victim’ may even be unaware of its occurrence. Some companies may simply assume that it happens, because they do it themselves, scraping competitor data.
Where scraping is unwanted, the Oxylabs legal type of scraping can be defeated by insisting visitors have an account that they must log into. “You can prevent scraping by placing all the data you want to hide behind login requirements that can be strengthened by MFA,” comments Sulzenko. “But it’s a trade-off because this creates more friction for the legitimate customers you want to allow in.”
This is the trap faced, for example, by content and news sites. Take SecurityWeek itself. SecurityWeek wants its content to be seen and read freely. This means not requiring visitors to have an account that must be logged into. But that, in turn, means the content is more easily scraped and perhaps republished elsewhere under a different name. It happens.
Illegal scraping – the type performed by hackers – can only be mitigated by better security. “To prevent malicious web scraping, site owners need visibility into every API endpoint and the data exposed,” explains Gerlach. “Testing web interfaces and APIs for vulnerabilities frequently and early on improves overall security posture and provides insight to act quickly if needed.”
Rago adds, “Organizations must be careful that they only expose the information that they want exposed.” A retailer may want to openly share product, pricing, and inventory information, but probably doesn’t want to share customer and payment data. “To reduce risk,” he continued, “organizations need good visibility and governance around their data exposure and maintain proper security around web interfaces and the underlying APIs that transport this sensitive data.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Americans are increasingly using code words known as “algospeak” to evade detection by content moderation technology, especially when posting about things that are controversial or may break platform rules.
From Camping To Cheese Pizza, ‘Algospeak’ Is Taking Over Social Media
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2022/09/16/algospeak-social-media-survey/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=ForbesMainFacebook&utm_campaign=socialflowForbesMainFB&sh=7d6165ee55e1
Americans are increasingly using code words known as “algospeak” to evade detection by content moderation technology, especially when posting about things that are controversial or may break platform rules.
If you’ve seen people posting about “camping” on social media, there’s a chance they’re not talking about how to pitch a tent or which National Parks to visit. The term recently became “algospeak” for something entirely different: discussing abortion-related issues in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Social media users are increasingly using codewords, emojis and deliberate typos—so-called “algospeak”—to avoid detection by apps’ moderation AI when posting content that is sensitive or might break their rules. Siobhan Hanna, who oversees AI data solutions for Telus International, a Canadian company that has provided human and AI content moderation services to nearly every major social media platform including TikTok, said “camping” is just one phrase that has been adapted in this way. “There was concern that algorithms might pick up mentions” of abortion, Hanna said.
More than half of Americans say they’ve seen an uptick in algospeak as polarizing political, cultural or global events unfold,
survey of 1,000 people in the U.S. last month. And almost a third of Americans on social media and gaming sites say they’ve “used emojis or alternative phrases to circumvent banned terms,” like those that are racist, sexual or related to self-harm, according to the data. Algospeak is most commonly being used to sidestep rules prohibiting hate speech, including harassment and bullying, Hanna said, followed by policies around violence and exploitation.
We’ve come a long way since “pr0n” and the eggplant emoji. These ever-evolving workarounds present a growing challenge for tech companies and the third-party contractors they hire to help them police content.
New forms of algospeak also emerged on social media around the Ukraine-Russia war, Hanna said, with posters using the term “unalive,” for example—rather than mentioning “killed” and “soldiers” in the same sentence—to evade AI detection. And on gaming platforms, she added, algospeak is frequently embedded in usernames or “gamertags” as political statements
“One of the areas that we’re all most concerned about is child exploitation and human exploitation. [It’s] one of the fastest-evolving areas of algospeak.”
Siobhan Hanna of Telus International
Few laws regulating social media exist, and content moderation is one of the most contentious tech policy issues on the government’s plate. Partisan disagreements have stymied legislation like the Algorithmic Accountability Act, a bill aimed at ensuring AI (like that powering content moderation) is managed in an ethical, transparent way. In the absence of regulations, social media giants and their outside moderation companies have been going it alone. But experts have raised concerns about accountability and called for scrutiny of these relationships.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Meta:
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta plans to lay off 13% of its staff, or 11,000+ employees, and will cut discretionary spending and extend its hiring freeze through Q1
https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-message-to-employees/
Twitter asks some laid off workers to come back, Bloomberg reports
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-asks-some-laid-off-workers-come-back-bloomberg-news-2022-11-06/
Nov 6 (Reuters) – After Twitter Inc laid off roughly half its staff on Friday following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, the company is now reaching out to dozens of employees who lost their jobs and asking them to return, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday.
Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions, the report said citing people familiar with the moves.
1 minute readNovember 6, 202211:08 PM GMT+2Last Updated 3 days ago
Twitter asks some laid off workers to come back, Bloomberg reports
Reuters
Twitter logo at its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California
A view of the Twitter logo at its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California, U.S. October 28, 2022. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Nov 6 (Reuters) – After Twitter Inc laid off roughly half its staff on Friday following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, the company is now reaching out to dozens of employees who lost their jobs and asking them to return, Bloomberg News reported on Sunday.
Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions, the report said citing people familiar with the moves.
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Twitter recently laid off 50% of its employees, including employees on the trust and safety team, the company’s head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth said in a tweet earlier this week.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/09/fake-twitter-blue-check-lebron-musk/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook
We’ve lost count of how many times Musk has changed his mind or offered contradictory claims about what a new paid $8 verification badge would do, but after pushing the feature live, fake accounts are seizing on the chaos.
Twitter’s bought blue check marks are now available for some paying subscribers, injecting the timeline with tweets that appear to be from official accounts. And apparently Musk’s Twitter skeleton crew made no meaningful changes to the visual language of the blue check, so right now it signals that you’re either really who you say you are — @CocaCola, for instance — or you’re somebody random who just coughed up $8 and got a stamp of approval.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter begins to roll out, then kills, grey checkmarks for high-profile accounts
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/09/twitter-begins-to-roll-out-grey-checkmarks-for-high-profile-accounts/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook
Update: Well, that was fast. The grey checks have begun to disappear following a reply from Twitter CEO Elon Musk to YouTuber MKBHD implying that Musk has put the kibosh on the system — at least for now. But then, Twitter product manager Esther Crawford clarified that the grey “Official” labels are “still going out” as a part of the new Twitter Blue product launch today on iOS in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K., albeit focused on government and commercial entitles to begin with.
A day after announcing that it’d denote high-profile accounts in a way distinctive from the blue checkmark now available to all Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter has begun to roll out new badges that identify particular categories of official accounts, including government accounts, major media outlets and some public figures. The move is an attempt to safeguard against information spreading and impersonation on the platform as Twitter grapples with the fallout of expanding eligibility for its blue checkmark, which was previously reserved for vetted, ID-verified users.
The new badges — a grey checkmark beneath the old blue verification checkmark — designate accounts as “Official,”
As of publication time, there’s no obvious way to petition Twitter support to rectify verification oversights. Twitter previously allowed users to request to be publicly verified, but did away with the system — which was admittedly problematic in its own right — with the introduction of the new Twitter Blue.
“We’ll continue to experiment with ways to differentiate between account types,”
Some of the issues around grey badges will be addressed in the coming days, presumably — Twitter no doubt has thousands, if not millions, of high-profile accounts to comb through and vet. It’s work it made for itself. As alluded to earlier, the recently launched Twitter Blue plan that grants subscribers a blue checkmark doesn’t include ID verification or a review step, a flaw Twitter users, including comedians Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin, exploited in the past week to show how easy it is to pose as another account.
Prior to midterm elections in the U.S. on Tuesday, election security experts warned that bad actors could pay for a blue checkmark via the new Twitter Blue and then change their display names to impersonate government officials and authoritative sources of information. After beginning to roll out the new Blue over the weekend, Twitter, evidently coming to grips with the potential pitfall, decided to delay the launch until after Election Day.
Silverman, Griffin and others who created satirical handles were banned following Musk’s unilateral decision over the weekend to permanently bar from the platform impersonators who don’t make it clear that they’re engaging in parody.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elon Muskin sekoilu on monille liikaa, etsivät uutta foorumia – tässä voittajat https://www.is.fi/digitoday/art-2000009174869.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/31/mastodons-microblogging-app-saw-a-record-number-of-downloads-after-musks-twitter-takeover/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.karhuhelsinki.fi/blogi/helpompaa-sisallontuotantoa-wordpressilla-gutenberg-editori-tanaan-ja-huomenna/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://oddydigital.fi/kampanjat/milloin-viimeksi-olet-paivittanyt-bannerimainoksesi/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_campaign=Oddy+-+FB+-+uushankinta+-+traffic+-+jatkuva&utm_content=Marraskuu%2F22+-+kiinnostuksen+kohteet+-+traffic&fbclid=IwAR2AgURlBKZe7NmWzadKoYpWzg4nT2k8ObORqYZMWanmvGd1QEk5LGA1uv0
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.namecheap.com/blog/how-to-turn-your-blog-into-a-website/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft backs game developer Wemade in web3 push
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/02/microsoft-backs-web3-game-developer-wemade/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://osg.fi/blogi/verkkosivujen-uudistaminen-kolme-kultaista-saantoa/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/24/building-the-bridge-between-web-2-and-web3/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.iflscience.com/the-words-you-should-never-google-according-to-people-who-have-62374
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.namecheap.com/blog/build-a-brand-from-scratch-with-visual/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/08/what-is-mastodon/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2022/11/11/first-folding-iphone-doesnt-come-from-apple/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elon Musk Learned A Basic Fact About Twitter After The Platform He Owns Fact-Checked Him
After accidentally revealing he doesn’t know the basics, he deleted the tweet.
https://www.iflscience.com/elon-musk-learned-a-basic-fact-about-twitter-after-the-platform-he-owns-fact-checked-him-66188
Yesterday, Elon Musk logged on to the site he spent $42 billion on to reveal that he doesn’t know the levels of traffic (clicks through to a link, e.g. an article or blog post) that the website provides. Bloomberg writer Ashlee Vance wrote “it is really weird how Twitter drives so few clicks,” before Musk jumped in to “correct” her with his own incorrect information.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / @caseynewton:
Sources: Twitter cut ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract staff on November 12, which is expected to significantly impact content moderation and core infrastructure — Update: company sources tell me that yesterday Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees, with cuts expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running. People inside are stunned.
https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1591848844899540992
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sananvapautta rummuttava Elon Musk erotti eri mieltä olleen työntekijän ja pelotteli jättimainostajan pois https://www.is.fi/digitoday/art-2000009202314.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oliver Darcy / CNN:
Sources: tech news website Protocol, launched by former Politico owner Robert Allbritton in February 2020, will close later this week and lay off its ~60 staff — New York CNN Business — Protocol, the upstart technology news website launched by former Politico owner …
Protocol, the tech-news focused website, will shutter and lay off its entire staff
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/15/media/protocol/
New York CNN Business —
Protocol, the upstart technology news website launched by former Politico owner and publisher Robert Allbritton in early 2020, will shutter later this week and lay off dozens of staffers, people familiar with the matter told CNN on Tuesday.
Staffers were told at an all-hands meeting Tuesday that the news organization will cease publishing on its website Thursday. The outlet’s flagship newsletter, Source Code, will continue publishing for several more weeks, but all other newsletters will stop after Tuesday.
The shuttering of the news organization will impact approximately 60 staffers, people familiar with the matter said. They will remain active employees through Friday, December 16, and then be eligible for eight weeks of severance, the people added.
Allbritton announced the launch of Protocol in late 2019 to much buzz. The Washington media mogul told Vanity Fair at the time that he wanted to replicate Politico’s successful model for the technology industry.
“I would love for this to be as big as, if not larger than, Politico is right now,” Allbritton told Vanity Fair in 2019.
But Protocol never had much luck. Shortly after launching, the global pandemic unleashed brutal economic headwinds on the media industry, resulting in some cuts to staff. Finally, when it seemed that the outlet might catch its footing as the pandemic’s grip on the economy lifted, German publishing giant Axel Springer closed a deal to purchase Politico. That acquisition resulted in Protocol, which had operated independently, being folded into Politico Media Group.
But it comes as Big Tech firms have faced particularly challenging economic conditions, making it especially challenging for Protocol to generate revenue from advertising sales to the sector, people familiar with the matter said.
“The reality is that the ad market tightened, particularly in the tech space, which exacerbated some existing challenges that are typical of a new startup,” one person explained.
People familiar with the matter said that Protocol will again fall significantly short of revenue goals in 2022. And the outlook for next year looked grim, given the worsening economy and battering the technology industry has endured in recent months.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Web Giants to Submit User Data as EU Law Comes Into Effect
https://www.securityweek.com/web-giants-submit-user-data-eu-law-comes-effect
A new EU law imposing stricter online regulation comes into effect Wednesday and the biggest platforms like Facebook and Google will have until February 17 to reveal their user numbers.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) rules will be fully applied 12 months later from February 17, 2024, but officials will need time next year to decide which tech giants are big enough to need close observation.
The DSA was designed to combat online hate speech, disinformation and piracy, in Europe at a time when much of the internet content seen by EU citizens is controlled by US-based companies.
Under the new law, all social media platforms, online market places and search engines will be obliged to react more quickly to remove content deemed in breach of EU regulations.
This will include measures to limit the use of sensitive private data in targeting ads at European users and will insist on more transparency for the algorithms that suggest content.
But the new rules will come into effect earlier for what Brussels calls Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs) — those with more than 45 million active users in the EU.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://we.knowit.fi/experience-fi/ekologisempia-verkkopalveluita?fbclid=IwAR1WfwPNvVxocVh7hoB2DmgekWt7qDREw18fkAkhDXGOa7nETxUMQf2J6_s
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.mikrobitti.fi/uutiset/kiinalaiset-vaarensivat-42-000-verkkosivua-tunnetun-brandin-sivuilta-latautuukin-troijalainen/218cc863-4f67-4f62-9c64-d5181a635403
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elon Musk’s plan to turn Twitter into a super app is a step closer now that he owns the platform
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-super-app-x-2022-10
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pew Research Center:
A survey of US teens on social media: 80% feel closer to friends and 71% like showing creativity; 59% are neutral on its overall impact; girls report more drama
Connection, Creativity and Drama: Teen Life on Social Media in 2022
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/11/16/connection-creativity-and-drama-teen-life-on-social-media-in-2022/
Majorities of teens credit social media with strengthening their friendships and providing support while also noting the emotionally charged side of these platforms
Society has long fretted about technology’s impact on youth. But unlike radio and television, the hyperconnected nature of social media has led to new anxieties, including worries that these platforms may be negatively impacting teenagers’ mental health. Just this year, the White House announced plans to combat potential harms teens may face when using social media.
Majorities of teens say social media provides them with a space for connection, creativity and support …
Despite these concerns, teens themselves paint a more nuanced picture of adolescent life on social media. It is one in which majorities credit these platforms with deepening connections and providing a support network when they need it, while smaller – though notable – shares acknowledge the drama and pressures that can come along with using social media, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted April 14 to May 4, 2022.1
Tomi Engdahl says:
Panicked Elon Musk Reportedly Begging Engineers Not to Leave
“Sounds like playing hardball does not work.”
https://futurism.com/panicked-elon-musk-begging-engineers-not-to-leave
Elon Musk’s Twitter operations are still in free fall.
Earlier this week, the billionaire CEO sent an email to staff telling them that they “need to be extremely hardcore” and work long hours at the office, or quit and get three months severance, as The Washington Post reports.
Employees had until 5 pm on Thursday to click “yes” and be part of Twitter moving forward or take the money and part ways. The problem for Musk? According to former Uber engineer Gergely Orosz, who has had a close ear to Twitter’s recent inner turmoil, “far fewer than expected [developers] hit ‘yes.’”
So many employees called Musk’s bluff, Orosz says, that Musk is now “having meetings with top engineers to convince them to stay,” in an embarrassing reversal of his public-facing bravado earlier this week.
According to Orosz’s estimations, Twitter’s engineering workforce may have been cut by a whopping 90 percent in just three weeks.
Musk has been banging the war drums in an active attempt to weed out those who aren’t willing to abide by his strict rules and those who were willing to stand up to him.
But developers aren’t exactly embracing that kind of tyranny.
“Sounds like playing hardball does not work,” Orosz said. “Of course it doesn’t.”
“From my larger group of 50 people, 10 are staying, 40 are taking the severance,” one source reportedly told Orosz. “Elon set up meetings with a few who plan to quit.”
In short, developers are running for the hills — and besides, they’re likely to find far better work conditions pretty much anywhere else.
“I am not sure Elon realizes that, unlike rocket scientists, who have relatively few options to work at, [developers] with the experience of building Twitter only have better options than the conditions he outlines,” Orosz argued.
Those who spoke out against him were summarily fired.
That kind of hostility in leadership — Musk has shown an astonishing lack of respect — clearly isn’t sitting well with many developers, who have taken up his to get three months of severance and leave.
“I meant it when I called Elon’s latest ultimatum the first truly positive thing about this Twitter saga,” Orosz wrote. “Because finally, everyone who had enough of the BS and is not on a visa could finally quit.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter-Musk News Timeline: #RIPTwitter Trends After Employees Resign
Elon Musk had asked Twitter employees to sign on to his new “hardcore” culture at Twitter. Many reportedly said no.
https://www.cnet.com/news/social-media/twitter-musk-news-timeline-riptwitter-trends-after-employees-resign/
Twitter’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, has been making dramatic changes since he finalized a deal to buy the company for about $44 billion on Oct. 27. After laying off half the staff, he gave remaining employees an ultimatum to pledge working under his new hard-charging culture or get out. Many, it seems, decided to leave.
Here’s the most recent news about Musk’s takeover of Twitter:
Nov. 17: Twitter users fear the end of the platform is near. Musk locks office doors as many employees take severance offers. Meanwhile, senators want FTC investigation
Twitter users started tweeting farewell remarks as #RIPTwitter trended on the platform in the US.
Fears about a potential collapse of the site came after hundreds of employees decided to leave the company earlier in the day. One former Twitter employee told The Washington Post that there’s no longer “a skeleton crew manning the system.” “It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop,” the employee said. Musk tweeted a meme with Twitter’s logo on a grave stone.
The remaining 3,500 someodd employees left at Twitter had a choice to make at the end of the day on Nov. 17: Join Musk’s hard-charging new “Twitter 2.0,” complete with minimum-40-hour-workweeks and many other grueling changes, or leave with three months of severance.
Up to 75% of remaining employees reportedly went for the exits, according to Fortune and Bloomberg
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Verge:
Hundreds of Twitter employees post farewell messages and salute emojis in Slack and tweets, announcing their resignations after Elon Musk’s “hardcore” ultimatum — Musk gave Twitter staff a deadline to say if they are staying for his cultural reset of the company.
Hundreds of employees say no to being part of Elon Musk’s ‘extremely hardcore’ Twitter
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twitter-employees-resign-from-elon-musk-hardcore-deadline
Musk gave Twitter staff a deadline to say if they are staying for his cultural reset of the company. And right on deadline, the farewell emojis started pouring into Twitter’s Slack.
Hundreds of Twitter’s remaining employees have resigned ahead of Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” cultural reset of the company, according to internal Slack messages seen by The Verge and employee tweets.
The fresh purge of Twitter’s ranks comes after Musk recently fired dozens of employees who criticized or mocked him in tweets and internal messages. Musk then set a deadline of 5PM ET on Thursday for all employees to respond “yes” on a Google form if they want to stay for what he is calling “Twitter 2.0;” otherwise, today would be their final day of work and they would receive a severance package. After the deadline hit, hundreds of employees quickly started posting farewell messages and salute emojis in Twitter’s Slack, announcing that they had said no to Musk’s ultimatum.
“My watch ends with Twitter 1.0. I do not wish to be part of Twitter 2.0.”
Twitter had roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the deadline Thursday, thanks to Musk unceremoniously laying off about half of the 7,500-person workforce when he took over and the resignations that followed. Remaining and departing Twitter employees told The Verge that, given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon. One said that they’ve watched “legendary engineers” and others they look up to leave one by one.
“It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving,” the Twitter staffer said. “It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be.”
Multiple “critical” teams inside Twitter have now either completely or near-completely resigned, said other employees who requested anonymity to speak without Musk’s permission. That includes Twitter’s traffic and front end teams that route engineering requests to the correct backend services. The team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is also gone. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” a departing employee said.
Several members of Twitter’s “Command Center” team, a group of engineers that is on call 24/7 and acts as the clearing house for problems internally, also tweeted about their departures. “If they go down, there is no one to call when shit breaks,” said a person familiar with how the team operates. The team that manages Twitter API for developers has also been severely gutted.
His first priority as Twitter’s new owner has been to fundamentally reset its work culture. In an email to employees this week that was obtained by The Verge, he wrote: “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Many employees have chafed at Musk’s management style, and Musk himself has grown paranoid that they will sabotage the company. He met with a small group of senior engineers earlier on Thursday to hear why so many of them planned to leave, according to employees familiar with the meeting. Shortly after Musk’s deadline to opt into staying at the company hit, an unsigned email was sent to employees saying that badge access to its offices was suspended “effective immediately” until Monday.
Meanwhile, Twitter recruiters have already started reaching out to outside engineers to see if they want to join “Twitter 2.0 – an Elon company,” according to a message sent to one recruit that was seen by The Verge.
AJ McDougall / The Daily Beast:
Sources: Twitter has disabled badge access and shut down its offices until November 21, after a large number of employees chose to resign on Thursday — The temporary closure of the company’s offices comes as the billionaire is reportedly “terrified employees are going to sabotage the company.”
‘Sabotage’-Shy Musk Boards Up Twitter Offices as Staffers Flock to Quit: Report
https://www.thedailybeast.com/sabotage-shy-elon-musk-boards-up-twitter-offices-until-monday-as-remaining-staff-flock-to-quit-report-says
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg:
Sources: Elon Musk softens his remote work stance and tries to convince colleagues to stay, as more than anticipated opt to leave ahead of his 5pm ET deadline — Elon Musk gave Twitter Inc. employees an ultimatum to either commit to the company’s new “hardcore” work environment or leave.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-17/musk-softens-remote-work-mandate-to-retain-twitter-staffers
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tappoiko Elon Musk juuri Twitterin? https://www.is.fi/digitoday/art-2000009209919.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter Will Be Dead Within A Week, According To Remaining Twitter Employee
After employees left in droves, Twitter offices have been closed, and all staff locked out.
https://www.iflscience.com/twitter-will-be-dead-within-a-week-according-to-remaining-twitter-employee-66267
Twitter offices have closed, employees are reportedly leaving en masse, and those that remain are warning that the website does not have long before it’s “dead”. Just what the hell is going on at the website valued (by Musk, at least) at $44 billion just a few short weeks ago?
Earlier this week, Musk offered his employees an ultimatum: sign up to “hardcore” Twitter and “long hours at high intensity” or leave the company with severance. It appears that hundreds of people who survived the first round of 3,500 redundancies have chosen to take the chance to leave the company, including a lot of engineers responsible for keeping the site alive.
The managing editor of Platformer reports that the move of closing the offices until Monday is out of fear that former employees may tamper with the platform before they leave.
“Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why,”
Verge editor Alex Heath reports that, though access has been cut off to HQ for employees until Monday, many of the employees still have access to Twitter systems.
“Hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter employees have technically resigned but still have access to Twitter’s internal systems,” Heath wrote on Twitter, “with some speculating it is because the employees tasked with managing that access also resigned”.
Engineers within and without Twitter have warned that in the coming weeks and months, with Twitter site reliability engineer Ben Krueger telling MIT Technology Review that big problems could happen when large volumes of traffic hit the site, such as what happens during large news events. When you have a diminished site reliability team, and focus is shifted to new features, this could be when bigger breaks might happen. The breaks will accumulate, according to the engineer, until eventually the site becomes “not usable”. This problem, he said, would be compounded by engineers being tired and overworked.
Users have been reporting more outages on the website last night, which could be due to increased traffic as many on the website speculated, joked, and generally tweeted about its demise.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Beginner’s Guide to Mastodon
https://buffer.com/resources/mastodon-social/
Mastodon, a decentralized, open-source software that allows users to set up servers to communicate with each other, is growing in popularity as a “Twitter alternative”. This article provides a high-level overview of the platform: what it is and how it works.
Post-Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, interest in other social networking sites has spiked significantly. Some names may be familiar to you while others are completely new, but a quick search on Google Trends reveals that old or new, people are looking for the next, best microblogging platform.
https://gist.github.com/joyeusenoelle/74f6e6c0f349651349a0df9ae4582969
This guide now lives at https://github.com/joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon/