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.
2,210 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Top Creators 2022
These 49 social media savants—and one dog—are redefining celebrity for our connected age.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2022/09/06/top-creators-2022/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.komando.com/tech-tips/how-to-shrink-files/826254/
Tomi Engdahl says:
CSS Flexbox Explained – Complete Guide to Flexible Containers and Flex Items
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/css-flexbox-complete-guide/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hakukoneoptimoinnin aloitusopas, osa 4: Hakukoneystävällisen tekstin neljä nyrkkisääntöä
https://idafram.fi/ajankohtaista/hakukoneystavallinen-teksti-4-nyrkkisaantoa/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inside Matrix, the protocol that might finally make messaging apps interoperable
After years of walled gardens, cross-pollination could be in sight
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/30/inside-matrix-the-protocol-that-might-finally-make-messaging-apps-interoperable/?tpcc=tcplusfacebook
Interoperability and decentralization have been major themes in tech this year, driven in large part by mounting regulation, societal and industrial pressure, and the hype trains that are crypto and web3. That rising tide is lifting other boats: an open standards-based communication protocol called Matrix — which is playing a part in bringing interoperability to another proprietary part of our digital lives: messaging.
Anyone who has ever sent an SMS or email won’t have considered for a second what network, service provider, or messaging client their intended recipient used. The main reason is that it doesn’t really matter — T-Mobile and Verizon customers can text each other just fine, while Gmail and Outlook users have no problems emailing each other.
But that wasn’t always the case.
Fast forward to the modern smartphone age, and while email hasn’t exactly gone the way of the dodo and SMS is still stuttering along, the preeminent communication tools of today aren’t nearly as friendly with each other. Those looking to embrace independent privacy-focused messaging apps such as Signal will hit a brick wall when they realize that literally all their pals are using WhatsApp. Or iMessage. Or Telegram. Or Viber… you get the picture.
This trend permeates the enterprise realm, too. If your work uses Slack, good luck sending a message to your buddy across town forced to use Microsoft Teams, while those in human resources shoehorned onto Meta’s Workplace can think again about DM-ing their sales’ colleagues along the corridor using Salesforce Chatter.
This is nothing new, of course, but the issue of interoperability in the online messaging sphere has come sharply into focus in 2022. Europe is pushing ahead with rules to force interoperability and portability between online platforms via the Digital Markets Act (DMA), while the U.S. has similar plans via the ACCESS Act.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s arrival at Twitter has driven awareness of alternatives such as Mastodon, the so-called “open source Twitter alternative” that shot past 2 million users off the back of the chaos at Twitter.
Mastodon is powered by the open ActivityPub protocol and is built around the concept of the fediverse: a decentralized network of interconnected servers that allow different ActivityPub-powered services to communicate with each other. Tumblr recently revealed that it intends to support the ActivityPub protocol in the future, while Flickr CEO Don MacAskill polled his Twitter followers on whether the photo-hosting platform and community should also adopt ActivityPub.
Matrix was developed inside software and services company Amdocs back in 2014, spearheaded by Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape who later left the company to focus entirely on growing Matrix as an independent open source project. They also sought to commercialize Matrix through a company called New Vector, which developed a Matrix hosting service and a Slack alternative app called Riot
The flagship commercial implementation of Matrix was rebranded as Element a little more than two years ago, and today Element — backed by Automattic, Dawn Capital, Notion, Protocol Labs and others — is used by a host of organizations looking for a federated alternative to the big-name incumbents sold by U.S. tech giants.
Element itself is open source and promises end-to-end encryption, while its customers can access the usual cross-platform features most would expect from a team collaboration product, including group messaging and voice and video chat.
A growing array of regulations, particularly in Europe, are forcing Big Tech to pay attention to data sovereignty, with the likes of Google partnering with Deutsche Telekom’s IT services and consulting subsidiary T-Systems last year to offer German companies a “sovereign cloud” for their sensitive data.
This regulatory push, alongside growing expectations around data sovereignty, has been a boon for the Matrix protocol. Last year, the agency responsible for digitalizing Germany’s health care system revealed that it was transitioning to Matrix, ensuring that the 150,000 individual entities that constitute the health care industry such as hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies, could communicate with each other regardless of what Matrix-based app they used.
“The pendulum has been clearly swinging towards decentralization for quite a while,” Hodgson explained to TechCrunch. “We’re now seeing serious use of Matrix-based decentralized communications across or within the French, German, U.K, Swedish, Finnish and U.S governments, as well as the likes of NATO and adjacent organisations.”
“We believe that the value of any messaging platform grows based on its ability to connect with other platforms,” a Rocket.Chat spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We put a lot of effort into connecting Rocket.Chat with other platforms. We don’t have to worry about what client we use when emailing each other, and the same should be true when we’re messaging each other.”
What’s perhaps most interesting about all this is that it runs contrary to the path that traditional consumer and enterprise social networks, and team collaboration tools, have taken.
Slack, Facebook, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Twitter, and all the rest are all about harnessing the network effect, where a product’s value is intrinsically linked to the number of users on it.
Open and interoperable protocols support a new breed of business that’s cognizant of the growing demand for something that doesn’t lock users in.
“Our goal is not to force people to use Rocket.Chat in order to communicate with each other,” Rocket.Chat’s spokesperson continued. “Rather, our goal is to enable organizations to collaborate securely and connect with other organizations and individuals across the platforms of their choosing.”
Bridging the divide
The Matrix protocol also supports non-native interoperability through a technique called “bridging,” which ushers in support for non-Matrix apps, including WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. Element itself offers bridging as part of a consumer-focused subscription product called Element One, where users pay $5 per month to bring all their friends together into a single interface — irrespective of what app they use.
This is enabled through publicly available APIs created by the tech companies themselves. However, terms of use are typically restrictive with regards to how they can be used by competing apps, while they may also enforce rate-limits or usage costs.
Bridging as it stands sits somewhere in a grey area from a “is this allowed?” perspective. But with the world’s regulatory eyes laser-focused on Big Tech’s stranglehold on online communications, the companies perhaps don’t enforce all their T&Cs too rigorously.
The DMA came into force in Europe last month — though it won’t officially become applicable until next May — and it has specific provisions for interoperability and data portability. At that point, we’ll perhaps start to see how the Big Tech “gatekeepers” of the world plan to support the new regulations.
Popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, while offering end-to-end encryption, weren’t designed for enterprise or governmental use-cases as they don’t allow organizations to easily manage any of their messaging data — yet such apps are widely used in such scenarios.
“I understand the value of instant communication that something like WhatsApp can bring, particularly during the pandemic where officials were forced to make quick decisions and work to meet varying demands,” U.K. information commissioner John Edwards said in a statement at the time. “However, the price of using these methods, although not against the law, must not result in a lack of transparency and inadequate data security. Public officials should be able to show their workings, for both record keeping purposes and to maintain public confidence. That is how trust in those decisions is secured and lessons are learnt for the future.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Turn A Webpage Into A Desktop App With Gluon
https://hackaday.com/2022/12/30/turn-a-webpage-into-a-desktop-app-with-gluon/
Electron is software for running web-written apps in the same way as native ones, and has gotten plenty of bad press for its RAM appetite around these parts. But while the execution might leave something to be desired, the concept itself is quite solid — if you’ve already got code written for the web, a quick and easy way to bring it over to the desktop would be very valuable.
Which is why [CanadaHonk] is building a framework called Gluon, which aims to turn your web pages into desktop apps with little to no effort.
One of the coolest parts is that it’s able to use your system-installed browser, and not a bundled-in one like Electron. Firefox support is firmly on the roadmap, too, currently in experimental stage. Linux support is being worked on as well
https://github.com/gluon-framework/gluon
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:
A profile of Matrix, an open-source, decentralized protocol for messaging interoperability that saw its network’s users double in 2022 to at least 80.3M
Inside Matrix, the protocol that might finally make messaging apps interoperable
After years of walled gardens, cross-pollination could be in sight
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/30/inside-matrix-the-protocol-that-might-finally-make-messaging-apps-interoperable/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudGVjaG1lbWUuY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIar-RBA7QScU1_mR8XkM9TNNWf2oRZby4CKNuMrD4J24XaP8hpOxmLdauwuz9uoFrZrbEACA-gz9_Vlq9ajQP6DFrcYVBAIYiCw4QYyFstu7vyqZldImdctesUKRGhiZT7RdHGHhtLFsah3ymZDCrXbpRg34w35cbrn0uxPEt0R
Interoperability and decentralization have been major themes in tech this year, driven in large part by mounting regulation, societal and industrial pressure and the hype trains that are crypto and web3. That rising tide is lifting other boats, such as an open standards-based communication protocol called Matrix — which is playing a part in bringing interoperability to another proprietary part of our digital lives: messaging.
The number of people on the Matrix network doubled in size this year, according to Matthew Hodgson, one of Matrix’s co-creators — a notable, if modest, boost to 80.3 million users (that number may be higher; not all Matrix deployments “phone home” stats to Matrix.org).
While the bulk of all this activity has been in enterprise communications, it looks like mainstream consumer platforms might now also be taking notice.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein says the company’s Audiences marketing tool, which uploads customer data to Meta and Google’s ad platforms, is a key focus
https://www.ft.com/content/84ea2a9c-c28d-42a6-b3a9-0d6cc0fb37bb
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cristina Criddle / Financial Times:
Google’s Jigsaw and UN-backed Tech Against Terrorism plan to release a free moderation tool to help smaller websites flag and remove terrorist material
https://www.ft.com/content/c2da6eb1-ba81-40c5-a411-dfc94ea280db
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/05/n-o-d-e-unveils-slick-tech-news-site-hackaday-editors-suddenly-feel-sweaty/
https://mosfet.net/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/eu-omnibus-directive/td-p/1603478
https://apps.shopify.com/omnibus-price?locale=fi
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/your-account/legal/pricing-indication-directive
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.verkkouutiset.fi/a/huippuyliopiston-lista-haitallisista-sanoista-on-silkkaa-george-orwellia/#f105d9e9
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://yrityksille.fonecta.fi/artikkeli/mika-on-omnibus-direktiivi/?cmp=ECOM_T%2BVerkkokauppa_A%2BOmnibus%2BAlways-on&mxcontentid=6295134722033&utm_source=fb&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Website+traffic+-+ecom+manager&utm_content=Omnibus-1&fbclid=IwAR3U-BT9e_5ePMbipAXv47sNvtfaPc6eqIXhKa62lMhCmx_5L_-L1T4D1yE
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2023/01/01/sherlock-holmes-enters-the-public-domain—here-are-the-other-works-free-to-use-in-2023/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://idafram.fi/ajankohtaista/hakukoneystavallinen-teksti-4-nyrkkisaantoa/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mastodon—and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers
Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort of.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/mastodon-highlights-pros-and-cons-of-moving-beyond-big-tech-gatekeepers/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Washington Post:
A New York University study finds Russian troll Twitter accounts had a minimal impact on 2016 US election voters; 1% of users accounted for 70% of the exposure — Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202! I caught up on some time hanging out with friends this past weekend. Friends are cool.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/09/russian-trolls-twitter-had-little-influence-2016-voters/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Makena Kelly / The Verge:
Sources: Parler’s parent company laid off ~75% of its staff and most of its chief executives over the past few weeks, leaving the social app with ~20 employees — Parlement Technologies, the parent company of “censorship-free” social media platform Parler, has laid off a majority of its staff …
More: BGR and Engadget
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/10/23549198/parler-parlement-technologies-layoffs-gettr-george-farmer-candace-owens
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tony Stubblebine / The Official Medium Blog:
Medium launches a Mastodon instance on me.dm, promising members a service with reliable moderation, smoother onboarding, an interesting local feed, and more — The fediverse is a breath of fresh air for writers and social media — Today, Medium is launching a Mastodon instance at me.dm …
https://blog.medium.com/medium-embraces-mastodon-19dcb873eb11
Tomi Engdahl says:
John D. McKinnon / Wall Street Journal:
Google argues that gutting Section 230 “would upend the internet” in a brief filed with the US Supreme Court ahead of a YouTube case involving terrorist content — Tech giant files brief in YouTube case brought by family of woman killed in Paris terrorist attacks
Google Says Supreme Court Ruling Could Potentially Upend the Internet
Tech giant files brief in YouTube case brought by family of woman killed in Paris terrorist attacks
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-says-supreme-court-ruling-could-potentially-upend-the-internet-11673553968?mod=djemalertNEWS
Google says YouTube ‘abhors terrorism and over the years has taken increasingly effective actions to remove terrorist and other potentially harmful content.’
WASHINGTON—A case before the Supreme Court challenging the liability shield protecting websites such as YouTube and Facebook could “upend the internet,” resulting in both widespread censorship and a proliferation of offensive content, Google said in a court filing Thursday.
In a new brief filed with the high court, Google said that scaling back liability protections could lead internet giants to block more potentially offensive content—including controversial political speech—while also leading smaller websites to drop their filters to avoid liability that can arise from efforts to screen content.
“This Court should decline to adopt novel and untested theories that risk transforming today’s internet into a forced choice between overly curated mainstream sites or fringe sites flooded with objectionable content,” Google said in its brief.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fact-Checking Is Actually Very Effective In Challenging Disinformation
https://www.iflscience.com/factchecking-is-actually-very-effective-in-challenging-disinformation-60876
To counteract misinformation, fact-checking works. This is according to a new study that looked at how effective the employment of fact-checking is in counteracting fake news. Interestingly, fact-checking is very effective at reducing false beliefs with no suggestion it backfires, making people more entrenched in their beliefs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is PHP Still Relevant to Build Websites in 2023: Benefits and Real Examples
https://www.altamira.ai/build-websites-with-php/
PHP is one such common technology that developers choose to focus on, and you may be wondering: “Why PHP?” or “Isn’t PHP outdated?”. And with this article, we will definitely answer the question.
What Are the Main Advantages of PHP?
PHP is known to be the most frequently used programming language. According to W3Techs, 78.8% of all websites are using PHP for their server-side.
Interesting fact: PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. Now PHP is widely known and thought of as Hypertext Preprocessor.
So, what are the main benefits of using PHP for web development?
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://github.com/symisc/PH7
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/php-memory-limit/
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.memory-get-usage.php
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peter Kafka / Vox:
Q&A with ex-Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory professor Alex Stamos on overestimating mis- and disinformation’s impact, Brazil, Gamergate, and more — “Resist trying to make things better”: A conversation with internet security expert Alex Stamos.
Are we too worried about misinformation?
https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/1/16/23553802/misinformation-twitter-facebook-alex-stamos-peter-kafka-media-column
“Resist trying to make things better”: A conversation with internet security expert Alex Stamos.
I’m old enough to remember when the internet was going to be great news for everyone. Things have gotten more complex since then: We all still agree that there are lots of good things we can get from a broadband connection. But we’re also likely to blame the internet — and specifically the big tech companies that dominate it — for all kinds of problems.
And that blame-casting gets intense in the wake of major, calamitous news events, like the spectacle of the January 6 riot or its rerun in Brazil this month, both of which were seeded and organized, at least in part, on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram. But how much culpability and power should we really assign to tech?
Stamos is the former head of security at Facebook who now heads up the Stanford Internet Observatory, which does deep dives into the ways people abuse the internet.
“There was a massive overestimation of the capability of mis- and disinformation to change people’s minds — of its actual persuasive power”
Alex Stamos
I think what has happened is there was a massive overestimation of the capability of mis- and disinformation to change people’s minds — of its actual persuasive power. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem, but we have to reframe how we look at it — as less of something that is done to us and more of a supply and demand problem. We live in a world where people can choose to seal themselves into an information environment that reinforces their preconceived notions, that reinforces the things they want to believe about themselves and about others. And in doing so, they can participate in their own radicalization. They can participate in fooling themselves, but that is not something that’s necessarily being done to them.
Peter Kafka
But now we have a playbook for whenever something awful happens, whether it’s January 6 or what we saw in Brazil or things like the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand: We say, “what role did the internet play in this?” And in the case of January 6 and in Brazil, it seems pretty evident that the people who are organizing those events were using internet platforms to actually put that stuff together. And then before that, they were seeding the ground for this disaffection and promulgating the idea that elections were stolen. So can we hold both things in our head at the same time — that we’ve both overestimated the effect of Russians reinforcing our filter bubble versus state and non-state actors using the internet to make bad things happen?
Peter Kafka
The throughline here is that after one of these events happens, we collectively say, “Hey, Twitter or Facebook or maybe Apple, you let this happen, what are you going to do to prevent it from happening again?” And sometimes the platforms say, “Well, this wasn’t our fault.” Mark Zuckerberg famously said that idea was crazy after the 2016 election.
Alex Stamos
And then [former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg] did that again, after January 6.
“Resist trying to make things better”
Peter Kafka
And then you see the platforms do whack-a-mole to solve the last problem.
Peter Kafka
The throughline here is that after one of these events happens, we collectively say, “Hey, Twitter or Facebook or maybe Apple, you let this happen, what are you going to do to prevent it from happening again?” And sometimes the platforms say, “Well, this wasn’t our fault.” Mark Zuckerberg famously said that idea was crazy after the 2016 election.
Alex Stamos
And then [former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg] did that again, after January 6.
“Resist trying to make things better”
Peter Kafka
And then you see the platforms do whack-a-mole to solve the last problem.
I’m going to further complicate it because I wanted to bring the pandemic into this — where at the beginning, we asked the platforms, “what are you going to do to help make sure that people get good information about how to handle this novel disease?” And they said, “We’re not going to make these decisions. We’re not not epidemiologists. We’re going to follow the advice of the CDC and governments around the world.” And in some cases, that information was contradictory or wrong and they’ve had to backtrack. And now we’re seeing some of that play out with the release of the Twitter Files where people are saying, “I can’t believe the government asked Twitter to take down so-and-so’s tweet or account because they were telling people to go use ivermectin.”
So you have this whole stew of stuff where it’s unclear what role the government should have in working with the platforms, what role the platforms should have at all. So should platforms be involved in trying to stop mis- or disinformation? Or should we just say, “this is like climate change and it’s a fact of life and we’re all going to have to sort of adapt to this reality”?
“People generally believe that if something is against their side, that the platforms have a huge responsibility. And if something is on their side, [the platforms] should have no responsibility.”
Alex Stamos
The fundamental problem is that there’s a fundamental disagreement inside people’s heads — that people are inconsistent on what responsibility they believe information intermediaries should have for making society better. People generally believe that if something is against their side, that the platforms have a huge responsibility. And if something is on their side, [the platforms] should have no responsibility. It’s extremely rare to find people who are consistent in this.
I think that the responsibility of platforms is to try to not make things worse actively — but also to resist trying to make things better. If that makes sense.
Peter Kafka
No. What does “resist trying to make things better” mean?
Alex Stamos
I think the legitimate complaint behind a bunch of the Twitter Files is that Twitter was trying too hard to make American society and world society better, to make humans better. That what Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and other companies should focus on is, “are we building products that are specifically making some of these problems worse?” That the focus should be on the active decisions they make, not on the passive carrying of other people’s speech. And so if you’re Facebook, your responsibility is — if somebody is into QAnon, you do not recommend to them, “Oh, you might want to also storm the Capitol. Here’s a recommended group or here’s a recommended event where people are storming the Capitol.”
That is an active decision by Facebook — to make a recommendation to somebody to do something. That is very different than going and hunting down every closed group where people are talking about ivermectin and other kinds of folk cures incorrectly. That if people are wrong, going and trying to make them better by hunting them down and hunting down their speech and then changing it or pushing information on them is the kind of impulse that probably makes things worse. I think that is a hard balance to get to.
Where I try to come down on this is: Be careful about your recommendation algorithms, your ranking algorithms, about product features that make things intentionally worse. But also draw the line at going out and trying to make things better.
The great example that everyone is spun up about is the Hunter Biden laptop story. Twitter and Facebook, in doing anything about that, I think overstepped, because whether the New York Post does not have journalistic ethics or whether the New York Post is being used as part of a hacking leak campaign is the New York Post’s problem. It is not Facebook’s or Twitter’s problem.
“The reality is that we have to have these kinds of trade-offs”
Peter Kafka
Are there practical things that government can impose in the US and other places?
Alex Stamos
The government in the United States is very restricted by the First Amendment [from] pushing of the platforms to change speech. Europe is where the rubber’s really hitting the road. The Digital Services Act creates a bunch of new responsibilities for platforms. It’s not incredibly specific on this area, but that is where, from a democratic perspective, there will be the most conflict over responsibility. And then you see in Brazil and India and other democracies that are backsliding toward authoritarianism, you see much more aggressive censorship of political enemies. That is going to continue to be a real problem around the world.
Peter Kafka
Over the years, the big platforms built pretty significant apparatuses to try to moderate themselves. You were part of that work at Facebook. And we now seem to be going through a real-time experiment at Twitter, where Elon Musk has said ideologically, he doesn’t think Twitter should be moderating anything beyond actual criminal activity. And beyond that, it costs a lot of money to employ these people and Twitter can’t afford it, so he’s getting rid of basically everyone who was involved in disinformation and in moderation. What do you imagine the effect that will have?
Alex Stamos
It is open season. If you are the Russians, if you’re Iran, if you’re the People’s Republic of China, if you are a contractor working for the US Department of Defense, it is open season on Twitter. Twitter’s absolutely your best target.
“Gamergate every single day”
Peter Kafka
Every time I see a story pointing out that such-and-such disinformation exists on YouTube or Twitter, I think that you could write these stories in perpetuity. Twitter or YouTube or Facebook may crack down on a particular issue, but it’s never going to get out of this cycle. And I wonder if our efforts aren’t misplaced here and that we shouldn’t be spending so much time trying to point out this thing is wrong on the internet and instead doing something else. But I don’t know what the other thing is. I don’t know what we should be doing. What should we be thinking about?
Alex Stamos
I’d like to see more stories about the specific attacks against individuals. I think we’re moving into a world where effectively it is Gamergate every single day — that there are politically motivated actors who feel like it is their job to try to make people feel horrible about themselves, to drive them off the internet, to suppress their speech. And so that is less about broad persuasion and more about the use of the internet as a pitched battlefield to personally destroy people you disagree with.
A key thing everybody needs to do is to be careful with their own social media use.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Charles Hymas / Telegraph:
The UK amends the Online Safety Bill to make senior managers at tech companies criminally liable for failures to protect minors, following demands by Tory MPs
Rishi Sunak forced to back down over Online Safety Bill after Tory rebellion
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/01/16/rishi-sunak-forced-back-online-safety-bill-tory-rebellion/
Social media bosses who fail to protect children from harmful content will face jail now the Government has conceded to rebel MPs
Social media bosses who repeatedly fail to protect children from online harms will face jail after the Government backed down in face of a major Tory backbench rebellion.
Michelle Donelan, the Culture Secretary, has accepted changes to the Online Safety Bill that will make senior managers at tech firms criminally liable for persistent breaches of their duty of care to children.
Ministers are expected to unveil the details of the plan in the Commons on Tuesday after a rebellion by nearly 50 Tory MPs demanding tougher action on tech bosses.
It is the third time Rishi Sunak has caved in following similar revolts over planning and onshore wind farms where he also faced the prospect of being defeated in a Commons vote.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digiday:
Similarweb: Twitter referral traffic to 12 major news outlets fell 12% on average from November 2022 to December 2022; only traffic to NY Post and Fox News grew — Under the leadership of Elon Musk, Twitter’s role as a traffic referral source to publishers’ sites is largely declining.
Publishers lament the removal of Twitter Moments as referral traffic dips
https://digiday.com/media/publishers-lament-the-removal-of-twitter-moments-as-referral-traffic-dips/
Under the leadership of Elon Musk, Twitter’s role as a traffic referral source to publishers’ sites is largely declining.
Twitter referral traffic to a dozen major publishers’ websites declined, on average, by 12% in December 2022 compared to November 2022, according to an analysis by Similarweb, a data analytics company that monitors web traffic. Some publishers — such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, the BBC and Yahoo — each saw referral traffic from Twitter fall between 10% and 18% month over month.
Only two publishers in the sample set — The New York Post and Fox News — saw their traffic increase while People’s website traffic declined by 46%. In most cases, changes were sharper than publishers saw between November and December 2021, when most publishers in the sample set saw traffic increase rather than decrease.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Verge:
Source: CNET owner Red Ventures has used AI tools like Wordsmith to write stories for at least a year and a half, causing unease amid layoffs and restructuring
— Fake bylines. Content farming. Affiliate fees. What happens when private equity takes over a storied news site and milks it for clicks?
Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/19/23562966/cnet-ai-written-stories-red-ventures-seo-marketing
Fake bylines. Content farming. Affiliate fees. What happens when private equity takes over a storied news site and milks it for clicks?
Every morning around 9AM ET, CNET publishes two stories listing the day’s mortgage rates and refinance rates. The story templates are the same every day. Affiliate links for loans pepper the page. Average rates float up and down day by day, and sentences are rephrased slightly, but the tone — and content — of each article is as consistent as clockwork. They are perfectly suited to being generated by AI.
The byline on the mortgage stories is Justin Jaffe, the managing editor of CNET Money, but the stories aren’t listed on Jaffe’s actual author page. Instead, they appear on a different author page that only contains his mortgage rate stories. His actual author page lists a much wider scope of stories, along with a proper headshot and bio.
Daily mortgage rate stories might seem out of place on CNET, slotted between MacBook reviews and tech news. But for CNET parent company Red Ventures, this SEO-friendly content is the point.
CNET was once a high-flying powerhouse of tech reporting that commanded a $1.8 billion purchase price when it was acquired by CBS in 2008. Since then, it has fallen victim to the same disruptions and business model shifts as the rest of the media industry, resulting in CBS flipping the property to Red Ventures for just $500 million in 2020.
Red Ventures’ business model is straightforward and explicit: it publishes content designed to rank highly in Google search for “high-intent” queries and then monetizes that traffic with lucrative affiliate links. Specifically, Red Ventures has found a major niche in credit cards and other finance products. In addition to CNET, Red Ventures owns The Points Guy, Bankrate, and CreditCards.com, all of which monetize through credit card affiliate fees.
This type of SEO farming can be massively lucrative
The CNET AI stories at the center of the controversy are straightforward examples of this strategy: “Can You Buy a Gift Card With a Credit Card?” and “What Is Zelle and How Does It Work?” are obviously designed to rank highly in searches for those topics. Like CNET, Bankrate and CreditCards.com have also published AI-written articles about credit cards with ads for opening cards nestled within.
This type of SEO farming can be massively lucrative. Digital marketers have built an entire industry on top of credit card affiliate links, from which they then earn a generous profit. Various affiliate industry sites estimate the bounty for a credit card signup to be around $250 each. A 2021 New York Times story on Red Ventures pegged it even higher, at up to $900 per card.
Tomi Engdahl says:
News media should’ve sent a signal to Twitter by not tweeting after the site suspended some journalists’ accounts; Fox News once boycotted Twitter for 16 months
When It Comes to Twitter, Mainstream News Outlets Should Take a Cue From Fox News. Seriously.
https://www.readtpa.com/p/take-a-twitter-lesson-from-fox-news
Fox once abandoned Twitter for 16 months in a vague, nonsensical protest. News outlets with legitimate grievances didn’t even wait until their reporters were reinstated after being wrongly suspended.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Suomenkin tietosuojaviranomainen puuttui nyt Google Analyticsin käyttöön. Avasimme tilannetta blogissa.
https://www.karhuhelsinki.fi/blogi/tietosuojaviranomainen-puuttui-google-analyticsin-kayttoon-nyt-myos-suomessa/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=display&fbclid=IwAR26Rt6Xo-WJ7j9Gj93lKqJYAy0TC5xahsmhewdDt6izXewHEeFL4c-da6Q
Apulaistietosuojavaltuutettu antoi tammikuussa 2023 pääkaupunkiseudun kaupungeille huomautuksen Helmet-kirjastojen verkkosivuilla käytetyistä seurantateknologioista ja erityisesti Google Analyticsin sekä Google Tag Managerin hyödyntämisestä. Tässä kirjoituksessa arvioimme viranomaispäätöksen vaikutuksia.
Eri EU-maiden tietosuojaviranomaiset ovat viimeisen vuoden aikana julkistaneet Google Analyticsin käyttöä kritisoivia päätöksiä.
Tuore apulaistietosuojavaltuutetun ratkaisu on ensimmäinen suora kotimainen viranomaiskannanotto Google Analyticsin käyttöä vastaan. Se tosin on huomioitava, että tietosuojavaltuutetun toimiston julkaisema polveileva 13-sivuinen päätös ei keskity vain Analyticsiin, vaan nostaa esiin monenlaisia muitakin tietosuojanäkökohtia Helmet-sivustoilta ja aiheellisia yleisen tason huolia verkkosivujen tietosuojasta.
Tietosuojaviranomainen näkee erityisen ongelmallisena sen, että Google Analyticsillä kerätään kävijöistä dataa, joka voi päätyä Yhdysvaltoihin. Lainsäädäntö USA:ssa mahdollistaa tiedusteluviranomaisten pääsyn sikäläisten teknologiayhtiöiden keräämään henkilödataan. Tämä yhdistelmä on GDPR:n näkökulmasta mahdoton hyväksyä. Tähän on vedottu kaikissa EU-maista saaduissa Analytics-kriittisissä viranomaispäätöksissä.
Sama ongelma koskee myös muita yhdysvaltalaisten yritysten tarjoamia digitaalisia palveluita EU:ssa, mutta Google Analytics on noussut nykyisessä tietosuojakeskustelussa suurimpaan rooliin.
Puuttuva palanen: Privacy Shield
Apulaistietosuojavaltuutettu nostaa ratkaisunsa keskeiseksi perusteeksi sen, että EU-tuomioistuin kesällä 2020 kaatoi EU:n ja Yhdysvaltain välistä henkilödatan siirtoa suojanneen Privacy Shield -järjestelyn.
Tilanteen tekee erityisen mielenkiintoiseksi se, että Privacy Shield tekee parhaillaan paluuta. Mikäli prosessi etenee sujuvasti, järjestely voidaan saada uudelleen voimaan jo lähikuukausien aikana.
Uusi Privacy Shield voi parhaimmillaan tuoda nopeankin helpotuksen yhdysvaltalaisten IT-jättien GDPR-ongelmiin
Mikäli Privacy Shield saadaan uudelleen suojaamaan EU-kansalaisten henkilötietoja ei-toivotulta käytöltä USA:ssa, ratkeaako myös Google Analyticin ja muiden amerikkalaisteknologioiden käyttöä koskeva tietosuojaongelma? Tätä ei vielä tiedetä, mutta näemme entistäkin toivottavampana sen, että Privacy Shieldiä viedään kohti maalia.
Evästeet mainittu: vääränlainen toimintaperiaate sai moitteet
Tuoreessa viranomaispäätöksessä Helmetiä nuhdellaan myös siitä, että sivustot keräävät henkilödataa evästeisiin perustuen jo ennen kuin kävijä on antanut siihen lupaa. Tämä on selkeä epäkohta ja vastoin Liikenne- ja viestintävirasto Traficomin syyskuussa 2021 tekemää evästelinjausta, jota myös analysoimme tuoreeltaan blogissamme.
Kävijän selaimeen saa asettaa muita kuin sivuston toiminnan kannalta välttämättömiä evästeitä vasta, kun kävijä antaa sille hyväksyntänsä. Traficomin linjauksen seurauksena suomalaisille verkkosivuille on viimeisen 1,5 vuoden aikana ilmestynyt evästehyväksyntäruutuja kuin sieniä sateella.
Välikevennyksenä todettakoon, että mikäli Helmetin verkkosivutiimi olisi lukenut blogiimme kootut ohjeet evästehyväksyntäruudun oikeaoppisesta toteutuksesta, ainakin tämä osa viranomaiskritiikistä olisi vältetty.
Odotettavissa lämpenevää kiinnostusta vaihtoehtoisiin analytiikkatuotteisiin
Mitä apulaistietosuojavaltuutetun tuoreesta päätöksestä seuraa? Emme usko, että se heti mullistaa verkkosivujen analytiikan käyttötapoja Suomessa. Se on kuitenkin selvää, että yhä useampi organisaatio tarkastelee tekniikoita ja käytäntöjä, joilla heidän verkkosivujensa kävijöitä seurataan. Viranomaispäätöksessä nostetaan julkisen sektorin verkkosivustot erityiseksi huomion kohteeksi, mutta päätöksestä syntyvät paineaallot tunnetaan nopeasti myös yrityksissä.
Arvioimme, että yhä useampi verkkosivuston omistaja kiinnostuu lähitulevaisuudessa korvaamaan Google Analyticsin vaihtoehtoisella analytiikkatuotteella, joka kunnioittaa paremmin kävijöiden tietosuojaa. Apulaistietosuojavaltuutettu mainitsee kannanotossaan myönteisessä sävyssä Matomo Analytics -tuotteen. Helmet-kirjastojen todetaan sivustoillaan jo siirtyneen siihen. Kirjastot ovat myös kertoneet luopuvansa Google Analyticsin käytöstä.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/18/punycodes-explained/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.karhuhelsinki.fi/blogi/kysyimme-tekoalylta-vuoden-2023-verkkosivutrendit/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is WordPress Secure?
https://blog.sucuri.net/2023/01/is-wordpress-secure.html
In this post, Ill be breaking down the WordPress ecosystem along with some security best practices to help you understand whether WordPress is safe and how to protect your site from attacks
According to W3Techs, 43.2% of all websites on the internet use WordPress. And of all websites that use a CMS (Content Management System) more than half (64%) leverage WordPress to power their blog or website. Unfortunately, since WordPress has such a large market share it has also become a prime target for attackers.
You might be wondering whether WordPress is safe to use. And the short answer is yes — WordPress core is safe to use, but only if you maintain it to the latest version and employ some additional protections on the admin login page.
Is WordPress core secure?
In short, yes — WordPress core is secure, but only if you maintain it to the latest version.
But at the time of writing, only 60% of WordPress sites are using the latest version of WordPress. That means the other 40% of outdated sites are at risk of hackers targeting known vulnerabilities.
Hackers are constantly scanning the internet for outdated core WordPress installations or websites using plugins or themes with known vulnerabilities. They even have automated scripts that make it easy to find and exploit vulnerable websites.
How to secure
1 – Keep your WordPress plugins and themes patched
WordPress has literally thousands of options when it comes to plugins and themes. WordPress
2 – Use strong usernames and passwords for WordPress login and hosting
When you set up your hosting account or WordPress website login credentials, it’s important to use complex usernames and passwords. Stay away from simple or default usernames and passwords.
3 – Protect your WordPress login pages
The WordPress default login pages /wp-login.php and /wp-admin are commonly crawled by bots. Hackers use scripts to brute force attack and guess admin login credentials.
Enable two factor authentication
Change your default login page
Changing your default login page to a unique URL is yet another way to help mitigate attacks.
Deny all unnecessary access
With all that being said, by far the most secure method is to outright deny any and all attempts at accessing the login or admin panel from IP addresses which do not require it.
This can be done very easily by adding protected pages with our website firewall but can also be done free-of-charge by using .htaccess file rules within Apache environments.
4 — Setup Daily Website Backups
Website backups are the foundation of a strong security posture. When your WordPress website encounters an error or is infected with malware, you’ll want the ability to recover as quickly as possible.
5 — Install an SSL Certificate
An SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate is a digital certificate that encrypts the data that is being sent through your website. Although SSL encryption is not going to help protect your website from attackers, it does still play an important role in the overall security and trustworthiness of your website. Strong encryption is vital to ensuring your (and your site visitors) privacy is protected whenever they submit data on your site.
6 — Use the latest version of PHP
Out of date versions of PHP do contain vulnerabilities, so it’s important to patch to the latest version.
7 — Advanced DIY Protection (.htaccess & wp-config.php)
Restrict logins to a specific IP range
Disable browser viewing of directories: Options All -Indexes
Disable XML-RPC
This will disable trackbacks and ping-backs among other nuisances, but keep in mind it can also prevent users from placing comments on the website.
Add security headers
Disallow file modifications in wp-config.php
Disable PHP execution in /wp-content/uploads
Summary
While WordPress core receives frequent updates and has a default software security policy in place, there are many ways you can harden the installation to enhance the security of your WordPress website.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Project Bishop: Clustering Web Pages
https://research.nccgroup.com/2023/01/19/project-bishop-clustering-web-pages/
If you are a Machine Learning (ML) enthusiast like us, you may recall our blogpost series from 2019 regarding Project Ava, which documented our experiments in using ML techniques to automate web application security testing tasks. In February 2020 we set out to build on Project Ava with Project Bishop, which was to specifically look at use of ML techniques for intelligent web crawling. This research was performed by Thomas Atkinson, Matt Lewis and Jose Selvi. In this blogpost we share some of the preliminary experiments that we performed under Project Bishop, and their results, which may be of interest and use to other researchers in this field. The main question we sought to answer through our research was whether a ML model could be generated that would provide contextual understanding of different web pages and their functions (e.g., login page, generic web form submission, profile/image upload etc.).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rolling Stone:
Sources: Donald Trump does not want to renew his Truth Social exclusivity contract, expiring in June 2023, and is asking associates for first tweet suggestions — The ex-president is planning his first tweets with a few months to go on his Truth Social contract
Trump Looks to Ditch His Own Social Media Site
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-ditch-truth-social-for-twitter-facebook-1234665307/
The ex-president is planning his first tweets with a few months to go on his Truth Social contract
In the months ahead of what’s likely to be a brutal Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump and his 2024 campaign are laying the groundwork for his big, bombastic return to major social media platforms. Such a return, though, would inevitably involve Trump screwing over one of his own companies — and he’s been telling confidants that he is prepared to do just that.
When Trump first founded Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), he agreed to a “social media exclusivity term” that required him to “first channel any and all social media communications” to his Truth Social account for six hours before posting the content to other platforms, according to SEC filings.
Since late last year, former President Trump has informed several people close to him that he doesn’t want to re-up the exclusivity agreement with his social media company, Truth Social, two sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. “There’s not going to be a need for that,” is how one of the sources recalls Trump describing his soon-to-expire contractual obligation.
The 18-month term of that requirement is up in June — right as the Republican primary is expected to begin heating up. After that, Trump’s exclusivity term would automatically renew for six month periods “unless notice is given.” In the event his exclusivity term expires, Trump would still be “required to post contemporaneously to Truth Social.”
“He said there’s an expiration date and that he didn’t want to make commitments,” the other source says.
Asked whether Trump planned to continue to make Truth Social his exclusive social media home, a company representative directed Rolling Stone to a recent appearance by TMTG CEO Devin Nunes on Newsmax where the former California congressman said Trump “has no interest in going back to Twitter.”
Others, of course, disagree. One person close to Trump who has spoken to the ex-president recently about Twitter tells Rolling Stone on Sunday: “There is no way [Nunes’ statement] is true.”
Regardless of what happens with his exclusivity term, Trump’s agreement with the company grants him greater freedom in campaigning for his upcoming 2024 run. His agreement exempts posts as long as the content “specifically relates to political messaging, political fundraising or get-out-the vote efforts,” according to the SEC filings.
The recent accounts of Trump’s growing restlessness with his own platform come at a time when the former president — once exiled from mainstream social media for instigating a deadly insurrection — could return to some of those platforms. Twitter, now owned by right-wing billionaire Elon Musk, reinstated Trump’s account in November, but Trump demurred and said he’d stay with Truth Social. The Trump campaign has also pressed Facebook to end the indefinite suspension of his account put in place after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack.
A Meta spokesperson referred Rolling Stone to its statement, made before the Trump campaign’s demand for reinstatement, which said that the company would make a decision “in the coming weeks in line with the process we laid out.” The statement, made in early January, suggests that a decision about the account could be announced relatively soon.
Meta’s independent Oversight Board upheld the company’s decision to restrict his account in a May 2021 ruling but called the undefined period of suspension it gave Trump “arbitrary”— the company’s rules call for time-bound or permanent suspension for severe violations — and asked officials to reassess it.
If Meta officials reinstate his account, Trump will face a moderation process with new and potentially stricter reviewers involved than the environment he faced during his presidency.
Previously, users could only appeal the company’s decisions to remove content, but the board’s jurisdiction expanded in April 2021 to allow third parties to appeal content “which they think should be removed from Facebook or Instagram.” If Trump returns to Facebook, his posts could face a second layer of scrutiny from the independent Oversight Board, which may feel freer to enforce the company’s rules against the Republican presidential favorite.
And as NBC News reported on Wednesday, Trump has begun to ask associates for their thoughts about a return to Twitter and suggestions for a first tweet. People with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that some of these ideas that Trump has personally discussed include a tweet that features a slickly made, WWE-style campaign video about the ex-president returning to the platform, and then to the White House. One of these sources says Trump has privately rattled off possible topics in recent weeks for his initial barrage of new tweets, such as ones focused on insulting President Joe Biden and others comparing himself to Superman.
Other ideas, however, have included picking at the scabs of the Jan. 6 attack. According to one source familiar with the matter, Trump and some of his close allies have already brainstormed about him tweeting that, even though Big Tech tried to “silence” him over his lies about a “rigged election,” he was now back to make “the Left” miserable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Smith / Semafor:
The unprofitable Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and Time rely on their billionaire owners’ goodwill to survive while trying new business models
— Starting a decade ago, a generation of new-money billionaires rode to the rescue of American journalism:
The Billionaire Era in News is Fizzling
https://www.semafor.com/article/01/22/2023/the-billionaire-era-in-news-is-fizzling
Starting a decade ago, a generation of new-money billionaires rode to the rescue of American journalism:
2013: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million
2014: eBay founder Pierre Omidyar granted First Look Media, including The Intercept, $250 million
2017: Apple billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs bought 70% of The Atlantic in a deal valuing the company at about $160 million, according to a person close to the deal
2018: Biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought assets including the Los Angeles Times for $500 million
2018: Salesforce Founder Marc Benioff bought Time for $190 million
The new owners promised both to support the journalism and help revolutionize business models.
The billionaires have mostly kept half of that promise, protecting journalists’ jobs and meddling little. But the other half of the plan — to find new models — has remained largely unfulfilled, as the money-losing outlets all continue to rely on their owners’ goodwill for survival, according to people at each outlet. And now all face questions of strategy and morale that are the flip side of dependence on a wealthy benefactor.
The clearest struggles are at the Washington Post, which effectively admitted defeat last year in its attempts to rebuild its core as a scalable tech business with products called Zeus and Arc. Now it’s simply a media company that battled The New York Times for Trump scoops but has no answer to its rival’s success in other areas, such as cooking, audio, and games. Bezos visited last week to calm a restive newsroom.
The others follow a similar,if less publicly painful, pattern. The Los Angeles Times has rebuilt its newsroom and improved its local lifestyle coverage, but its strategy remains adrift under Soon-Shiong, who has taken the title of “Executive Chairman” and has not appointed a CEO.
Time has morphed into a global events business with a studio that, I’m told, accounts for about a third of its revenue, and which hopes to break even this year. It’s gradually converting its print product to a US News-style compendium of lists. But it has struggled for relevance in national news
The challenge is in part that during the period when the billionaires emerged as white knights, alternate models seemed hopeless, with print in ruins and the promise of social media collapsing. (
But since then, distinct models have emerged. Local nonprofits have begun to serve some of the functions of accountability and state government news from Sacramento to Mississippi, seeking billionaires’ — and the other 99.99%’s — money, but little else. The emergence of digital subscriptions gave organizations from the Times to tiny Substacks a stable source of revenue, provided they could connect intensely with an audience. Washington proved a fruitful starting point for a new generation of companies including Politico, Axios, and Punchbowl News. (Semafor is riding some of the same currents.)
Survival without a billionaire requires the kind of obsessive execution and low-key panic that Benioff, Bezos, Omidyar, and Soon-Shiong brought to the early days of the companies that made them rich. Now they own the only news organizations that aren’t running scared.
“Everyone thought the billionaires could save us — clearly, they’re not engaged,” grumbled one executive at a billionaire-owned newsroom. “It’s not a good model because they lose interest or they get pissy.”
Building — or reinventing — a brand in the shadow of a billionaire has its challenges, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Tips for Writing Your First Technical Book
Jan. 26, 2015
Ten tips for writing your first technical book from Lou Frenzel, author of 23 different books.
https://www.electronicdesign.com/blogs/article/21802756/10-tips-for-writing-your-first-technical-book
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bryce Elder / Financial Times:
FT Alphaville closes its Mastodon server and reflects on why running a social media site is a bad idea, including due to reputational, legal, and security risks — Extinction looms for FTAV’s Mastodon presence — A few months ago, FT Alphaville thought it might be fun to host a Mastodon server.
We tried to run a social media site and it was awful
https://www.ft.com/content/8d995a24-d77c-4208-a3a6-603d8788ebcd
Tomi Engdahl says:
Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Substack introduces private publications, search improvements, chat updates, post duplication, publication toggling, inline footnotes, LaTeX support, and more
Substack introduces ‘private Substacks’ that readers can request to subscribe to
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/26/substack-introduces-private-substacks-that-readers-can-request-to-subscribe-to/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Käräjäoikeuden mukaan Helsingin Sanomien kaksi toimittajaa syyllistyi turvallisuussalaisuuden paljastamiseen – toiselle tuomittiin sakkoja
https://yle.fi/a/74-20014910
Oikeus katsoo, että joulukuussa 2017 julkaistu Viestikoekeskus-artikkeli sisälsi turvallisuussalaisuuksia. Toimituksen esimiehen Kalle Silfverbergin syyteet hylättiin. Juttu määrättiin poistettavaksi.
Helsingin käräjäoikeuden mukaan Viestikoekeskusta käsittelevän artikkelin kirjoittaneet toimittajat Laura Halminen ja Tuomo Pietiläinen syyllistyivät turvallisuussalaisuuden paljastamiseen.
Oikeus katsoo, että Helsingin Sanomissa 16. joulukuuta 2017 julkaistussa jutussa julkistettiin useita sellaisia sotilastiedustelua koskevia tietoja, jotka oli Suomen ulkoisen turvallisuuden vuoksi säädetty salassa pidettäväksi.
Artikkelin kirjoittamisesta päävastuulliseksi katsottu toimittaja Tuomo Pietiläinen tuomittiin 50 päiväsakkoon. Halmisen rooli kirjoitustyössä katsottiin vähäisemmäksi, ja hänet jätettiin tuomitsematta rangaistukseen.
– Kun oikeudenkäynti oli lisäksi kestänyt pitkään ja saanut poikkeuksellista julkisuutta, käräjäoikeus on tuominnut päävastuulliselle toimittajalle [Pietiläiselle] vankeusrangaistuksen sijasta sakkoa. Toisen toimittajan [Halmisen] rooli artikkelissa oli ollut selvästi kollegaansa vähäisempi, ja hän oli pyrkinyt varmistumaan julkaisemisen laillisuudesta. Näistä syistä käräjäoikeus on jättänyt hänet rangaistukseen tuomitsematta, oikeus muotoilee.
Pietiläisen lähiesimiestä, Kalle Silfverbergiä, koskevat syytteet on hylätty
Lisäksi Helsingin Sanomien verkkosivuilla oleva Viestikoekeskus-artikkeli määrättiin poistettavaksi ja ”hävitettäväksi”.
Käräjäoikeus on hylännyt syytteet turvallisuussalaisuuden paljastamisen yrityksestä, joka koski myöhemmin julkaistaviksi tarkoitettuja artikkeliluonnoksia.
Syyttäjä vaati kaikille kolmelle vähintään puolentoista vuoden ehdollisia vankeusrangaistuksia turvallisuussalaisuuden paljastamisesta.
Toimittajat ovat kiistäneet syyllistyneensä rikoksiin. Puolustuksen mukaan Viestikoekeskusta käsittelevässä jutussa ei paljastettu turvallisuussalaisuuksia, eivätkä toimittajat tehneet päätöstä artikkelin julkaisusta.
Oikeus: Juttu sisälsi yksityiskohtia sotilastiedustelusta
Helsingin käräjäoikeuden mukaan Helsingin Sanomien artikkeli sisälsi yksityiskohtia noin 10 vuoden takaisista sotilastiedustelun tehtävistä, toiminnasta, organisaatiosta, suorituskyvystä ja hankinnoista. Oikeudenkäynnissä näiden tietojen osoitettiin olevan keskeisesti peräisin Puolustusvoimilta.
– Sotilastiedustelun pitkäjänteisyys huomioon ottaen useissa muissa tekstikohdissa paljastettuja tietoja ei kuitenkaan voitu pitää ilmeisen vaarattomina. Näiden salassa pidettäviksi säädettyjen tietojen julkistaminen on täyttänyt turvallisuussalaisuuden paljastamista koskevan rikoksen tunnusmerkistön, tuomiossa todetaan.
Oikeus muistuttaa, että tiedotusvälineen julkaiseman sisällön lainmukaisuudesta vastaa paitsi julkaisemisesta päättänyt taho, myös sisällön laatija. Käräjäoikeus on pitänyt artikkelin kirjoittajien menettelyä tahallisena, koska kokeneina toimittajina heidän täytyi tuntea sotilastiedustelutietojen salassapitoa koskeva tiukka oikeuskäytäntö ja koska Puolustusvoimien tiedustelupäällikkö oli etukäteen jopa kiinnittänyt toimittajien huomiota rikoslain säännökseen.
Artikkelin aiheeksi oli nimetty sotilastiedustelua koskenut ajankohtainen lakihanke, mutta käräjäoikeus on katsonut, että paljastetuilla yksityiskohdilla ei ollut liityntää lakihankkeeseen.
– Kun yksityiskohdat eivät myöskään paljastaneet epäkohtia tai väärinkäytöksiä, käräjäoikeus on arvioinut, ettei toimittajilla ollut tiedotusvälineiden yhteiskunnalliseen erityisasemaan perustuvaa oikeuttamisperustetta julkistaa näitä tietoja, ratkaisussa kerrotaan.
Helsingin käräjäoikeus alleviivaa, että tiedotusvälineiden yhteiskunnallisen erityisaseman vuoksi Euroopan ihmisoikeustuomioistuin on vain poikkeuksellisissa tilanteissa pitänyt mahdollisena, että toimittaja tuomitaan sananvapausrikoksesta vankeusrangaistukseen.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.valve.fi/blogi/miten-luoda-verkkosivut-jotka-tuottavat-vahemman-tuskaa-ja-parempia-tuloksia
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic:
How the “enshittification” cycle, in which platforms first are good to users and business customers before abusing them, has infected TikTok, Amazon, and others
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023)
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users.
That tempted in lots of business customers – Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers.
This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.
That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees.
Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
This is why – as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay – platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”
This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.
Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow.
Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic.
First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.
This made publications truly dependent on Facebook – their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.
Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.
Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue
Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves
But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.
Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice
Tomi Engdahl says:
CTech:
OpenWeb, which helps outlets target readers with ads and manage comments, acquires Jeeng, an audience management service used by over 650 publishers, for $100M
OpenWeb acquires audience management platform Jeeng for $100 million
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hkuhwqgnj
The Israeli-founded unicorn, which raised $170 million at a $1.5 billion valuation three months ago, completed its third acquisition in a year, taking its total spending to $260 million
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://parcero.fi/suuri-generaatio-opas/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://yrityksille.fonecta.fi/artikkeli/mika-on-omnibus-direktiivi/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.canva.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael King / Search Engine Land:
An in-depth analysis of Yandex’s leaked source code shows 17,854 ranking factors, scraping Google, Bing, YouTube, and TikTok, “Vital Hosts” boosts, and more
Yandex scrapes Google and other SEO learnings from the source code leak
https://searchengineland.com/yandex-leak-learnings-392393
Yandex isn’t Google, but there is a lot SEOs can learn about how a modern search engine is built from reviewing this codebase.
“Fragments” of Yandex’s codebase leaked online last week. Much like Google, Yandex is a platform with many aspects such as email, maps, a taxi service, etc. The code leak featured chunks of all of it.
According to the documentation therein, Yandex’s codebase was folded into one large repository called Arcadia in 2013. The leaked codebase is a subset of all projects in Arcadia and we find several components in it related to the search engine in the “Kernel,” “Library,” “Robot,” “Search,” and “ExtSearch” archives.
The move is wholly unprecedented. Not since the AOL search query data of 2006 has something so material related to a web search engine entered the public domain.
Although we are missing the data and many files that are referenced, this is the first instance of a tangible look at how a modern search engine works at the code level.
Yandex ‘leak’ reveals 1,922 search ranking factors
https://searchengineland.com/yandex-search-ranking-factors-leak-392323
SEOs have already started analyzing Yandex’s search ranking factors, which include PageRank and several other link-related factors
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Herrman / New York Magazine:
Amazon’s third-party “seller services”, a large and growing part of the company’s revenue that is also profitable, has filled its Marketplace with junk products
The Junkification of Amazon Why does it feel like the company is making itself worse?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/why-does-it-feel-like-amazon-is-making-itself-worse.html
Let’s say you’re a regular Amazon shopper in need of a spatula. You might start your journey by typing the word “spatula” into the search box with a qualifier or two (“silicone,” “fish,” “magenta”). In response, Amazon will produce a very large list presented in a large paginated grid or, on a phone, a bottomless scroll. You have, it is implied, thousands of options within immediate reach; Amazon presents them to you in a particular but mostly unexplained order. Some of the spatulas you encounter first will carry brand names you’ve heard of before, like KitchenAid or Rubbermaid, while others will have names like IOCBYHZ, BANKKY, or KLAQQED. Some of them will appear identical to one another or even share the same product photos with different names and prices. Other listings will disclose, usually in small gray text, that they’re “sponsored.” (Of the 81 clickable, buyable products on my first page of search results for “spatula” — product listings, banners, and recommendation modules — 29, or more than a third, were some form of ad.)
Many products will be described in SEO-ese: “Silicone Spatula Turner, VOVOLY 3-Pack Spatula Set for Nonstick Cookware, BPA Free Rubber Spatulas, Heat Resistant Kitchen Utensil, No Scratch or Melting, Ideal for Egg, Cookie, Crepe, Burger, Pancake.” Most, maybe all, will be eligible for Prime.
You’ll have options! So many options that, unless you have strongly held preferences about spatula brands — unlikely, given that you just typed “spatula” into Amazon — you’re going to need some guidance. BANKKY or KLAQQED? Should you give IOCBYHZ a look or just pay extra for the Oxo? Your eyes are drawn to the only relevant, useful information on the page: star ratings. On this first page, sponsored or not, they’re all hovering between 4 and 5 stars and mostly between 4.6 and 4.9: 403 ratings, 4.7 stars; 10,845 ratings, 4.8 stars; 27 ratings, 4.7 stars; 20,069 ratings, 4.7 stars.
You read a little feedback to quell your doubts or ease your mind, then eventually, or quickly, you pluck a spatula out of the cascade. There’s a good chance, however, that it won’t actually be sold by Amazon but rather by a third-party seller that has spent months or years and many thousands of dollars hustling for search placement on the platform — its “store,” to use Amazon’s term, is where you will have technically bought this spatula. There’s an even better chance you won’t notice this before you order it. In any case, it’ll be at your door in a couple of days.
The system worked. But what system? In your short journey, you interacted with a few. There was the ’90s-retro e-commerce interface, which conceals a marketplace of literally millions of sellers, each scrapping for relevance, using Amazon as a sales channel for their own semi-independent businesses. It subjected you to the multibillion-dollar advertising network planted between Amazon users and the things they browse and buy. It was shipped to you through a sprawling, submerged logistics empire with nearly a million employees and contractors in the United States alone. You were guided almost entirely by an idiosyncratic and unreliable reputation system, initially designed to review books, that has used years of feedback from hundreds of millions of customers to help construct an alternative universe of sometimes large but often fleeting brands that have little identity or relevance outside of the platform. You found what you were looking for, sort of, through a process that didn’t feel much like shopping at all.
This is all normal in that Amazon is so dominant that it sets norms. But its essential weirdness — its drift from anything resembling shopping or informed consumption — is becoming harder for Amazon’s one-click magic trick to hide.
Interacting with Amazon, for most of its customers, broadly produces the desired, expected, and generally unrivaled result: They order all sorts of things; the prices are usually reasonable, and they don’t have to think about shipping costs; the things they order show up pretty quickly; returns are no big deal. But, at the core of that experience, something has become unignorably worse. Late last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon’s customer satisfaction had fallen sharply in a range of recent surveys, which cited COVID-related delivery interruptions but also poor search results and “low-quality” items. More products are junk. The interface itself is full of junk. The various systems on which customers depend (reviews, search results, recommendations) feel like junk. This is the state of the art of American e-commerce, a dominant force in the future of buying things. Why does it feel like Amazon is making itself worse? Maybe it’s slipping, showing its age, and settling into complacency. Or maybe — hear me out — everything is going according to plan.
Like most tech companies, Amazon’s corporate outlook at the beginning of 2023 wasn’t ideal: falling stock price, rising costs, geopolitical concerns, real inroads by labor organizers, the end of the “pandemic shopping habits” that were, just two years ago, predicted to accelerate e-commerce adoption by leaps and bounds.