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The answer may not be what we think.
Moynaq, Aral Sea, CC-BY 2.0 Arian Zwegers
Many developers work on the “web platform” because they believe in the model of competing and interoperable implementations (i.e. browsers). These folks (of which I am one) believe that competing and interoperable implementations is what makes the web fundamentally stronger than other platforms. Unlike Windows, iOS, or Android (for example), the web’s users have choice about how they participate. If they disagree with how their chosen browser is being managed, they can switch to another.
Many developers work on the “web platform” because they believe in the model of competing and interoperable implementations (i.e. browsers). These folks (of which I am one) believe that competing and interoperable implementations is what makes the web fundamentally stronger than other platforms. Unlike Windows, iOS, or Android (for example), the web’s users have choice about how they participate. If they disagree with how their chosen browser is being managed, they can switch to another.
Why do we care about encryption? Why was it a big deal, at least in theory, when Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Facebook would move to end-to-end encryption on all three of its messaging platforms? We don’t just support encryption for its own sake. We fight for it because...
Het kabinet heeft vlak voor de parlementaire zomervakantie zijn klimaatbeleid bekend gemaakt. Na lang polderen zijn er plannen te over, maar het is te weinig en te laat. Politiek Dagboek over de keus: geruststellen en mensen ‘meenemen’, of de ramp vergroten.
Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone...
An Indian research university has assembled 73 million journal articles (without permission) and is offering the archive for unfettered scientific text-mining
Het gezichtsherkenningsnetwerk van de Nederlandse recherche ontwikkelt zich razendsnel, maar burgers worden daar nauwelijks bij betrokken.
Following the panic over this viral app, the moral of the story is: don’t worry too much about ‘the Russians’. You should worry about everything
The latest release of Privacy Badger gives it the power to detect and block a new class of evasive, pervasive third-party trackers, including Google Analytics. Most blocking tools, like uBlock Origin, Ghostery, and Firefox’s native blocking mode (using Disconect’s block lists), use human-curated...
In the past week, a controversy around F-Droid took place at its forum and in the fediverse. We feel like we have to put out a public statement to clear F-Dr...
Politie: De Nationale Politie negeert interne meldingen over discriminatie, seksuele intimidatie en ander grensoverschrijdend gedrag. Politiecoach Carel Boers en andere medewerkers slaan alarm.
Startup plans to use small ‘threads’ to detect neuron activity, as Musk claims tests already show ‘monkey can control computer with its brain’
Many of the key Googler Uprising organizers have quit, citing retaliation from senior management
From a letter written in 1905 by Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria. Trump had been ordered to leave Bavaria for failing to complete mandatory military service and to register his initial emigration to the United States twenty years earlier. Prince Luitpold rejected Trump’s request for repatriation; the family later settled in New York. Translated from the German by Austen Hinkley.
Om afgrijzen op te wekken vertel ik aan echtparen graag het verhaal van de vrouw zonder sleutel. Ooit las ik een interview met een vrouw die geen sleutel bezat van haar eigen huis. Haar man had er eentje, zei ze, en ze had haar man altijd bij zich. Of hij haar.In de Verenigde Staten is rumoer ontstaan over een huwelijksconstructie die hier wat op lijkt: de Billy Graham Rule. Robert Foster, in de…
Mastodon is figuring out how to address Gab joining its platform
An invitation to the palace to accept a New Year honour... you must be joking. Benjamin Zephaniah won't be going. Here he explains why.
Dit is een fascinerende discussie: telecom leveranciers willen met 5G de inzet van neppe accesspunten onmogelijk maken, terwijl de diensten zeggen dat ze die juist nodig hebben.
Dit is een fascinerende discussie: telecom leveranciers willen met 5G de inzet van IMSi-catchers onmogelijk maken, terwijl de diensten zeggen dat ze die juist nodig hebben. Dit is eigenlijk dezelfde discussie als rondom versleuteling, misschien dus goed als wij er actief op worden.
Seki Edge Nagelknipper S-106. De s106 is, mede door de heerlijke knipeigenschappen, al jaren het topmodel van Seki Edge. Geen nagels afhakken maar u...
Het riool schoonmaken in Mexico City?
Everyone in the tech world claims to love interoperability—the technical ability to plug one product or service into another product or service—but interoperability covers a lot of territory, and depending on what's meant by interoperability, it can do a lot, a little, or nothing at all to protect...
Taste the fruit of this tree we’ve planted together.
Carlos Maza started posting videos on YouTube, and ran afoul of a guy who reminded him of his high school bullies. He asked YouTube to intervene, and then things got extremely complicated.Carlos Maza's video series StrikethroughMark Bergen on how toxic videos became more common on YouTubeMegan Farokhmanesh's article about Google's LGBTQ employees and their reaction to the company's policy decisionsKevin Roose's "The Making of a YouTube Radical"
Today, President Trump is hosting a social media summit at the White House. Rather than inviting actual social media platforms and experts to have a
One of my favorite books when I was young was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, and one of its central themes is the attempt of King Arthur to replace an ethos of “might is right” with someth…
It is all but impossible to beat an Aggregator head-on, as Walmart is trying to do with Amazon. The solution instead is to build a platform like Shopify.
It is all but impossible to beat an Aggregator head-on, as Walmart is trying to do with Amazon. The solution instead is to build a platform like Shopify.
In gesprekken en debatten over klimaatopwarming vliegen de felle meningen je om de oren. Dat is mooi – de uitwisseling van ideeën is de brandstof van vooruitgang. Maar vaak worden oude misverstanden of onwaarheden herhaald. Daarom: de feiten over de grootste klimaatmisverstanden.
In gesprekken en debatten over klimaatopwarming vliegen de felle meningen je om de oren. Dat is mooi – de uitwisseling van ideeën is de brandstof van vooruitgang. Maar vaak worden oude misverstanden of onwaarheden herhaald. Daarom: de feiten over de grootste klimaatmisverstanden.
No! Stop! Go back! Reading the abstract is like taking the red pill in the Matrix.<br><br>In this article we discuss “the game.” “The game” is the quest for mea
Via de slimme luidsprekers en de Assistent-app van Google krijgen medewerkers dingen te horen die bewust of onbewust zijn ingesproken.
De grote bedrijven trekken zich het lot aan van de allerarmsten. Facebook maakt plannen voor de introductie van een eigen munt en stelt dat mensen zonder bankrekening dan toch online kunnen betalen. Een private munt als redding van ‘the unbanked’: het bedrijf claimt trots een maatschappelijke opdracht te vervullen. „We vinden dat veel meer mensen toegang moeten hebben tot financiële diensten en…
This document exists to lay out some general principles of running a small social network site that have worked for me. These principles are related to community building more than they are related to specific technologies.
Het Platform Bescherming Burgerrechten is een netwerk van organisaties, groepen en personen die elkaar vinden in het streven naar een betere waarborging en versterking van de burgerrechten in Nederland.
Ben Williamson Turnitin can now analyse students’ individual writing styles to tackle ‘contract cheating’. Image by Xavi The acquisition of plagiarism detection company Turnitin f…
Facebook’s independent oversight board will have a final charter by August. It’s messy, but so is every constitutional convention
Many digital payments can be tracked, potentially assisting an authoritarian crackdown.
“I made a list of hideous men in my life. It includes the president — who assaulted me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman 23 years ago.”
“I made a list of hideous men in my life. It includes the president — who assaulted me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman 23 years ago.”
In response to mass shootings, some schools and hospitals are installing microphones equipped with algorithms. The devices purport to identify stress and anger before violence erupts. Our testing found them less than reliable.
Tim Wu rebuts Zuck's reasons for exempting Facebook from antitrust enforcement
Microsoft has closed its ebook store—and will soon make its customers' libraries disappear along with it.
I’m Rahul Vohra, founder and CEO of Superhuman. Over the last 24 hours, we have seen vigorous debate on pixel tracking within email, also…
Mastodon is completely opposed to Gab’s project and philosophy, which seeks to monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech. Mastodon remains committed to standing up against hate speech; for example, our new server covenant means we only list servers on joinmastodon.org that are committed to active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia. The Mastodon community does not approve of their attempt to hijack our infrastructure and has already taken steps to isolate Gab and keep hate speech off the fediverse.
Several times over the 13 years that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve railed against the toxic myth that science fiction is a predictive literature, a way to know the future. Scienc…
Google’s internet freedom moonshot has gotten glowing attention for its ambitious projects. But current and former employees, leaked documents, and internal messages reveal a grim reality.
Mass murders present challenge for search engine to deliver accurate results
To prove a point about common location-sharing apps, I asked my wife to use them to spy on me.
Opinion: We've been assured that facial recognition technology is secure, reliable, and accurate. That's far from certain.
I’ve been peripherally aware of the IndieWeb movement for a few years now – mostly because they seem to like RSS almost as much as I do – but I’ve only recently dug into it. In a nutshell, IndieWeb is about using the World Wide Web itself as a social network, through a set of open standards for communication and identification of content and people. These things can be used instead of modern social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc…) or in a way that incorporates these networks as a complementary channel.
A supported fork of Mastodon that provides local posting and a wider range of content types. - hometown-fork/hometown
The three-year-old group, which has roughly 9,500 members, shared derogatory comments about Latina lawmakers who plan to visit a controversial Texas detention facility on Monday, calling them “scum buckets” and “hoes.”
Met de Libra vindt Facebook niet de cryptomunt opnieuw uit, maar het vrije bankieren. Het wil de internationale betaalmarkt veroveren. Instabiliteit dreigt.
Opinion: Larry Sanger, the cofounder of Wikipedia and chief information officer of Everipedia, suggests how to spark a decentralized social media movement.
Topadviseur Nick Clegg reageert op schandalen en zorgen rondom het techbedrijf. "We kunnen ons boos maken over technologie of we kunnen een oplossing vinden."
Your guide to understanding an industry where capitalism is euphemized
Edward Snowden, the notorious American whistleblower, has confirmed he relied on the censorship resistance of Bitcoin to help leak data to journalists in 2013.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: We've all tried to log into a website or submit a form only to be stuck clicking boxes of traffic lights or storefronts or bridges in a desperate attempt to finally convince the computer that we're not actually a bot. For many years, this has be...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: We've all tried to log into a website or submit a form only to be stuck clicking boxes of traffic lights or storefronts or bridges in a desperate attempt to finally convince the computer that we're not actually a bot. For many years, this has be...
Posted by Alex Fabrikant, Research Scientist, Google Research Hundreds of millions of people across the world rely on public transit for...
Article
From Marxism to hip hop, China’s appropriations from the West show that globalisation makes the world bumpy, not flat
Security through obscurity is out, security through tomfoolery is in. From a report: That's the basic philosophy sold by Track THIS, "a new kind of incognito" browsing project, which opens up 100 tabs crafted to fit a specific character -- a hypebeast, a filthy rich person, a doomsday prepper, or an...