Archive: November, 2020

Imagine if you were told that fossil fuels were the only way of extracting energy. It would be an absurd claim. Not only are other energy sources available—solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear—fossil fuels aren’t even the most effecient source of energy. To say that you can’t have energy without burning fossil fuels would be pitifully incorrect.

And yet when it comes to online advertising, we seem to have meekly accepted that you can’t have effective advertising without invasive tracking. But nothing could be further from the truth. Invasive tracking is to online advertising as fossil fuels are to energy production—an outmoded inefficient means of getting substandard results.

Before the onslaught of third party cookies and scripts, online advertising was contextual. If I searched for property insurance, I was likely to see an advertisement for property insurance. If I was reading an article about pet food, I was likely to be served an advertisement for pet food.

Simply put, contextual advertising ensured that the advertising that accompanied content could be relevant and timely. There was no big mystery about it: advertisers just needed to know what the content was about and they could serve up the appropriate advertisement. Nice and straightforward.

Too straightforward.

What if, instead of matching the advertisement to the content, we could match the advertisement to the person? Regardless of what they were searching for or reading, they’d be served advertisements that were relevant to them not just in that moment, but relevant to their lifestyles, thoughts and beliefs? Of course that would require building up dossiers of information about each person so that their profiles could be targeted and constantly updated. That’s where cross-site tracking comes in, with third-party cookies and scripts.

This is behavioural advertising. It has all but elimated contextual advertising. It has become so pervasive that online advertising and behavioural advertising have become synonymous. Contextual advertising is seen as laughably primitive compared with the clairvoyant powers of behavioural advertising.

But there’s a problem with behavioural advertising. A big problem.

It doesn’t work.

First of all, it relies on mind-reading powers by the advertising brokers—Facebook, Google, and the other middlemen of ad tech. For all the apocryphal folk tales of spooky second-guessing in online advertising, it mostly remains rubbish.

Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway:

None of this works. They are still trying to sell me car insurance for my subway ride.

Have you actually paid attention to what advertisements you’re served? Maciej did:

I saw a lot of ads for GEICO, a brand of car insurance that I already own.

I saw multiple ads for Red Lobster, a seafood restaurant chain in America. Red Lobster doesn’t have any branches in San Francisco, where I live.

Finally, I saw a ton of ads for Zipcar, which is a car sharing service. These really pissed me off, not because I have a problem with Zipcar, but because they showed me the algorithm wasn’t even trying. It’s one thing to get the targeting wrong, but the ad engine can’t even decide if I have a car or not! You just showed me five ads for car insurance.

And yet in the twisted logic of ad tech, all of this would be seen as evidence that they need to gather even more data with even more invasive tracking and surveillance.

It turns out that bizarre logic is at the very heart of behavioural advertising. I highly recommend reading the in-depth report from The Correspondent called The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising:

It’s about a market of a quarter of a trillion dollars governed by irrationality.

The benchmarks that advertising companies use – intended to measure the number of clicks, sales and downloads that occur after an ad is viewed – are fundamentally misleading. None of these benchmarks distinguish between the selection effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that are happening anyway) and the advertising effect (clicks, purchases and downloads that would not have happened without ads).

Suppose someone told you that they keep tigers out of their garden by turning on their kitchen light every evening. You might think their logic is flawed, but they’ve been turning on the kitchen light every evening for years and there hasn’t been a single tiger in the garden the whole time. That’s the logic used by ad tech companies to justify trackers.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for users. The advertisements are irrelevant most of the time, and on the few occasions where the advertising hits the mark, it just feels creepy.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for advertisers. They spend their hard-earned money on invasive ad tech that results in no more sales or brand recognition than if they had relied on good ol’ contextual advertising.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is very bad for the web. Megabytes of third-party JavaScript are injected at exactly the wrong moment to make for the worst possible performance. And if that doesn’t ruin the user experience enough, there are still invasive overlays and consent forms to click through (which, ironically, gets people mad at the legislation—like GDPR—instead of the underlying reason for these annoying overlays: unnecessary surveillance and tracking by the site you’re visiting).

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is good for the middlemen doing the tracking. Facebook and Google are two of the biggest players here. But that doesn’t mean that their business models need to be permanently anchored to surveillance. The very monopolies that make them kings of behavioural advertising—the biggest social network and the biggest search engine—would also make them titans of contextual advertising. They could pivot from an invasive behavioural model of advertising to a privacy-respecting contextual advertising model.

The incumbents will almost certainly resist changing something so fundamental. It would be like expecting an energy company to change their focus from fossil fuels to renewables. It won’t happen quickly. But I think that it may eventually happen …if we demand it.

In the meantime, we can all play our part. Just as we can do our bit for the environment at an individual level by sorting our recycling and making green choices in our day to day lives, we can all do our bit for the web too.

The least we can do is block third-party cookies. Some browsers are now doing this by default. That’s good.

Blocking third-party JavaScript is a bit trickier. That requires a browser extension. Most of these extensions to block third-party tracking are called ad blockers. That’s a shame. The issue is not with advertising. The issue is with tracking.

Alas, because this software is labelled under ad blocking, it has led to the ludicrous situation of an ethical argument being made to allow surveillance and tracking! It goes like this: websites need advertising to survive; if you block the ads, then you are denying these sites revenue. That argument would make sense if we were talking about contextual advertising. But it makes no sense when it comes to behavioural advertising …unless you genuinely believe that online advertising has to be behavioural, which means that online advertising has to track you to be effective. Such a belief would be completely wrong. But that doesn’t stop it being widely held.

To argue that there is a moral argument against blocking trackers is ridiculous. If anything, there’s a moral argument to be made for installing anti-tracking software for yourself, your friends, and your family. Otherwise we are collectively giving up our privacy for a business model that doesn’t even work.

It’s a shame that advertisers will lose out if tracking-blocking software prevents their ads from loading. But that’s only going to happen in the case of behavioural advertising. Contextual advertising won’t be blocked. Contextual advertising is also more lightweight than behavioural advertising. Contextual advertising is far less creepy than behavioural advertising. And crucially, contextual advertising works.

That shouldn’t be a controversial claim: the idea that people would be interested in adverts that are related to the content they’re currently looking at. The greatest trick the ad tech industry has pulled is convincing the world that contextual relevance is somehow less effective than some secret algorithm fed with all our data that’s supposed to be able to practically read our minds and know us better than we know ourselves.

Y’know, if this mind-control ray really could give me timely relevant adverts, I might possibly consider paying the price with my privacy. But as it is, YouTube still hasn’t figured out that I’m not interested in Top Gear or football.

The next time someone is talking about the necessity of advertising on the web as a business model, ask for details. Do they mean contextual or behavioural advertising? They’ll probably laugh at you and say that behavioural advertising is the only thing that works. They’ll be wrong.

I know it’s hard to imagine a future without tracker-driven behavioural advertising. But there are no good business reasons for it to continue. It was once hard to imagine a future without oil or coal. But through collective action, legislation, and smart business decisions, we can make a cleaner future.

Back in March, I wrote about a dilemma I was facing. I could make the certificates on The Session more secure. But if I did that, people using older Android and iOS devices could no longer access the site:

As a site owner, I can either make security my top priority, which means you’ll no longer be able to access my site. Or I can provide you access, which makes my site less secure for everyone.

In the end, I decided in favour of access. But now this issue has risen from the dead. And this time, it doesn’t matter what I think.

Let’s Encrypt are changing the way their certificates work and once again, it’s people with older devices who are going to suffer:

Most notably, this includes versions of Android prior to 7.1.1. That means those older versions of Android will no longer trust certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.

This makes me sad. It’s another instance of people being forced to buy new devices. Last time ‘round, my dilemma was choosing between security and access. This time, access isn’t an option. It’s a choice between security and the environment (assuming that people are even in a position to get new devices—not an assumption I’m willing to make).

But this time it’s out of my hands. Let’s Encrypt certificates will stop working on older devices and a whole lotta websites are suddenly going to be inaccessible.

I could look at using a different certificate authority, one I’d have to pay for. It feels a bit galling to have to go back to the scammy world of paying for security—something that Let’s Encrypt has taught us should quite rightly be free. But accessing a website should also be free. It shouldn’t come with the price tag of getting a new device.

I’ve been watching The Right Stuff on Disney Plus. It’s a modern remake of the ’80s film of the ’70s Tom Wolfe book of ’60s events.

It’s okay. The main challenge, as a viewer, is keeping track of which of the seven homogenous white guys is which. It’s like Merry, Pippin, Ant, Dec, and then some.

It’s kind of fun watching it after watching For All Mankind which has some of the same characters following a different counterfactual history.

The story being told is interesting enough (although Tom has pointed out that removing the Chuck Yeager angle really diminishes the narrative). But ultimately the tension is manufactured around a single event—the launch of Freedom 7—that was very much in the shadow of Gargarin’s historic Vostok 1 flight.

There are juicier stories to be told, but those stories come from Russia.

Some of these stories have been told in film. The Spacewalker told the amazing story of Alexei Leonov’s mission, though it messes with the truth about what happened with the landing and recovery—a real shame, considering that the true story is remarkable enough.

Imagine an alternative to The Right Stuff that relayed the drama of Soyuz 1—it’s got everything: friendship, rivalries, politics, tragedy…

I’d watch the heck out of that.

When I was speaking at conferences last year about service workers, I’d introduce the Cache API. I wanted some way of explaining the difference between caching and other kinds of storage.

The way I explained was that, while you might store stuff for a long time, you’d only cache stuff that you knew you were going to need again. So according to that definition, when you make a backup of your hard drive, that’s not caching …becuase you hope you’ll never need to use the backup.

But that explanation never sat well with me. Then more recently, I was chatting with Amber about caching. Once again, we trying to define the difference between, say, the Cache API and things like LocalStorage and IndexedDB. At some point, we realised the fundamental difference: caches are for copies.

Think about it. If you store something in LocalStorage or IndexedDB, that’s the canonical home for that data. But anything you put into a cache must be a copy of something that exists elsewhere. That’s true of the Cache API, the browser cache, and caches on the server. An item in one of those caches is never the original—it’s always a copy of something that has a canonical home elsewhere.

By that definition, backing up your hard drive definitely is caching.

Anyway, I was glad to finally have a working definition to differentiate between caching and storing.

I started getting some emails recently from people having issues using The Session. The issues sounded similar—an interactive component that wasn’t, well …interacting.

When I asked what device or browser they were using, the answer came back the same: Safari on iPad. But not a new iPad. These were older iPads running older operating systems.

Now, remember, even if I wanted to recommend that they use a different browser, that’s not an option:

Safari is the only browser on iOS devices.

I don’t mean it’s the only browser that ships with iOS devices. I mean it’s the only browser that can be installed on iOS devices.

You can install something called Chrome. You can install something called Firefox. Those aren’t different web browsers. Under the hood they’re using Safari’s rendering engine. They have to.

It gets worse. Not only is there no choice when it comes to rendering engines on iOS, but the rendering engine is also tied to the operating system.

If you’re on an old Apple laptop, you can at least install an up-to-date version of Firefox or Chrome. But you can’t install an up-to-date version of Safari. An up-to-date version of Safari requires an up-to-date version of the operating system.

It’s the same on iOS devices—you can’t install a newer version of Safari without installing a newer version of iOS. But unlike the laptop scenario, you can’t install any version of Firefox of Chrome.

It’s disgraceful.

It’s particularly frustrating when an older device can’t upgrade its operating system. Upgrades for Operating system generally have some hardware requirements. If your device doesn’t meet those requirements, you can’t upgrade your operating system. That wouldn’t matter so much except for the Safari issue. Without an upgraded operating system, your web browsing experience stagnates unnecessarily.

For want of a nail…

• A website feature isn’t working so
• you need to upgrade your browser which means
• you need to upgrade your operating sytem but
• you can’t upgrade your operating system so
• you need to buy a new device.

Apple doesn’t allow other browsers to be installed on iOS devices so people have to buy new devices if they want to use the web. Handy for Apple. Bad for users. Really bad for the planet.

It’s particularly galling when it comes to iPads. Those are exactly the kind of casual-use devices that shouldn’t need to be caught in the wasteful cycle of being used for a while before getting thrown away. I mean, I get why you might want to have a relatively modern phone—a device that’s constantly with you that you use all the time—but an iPad is the perfect device to just have lying around. You shouldn’t feel pressured to have the latest model if the older version still does the job:

An older tablet makes a great tableside companion in your living room, an effective e-book reader, or a light-duty device for reading mail or checking your favorite websites.

Hang on, though. There’s another angle to this. Why should a website demand an up-to-date browser? If the website has been built using the tried and tested approach of progressive enhancement, then everyone should be able to achieve their goals regardless of what browser or device or operating system they’re using.

On The Session, I’m using progressive enhancement and feature detection everywhere I can. If, for example, I’ve got some JavaScript that’s going to use querySelectorAll and addEventListener, I’ll first test that those methods are available.

if (!document.querySelectorAll || !window.addEventListener) {
  // doesn't cut the mustard.
  return;
}

I try not to assume that anything is supported. So why was I getting emails from people with older iPads describing an interaction that wasn’t working? A JavaScript error was being thrown somewhere and—because of JavaScript’s brittle error-handling—that was causing all the subsequent JavaScript to fail.

I tracked the problem down to a function that was using some DOM methods—matches and closest—as well as the relatively recent JavaScript forEach method. But I had polyfills in place for all of those. Here’s the polyfill I’m using for matches and closest. And here’s the polyfill I’m using for forEach.

Then I spotted the problem. I was using forEach to loop through the results of querySelectorAll. But the polyfill works on arrays. Technically, the output of querySelectorAll isn’t an array. It looks like an array, it quacks like an array, but it’s actually a node list.

So I added this polyfill from Chris Ferdinandi.

That did the trick. I checked with the people with those older iPads and everything is now working just fine.

For the record, here’s the small collection of polyfills I’m using. Polyfills are supposed to be temporary. At some stage, as everyone upgrades their browsers, I should be able to remove them. But as long as some people are stuck with using an older browser, I have to keep those polyfills around.

I wish that Apple would allow other rendering engines to be installed on iOS devices. But if that’s a hell-freezing-over prospect, I wish that Safari updates weren’t tied to operating system updates.

Apple may argue that their browser rendering engine and their operating system are deeply intertwingled. That line of defence worked out great for Microsoft in the ‘90s.

I wrote a little something recently about using ARIA attributes as selectors in CSS. For me, one of the advantages is that because ARIA attributes are generally added via JavaScript, the corresponding CSS rules won’t kick in if something goes wrong with the JavaScript:

Generally, ARIA attributes—like aria-hidden—are added by JavaScript at runtime (rather than being hard-coded in the HTML).

But there’s one instance where I actually put the ARIA attribute directly in the HTML that gets sent from the server: aria-live.

If you’re not familiar with it, aria-live is extremely useful if you’ve got any dynamic updates on your page—via Ajax, for example. Let’s say you’ve got a bit of your site where filtered results will show up. Slap an aria-live attribute on there with a value of “polite”:

<div aria-live="polite">
...dynamic content gets inserted here
</div>

You could instead provide a value of “assertive”, but you almost certainly don’t want to do that—it can be quite rude.

Anyway, on the face it, this looks like exactly the kind of ARIA attribute that should be added with JavaScript. After all, if there’s no JavaScript, there’ll be no dynamic updates.

But I picked up a handy lesson from Ire’s excellent post on using aria-live:

Assistive technology will initially scan the document for instances of the aria-live attribute and keep track of elements that include it. This means that, if we want to notify users of a change within an element, we need to include the attribute in the original markup.

Good to know!

Back at the start of the (first) lockdown, I wrote about using my website as an outlet:

While you’re stuck inside, your website is not just a place you can go to, it’s a place you can control, a place you can maintain, a place you can tidy up, a place you can expand. Most of all, it’s a place you can lose yourself in, even if it’s just for a little while.

Last week was eventful and stressful. For everyone. I found myself once again taking refuge in my website, tinkering with its inner workings in the way that someone else would potter about in their shed or take to their garage to strip down the engine of some automotive device.

Colly drew my attention to Bookshop.org, newly launched in the UK. It’s an umbrella website for independent bookshops to sell through. It’s also got an affiliate scheme, much like Amazon. I set up a Bookshop page for myself.

I’ve been tracking the books I’m reading for the past three years here on my own website. I set about reproducing that list on Bookshop.

It was exactly the kind of not-exactly-mindless but definitely-not-challenging task that was perfect for the state of my brain last week. Search for a book; find the ISBN number; paste that number into a form. It’s the kind of task that a real programmer would immediately set about automating but one that I embraced as a kind of menial task to keep me occupied.

I wasn’t able to get a one-to-one match between the list on my site and my reading list on Bookshop. Some titles aren’t available in the online catalogue. For example, the book I’m reading right now—A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit—is nowhere to be found, which seems like an odd omission.

But most of the books I’ve read are there on Bookshop.org, complete with pretty book covers. Then I decided to reverse the process of my menial task. I took all of the ISBN numbers from Bookshop and add them as machine tags to my reading notes here on my own website. Book cover images on Bookshop have predictable URLs that use the ISBN number (well, technically the EAN number, or ISBN-13, but let’s not go down a 927 rabbit hole here). So now I’m using that metadata to pull in images from Bookshop.org to illustrate my reading notes here on adactio.com.

I’m linking to the corresponding book on Bookshop.org using this URL structure:

https://uk.bookshop.org/a/{{ affiliate code }}/{{ ISBN number }}

I realised that I could also link to the corresponding entry on Open Library using this URL structure:

https://openlibrary.org/isbn/{{ ISBN number }}

Here, for example, is my note for The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie. That entry has a tag:

book:ean=9780356506999

With that information I can illustrate my note with this image:

https://images-eu.bookshop.org/product-images/images/9780356506999.jpg

I’m linking off to this URL on Bookshop.org:

https://uk.bookshop.org/a/980/9780356506999

And this URL on Open Library:

https://openlibrary.org/isbn/9780356506999

The end result is that my reading list now has more links and pretty pictures.

Oh, I also set up a couple of shorter lists on Bookshop.org:

• Favourite Non-fiction
• Favourite Fiction

The books listed in those are drawn from my end of the year round-ups when I try to pick one favourite non-fiction book and one favourite work of fiction (almost always speculative fiction). The books in those two lists are the ones that get two hearty thumbs up from me. If you click through to buy one of them, the price might not be as cheap as on Amazon, but you’ll be supporting an independent bookshop.