Link archive: April 25th, 2017

Could we reboot a modern civilisation without fossil fuels? | Aeon Essays

Is the emergence of a technologically advanced civilisation necessarily contingent on the easy availability of ancient energy? Is it possible to build an industrialised civilisation without fossil fuels?

This thought experiment leads to some fascinating conclusions.

So, would a society starting over on a planet stripped of its fossil fuel deposits have the chance to progress through its own Industrial Revolution? Or to phrase it another way, what might have happened if, for whatever reason, the Earth had never acquired its extensive underground deposits of coal and oil in the first place? Would our progress necessarily have halted in the 18th century, in a pre-industrial state?

Replacing Disqus with Github Comments · Gazoo.vrv

If you’re using Disqus to power the comments on your blog, you might like to know that it’s pulling on loads of nasty tracking scripts. Bad for privacy and bad for performance.

The Washington Post cuts off ad tech vendors slowing its site - Digiday

I’d love to see other publishers take a firm stand against the shoddy ad tech from data brokers slowing down their sites.

We go to our partners and say, ‘This is how fast things need to be executed; if you don’t hit this threshold, we can’t put you on the site.’

(I mean, I’d really like to see publishers take a stand against invasive tracking via ads, but taking a stand on speed is a good start.)

DRM for the Web is a Bad Idea | Internet Archive Blogs

The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) addition to HTML is effectively DRM with the blessing of the W3C. It’s bad for accessibility, bad for usability, bad for security, and as the Internet Archive rightly points out, it’s bad for digital preservation.