Link archive: August 22nd, 2017

Refraction Networking

This looks like an interesting network-level approach to routing around the censorship of internet-hostile governments like China, Turkey, Australia, and the UK.

Rather than trying to hide individual proxies from censors, refraction brings proxy functionality to the core of the network, through partnership with ISPs and other network operators. This makes censorship much more costly, because it prevents censors from selectively blocking only those servers used to provide Internet freedom. Instead, whole networks outside the censored country provide Internet freedom to users—and any encrypted data exchange between a censored nation’s Internet and a participating friendly network can become a conduit for the free flow of information.

Inside a super fast CSS engine: Quantum CSS (aka Stylo) ★ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

Lin gives a deep dive into Firefox’s new CSS engine specifically, but this is also an excellent primer on how browsers handle CSS in general: parsing, styling, layout, painting, compositing, and rendering.

What Would Augment Reality? (with images, tweets) · lukew · Storify

Luke has been asking people to imagine ways of augmenting the world. Spimes are back, baby!

To reduce gender biases, acknowledge them : Nature News & Comment

Deb Chachra:

If research on biases has told us anything, it is that humans make better decisions when we learn to recognize and correct for bias.

A few technical words about Upsideclown, and some thoughts about audiences and the web (17 Aug., 2017, at Interconnected)

Matt writes about the pleasure of independent publishing on the web today:

It feels transgressive to have a website in 2017. Something about having a domain name and about coding HTML which is against the grain now. It’s something big companies do, not small groups. We’re supposed to put our content on Facebook or Medium, or keep our publishing to an email newsletter. But a website?

But he points out a tension between the longevity that you get from hosting the canonical content yourself, and the lack of unified analytics when you syndicate that content elsewhere.

There’s no simple online tool that lets me add up how many people have read a particular story on Upsideclown via the website, the RSS feed, and the email newsletter. Why not? If I add syndication to Facebook, Google, and Apple, I’m even more at sea.

The Web as a Material — Joschi Kuphal · Web architect · Nuremberg / Germany

Joschi gives the backstory to last week’s excellent Material conference in Iceland that he and Brian organised. I love that this all started with a conversation at Indie Web Camp Brighton back in 2014.