siderea | I Blame the W3C’s HTML Standard for Ordered Lists [tech, soc, Patreon]
Gosh! And I thought I had strong opinions about markup!
Link tags: law
101
New Low in the Accessibility “Industry:” Overlay Company Sues Globally-Recognized Accessibility Expert
Lainey Feingold on the ongoing court proceedings against Adrian Roselli:
This lawsuit against Adrian Roselli impacts every person who cares about including disabled people in the digital world. It impacts all of us who speak, write, and advocate for digital accessibility that is fair, equitable, and ethical.
Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA? – Terence Eden’s Blog
I want to live in a future where Artificial Intelligences can relieve humans of the drudgery of labour. But I don’t want to live in a future which is built by ripping-off people against their will.
Word Count 53: The state of AI and the Goodreads fiasco
Could the tsunami of AI shite turn out to be a flash flood? Might the models rapidly degrade into uselessness or soon be sued or blocked out of existence? Will users rebel as their experience of the internet is degraded?
In my most optimistic moments, I find myself hoping that the whole AI edifice will come tumbling down as tools disintegrate, people realise how unreliable they are, and how valuable human-generated and curated information really is. But it’s not a safe bet.
🧞♀️✨ The Real Godwin’s Law
Once a privately owned, centralized platform closes its public APIs, the platform will invariably lose any usablity except for people who publicly or privately admire Hitler.
Derek Powazek - A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.
The first thirty years of the web may have been an orgy of unregulated expansion, but that era is over. The EU has been a leader with the GDPR, but there’s more coming. And I’m glad. The big players have had plenty of time to get their shit together and they haven’t. It’s time to regulate them as much as we regulate a shot of bourbon.
Ban Online Behavioral Advertising | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Targeted advertising based on online behavior doesn’t just hurt privacy. It also contributes to a range of other harms.
I very much agree with this call to action from the EFF.
Maybe we can finally get away from the ludicrious idea that behavioural advertising is the only possible form of effective advertising. It’s simply not true.
The Laboratorium (2d ser.) (I Do Not Think That NFT Means What You Think It…)
The bottom line is that almost everything NFT advocates want to do on a blockchain can be done more easily and efficiently without one, and the legal infrastructure needed to make NFTs work defeats the point of using a blockchain in the first place.
Using Google Fonts Breaches GDPR – Interdependent Thoughts
Remember when I said you should avoid third-party dependencies?
An Idea from Computer Science That Can Change Your Life – Jorge Arango
Applying Postel’s Law to relationships:
I aspire to be conservative in what and how I share (i.e., avoid drama) while understanding that other people will say all sorts of unmindful things.
The Internet Is Rotting - The Atlantic
A terrific piece by Jonathan Zittrain on bitrot and online digital preservation:
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
Why Generation X will save the web - Hi, I’m Heather Burns
Today’s young tech policy professionals are are, quite rightfully, responding to the only internet in the only world they have ever known. The awful one. The one where the internet was and is a handful of billion-pound companies. The one where the internet has only ever been petrol on a fire. The one where the internet has been essential infrastructure like water and heat, not a thing you had to request and master. The closed internet made for them. Not the open internet I got to make.
So if you think that the biggest threat to encryption is elderly politicians who still need their secretaries to print out emails for them, it’s time you found yourself in a meeting with someone under the age of 30 who is going to war against encryption because he has never needed encryption in his life.
Web Sites as ‘Public Accommodation’ under a Pandemic | Adrian Roselli
If you dodged an accessibility lawsuit because you have physical locations, what does it mean when those physical locations close?
Good question.
As movie theaters, restaurant ordering, college courses, and more move to online-first delivery, the notion of a corresponding brick-and-mortar venue falls away. If the current pandemic physical distancing measures stretch into the next year as many think, then this blip becomes the de facto new normal.
The 3 Laws of Serverless - Burke Holland
“Serverless”, is a buzzword. We can’t seem to agree on what it actaully means, so it ends up meaning nothing at all. Much like “cloud” or “dynamic” or “synergy”. You just wait for the right time in a meeting to drop it, walk to the board and draw a Venn Diagram, and then just sit back and wait for your well-deserved promotion.
That’s very true, and I do not like the term “serverless” for the rather obvious reason that it’s all about servers (someone else’s servers, that is). But these three principles are handy for figuring out if you’re building with in a serverlessy kind of way:
- You have no knowledge of the underlying system where your code runs.
- Scaling is an intrinsic attribute of the technology; so much so that it just happens automatically.
- You only pay for what you use.
Abstraction; scale; consumption.
How Ireland became Europe’s data watchdog - BBC News
The coming GDPR storm:
Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, Helen Dixon, is expected to circulate her decisions on some cases by July or August, with final rulings made by the end of the year.
(That’s my sister-in-law, that is.)
Gutenberg and the Internet
Steven Pemberton’s presentation on the printing press, the internet, Moore’s Law, and exponential growth.
Designing, laws, and attitudes. — Ethan Marcotte
Ethan ponders what the web might be like if the kind of legal sticks that exist for accessibility in some countries also existed for performance.
Website Accessibility Begins with Responsive Web Design
I recently asked a friend who happens to be blind if he’d share some sites that were built really well—sites that were beautifully accessible. You know what he said? “I don’t use the web. Everything is broken.”
Everything is broken. And it’s broken because we broke it.
But we can do better.
Design Laws in Nature by Jordan Moore
A deep, deep dive into biomicry in digital design.
Nature is our outsourced research and development department. Observing problems solved by nature can help inform how we approach problems in digital design. Nature doesn’t like arbitrary features. It finds a way to shed unnecessary elements in advancing long-term goals over vast systems.
The Eponymous Laws of Tech - daverupert.com
Dave has curated a handy list of eponymous laws.