Link tags: mission

Google, Facebook hiding behind skirts of small business

While the dream of “personalized” ads has turned out to be mostly a nightmare, adtech has built some of the wealthiest companies in the world based on tracking us. It’s no surprise to me that as Members of the European Parliament contemplate tackling these many harms, Big Tech is throwing millions of Euros behind a “necessary evil” PR defense for its business model.

But tracking is an unnecessary evil.

Yes! This!

Even in today’s tracking-obsessed digital ecosystem it’s perfectly possible to target ads successfully without placing people under surveillance. In fact right now, some of the most effective and highly valued online advertising is contextual — based on search terms, other non-tracking based data, and the context of websites rather than intrusive, dangerous surveillance.

Let’s be clear. Advertising is essential for small and medium size businesses, but tracking is not.

Rather than creating advertising that is more relevant, more timely and more likable we are creating advertising that is more annoying, more disliked, and more avoided.

I promise you, the minute tracking is outlawed, Facebook, Google and the rest of the adtech giants will claim that their new targeting mechanisms (whatever they turn out to be) are superior to tracking.

UK ICO: surveillance advertising is dead

Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.

Tracking-industry body IAB Europe told that it has infringed the GDPR, and its “consent” pop-ups used by Google and other tech firms are unlawful. - Irish Council for Civil Liberties

Google and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal.

HTML Forms: How (and Why) to Prevent Double Form Submissions – Bram.us

I can see how this would be good to have fixed at the browser level.

Why is this interesting? - The Transmission Edition

Looking at COVID-19 through the lens of pace layers.

…a citizen could actually play a part that was as important as a vaccine, but instead of preventing transmission of the virus into another cell at the ACE receptor level, it’s preventing transmission of the virus at the social network level. So we’re actually adopting a kind of behavioral vaccine policy, by voluntarily or otherwise self-isolating.

Apollo 13 in Real Time

It was fifty years ago this weekend. Follow along here, timeshifted by half a century.

The Worm is Back! | NASA

The return of NASA’s iconic “worm” logo (for some missions).

To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution | Technology | The Guardian

Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people.

Website Carbon Calculator – Calculate your websites carbon emissions

Get an idea of how much your website is contributing to the climate crisis.

In total, the internet produces 2% of global carbon emissions, roughly the same as that bad boy of climate change, the aviation industry.

The sublime Romanticism of the moon landing

The lunar landing was not a scientific announcement or a political press conference; it was a performance, a literal space opera, a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk that brought together the efforts of more than 400,000 people, performed before an audience of some 650 million. It was a victory, as Armstrong immediately recognized, not of Western democratic capitalism over Soviet tyranny, or of America over the rest of the world, but for humanity. It belongs to the United States no more than Michelangelo does to Italy or Machu Picchu to Peru.

Neil & Buzz

A delightful dialogue …on the moon!

Apollo 11 in Real-time

What a magnificent website! You can watch, read, and listen to the entire Apollo 11 mission! Do it now, or wait until until July 16th when you can follow along in real time …time-shifted by half a century.

Going Critical — Melting Asphalt

This is an utterly fascinating interactive description of network effects, complete with Nicky Case style games. Play around with the parameters and suddenly you can see things “going viral”:

We can see similar things taking place in the landscape for ideas and inventions. Often the world isn’t ready for an idea, in which case it may be invented again and again without catching on. At the other extreme, the world may be fully primed for an invention (lots of latent demand), and so as soon as it’s born, it’s adopted by everyone. In-between are ideas that are invented in multiple places and spread locally, but not enough so that any individual version of the idea takes over the whole network all at once. In this latter category we find e.g. agriculture and writing, which were independently invented ~10 and ~3 times respectively.

Play around somewhere and you start to see why cities are where ideas have sex:

What I learned from the simulation above is that there are ideas and cultural practices that can take root and spread in a city that simply can’t spread out in the countryside. (Mathematically can’t.) These are the very same ideas and the very same kinds of people. It’s not that rural folks are e.g. “small-minded”; when exposed to one of these ideas, they’re exactly as likely to adopt it as someone in the city. Rather, it’s that the idea itself can’t go viral in the countryside because there aren’t as many connections along which it can spread.

This really is a wonderful web page! (and it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Zero licence)

We tend to think that if something’s a good idea, it will eventually reach everyone, and if something’s a bad idea, it will fizzle out. And while that’s certainly true at the extremes, in between are a bunch of ideas and practices that can only go viral in certain networks. I find this fascinating.

I commissioned an oil painting of Barbra Streisand’s cloned dogs

There’s something deliciously appropriate about using a painting cloning service to clone a photograph of some cloned dogs.

“Did you just order an oil painting of Barbra Streisand’s dogs?” is the most Simon and Natalie thing ever.

Although this comes close:

I took it to the framing store and asked if they could do something with “an air of existential dread”… and they nailed it too!

An exercise in progressive enhancement - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Hui-Jing talks through her process of building a to-do app on Glitch using a progressive enhancement mindset:

I found that HTML out-of-the-box takes care of a lot of things when it comes to collecting user inputs from the front-end, which resulted in much less code required. This is not to say client-side Javascript is bad, because the experience was smoother (and faster) when I used it for updating content.

194028 – Add limits to the amount of JavaScript that can be loaded by a website

Now this is a feature request I can get behind!

A user must provide permission to enable geolocation, or notifications, or camera access, so why not also require permission for megabytes of JavaScript that will block the main thread?

Without limits, there is no incentive for a JavaScript developer to keep their codebase small and dependencies minimal. It’s easy to add another framework, and that framework adds another framework, and the next thing you know you’re loading tens of megabytes of data just to display a couple hundred kilobytes of content.

I’m serious about this. It’s is an excellent proposal for WebKit, similar to the never-slow mode proposed by Alex for Chromium.

PushAPI without Notifications | Seblog

Remember when I wrote about using push without notifications? Sebastiaan has written up the details of the experiment he conducted at Indie Web Camp Berlin.

Thinking about permissions on the web | Sally Lait

Sally takes a long hard look at permissions on the web. It’s a fascinating topic because of all the parties involved—browsers, developers, and users.

In order to do permissions well, I think there are two key areas to think about - what’s actually being requested, and how it’s being requested.

Is a site being intrusive with what they can potentially learn about me (say, wanting my precise location when it’s unnecessary)? Or is it being intrusive in terms of how they interact with me (popping up a lot of notifications and preventing me from quickly completing my intended task)? If one of those angles doesn’t work well, then regardless of whether the other is acceptable to someone, they’re likely to start opting out and harbouring negative feelings.

Three Missions | Field Notes

Okay, I think I’m going to have to get this pack of three notebooks: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

New Privacy Rules Could Make This Woman One of Tech’s Most Important Regulators - The New York Times

It’s kind of surreal to see a profile in the New York Times of my sister-in-law. Then again, she is Ireland’s data protection commissioner, and what with Facebook, Twitter, and Google all being based in Ireland, and with GDPR looming, her work is more important than ever.

By the way, this article has 26 tracking scripts. I don’t recall providing consent for any of them.