Here are some web trends for 2020:
Responsive web design in 2020 should be a given because every serious project that you create should look good and be completely usable on all devices. But there’s no need to over-complicate things.
Web Development in 2020: What Coding Tools You Should Learn article gives an overview of recommendations what you learn to become a web developer in 2020.
You might have seen Web 3.0 on some slides. What is the definition of web 3 we are talking about here?
There seems to be many different to choose from… Some claim that you need to blockchain the cloud IOT otherwise you’ll just get a stack overflow in the mainframe but I don’t agree on that.
Information on the web address bar will be reduced on some web browsers. With the release of Chrome 79, Google completes its goal of erasing www from the browser by no longer allowing Chrome users to automatically show the www trivial subdomain in the address bar.
You still should target to build quality web site and avoid the signs of a low-quality web site. Get good inspiration for your web site design.
Still a clear and logical structure is the first thing that needs to be turned over in mind before the work on the website gears up. The website structure for search robots is its internal links. The more links go to a page, the higher its priority within the website, and the more times the search engine crawls it.
You should upgrade your web site, but you need to do it sensibly and well. Remember that a site upgrade can ruin your search engine visibility if you do it badly. The biggest risk to your site getting free search engine visibility is site redesign. Bad technology selection can ruin the visibility of a new site months before launch. Many new sites built on JavaScript application frameworks do not benefit in any way from the new technologies. Before you go into this bandwagon, you should think critically about whether your site will benefit from the dynamic capabilities of these technologies more than they can damage your search engine visibility. Well built redirects can help you keep the most outbound links after site changes.
If you go to the JavaScript framework route on your web site, keep in mind that there are many to choose, and you need to choose carefully to find one that fits for your needs and is actively developed also in the future.
JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you’re not alone… a chunk of pros also feel JS is ‘overly complex’
Keep in mind the recent changes on the video players and Google analytics. And for animated content keep in mind that GIF animations exists still as a potential tool to use.
Keep in mind the the security. There is a skill gap in security for many. I’m not going to say anything that anyone who runs a public-facing web server doesn’t already know: the majority of these automated blind requests are for WordPress directories and files. PHP exploits are a distant second. And there are many other things that are automatically attacked. Test your site with security scanners.
APIs now account for 40% of the attack surface for all web-enabled apps. OWASP has identified 10 areas where enterprises can lower that risk. There are many vulnerability scanning tools available. Check also How to prepare and use Docker for web pentest . Mozilla has a nice on-line tool for web site security scanning.
The slow death of Flash continues. If you still use Flash, say goodbye to it. Google says goodbye to Flash, will stop indexing Flash content in search.
Use HTTPS on your site because without it your site rating will drop on search engines visibility. It is nowadays easy to get HTTPS certificates.
Write good content and avoid publishing fake news on your site. Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy,
Think to who you are aiming to your business web site to. Analyze who is your “true visitor” or “power user”. A true visitor is a visitor to a website who shows a genuine interest in the content of the site. True visitors are the people who should get more of your site and have the potential to increase the sales and impact of your business. The content that your business offers is intended to attract visitors who are interested in it. When they show their interest, they are also very likely to be the target group of the company.
Should you think of your content management system (CMS) choice? Flexibility, efficiency, better content creation: these are just some of the promised benefits of a new CMS. Here is How to convince your developers to change CMS.
Here are some fun for the end:
Did you know that if a spider creates a web at a place?
The place is called a website
Confession: How JavaScript was made.
2,321 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Effects of hue, saturation, and brightness on preference
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/col.10051?fbclid=IwAR1jmckc6LDiGi41HXnfKqVEF_ETfyUFWzpBO5_Kb4CaO-7LqQ6uxdD_67o
were asked to view eight background colors selected from HSB color space on which color squares of differing hues, saturations, and brightnesses were presented. Subjects were asked to show the color square they preferred on the presented background color. Findings showed that colors having maximum saturation and brightness were most preferred. Blue was the most preferred hue regardless of background.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Musk admits X may be doomed to fail as new glitch wipes out pictures from former Twitter platform
Glitch comes after Mr Musk’s X slowed down access to the sites of rival social media platforms
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/musk-x-twitter-fail-pictures-b2396398.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0qjCHVnVUzr7qYEqNAIF8kxt8qfp9V62QfOAqIx4NDT43PTftFZvHbpqg#Echobox=1692593681
Elon Musk, the owner of X – the company formerly known as Twitter – said on Saturday that the social media platform “may fail” as a new glitch wiped out most pictures tweeted before December 2014.
“The sad truth is that there are no great ‘social networks’ right now. We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one,” Mr Musk posted on X.
Since his take-over of the company for $44bn, the multibillionaire has tried to shake things up, introducing radical new changes to the platform, from laying off over three-fourths of Twitter’s workforce to his latest statement that the platform’s feature to block other user profiles would be removed.
The platform, being rebranded as X, has also suffered blackouts and glitches in recent times with the latest one appearing to affect tweets with pictures and links published prior to December 2014.
This image has since been restored, but most old tweets before December 2014 have broken short links instead of the actual media or links.
“More vandalism from Elon Musk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. That’s – so far – almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service,” Brazilian YouTuber Tom Coates posted on Twitter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fan Ports PlayStation Classic, Dares Sony To Shut Him Down And Make Its Own
Beloved PS1 launch game WipeOut is now playable for free in your web browser
https://kotaku.com/sony-playstation-wipeout-remaster-free-pc-port-ps-plus-1850728999
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://idafram.fi/ajankohtaista/google-analytics-4-mika-muuttuu-ja-miksi/
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/google-analytics/google-analytics-setup
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://9to5google.com/2023/08/24/threads-web-rolling-out/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Roger Montti / Search Engine Journal:
WordPress.com debuts a 100-year domain name registration for $38K, offering managed hosting and 24/7 customer service; domains are typically capped at 10 years — WordPress announces the availability of 100-year domain name registrations that include 24/7 assistance and managed web hosting
WordPress Announces 100-Year Domain Name Registrations
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-100-year-domain-name-registrations/494878/
WordPress announces the availability of 100-year domain name registrations that include 24/7 assistance and managed web hosting
Tomi Engdahl says:
YouTube is updating its enforcement policies to give creators who break its rules a chance to wipe the slate clean. . As long as they complete a training course and avoid violating the same policy within a 90-day period, YouTube will remove a warning from their account.
YouTubers can take training courses to remove warnings from their permanent record
https://www.engadget.com/youtubers-can-take-training-courses-to-remove-warnings-from-their-permanent-record-181432261.html?fbclid=IwAR3oGXWZFEMRpS7NAr8UOEy3T2_-lb8TL8im33eQ6l-7tMyJBkdl9ka9Y1I&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cDovL20uZmFjZWJvb2suY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAL8BKclGgm7fZHgGk6LDF_GPjo85nM1VclqFfq9uXZXXC2Lu4u1ugEg1dpGPF9U2dwd4zBNGRo7MtqE-oKFW6zSamkVxgkrvtQrccrFdoGwO1RNCIXcecCAixH8adNIeBoD4o-5ku8TXaQ8Z5MXiaEMD_5K4loUG0Fb82zICnIsU
They’ll have to avoid violating the same policy a second time in a 90-day period too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kommentti: Kuukauden vaihteessa internetissä tapahtuu muutos, jollaista ei ole ennen nähty https://www.is.fi/digitoday/art-2000009818218.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Meta’s Twitter Alternative ‘Threads’ Has Already Lost 80 Percent Of Active Users
https://trendingpoliticsnews.com/mark-zuckerbergs-twitter-killer-app-struggles-as-engagement-craters-cmc/?fbclid=IwAR2iWHyDkXeFVZdF3VTp4BQn4YzobPgP3tA3C72Enzt7CsF2eEqUbNjYtwc
Meta’s “Threads” — a text-based social media network that was founded as a “sanely run” Twitter competitor — is struggling massively as engagement has cratered within just two months of launch.
Mega CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented the app as a massive success upon launch after Threads reported more than 30 million sign-ups within 24 hours of its July 5 debut. Meta has described the platform as, “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2023/08/26/going-to-extremes-to-block-youtube-ads/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Europe is Cracking Down on Big Tech. This Is What Will Change When You Sign On
https://www.securityweek.com/europe-is-cracking-down-on-big-tech-this-is-what-will-change-when-you-sign-on/
The Digital Services Act aims to protect European users when it comes to privacy, transparency and removal of harmful or illegal content.
Starting Friday, Europeans will see their online life change.
People in the 27-nation European Union can alter some of what shows up when they search, scroll and share on the biggest social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook and other tech giants like Google and Amazon.
That’s because Big Tech companies, most headquartered in the U.S., are now subject to a pioneering new set of EU digital regulations. The Digital Services Act aims to protect European users when it comes to privacy, transparency and removal of harmful or illegal content.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elon Musk Says X, Formerly Twitter, Will Have Voice and Video Calls, Updates Privacy Policy
https://www.securityweek.com/elon-musk-says-x-formerly-twitter-will-have-voice-and-video-calls-updates-privacy-policy/
Twitter has updated its privacy policies, which will allow for the collection of biometric data and employment history, among other information.
Elon Musk said Thursday that his social network X, formerly known as Twitter, will give users the ability to make voice and video calls on the platform. Musk, who has a history of making proclamations about coming features and policies that have not always come to fruition, did not say when the features would be available to users.
The company also updated its privacy policies that will allow for the collection of biometric data and employment history, among other information.
Musk posted on the former Twitter that the site’s voice and video calls will work on Apple and Android devices as well as on computers, with “No phone numbers needed.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
James Clayton / BBC:
EU study: social media companies have failed to stop pro-Russian disinformation since 2022 and the “reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts” grew in 2023 — Social media companies have failed to stop “large-scale” Russian disinformation campaigns since the invasion of Ukraine, the EU has said.
Tech firms fail to tackle Russian propaganda – EU
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66693156
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dylan Smith / TucsonSentinel.com:
Molly Holzschlag, aka “mollydotcom”, a longtime advocate for the open web and accessible, inclusive online design standards, died at 60 on September 5 — Pioneer of online design & accessibility — Molly Holzschlag, whose pioneering work in online design standards led to her being dubbed …
Tucson’s Molly Holzschlag, known as ‘the fairy godmother of the web,’ dead at 60
Pioneer of online design & accessibility
https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/090523_molly_holzschlag/tucsons-molly-holzschlag-known-as-the-fairy-godmother-web-dead-60/
Molly Holzschlag, whose pioneering work in online design standards led to her being dubbed “the fairy godmother of the web,” has died at age 60.
She was steadfast in her insistence that the World Wide Web be usable by disabled people, including sites being able to be parsed by screenreader technology for people with impaired vision.
“Farewell to a tireless advocate for a kinder, more accessible, more open web. Your pain is over, now you may rest,” tweeted web standards pioneer Jeffrey Zeldman, reacting to the Sentinel’s report of Holzschlag’s death.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lane Brown / Vulture:
How Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, an important metric in entertainment, became erratic and reductive as some PR firms hack its score by paying obscure “critics” — In 2018, a movie-publicity company called Bunker 15 took on a new project: Ophelia, a feminist retelling of Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley.
The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes The most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked — and yet has Hollywood in its grip.
https://www.vulture.com/article/rotten-tomatoes-movie-rating.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome
Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a “topic” list it shares with advertisers.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hostingcanada.org/htpasswd-generator/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-fix-the-mixed-content-error-in-wordpress-step-by-step/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://wpengine.com/support/mixed-content/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/#reviews
Tomi Engdahl says:
david Pogue — After Apple blocked cookies in its Safari browser, Google has now built, RIGHT INTO CHROME, a tracker that ‘tracks the web pages you visit and generates a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask
Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome
Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a “topic” list it shares with advertisers.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/?fbclid=IwAR0LPdMWXgp0nEO8uX_pAHSoAcPj85mZ8VmWWJH7nOaQbvXFfNn-I9zCtRs
neha says:
News of Uttarakhand is a leading online news portal that provides comprehensive coverage of the latest news and events happening in Uttarakhand, India. News of Uttarakhand offer a variety of news content, including breaking news, political news, business news, sports news, entertainment news, and more. We are committed to providing our readers with accurate, unbiased, and timely news coverage.
Telkom University says:
What are some key considerations for web developers to keep in mind when creating projects in 2020, given the emphasis on responsive design?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Financial Times:
Meta launches in-chat payments for WhatsApp in India, allowing businesses to accept payments via credit/debit cards, WhatsApp Pay or UPI at no extra cost — Parent company Meta seeks to tap its messaging service’s biggest market to boost revenue — Hundreds of millions of WhatsApp users …
https://www.ft.com/content/64104575-50ed-49ef-b9c9-4354294d96d2
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Meta expands its Meta Verified program to businesses on Facebook and Instagram in select geographies, starting at $21.99 per month per page on either service
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/meta-is-expanding-its-verification-program-to-businesses/
Tomi Engdahl says:
AI-generated books force Amazon to cap e-book publications to 3 per day https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-generated-books-force-amazon-to-cap-ebook-publications-to-3-per-day/
On Monday, Amazon introduced a new policy that limits Kindle authors from self-publishing more than three books per day on its platform, reports The Guardian. The rule comes as Amazon works to curb abuses of its publication system from an influx of AI-generated books.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, an AI assistant that can compose text in almost any style, some news outlets have reported a marked increase in AI-authored books, including some that seek to fool others by using established author names. Despite the anecdotal observations, Amazon is keeping its cool about the scale of the AI-generated book issue for now. “While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers,” they write, “in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Simon Sharwood / The Register:
Google plans to discontinue Gmail’s Basic HTML version in January 2024, saying the view does not include “full Gmail feature functionality” — The blind think this is not a visionary decision — Google will discontinue the Basic HTML version of its Gmail service in January 2024.
Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024
The blind think this is not a visionary decision
https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/25/gmail_basic_html_discontinued/
Google will discontinue the Basic HTML version of its Gmail service in January 2024.
It’s unclear when Google made the decision to end Basic HTML support – news of which can be found in this support page titled “Use the latest version of Gmail in your browser.” Archive.org’s last capture of the page comes from late 2022, and Google’s own cache has not coughed up info that would identify the date of the change.
The Register asked Google when the decision to end Basic HTML was made, and why.
A spokesperson sent us the following statement:
“The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality.”
Google suggests that not including “full Gmail feature functionality” is the point of the Basic HTML offering. When your correspondent loaded it, Google delivered a warning that it is “designed for slower connections and legacy browsers.”
Intriguingly, when we used Chrome’s Inspect>Network tool to test the HTML page’s load time, it came in at 1200 milliseconds. Full fat Gmail loaded in 700 milliseconds – but then kept loading elements for almost a minute before settling down.
The decision has been criticized by Pratik Patel, who describes himself on Mastodon as “a blind technologist … who finds himself championing #accessibility for fun and necessity.”
“I know many #blind people who use GMail’s HTML view. Not only will they be confused but will be unhappy,” he wrote.
Google is infamous for discontinuing services that – for whatever reasons – don’t meet its goals. Over the years it has killed off favorites like its RSS reader, flops like Wave, projects like Google Code that lost to rival offerings, and invasive ad tech that its peers rejected.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
The number of fact-checking sites has declined worldwide, as social media platforms reduce disinformation efforts and false AI content keeps fact-checkers busy — The momentum behind organizations that aim to combat online falsehoods has started to taper off.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/business/media/fact-checkers-misinformation.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sam Schechner / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Meta pitched a plan to EU regulators to charge European users a subscription fee to use Facebook and Instagram without ads starting at €10 per month — European users would have option to pay fee or agree to personalized ads, according to company’s pitch to regulators
Meta Plans to Charge $14 a Month for Ad-Free Instagram or Facebook
https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-floats-charging-14-a-month-for-ad-free-instagram-or-facebook-5dbaf4d5?mod=followamazon
European users would have option to pay fee or agree to personalized ads, according to company’s pitch to regulators
Would people pay nearly $14 a month to use Instagram on their phones without ads? How about nearly $17 a month for Instagram plus Facebook—but on desktop?
That is what Meta Platforms META -2.22%decrease; red down pointing triangle
wants to charge Europeans for monthly subscriptions if they don’t agree to let the company use their digital activity to target ads, according to a proposal the social-media giant has made in recent weeks to regulators.
The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent—jeopardizing its main source of revenue.
Meta officials detailed the plan in meetings in September with its privacy regulators in Ireland and digital-competition regulators in Brussels. The plan has been shared with other EU privacy regulators for their input, too.
Meta has told regulators it hopes to roll out the plan—which it calls SNA, or subscription no ads—in coming months for European users. It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.
Under the plan, Meta has told regulators it would charge users roughly €10 a month, equivalent to about $10.50, on desktop on a Facebook or Instagram account, and roughly €6 for each additional linked account, the people said. On mobile devices the price would jump to roughly €13 a month because Meta would factor in commissions charged by Apple
’s and Google’s app stores on in-app payments.
Planning to launch a subscription option for core Meta services is a major turnaround for the company. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has long insisted that his core services should remain free and supported by advertising so that they can be available to people of all income levels.
“You don’t need thousands of dollars to connect with people who use our services,”
Privacy-conscious users in the U.S. shouldn’t expect to be offered the option to pay for ad-free Instagram or Facebook soon. Meta’s proposals have been pitched specifically as a way to navigate demands by EU regulators to seek consent before crunching user data to select highly personalized ads.
To be sure, Zuckerberg has also said he would be open to the idea of a paid service to cope with tougher scrutiny about privacy
It isn’t clear if regulators in Ireland or Brussels will deem the new plan compliant with EU laws, or whether they will insist Meta offer cheaper or even free versions with ads that aren’t personalized based on a user’s digital activity.
One issue for regulators, some of the people familiar with the proposals said, is whether the prices Meta is proposing to charge will make the ad-free service too expensive for most people, even if they don’t want to have their data used to target ads.
A Meta spokesman says the company believes in “free services which are supported by personalized ads” but is exploring “options to ensure we comply with evolving regulatory requirements.”
Meta’s proposal to regulators and specifics of the plan such as the price and timing haven’t been previously reported.
Driving Meta’s proposal has been demands by privacy regulators, led by Ireland, that Meta seek user consent before showing so-called behavioral ads, targeted with user activity data. In response, Meta had offered to seek such consent as soon as the end of October, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Separately, the EU’s executive arm said last month that Instagram, Facebook and Meta’s advertising network would fall under the scope of the bloc’s new digital-competition law, the Digital Markets Act. That law requires user consent before mingling user data among its services, or combining it with data from other companies.
Meta has said it hopes its subscription plan could comply with both edicts. Under the EU law, a user who declines to give consent for certain data use must still be able to access a service.
Meta reported its overall revenue in Europe worked out to roughly $17.88 per Facebook user in the second quarter, or just under $6 per user across all of its apps, on average, per month. The real average-revenue-per-month figure for EU users is likely somewhat higher
Meta estimates it has 258 million monthly Facebook users and 257 million Instagram users for the first half of the year in the EU
Meta has been pushed toward a subscription service by tightening enforcement of EU rules.
Meta has in pushing for its plan pointed to previous examples of how some other companies, such as music-streaming service Spotify, offer users a choice between a free ad-supported service or a subscription service without ads. Meta’s proposed pricing on mobile is similar to what YouTube charges for its ad-free premium service in Europe.
The company has also pointed to a paragraph in that July EU court decision that said social-media companies could charge a “reasonable fee” to users who decline to let their data be used for certain ad-targeting purposes, saying that opens the door to a subscription service.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kolumni: Murha ja #metoo eivät vanhene koskaan, mies on syyllinen vaikka toisin todistetaan
https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/5a378af3-b2ea-43e7-ad48-6daced6a6bb0
Me olemme valmiita tuhoamaan ihmisten uran, elämän ja maineen pelkkien nimettömien syytösten perusteella, kirjoittaa Iltalehden kolumnisti Sanna Ukkola.
Varsinkin #metoon jälkeen yhteiskunnassamme on tapahtunut perustavanlaatuinen mullistus siinä, miten me suhtaudumme syytöksiin julkisuuden henkilöitä kohtaan, syyttömyysolettamaan ja totuuteen ylipäänsä.
Olemme valmiita tuhoamaan ihmisten uran, elämän ja maineen pelkkien syytösten perusteella. Usein ne ovat vielä anonyymien esittäjien väitteitä.
Kuinka helpon aseen tämä antaa esimerkiksi poliittista vastustajaa kohtaan? Hanki nainen tai naisia, jotka ovat valmiita kertomaan medialle “anonyymisti” väitteitä miehen väitetystä huonosta kohtelusta – ja onnistut suhteellisen helposti tuhoamaan hänen uransa.
sindi says:
Is this the website to design? Telkom University
Tomi Engdahl says:
Konsulttimme Ida tunnustautuu entiseksi natiivimainontavihaajaksi. Kelkka on kuitenkin kääntynyt ja nyt hän toteaa natiivimainonnan olevan äärimmäisen pätevä keino saada sisällöille näkyvyyttä suuren yleisön keskuudessa.
Samalla hän huomauttaa, että myös huonoa natiivimainontaa on olemassa – ja siksi luvassa on myös vinkkejä vetoavan sisällön luomiseen. Lue lisää blogista!
https://blog.netprofile.fi/natiivimainonta-yok?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=Natiivimainonta+y%C3%B6k&fbclid=IwAR3H0pp46F8naR3WpLKckMtSXoHFId3WQX5WMtk3JjiLoZfXXmm1IwN1fgI_aem_AfVeVIUWaIMtHKO3m_EPjv2Jk3DWv2ft3zBTjGsPTAI24D8pNqEztiqUZgAO2y-xAper8ChEWIMX_nSY37blSuYf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Turns out, bottling your kid’s childhood into social media content for the sake of monetization may not be great for your relationship with them.
Their Parents Were Family Influencers, Now Their Kids Hate Them
“Any money you get will be greatly overshadowed by years of suffering.”
https://futurism.com/parents-influencers-kids-hate-them?fbclid=IwAR1lXWEZEqpe_9YwaCgthdsZ2M_36HNrcx2_un89B5nTJyYgCyvSzHWPnRs
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter’s transformation into ‘X’ under Elon Musk continues, now confiscating popular handles and eroding what made Twitter unique.
By Seizing @Music, Elon Musk Shows He Doesn’t Know What Made Twitter Good
https://www.wired.com/story/by-seizing-music-elon-musk-shows-he-doesnt-know-what-made-twitter-good/?utm_brand=wired&mbid=social_facebook&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR3Wvj6EjIBM7FRGaiRWzewd50qFBmtxQzMLIQKT6BIG6XgNlplRLqHvb2Y
Since taking over Twitter, Musk has made mistake after mistake. His latest decision proves that he has never understood the average Twitter user—or doesn’t care to build a platform for them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matt Mullenweg:
While X charging users $1/year to combat bots and spam is an appealing idea, the value in manipulating X is so high that bad actors will still find a way
Cost of Spam
https://ma.tt/2023/10/cost-of-spam/
Twitter/X is testing charging users $1/year with the idea that will keep out bots and spam. It’s an appealing idea, and charging definitely does introduce a “proof of work” that wasn’t there before, but the history of the web shows this is not really a big deterrent. Domains cost money, usually a lot more than a dollar a year, and millions are used for spam or nefarious purposes. The spammers obviously thought their benefit would be more than the cost of the domain, or they use stolen credit cards and identities. Charging may cause a short-term drop in bots while the bad guys update their scripts, but the value of manipulating X/Twitter is so high I imagine there is already millions of dollars being spent on it.
EXCLUSIVE: X, formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet and retweet
https://fortune.com/2023/10/17/twitter-x-charging-new-users-1-dollar-year-to-tweet/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kylie Robison / Fortune:
X tests Not A Bot, requiring new, unverified users to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post and interact, in New Zealand and the Philippines — The owner of X, Elon Musk, has long floated the idea of charging users $1 to use the platform.
EXCLUSIVE: X, formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet and retweet
https://fortune.com/2023/10/17/twitter-x-charging-new-users-1-dollar-year-to-tweet/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Karissa Bell / Engadget:
X now requires a linked source for proposed Community Notes, as researchers say misinformation on X has reached new heights during the Israel-Hamas war — Researchers have said that misinformation has reached new heights amid the Israel-Hamas war. — X is making a significant change …
X now requires community fact checks to include sources
Researchers have said that misinformation has reached new heights amid the Israel-Hamas war.
https://www.engadget.com/x-now-requires-community-fact-checks-to-include-sources-235125787.html
X is making a significant change to its crowd-sourced fact checking tool in an attempt to stem the flow of misinformation on its platform. The new rule is one that will be familiar to professional fact checkers, academics and Wikipedia editors, but is nonetheless new to X’s approach to fact-checking: the company will now require its volunteer contributors to include sources on every community note they write.
Politico:
Analysis: Israel has pushed dozens of ads, including graphic videos, on X and YouTube in the EU, the UK, and the US to drum up support for its actions in Gaza
Israel floods social media to shape opinion around the war
https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-social-media-opinion-hamas-war/
Since Hamas’ attack, Israel has pushed dozens of online ads, including graphic videos, to millions of people to drum up support for its actions.
BRUSSELS — A photo with a bloody dead baby whose face is blurred has been circulating on X for the last four days.
“This is the most difficult image we’ve ever posted. As we are writing this we are shaking,” the accompanying message says.
The footage is not from a reporter covering the conflict in Israel and Gaza, or from one of the countless accounts sharing horrifying videos of the atrocities.
Since Hamas attacked thousands of its citizens last week, the Israeli government has started a sweeping social media campaign in key Western countries to drum up support for its military response against the group. Part of its strategy: pushing dozens of ads containing brutal and emotional imagery of the deadly militant violence in Israel across platforms such as X and YouTube, according to data reviewed by POLITICO.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Similarweb: in September, X’s global monthly website traffic fell 14% YoY, US traffic declined 19% YoY, while traffic to Elon Musk’s profile page was up 96% YoY — Despite proclamations from X CEO Linda Yaccarino that usage of the social network was at an all-time high this summer …
One year post-acquisition, X traffic and monthly active users are in decline, report claims
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/17/one-year-post-acquisition-x-traffic-and-monthly-active-users-are-in-decline-report-claims/
Despite proclamations from X CEO Linda Yaccarino that usage of the social network was at an all-time high this summer, a new report is throwing cold water on those claims, saying that X usage has actually declined on all fronts, across both web and mobile. According to data from market intelligence firm Similarweb, X’s global website traffic was down 14% year-over-year in September, and U.S. traffic was down by 19%. On mobile devices in the U.S., performance had also declined 17.8% year-over-year, based on monthly active users on iOS and Android.
Although the U.S. accounts for roughly a quarter of X’s web traffic, other countries also saw declines in web traffic, including the U.K. (-11.6%), France (-13.4%), Germany (-17.9%) and Australia (-17.5%).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Katie Notopoulos / MIT Technology Review:
Federated networks like Mastodon and a growing acceptance of paying for content may help move people away from big social platforms and improve online discourse
How to fix the internet
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/
If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms.
Katie Notopoulosarchive page
October 17, 2023
hand emerging from a phone holding a bag
Erik Carter
We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For the first time in years, it feels as though something truly new and different might be happening with the way we communicate online. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. The question is: What do we want to come next?
There’s a sort of common wisdom that the internet is irredeemably bad, toxic, a rash of “hellsites” to be avoided. That social platforms, hungry to profit off your data, opened a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed. Indeed, there are truly awful things that happen on the internet, things that make it especially toxic for people from groups disproportionately targeted with online harassment and abuse. Profit motives led platforms to ignore abuse too often, and they also enabled the spread of misinformation, the decline of local news, the rise of hyperpartisanship, and entirely new forms of bullying and bad behavior. All of that is true, and it barely scratches the surface.
But the internet has also provided a haven for marginalized groups and a place for support, advocacy, and community. It offers information at times of crisis. It can connect you with long-lost friends. It can make you laugh. It can send you a pizza. It’s duality, good and bad, and I refuse to toss out the dancing-baby GIF with the tubgirl-dot-png bathwater. The internet is worth fighting for because despite all the misery, there’s still so much good to be found there. And yet, fixing online discourse is the definition of a hard problem. But look. Don’t worry. I have an idea.
What is the internet and why is it following me around?
To cure the patient, first we must identify the disease.
When we talk about fixing the internet, we’re not referring to the physical and digital network infrastructure: the protocols, the exchanges, the cables, and even the satellites themselves are mostly okay. (There are problems with some of that stuff, to be sure. But that’s an entirely other issue—even if both do involve Elon Musk.) “The internet” we’re talking about refers to the popular kinds of communication platforms that host discussions and that you probably engage with in some form on your phone.
Some of these are massive: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, X.
Although the exact nature of what we see on those platforms can vary widely from person to person, they mediate content delivery in universally similar ways that are aligned with their business objectives. A teenager in Indonesia may not see the same images on Instagram that I do, but the experience is roughly the same: we scroll through some photos from friends or family, maybe see some memes or celebrity posts; the feed turns into Reels; we watch a few videos, maybe reply to a friend’s Story or send some messages. Even though the actual content may be very different, we probably react to it in much the same way, and that’s by design.
The internet also exists outside these big platforms; it’s blogs, message boards, newsletters and other media sites. It’s podcasts and Discord chatrooms and iMessage groups. These will offer more individualized experiences that may be wildly different from person to person. They often exist in a sort of parasitic symbiosis with the big, dominant players, feeding off each other’s content, algorithms, and audience.
The internet is good things.
It’s also very bad things: 4chan and the Daily Stormer, revenge porn, fake news sites, racism on Reddit, eating disorder inspiration on Instagram, bullying, adults messaging kids on Roblox, harassment, scams, spam, incels, and increasingly needing to figure out if something is real or AI.
The bad things transcend mere rudeness or trolling. There is an epidemic of sadness, of loneliness, of meanness, that seems to self-reinforce in many online spaces. In some cases, it is truly life and death. The internet is where the next mass shooter is currently getting his ideas from the last mass shooter, who got them from the one before that, who got them from some of the earliest websites online. It’s an exhortation to genocide in a country where Facebook employed too few moderators who spoke the local language because it had prioritized growth over safety.
The existential problem is that both the best and worst parts of the internet exist for the same set of reasons, were developed with many of the same resources, and often grew in conjunction with each other.
The internet’s original sin was an insistence on freedom: it was made to be free, in many senses of the word. The internet wasn’t initially set up for profit; it grew out of a communications medium intended for the military and academics (some in the military wanted to limit Arpanet to defense use as late as the early 1980s).
When the internet began to be built out commercially in the 1990s, its culture was, perversely, anticommercial.
They were passionate about making software open source. Their very mantra was “Information wants to be free”
It just so happened that those people were quite often affluent white men in California, whose perspective failed to predict the dark side of the free-speech, free-access havens they were creating. (In fairness, who would have imagined that the end result of those early discussions would be Russian disinformation campaigns targeting Black Lives Matter? But I digress.)
The culture of free demanded a business model that could support it. And that was advertising. Through the 1990s and even into the early ’00s, advertising on the internet was an uneasy but tolerable trade-off. Early advertising was often ugly and annoying: spam emails for penis enlargement pills, badly designed banners, and (shudder) pop-up ads. It was crass but allowed the nice parts of the internet—message boards, blogs, and news sites—to be accessible to anyone with a connection.
Targeted advertising and the commodification of attention
In 1999, the ad company DoubleClick was planning to combine personal data with tracking cookies to follow people around the web so it could target its ads more effectively. This changed what people thought was possible. It turned the cookie, originally a neutral technology for storing Web data locally on users’ computers, into something used for tracking individuals across the internet for the purpose of monetizing them.
Our modern internet is built on highly targeted advertising using our personal data. That is what makes it free. The social platforms, most digital publishers, Google—all run on ad revenue. For the social platforms and Google, their business model is to deliver highly sophisticated targeted ads. (And business is good: in addition to Google’s billions, Meta took in $116 billion in revenue for 2022. Nearly half the people living on planet Earth are monthly active users of a Meta-owned product.) Meanwhile, the sheer extent of the personal data we happily hand over to them in exchange for using their services for free would make people from the year 2000 drop their flip phones in shock.
And that targeting process is shockingly good at figuring out who you are and what you are interested in. It’s targeting that makes people think their phones are listening in on their conversations; in reality, it’s more that the data trails we leave behind become road maps to our brains.
When we think of what’s most obviously broken about the internet—harassment and abuse; its role in the rise of political extremism, polarization, and the spread of misinformation; the harmful effects of Instagram on the mental health of teenage girls—the connection to advertising may not seem immediate. And in fact, advertising can sometimes have a mitigating effect: Coca-Cola doesn’t want to run ads next to Nazis, so platforms develop mechanisms to keep them away.
But online advertising demands attention above all else, and it has ultimately enabled and nurtured all the worst of the worst kinds of stuff. Social platforms were incentivized to grow their user base and attract as many eyeballs as possible for as long as possible to serve ever more ads. Or, more accurately, to serve ever more you to advertisers. To accomplish this, the platforms have designed algorithms to keep us scrolling and clicking, the result of which has played into some of humanity’s worst inclinations.
In 2018, Facebook tweaked its algorithms to favor more “meaningful social interactions.” It was a move meant to encourage users to interact more with each other and ultimately keep their eyeballs glued to News Feed, but it resulted in people’s feeds being taken over by divisive content. Publishers began optimizing for outrage, because that was the type of content that generated lots of interactions.
On YouTube, where “watch time” was prioritized over view counts, algorithms recommended and ran videos in an endless stream.
blog software Movable Type, remembers a backlash when his company started charging for its services in the mid-’00s. “People were like, ‘You’re charging money for something on the internet? That’s disgusting!’” he told MIT Technology Review. “The shift from that to, like, If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product … I think if we had come up with that phrase sooner, then the whole thing would have been different. The whole social media era would have been different.”
The big platforms’ focus on engagement at all costs made them ripe for exploitation. Twitter became a “honeypot for a**holes” where trolls from places like 4chan found an effective forum for coordinated harassment. Gamergate started in swampier waters like Reddit and 4chan, but it played out on Twitter
Platform dynamics created such a target-rich environment that intelligence services from Russia, China, and Iran—among others—use them to sow political division and disinformation to this day.
“Humans were never meant to exist in a society that contains 2 billion individuals,” says Yoel Roth, a technology policy fellow at UC Berkeley and former head of trust and safety for Twitter. “And if you consider that Instagram is a society in some twisted definition, we have tasked a company with governing a society bigger than any that has ever existed in the course of human history. Of course they’re going to fail.”
How to fix it
Here’s the good news. We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent-seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow.
One positive sign is the growing understanding that sometimes … you have to pay for stuff. And indeed, people are paying individual creators and publishers on platforms such as Substack, Patreon, and Twitch. Meanwhile, the freemium model that YouTube Premium, Spotify, and Hulu explored proves (some) people are willing to shell out for ad-free experiences. A world where only the people who can afford to pay $9.99 a month to ransom back their time and attention from crappy ads isn’t ideal, but at least it demonstrates that a different model will work.
Another thing to be optimistic about (although time will tell if it actually catches on) is federation—a more decentralized version of social networking. Federated networks like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta’s Threads are all just Twitter clones on their surface—a feed of short text posts—but they’re also all designed to offer various forms of interoperability. Basically, where your current social media account and data exist in a walled garden controlled entirely by one company, you could be on Threads and follow posts from someone you like on Mastodon—or at least Meta says that’s coming.
The big idea is that in a future where social media is more decentralized, users will be able to easily switch networks without losing their content and followings. “As an individual, if you see [hate speech], you can just leave, and you’re not leaving your entire community—your entire online life—behind. You can just move to another server and migrate all your contacts, and it should be okay,” says Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy advocate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And I think that’s probably where we have a lot of opportunity to get it right.”
There’s a lot of upside to this, but Collings is still wary. “I fear that while we have an amazing opportunity,” she says, “unless there’s an intentional effort to make sure that what happened on Web2 does not happen on Web3, I don’t see how it will not just perpetuate the same things.”
Federation and more competition among new apps and platforms provide a chance for different communities to create the kinds of privacy and moderation they want, rather than following top-down content moderation policies created at headquarters in San Francisco that are often explicitly mandated not to mess with engagement.
The tunnel-vision focus on growth created bad incentives in the social media age. It made people realize that if you wanted to make money, you needed a massive audience, and that the way to get a massive audience was often by behaving badly. The new form of the internet needs to find a way to make money without pandering for attention. There are some promising new gestures toward changing those incentives already. Threads doesn’t show the repost count on posts, for example—a simple tweak that makes a big difference because it doesn’t incentivize virality.
We, the internet users, also need to learn to recalibrate our expectations and our behavior online. We need to learn to appreciate areas of the internet that are small, like a new Mastodon server or Discord or blog. We need to trust in the power of “1,000 true fans” over cheaply amassed millions.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
First Brexit, now X-it: Musk ‘considering’ pulling platform from EU over probe
Plus: Working from home is ‘detached from reality’ says world’s richest man
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/19/musk_x_europe/
Elon Musk is said to be toying with the idea of withdrawing access to X in the European Union rather than go to the effort of complying with the bloc’s Digital Services Act.
As The Register reported last week, His Muskiness had a rather public spat on the website with Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market, who was simply reminding social media platforms of their content moderation obligations under the law.
This was particularly in light of renewed hostilities between Israel and Hamas, and the potential disinformation campaigns that had begun swirling online. Meta, TikTok, and YouTube were also sent letters.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
News publishers scramble to adjust to declining referral traffic, as Meta, X, and even Google become less dependable at amplifying and supporting journalism — News organizations are scrambling to adjust to the latest rift in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/technology/news-social-media-traffic.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s upcoming “IP Protection” feature to hide users’ IP addresses by routing traffic through a proxy.
#Google #chrome #privacy #cybersecurity
Google Chrome’s new “IP Protection” will hide users’ IP addresses
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chromes-new-ip-protection-will-hide-users-ip-addresses/?fbclid=IwAR1GxoZZFc25ct-R9OLYJbrZAwle8TXquWLjGRmZ9HHwj91-R1_w3ccCO74
Google is getting ready to test a new “IP Protection” feature for the Chrome browser that enhances users’ privacy by masking their IP addresses using proxy servers.
Recognizing the potential misuse of IP addresses for covert tracking, Google seeks to strike a balance between ensuring users’ privacy and the essential functionalities of the web.
IP addresses allow websites and online services to track activities across websites, thereby facilitating the creation of persistent user profiles. This poses significant privacy concerns as, unlike third-party cookies, users currently lack a direct way to evade such covert tracking.
While IP addresses are potential vectors for tracking, they are also indispensable for critical web functionalities like routing traffic, fraud prevention, and other vital network tasks.
The “IP Protection” solution addresses this dual role by routing third-party traffic from specific domains through proxies, making users’ IP addresses invisible to those domains. As the ecosystem evolves, so will IP Protection, adapting to continue safeguarding users from cross-site tracking and adding additional domains to the proxied traffic.
“Chrome is reintroducing a proposal to protect users against cross-site tracking via IP addresses. This proposal is a privacy proxy that anonymizes IP addresses for qualifying traffic as described above,” reads a description of the IP Protection feature.
Initially, IP Protection will be an opt-in feature, ensuring users have control over their privacy and letting Google monitor behavior trends.
The feature’s introduction will be in stages to accommodate regional considerations and ensure a learning curve.
The first phase, dubbed “Phase 0,” will see Google proxying requests only to its own domains using a proprietary proxy. This will help Google test the system’s infrastructure and buy more time to fine-tune the domain list.
To start, only users logged into Google Chrome and with US-based IPs can access these proxies.
Potential security concerns
Google explains there are some cybersecurity concerns related to the new IP Protection feature.
As the traffic will be proxied through Google’s servers, it may make it difficult for security and fraud protection services to block DDoS attacks or detect invalid traffic.
Furthermore, if one of Google’s proxy servers is compromised, the threat actor can see and manipulate the traffic going through it.
To mitigate this, Google is considering requiring users of the feature to authenticate with the proxy, preventing proxies from linking web requests to particular accounts, and introducing rate-limiting to prevent DDoS attacks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inside Meta, Debate Over What’s Fair in Suppressing Comments in the Palestinian Territories
In trying to prevent Instagram and Facebook from contributing to further violence, Meta is juggling internal friction and limited tools
https://www.wsj.com/tech/inside-meta-debate-over-whats-fair-in-suppressing-speech-in-the-palestinian-territories-6212aa58?mod=followamazon
Tomi Engdahl says:
It Looks Like Twitter Is in Even Deeper Trouble Than We Thought
“This is a drop we have not seen before for any major advertising platform.”
https://futurism.com/twitter-deeper-trouble-advertisers?fbclid=IwAR1RuROT4fkg5uIBlBwWhrpw_OgHXneQAPQ8WP6JIUGYta-UseDKsMZzpII
X-formerly-Twitter is still bleeding advertisers under Elon Musk’s characteristically unpredictable leadership — and the situation may be even more dire than we’d thought.
As Insider reports, marketing consultancy Ebiquity found that the vast majority of the biggest spenders have stopped advertising on X following Musk’s ill-fated takeover last year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sqword is a word game you can play for free on its website. If you find it somewhere else, you might be in for a surprise.
Websites stole and monetized a free browser game, so the designer replaced it with Goatse
https://www.pcgamer.com/websites-stole-and-monetized-a-free-browser-game-so-the-designer-replaced-it-with-goatse/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=facebook.com&fbclid=IwAR3pitHkRmoYZqN6fjTMh9bhZO-naLxvBkJZJhcVJTkgZ1LaM45nz00fX9Q
“It has been one of my greatest achievements as a dev”.
Sqword is a word game where you try to make as many words as you can in a five-by-five square grid, earning more points for longer words. It was made by Josh C. Simmons and his friends, and is freely available at sqword.com. However, it’s also been picked up by multiple browser game portals, who took it without permission and ran it behind their own ads for profit.
As reported by 404, Simmons found out Sqword was being monetized by sites that were simply embedding it with iFrame, and decided to do something about it. “The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page”, he wrote. “I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place of the app if Sqword detects that it is in an iFrame.”
Simmons added the text, “I steal other people’s code because I’m a total hack”
Simmons finished with a warning. “Let this be a lesson to you—if you are using an iFrame to display a site that isn’t yours, even for legitimate purposes, you have no control over that content—it can change at any time. One day instead of looking into an iFrame, you might be looking at an entirely different kind of portal.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.digimarkkinointi.fi/blogi/meta-mainonta-uudet-mainostavoitteet
Tomi Engdahl says:
WordPress.com blogs can now be followed on Mastodon and other federated platforms
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/11/wordpress-com-blogs-can-now-be-followed-on-mastodon-and-other-federated-platforms/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/11/wordpress-com-blogs-can-now-be-followed-on-mastodon-and-other-federated-platforms/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/18/youtubes-latest-features-aim-to-help-creators-make-more-money-from-shoppable-videos/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.mikrobitti.fi/uutiset/internetin-kolmas-vallankumous-tata-web3-merkitsee/efe0d87a-6491-429f-937e-888b61577130
Internetin kolmas vallankumous: tätä ”web3” merkitsee
16.10.202315:10|päivitetty16.10.202315:34
Maailmanlaajuinen tietoverkko on kehittynyt yksinkertaisista html-sivuista kaikenkattavaksi liiketoiminnan ja ihmisten yhteydenpidon alustaksi. Mitä internetin seuraava vaihe tuo tullessaan?
Kun hoidat pankkiasioitasi älypuhelimella tai tilaat ravintolaruokaa kotiinkuljetuksella, käytät hyväksesi internetin toisen vaiheen palveluja.