QUINCY, MA—Confirming that they have no intention of modifying the traditional uniform of their profession at any point in the foreseeable future, mathematics professors from across the country joined their voices Monday to reaffirm their commitment to wearing chinos with running shoes. “We believe that this singular look has really been working for us for the past few decades, allowing as always for slight variations such as the presence or absence of pleats and the availability of slightly different varieties of white Reebok footwear, and we have decided to formally recommit to this outfit for as long as our profession continues to exist,” said Boston University vector analysis professor Paul Slavish, explaining that the pairing of khakis with cross trainers had become the symbol of his profession, as it offered a perfect combination of professionalism, approachability, and the comfort vital for on-campus life. “We acknowledge that our sneakers, while technically advanced, will never be used for actual running; our pants, while relatively clean, will never actually be ironed; and that this lower ensemble will always be paired with either a dress shirt two sizes too large or a sweat-wicking polo shirt that has never—and will never—wick away the sweat of exercise. Never shall we stray from this sacred combination, which proclaims at a glance that we are casual, unfussy people who happen to be very serious about mathematics. Plus, check out all these side pockets!” Slavish also confirmed that certain professors would occasionally wear a wacky necktie printed with mathematical symbols, but that this would occur at a maximum of three days per semester.
Month: May 2019
👓 Millions of Instagram influencers had their private contact data scraped and exposed | TechCrunch
A massive database containing contact information of millions of Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts has been found online. The database, hosted by Amazon Web Services, was left exposed and without a password allowing anyone to look inside. At the time of writing, the database had…
📑 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)But these lookalike audiences aren’t just potential new customers — they can also be used to exclude unwanted customers in the future, creating a sort of ad targeting demographic blacklist. ❧
📑 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)How consumers would be expected to navigate this invisible, unofficial credit-scoring process, given that they’re never informed of its existence, remains an open question. ❧
📑 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)In an initial conversation with a Facebook spokesperson, they stated that the company does “not provide creditworthiness services, nor is that a feature of Actionable Insights.” When asked if Actionable Insights facilitates the targeting of ads on the basis of creditworthiness, the spokesperson replied, “No, there isn’t an instance where this is used.” It’s difficult to reconcile this claim with the fact that Facebook’s own promotional materials tout how Actionable Insights can enable a company to do exactly this. Asked about this apparent inconsistency between what Facebook tells advertising partners and what it told The Intercept, the company declined to discuss the matter on the record, ❧
📑 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)“It sure smells like the prescreening provisions of the FCRA,” Reidenberg told The Intercept. “From a functional point of view, what they’re doing is filtering Facebook users on creditworthiness criteria and potentially escaping the application of the FCRA.” ❧
📑 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)>“If Facebook is providing a consumer’s data to be used for the purposes of credit screening by the third party, Facebook would be a credit reporting agency,” Reidenberg explained. “The [FCRA] statute applies when the data ‘is used or expected to be used or collected in whole or in part for the purpose of serving as a factor in establishing the consumer’s eligibility for … credit.'” If Facebook is providing data about you and your friends that eventually ends up in a corporate credit screening operation, “It’s no different from Equifax providing the data to Chase to determine whether or not to issue a credit card to the consumer,” according to Reidenberg. ❧
👓 Thanks to Facebook, Your Cellphone Company Is Watching You More Closely Than Ever | The Intercept
Sam Biddle (The Intercept)AMONG THE MEGA-CORPORATIONS that surveil you, your cellphone carrier has always been one of the keenest monitors, in constant contact with the one small device you keep on you at almost every moment. A confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that the social network courts carriers, along with phone makers — some 100 different companies in 50 countries — by offering the use of even more surveillance data, pulled straight from your smartphone by Facebook itself.
Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just technical information about Facebook members’ devices and use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company’s main iOS and Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well. The data has been used by Facebook partners to assess their standing against competitors, including customers lost to and won from them, but also for more controversial uses like racially targeted ads.
👓 Remark Development Log: Starting with the Kit | Eddie Hinkle
Eddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)This is the first post about Remark, my upcoming Social Reader that is replacing my previous app, Indigenous. In my last log about Indigenous I talked about taking the lessons I’ve learned during Indigenous and structuring Remark better from the ground up. First things first, I have multiple apps ...
Chris Messina (Twitter)Given all the dogged work that the #IndieWeb community has done to advance the cause, it's gratifying to see them get some "ink" in the @NewYorker, but I'm left feeling like I'm reading about an idiosyncratic classic car show, rather than discovering something new and wonderful. https://t.co/yYlNSZ1ZNq
— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) May 20, 2019
I agree with Chris’ summation and wish there would have been some more positive “gee wiz” in the piece.
The likely missed subtext here though is that the author is a computer science professor so avowedly anti-social media that he doesn’t have accounts of his own, and he has actually written a book about digital minimalism. From this perspective, this generally positive review of the IndieWeb in The New Yorker reads as positively scintillating!
It also bears pointing out that Cal Newport, the author of the piece, has both his own domain name and his own website which he uses as his primary identity on the web. He also uses it as the cornerstone of all of his web communication, so he’s as solidly in the IndieWeb camp as one could want from the perspective of the most simplistic definition.
I would love to see a journalist (rather than an essayist) who follows social and Internet culture more closely and intelligently (Taylor Lorenz 
for example?) who wanted to cover something more positive within the interwebz than the scandal-of-the-day at Instagram, Facebook, add silo-of-your-choice-here to direct a more balanced eye on the topic of how the IndieWeb community is looking to reshape the web. I suppose the benefit and the curse of a decentralized, non-corporate web movement is that it’s got to be heavily reliant on slow, steady growth with only the best of earned media. In some sense it’s nice being the under-the-radar internet version of Coachella circa ’99-’06 rather than the 2019 Coachella where everyone only cares about Beyoncé.
We’re obviously on the right track. Thankfully companies like Micro.blog have got a good start on mainstreaming some of our ideas in an ethical way. Keep up the good fight gang!
I’m still waiting for the thousands of app developers who were burned by Twitter to discover the ideas of Micropub or Microsub and rebuild those clients with it. Or the hundreds of second tier social apps (great unitaskers like SoundCloud as an example) that either just aren’t getting as much traction with Facebook, et al. or are worried about being put out of business by them that could be more IndieWeb friendly and benefit greatly from it.
👓 Distributed content: The best ways to build sustainable platform strategies | American Press Institute
Social platforms have forever altered the way consumers consume content online, but it can be hard to find footing in this new era. After a recent summit in NYC on the rise of distributed content, we’ve developed a list of strategic tactics publishers of any size can benefit from employing.
Interesting whitepaper, but too much talk about should without any evidence-based material or pieces which touch and improve an outlet’s bottom line.
👓 Novelist Mark Haddon Quit Twitter. Not Because It’s Terrible, But Because It Prevents Him From Being Great | Cal Newport
Last week, the British novelist Mark Haddon wrote an essay for the Financial Times about his recent decision to take a break from Twitter. What I liked about this piece is that it unpacked a nuanced back-and-forth thought process about social media.
👓 Wrap-Up and Coverage for Düsseldorf 2019 | beyond tellerrand
Where do I start? I mean, I run this event for nearly ten years now. Every time you think ”That’s it. It can’t get any better” and then you end the show and read, listen to and see all this wonderful and nice feedback. Wow, just incredible and fills me with a very warm and lovely feeling. Surely I am feeling exhausted. Empty. Tired. But the positive energy predominates. Energy that comes from people saying that they met many new friends, had exciting conversations and that my little event might have changed their life, or, at least, how they look at their day to day jobs and how they work. When I started beyond tellerrand, I never would have thought, that my event would have an impact for anyone. Honestly. I wanted to create a friendly and inspiring event, where people would feel welcome and spend two days with nice people. Two days, where they maybe could escape the daily routines and hectic. Two days, where phones and/or laptops mostly stay in their pockets and bags. Well, and now? I honestly feel like in a dream somehow. Thank you so, so much! With this wrap-up post, I want to give anyone who has been at the event a chance to look at everything that happened again as well as having a source for those who could not be there to watch all the videos, see blog posts by other people from the event and have a look at the many photos that had been taken. As usual I am going to update this blog post with new material as long as I find it or as long as people send stuff to me. If you have or find anything related to this event, that is not listed already, please let me know. Thanks. Kicking off the 2019 edition of beyond tellerrand. Photo: Juliane Schütz. Stats and Facts What I have recognised this year is, that many more people started using Instagram to document and talk about the event. Even though 2389 tweets had been made with the hashtag #btconf on Twitter, I had the feeling that more and more people use Instagram. Interesting also: we had less people using the wifi than ever before. Maybe also because people were following the talks more intensively. This year we had people from 24 countries in the house. Those countries, from A–Z, were: Argentina, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Gambia, Germany, Greece, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Singapore, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States. Wow. Thanks to the volunteer-team. Photo: Andreas Dantz. 14 wonderful volunteers were amongst those people. The core team is coming back for many, many years already and the names of those who helped running the event are: Alex, Andreas, Andy, Bartek, Daniela, Ewa, Jana, Jessica, Lisa, Patrick, Sven, Tom with Tanja (my lovely wife) and Guido leading the team. Absolutely fantastic to have such a stunning team. Thanks a lot! Side Events Before and After On Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th, we already and as usual for the last five years met for the IndieWebCamp in Düsseldorf. Tantek and I organised this IWC and it once more was hosted by our friends at sipgate. Indie Web Camp no. 5 in Düsseldorf at sipgate. Photo: Juliane Schütz. For the very first time our friends at Wacom hosted our Pre-Conference Warm-Up. All 200 tickets were taken and Wacom did an amazingly wonderful job of creating a friendly environment for us to meet and greet at the evening before beyond tellerrand. Wacom gave us a home and too care of us with drink, snacks and a DJ. Thank you so much! We furthermore had four sessions between the regular schedule: a Breakfast Session with Liam Griffin for Shopify, one Lunch-Time Session by Christoph Reinartz for trivago, another Lunch-Time Session with Chris Heilmann and the Working Draft Podcast for Microsoft, and an Evening-Break Session with Fabien Benetou for Mozilla. Thanks everybody for the session! Joschi Kuphal organised another Accessibility Club around beyond tellerrand. The first one in Düsseldorf and smaller than his conference in Berlin, but with around 70 attendees a well attended one with presentations and bar camp like sessions during the whole day. Photos This year Norman Posselt, Florian Ziegler, Juliane Schütz and Andreas Dantz officially took photos at the event, but other people shot some amazing photos as well. Anything I got or found so far is listed below. Florian Ziegler was part of the beyond tellerrand family again and captured the atmosphere in lovely black and white photos during the days. Juliane Schütz comes to Düsseldorf for a while now. Always known for amazing photos at the Indie Web Camp as well as beyond tellerrand, she caught this year’s edition in a mix of black and white as well as color shots. Andreas Dantz captured the show on stage and in the exhibition in this great set of photos. Long time friend and supporter with sipgate Axel Topeters created this set of lovely photos from two days in Düsseldorf. Juliane Schütz also created photo sets of day 1 and day 2 at the
👓 Why novelist Mark Haddon lost faith in Twitter | Financial Times
The platform brought the writer closer to readers — but at a cost. Here he explains why he stepped back
👓 The “Free” Model | Geek&Poke
See David Dalka's post "Dear Facebook, Please Return Our Social Networking Space". Tweet
This is an awesome cartoon.
I’m reminded a bit of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of the Thanksgiving Turkey in The Black Swan.