Reads, Listens, Watches

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of watched movies, television shows, online videos, and other visual-based events

👓 Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal | Signal

Read Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal by moxie0 (Signal)
At Signal, we’ve been thinking about the difficulty of private contact discovery for a long time. We’ve been working on strategies to improve our current design, and today we’ve published a new private contact discovery service. Using this service, Signal clients will be able to efficiently and scalably determine whether the contacts in their address book are Signal users without revealing the contacts in their address book to the Signal service.
There’s a lot of work involved here, but this is an intriguing proposition for doing contact discovery in social media while maintaining privacy. I can’t wait to see which silos follow suit, but I’m even more curious if any adventurous IndieWeb creators will travel down this road?

h/t cryptographer Matthew Green

🎧 This Week in Google: #413 You Never Know What’s Not Going to Happen | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #413 You Never Know What's Not Going to Happen from TWIT.tv
Today is the Net Neutrality Day of Action. Go to BattleForTheNet.com and write your congressperson. Also, The Pixel XL 2 may feature a squeezable frame. Allo is coming to the desktop in "a few weeks." Android 7.1 has "Panic Detection" mode. Facebook will sell ads in Messenger. Amazon Prime Day sales up 60% over last year's record-setting haul - with Echo Dot as the top-selling item. Samsung Galaxy Note 8 may explode onto the scene on August 23rd. Make Nokia great again. China teleports matter to space. Jeff's Numbers: Google spends $800,000 on newsbots that write 30,000 articles a month in the UK. Google doesn't owe France 1.1bn euros in back taxes. Danny's Stuff: Silk Vault Slim Wallet Case, The Big Sick Stacey's Thing: Fibaro HomeKit Sensors

👓 Giving you more characters to express yourself | Twitter

Read Giving you more characters to express yourself (Twitter Blog)
We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).
I’m sure I could say something flip, like my own website doesn’t impose any arbitrary limits like this on me, but honestly, where Twitter is involved, it’s just become painfully old.

I have taken to always posting on my own website(s) first–where the sky is the proverbial limit–and only then syndicating out to places like Twitter. While Twitter’s got a reasonable network and there are lots of interesting people who might not otherwise be online interacting, I really haven’t been using Twitter as much in the past two years as I had previously. This change isn’t going to affect me at all from a publishing perspective. There are much more valuable tools to be using now. (Though I do wish the rest of the web would catch up on some of the new technologies they’re really missing out on.)

I do appreciate that it will allow some others who don’t have their own websites some more flexibility. I’m hoping that the Twitter apps that handle notifications add the extra content as Twitter’s own mobile app notifications cut off even before the 140 character limit, which makes them painful to use from a UI perspective.

If nothing else, it’s nice to see them iterating a little, but they need to be doing it at a faster velocity.

👓 Secret Service protection for Donald Trump Jr. reactivated: report | The Hill

Read Secret Service protection for Donald Trump Jr. reactivated: report by Rebecca Savransky (The Hill)
Jr. reportedly has his Secret Service protection back, sources told CNN. The news comes after a previous report that Trump Jr. gave up his protection from the Secret Service because of privacy concerns. A senior administration official told The New York Times earlier this month the Secret Service had stopped protecting Trump Jr.
I’m curious what prompted the de-activation and then a subsequent re-activation so close to each other. Makes me wonder which body(ies) he may have disposed of in the interim?

👓 Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | Facebook

Read Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js by Adam Wolff (Facebook)
Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons. This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.
This won’t bode well for large portions of the web…

🎧 This Week in Google: #411 Dinah Won’t You Blow | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #411 Dinah Won't You Blow from TWIT.tv
EU fines Google €2.42 billion, Canada demands global de-listing. Google News' redesign causes Jeff concern. YouTube Party. Amazon Show unboxing. Facebook hits 2 billion users. Petya ransomware may be retaliation for Russian cyberwarfare on Ukraine. Jeff's report from Vidcon.

https://youtu.be/bRI078mWrxg

🎧 This Week in Google: #410 Addicted to Convenience | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #410 Addicted to Convenience from TWIT.tv
Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods and how it could change grocery stores. The transition from an economy of goods to one of experiences. Uber and Lyft get their way in Texas after refusing to comply with an ordinance requiring fingerprint background checks for drivers. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick resigns and whether or not the corporate culture of Uber was necessary for its success. Stacey's Thing: Radical Technologies - The Design of Every Day Life by Adam Greenfield Mike's Number: 18, the number of Girl Scout badges introduced for cybersecurity education Leo's Tool: Search for "Spinner" on Google

I enjoyed the discussion of the purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon. I had described a big chunk of the value there as Amazon buying up a lot of the only warehouse space available in housing zoned areas while they described it as solving the last mile problem in local delivery. This is essentially the same thing, though they didn’t mention Amazon’s experiments with delivery via drones which could easily become a reality with not only warehouse space, but landing pads and bases in every big neighborhood with a Whole Foods located within them.

It was cool to hear the news about Girl Scouts adding lots of cybersecurity badges to their list.

🎧 This Week in Google: #409 Practical Telepathy | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #409 Practical Telepathy from TWIT.TV
Leo, Jeff, and Stacey are all off this week, so Jason Howell, Ron Richards, and Kevin Marks are in charge. The Essential phone will be a Sprint exclusive, but that doesn't mean you can't buy one and use it with whatever service you want. Google's successor to the Pixel XL may be getting even bigger, and might get made by LG this time around. The current Pixel XL will self-destruct on October of 2018. Google's cute little self-driving cars are self-driving off into the sunset. Google Drive wants to back up your whole computer. Softbank is buying Boston Dynamics. Google's Project Sunroof lets you know which neighbors have solar power. Facebook expands safety check in a possibly stressful way. Kevin's Pick: IndieWeb and IndieWeb Summit Ron's Pick: Astro Jason's Pick: pix2pix fotogenerator

The conversation about how Facebook is doing their safety check is intriguing. How should they be doing it better to inform people who might be concerned, but without creating undue stress to others who generally aren’t involved or nearby? This is particularly interesting to me as I’m often near to frequent forest fires in Los Angeles, not to mention the future potential of major earthquake events.

👓 Decentralized Web Pt 3: Join the IndieWeb | Michael McCallister: Notes from the Metaverse

Read Decentralized Web Pt 3: Join the IndieWeb by Michael McCallister (Notes from the Metaverse)
In recent months, I’ve been learning a lot about the “IndieWeb,” an idea spread by folks who understand that the Web offers a unique platform where ordinary people without the financial clout of the 20th century publishing industry could still potentially reach millions with their ideas.

But to be honest, I’m not sure I can tell you why — and how — to join up any better than Chris Aldrich did in this piece on AltPlatform. So just go over there now.

I know Michael has been working at the IndieWeb bit for a while, so this is some nice praise.

🎧 This Week in Google: #408 Being Internet Awesome | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #408 Being Internet Awesome from TWIT.tv
Google will add a feature to Chrome that will block "bad ads." Meanwhile, Funding Choices will let you pay sites for an ad-free experience. Google helps kids "Be Internet Awesome." Amazon announces a way to get Prime on the cheap, and an inexpensive "Ice" phone. HomePod vs Google Home vs Amazon Echo.... FIGHT! Jason's Pick: Kotlin for Beginners (Udacity) Stacey's Thing: Snooz Danny's Stuff: Personal Search Tab

🎧 This Week in Google: #407 Grepping Mary Meeker | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #407 Grepping Mary Meeker from TWIT.tv
Government's role in online privacy. Mary Meeker's 2017 Internet trends report. Android creator Andy Rubin's new Essential phone. The true meaning of "covfefe." Does Netflix care about Net Neutrality? Chipotle hacked. Google's expensive gender pay gap.

Chipotle just can’t catch a break anymore.

I remember there used to be days when Meeker’s report would consume an entire episode of shows like this, and now it seems like it barely gets a passing message because it’s become so dense.

🎧 This Week in Google: #406 Call Me Mr. Pruneface | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #406 Call Me Mr. Pruneface | TWIT.TV from TWIT.tv
Google releases the Jamboard, their smart whiteboard. How Google's ATAP has changed. Google can now track your offline credit card purchases. Why is it so hard to get Android apps on Chromebooks? What is Fuschia? Android Automotive will take over your car's dashboard. Java creator James Gosling is going to AWS. 1Password introduces Travel Mode to protect you at the border. Chaos Computer Club demonstrates how to hack Samsung's Iris Detection with just a camera and a contact lens. The FCC really wants to kill net neutrality, and they will beat you up if you ask them polite questions. Ford's new CEO is all about self-driving cars, but Waymo has a huge lead over everyone else. Uber angers customers, drivers, and pretty much the entire city of Pittsburgh. Jeff's Number: Google Street view is 10 years old, and artists love it. Stacey's Thing: WeMo Dimmer Switch Ron Amadeo's Stuff: Elegato Stream Deck

Net neutrality again? Why can’t the FCC just give up on trying to kill it?

🎧 This Week in Google: #405 Google I/O | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #405 Google I/O from TWIT.tv
Leo Laporte, Jason Howell, and Jeff Jarvis report live from Google I/O to discuss today's keynote. Stacey Higginbotham joins them from Austin, TX.

Sad that it didn’t sound like anything new and shiny coming immediately out of the presentations. Lots of tech happening, but it’ll be a while before we see direct results.

👓 Here’s Why Steve Bannon Wears So Many Shirts | The Cut

Read Here’s Why Steve Bannon Wears So Many Shirts (The Cut)
His spokesperson and other highly knowledgeable play sources attempt to explain the former presidential counselor’s questionable fashion choice.

👓 Why I’m leaving a Research I University for a Liberal Arts College | AMS Blogs

Read Why I’m leaving a Research I University for a Liberal Arts College (inclusion/exclusion)
I knew at a pretty early stage in my life — my freshman year of college, to be exact — that I wanted to become a research mathematician.  I have degrees from fancy research universities…