For as long as I can remember, it’s been possible to configure WordPress like this:
Screenshot of WordPress’s membership settings, as found under Settings -> General
In essence, this combination of settings translates to: “Please take my site. No seriously, it’s yours.“. Allowing new users to sign up, and then making them site administrators allows them to completely take over your site.
I’m really surprised that this is not a heavily protected option and can’t think of a reason people would really want to do such a thing.
A chance encounter led me to want to post about my evolving views on education as essential public infrastructure. Thanks to a tweet by Sara Goldrick-Rab, I was led to an article by someone I’d never read, Corey DeAngelis, Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute: “Is Public Schooling a Public Good? An Analysis of Schooling Externalities”. If I were not already thinking about education as public infrastructure, I probably would have walked away from this article given all its issues (which I’ll end up addressing, like it or not) and the futility of engaging such polemical works. Yet so much sprang out of my reading of DeAngelis and the other works it led me to that I feel compelled to write, if only to set out some thinking on education as public infrastructure to build on later.
Ahead of the Great Deletion, Flickr has a decent export tool built in to the user settings page. You click the export button, wait a day or two for an email, and then get some ZIP files to download…
A man was removed from the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore after he loudly yelled pro-Hitler slogans during intermission.
Given the political climate, ubiquity of mass murders via guns, and the reactions reported, this seems tantamount to yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. It’s certainly psychological terrorism and bordering on even worse.
In the Wild West of “influencer” marketing, there are few protections and plenty of easy marks.
Of the multi-billion dollar business and the issues with needing to give away one’s password to be tracked within this field, the real loss here seems to be that Instagram isn’t building infrastructure for their users to take advantage of these opportunities. Even if they were only taking a small fraction of the income for facilitating the market, they’re missing out on hundreds of millions.
It’s not mentioned here, but the fact that there are businesses built around the idea of “link in bio” means that Instagram really isn’t innovating on their platform.
Is Instagram really so deaf to the needs of their userbase?
Micro.blog now has 3 distinct styles of usernames to make the platform more compatible with other services: Micro.blog usernames, e.g. @you. These are simple usernames for @-mentioning someone else in the Micro.blog community. Mastodon usernames, e.g. @you@yourdomain.com. When you search Micro.blog ...
I have been informed by friends of the family that William Goldman died last night. He was 87. Goldman, who twice won screenwriting Oscars for All The President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, passed away last night in his Manhattan home, surrounded by family and friends. His health had been failing for some time, and over the summer his condition deteriorated.
Last year, I posted my newwwyear goal and I decided to follow along with the rest of the IndieWeb commitments and make #newwwyear 2019 goals!
I took a look at my IndieWeb goals and made a list of the things I want to have live on my website by January 1, 2019. Webmentions
I used to display webmentio...
Nate Angell
Manton Reece
Eddie Hinkle