👓 I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends | Buzzfeed

Read How I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends by Katie Notopoulos (BuzzFeed)
Or, how to lose friends and influence people.
Black box algorithms are simply the bane of the world. How hard would it be to give us some manual and granular control over our own feeds. That’s really the next killer app. If the rise of the independent and decentralized web isn’t the thing that kills social media, it’s going to be a company that figures out how to act more human and give people the ability to control what they read.

👓 Web Application Outage Details | Simplenote

Read Web Application Outage Details (Simplenote)
Tuesday at about 4:50pm Pacific time our web application at app.simplenote.com went down, displaying a generic 404 error message. We discovered shortly after that Google Cloud Platform, which hosts the web application, had shut down the site due to a DMCA notice for allegedly infringing content that...
A bit crazy for a major web app to go down for a silly reason like this.

👓 My POSSE plan for evolving my site | Dries Buytaert

Read My POSSE plan for evolving my site by Dries BuytaertDries Buytaert (dri.es)
How I plan to evolve my site to take back control over my data and reclaim my blog as my thought space.
An excellent layout of itches for improving a website.

👓 Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement | EFF

Read Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and...
This is an insane bit of news and could have some chilling effects on all areas of the web.

👓 Porn star who alleged Trump affair: I can now tell my story | AP News

Read Porn star who alleged Trump affair: I can now tell my story by Jake Pearson and Jeff Horwitz (AP News)
NEW YORK (AP) — Stormy Daniels, the porn star whom Donald Trump’s attorney acknowledges paying $130,000 just before Election Day, believes she is now free to discuss an alleged sexual encounter with the man who is now president, her manager told The Associated Press Wednesday. At the same time, developments in the bizarre case are fueling questions about whether such a payment could violate federal campaign finance laws. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, believes that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, invalidated a non-disclosure agreement after two news stories were published Tuesday: one in which Cohen told The New York Times he made the six-figure payment with his personal funds, and another in the Daily Beast, which reported that Cohen was shopping a book proposal that would touch on Daniels’ story, said the manager, Gina Rodriguez.

👓 FAQ: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon? | Salon

Read FAQ: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon? (salon.com)
Like most media companies, Salon pays its bills through advertising and we profoundly appreciate our advertising partners and sponsors. In this traditional arrangement between reader and publisher, we are able to offer our readers a free reading experience in exchange for serving them ads. This relationship — of free or subsidized content in exchange for advertising — is not new; journalism has subsisted on this relationship for well over a century. This quid pro quo arrangement, ideally, benefits both readers and media. Yet in the past two decades, shifting tides in the media and advertising industries threw a wrench in this equation.
Just the other day I was reading about third party plugins that injected code that allowed websites to mine for bitcoin in the background. Now publications are actively doing this in the background as a means of making money? In addition to the silliness of the bitcoin part, this just sounds like poor editorial judgment all around.

👓 Crowdsourcing trusted news sources can work — but not the way Facebook says it’ll do it | Nieman Journalism Lab

Read Crowdsourcing trusted news sources can work — but not the way Facebook says it’ll do it by Laura Hazard Owen (Nieman Lab)
A new study finds asking Facebook users about publishers could "be quite effective in decreasing the amount of misinformation and disinformation circulating on social media" — but Facebook will need to make one important change to its plan.

👓 Facebook’s Campbell Brown: “This is not about us trying to make everybody happy” | Nieman Journalism Lab

Read Facebook’s Campbell Brown: “This is not about us trying to make everybody happy” by Laura Hazard Owen (Nieman Lab)
“If someone feels that being on Facebook is not good for your business, you shouldn’t be on Facebook. Let’s be clear about that…I don’t see us as the answer to the problem.”

👓 Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20 | Nieman Lab

Read Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20 by Laura Hazard Owen (Nieman Lab)
"I am like a vaudevillian. I'm the last guy dancing on the stage, by myself, and everyone else has moved on to movies and television."
An interesting take of blogging twenty years on. Most of the other blogs that he mentions don’t have a monetization strategy at all, but it’s great to hear a sketch of how a “one person” blog attempts to monetize.

👓 Jetpack 5.8: A Focus on Speed with Faster Search and Lazy Loading Images | Jetpack for WordPress

Read Jetpack 5.8: A Focus on Speed with Faster Search and Lazy Loading Images by Nicole Kohler (Jetpack for WordPress)
Today’s release of Jetpack 5.8 includes several features that have graduated from beta testing. We are very excited to bring them out for you to try. Let’s take a closer look at what we’ve included in this update, and how today’s additions will help you speed up your site and deliver faster...
I like the idea of Elastic Search being added in here and that alone might make it worth the subscription price! I’m surprised that it wasn’t bundled in from the start or that Elastic Search isn’t making an smaller subscription version available via plugin for a smaller price.

👓 Webmasters: Have some (sub resource) integrity! | InfoSec Guy

Read Webmasters: Have some (sub resource) integrity! (InfoSec Guy)
Earlier today it was discovered that a large number of websites (over 4,000) – including UK government and NHS websites – had been compromised with a “cryptominer”. A cryptominer is a piece of software that “mines” cryptocoins like Bitcoin, LiteCoin, Ethereum, etc, which in turn generate income. When a cryptominer is included within the code of a website and a visitor visits a web page on the site, his/her web browser becomes a “miner” and their device’s CPU is used to “mine” coins for whoever placed the cryptominer within the code. Essentially, someone else profits at your expense (and at the detriment to your device, if its CPU is being maxed out through mining), and all this takes place without your knowledge!

👓 Slack is the opposite of organizational memory | Abe Winter

Read Slack is the opposite of organizational memory by Abe Winter (abe-winter.github.io)
slack empowers your worst people to overwhelm your best. It has that in common with the open office. It normalizes interruptions, multitasking, and distractions, implicitly permitting these things to happen IRL as well as online. It normalizes insanely short reply times for questions. In the slack world people can escalate from asking in a room to @person to @here in a matter of minutes. And they’re not wrong to – if your request isn’t handled in 5 minutes it’s as good as forgotten.
An interesting take. There is obviously still room for a better mouse trap here.

👓 TEDxManchester 2018 – transcript | Dan Hett

Read TEDxManchester 2018 - transcript of presentation on Terrorism and the real problem (blog.danhett.com)
Yesterday I stood on stage at the sold-out TEDxManchester at the Bridgewater Hall, and spoke to about 2,400 people about my experiences. It was terrifying, but ultimately a really positive experience. I've barely decompressed, and I'm going to write a full blog post about it all when my head is back together a bit, but for now here's the transcript of what I said, more or less:
A stunning and powerful story about the true effects of terrorism…

👓 Children aren’t starting puberty younger, medieval skeletons reveal | The Conversation

Read Children aren’t starting puberty younger, medieval skeletons reveal by Mary Lewis (The Conversation)
Children are entering puberty younger than before, according to recent studies, raising concerns that childhood obesity and hormone-contaminated water supplies may be to blame. However, our archaeological research suggests that there’s nothing to worry about. Children in medieval England entered puberty between ten and 12 years of age – the same as today.
Of course, naturally, this isn’t the publicly perceived story. There’s still some science missing from the overall arc of the story, but people who believe that chemicals in the environment and hormones in food are causing children to start puberty at younger ages should be questioning why they think this is the case.

If anything, perhaps better first world lives may be pressuring the age down a bit, but even then it sounds like there’s a lower limit. Evolutionary effects are also certainly at play as well.