I lived in Germany for the latter half of the nineties. On August 11th, 1999, parts of Germany were in the path of a total eclipse of the sun. Freiburg—the town where I was living—wasn’t in the path, so Jessica and I travelled north with some friends to Karlsruhe. The weather wasn’t great. There was quite a bit of cloud coverage, but at the moment of totality, the clouds had thinned out enough for us to experience the incredible sight of a black sun.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Breitbart editor: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump will be ‘out by end of year’ | The Hill
An internet prankster posing as Stephen Bannon baited Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow into saying he would assist Bannon with his "dirty work" and help push Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner out of the White House. The Breitbart News editor said Kushner and Ivanka Trump would be "out by end of year" from their roles as White House advisers, according to the emails provided to CNN by the anonymous web troll, who has the username @SINON_REBORN on Twitter. The fake account — designed to look like it was Bannon's — first messaged Marlow on Sunday in an apparent attempt to fool Marlow into talking about Trump and Kushner.
👓 How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks | The Outline
For about five years, Mic.com was a place where readers could go to get moral clarity. In the Mic universe, heroes fought for equality against villains who tried to take it away. Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” “This Brave Woman's Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.” “Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.” “The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We're Not Talking About.” “The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.”
It’s disappointing to see such a huge disconnect between publishers and their journalistic staff. There’s also a business take away in that things typically won’t bode well in the long term when things like this happen. It’s going to be far more difficult for the publishers to find their way going forward.
👓 Is Anybody Home at HUD? | ProPublica
A long-harbored conservative dream — the “dismantling of the administrative state” — is taking place under Secretary Ben Carson.
I was just thinking yesterday, HUD has been awfully quiet. What has Ben Carson been up to?
The answer is appallingly painful, but seemingly par for the course, for the current administration.
While certainly having a particular point of view, this article is well reported with some great history/background, and specific examples. Sadly, it appears that the people Trump specifically said he was out to help are going to get the shaft even worse than I would have expected.
👓 This 1972 photo of women in miniskirts helped persuade Trump to commit to war in Afghanistan | Quartz
Trump's national security advisor used the photo to show how "western" Kabul had been in the past.
👓 I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It. | New York Times
I supported the president in dozens of articles, radio and TV appearances. I won’t do it any longer.
👓 ‘20 seconds of burning’: Friends partly blinded after watching solar eclipse warn of dangers | Washington Post
“We thought we were invincible, as most teenagers do,” said Roger Duvall, who briefly looked at a partial eclipse without protective eyewear.
I was wondering where these stories were hiding. I was surprised that I hadn’t seen more of them prior to the eclipse today.
👓 ‘Psychologically scarred’ millennials are killing countless industries from napkins to Applebee’s — here are the businesses they like the least | Business Insider
Millennials' preferences are killing dozens of industries. There are many complex reasons millennials' preferences differ from prior generations', including less financial stability and memories of growing up during the recession. "I think we have got a very significant psychological scar from this great recession," Morgan Stanley analyst Kimberly Greenberger told Business Insider. Here are 19 things millennials are killing.
There could be some more solid data in here, particularly since some of these businesses have been declining for more than a decade and some of that decline began during the recession.
👓 More on My LinkedIn Account | Schneier on Security
I have successfully gotten the fake LinkedIn account in my name deleted. To prevent someone from doing this again, I signed up for LinkedIn. This is my first -- and only -- post on that account. Now I hear that LinkedIn is e-mailing people on my behalf, suggesting that they friend, follow, connect, or whatever they do there with me. I assure you that I have nothing to do with any of those e-mails, nor do I care what anyone does in response.
More than any other network, I’ve been hearing more and more people quitting LinkedIn for security and other reasons.
👓 Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable by Ethan Zuckerman
Most distributed publishing tools are simply too complex for most users to adopt. Mastodon may have overcome that problem, borrowing design ideas from a successful commercial product. But the example of lolicon may challenge our theories in two directions. One, if you’re unable to share content on the sites you’re used to using – Twitter, in this case – you may be more willing to adopt a new tool, even if its interface is initially unfamiliar. Second, an additional barrier to adoption for decentralized publishing may be that its first large userbase is a population that cannot use centralized social networks. Any stigma associated with this community may make it harder for users with other interests to adopt these new tools.
Like many others, I can see many more and stronger reasons for a decentralized web than not. This article takes a look at a little bit of the downside of the model. (Though to be honest, I think the downside for this is even bigger in the siloed model.) Naturally the long term effects are far more complex than described here, but this is also very interesting during a week when there’s a continuing resurgence of neo-Nazis, the alt-right, and other white supremacists in America as well as a growing list of major companies that aren’t allowing them a safe harbor.
The US Government subpoena to DreamHost this week for visitors of an anti-Trump website and backbone internet companies like CloudFlare kicking off “The Daily Stormer” are particularly intriguing in the larger ecosystem as well.
I think there’s a lot here that’s both interesting to the IndieWeb community and from which we can all learn.
As I’m thinking about it, I wonder a bit what happens to the role of “community manager” in a larger decentralized and independent web? I hope it’s tummelers like Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, Jeremy Keith, Martijn van der Ven and others who continue to blaze the trail.
👓 Subscription Attrition | Brooks Review
I’ve been running this site as a “member” supported site since July of 2012. That’s what I call my subscription based, paywall model, a member-site. I’ve tried a lot of different methods to what I charge for, over the years, so I know a thing or two about subscriptions. I’m not selling software, but the consumer mindset on most any recurring payment is similar across the aisles. I’m sure Amazon could tell you some amazing stories about people being unwilling to use ‘Subscribe and Save’, but we are going to have to wait awhile for that TED talk.
Some interesting thoughts on diminishing returns and subscription pricing for personal blogs and related content.
👓 The Blockchain for Education: An Introduction | Hacked Education
Is blockchain poised to be “the next big thing” in education? This has become a question I hear with increasing frequency about a technology that, up until quite recently, was primarily associated with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The subtext to the question, I suppose: do educators need to pay attention to the blockchain? What, if anything, should they know about it?
A facile introduction with some interesting directions that education could take with it. Still, none seem so strong as to be worthwhile/valuable.
👓 Pivot time: searching for an Open Web blogging model | AltPlatform
We launched this blog less than three months ago to explore the latest in Open Web technologies. Things like the IndieWeb movement, blockchain apps, API platforms, Open AI, and more. AltPlatform has always been an experiment, as I made clear in our introductory post. However, from a publishing point of view the experiment hasn’t worked out as we had hoped. To put it plainly, the page views haven’t eventuated – at least in a sustained way. So it’s time to try something new. We’re going to pivot into something a bit different…soon.
I’m a bit saddened by this, but it’s always fun to try out new things. Can’t wait to see what comes next.
I love ricmac’s conceptualization of blogging and hope it comes back the way he–and I–envision it.
👓 Phở Networks, an experiment to create a singularist & truly scalable social platform | AltPlatform
An open source, MIT licensed project that I’ve been personally spending a lot of time on, for almost a year. – In a nutshell, Phở Networks lets you create independent social media outlets. – Phở Networks is singularist; because it allows you to create any form of social media, with a simple language that many sysadmins have already familiarized themselves with in the UNIX world; ACL — access-control lists. You may use Phở Networks as your blogging engine, but you can also create a whole new Facebook. Need proof? Just visit the pho-recipes Github repo. – Phở Networks is lightning fast and massively scalable, because it takes an unorthodox approach as to how it handles data. With Phở, data is stored and served warm right off the RAM, as it is built on top of Redis. With this unconventional RAM-first design choice (in contrast to caching, which most high-scale web sites have opted into), Phở Networks won’t be cheap (for now), but it will be blazing-fast and super low-maintenance by avoiding the limitations of sharding and hard-drive friction.
I’d heard of this a while back, but never spent much time on it. Perhaps it’s time to delve in a bit to play around?
👓 I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It. | New York Times
I supported the president in dozens of articles, radio and TV appearances. I won’t do it any longer.
A nice overview for the case against him.