Reads
👓 The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution | Quanta Magazine
As physicists extend the 19th-century laws of thermodynamics to the quantum realm, they’re rewriting the relationships among energy, entropy and information.
👓 An Open Letter to the Deputy Attorney General | New York Times
Rod Rosenstein has more authority than anyone else to restore Americans’ confidence in their government.
👓 Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (For the Future of Knowledge) | Hack Education
These remarks were given at Coventry University as part of my visiting fellowship at the Disruptive Media Learning Lab
Un-Annotated by Audrey Watters
Why Audrey Watters has blocked annotations from News Genius and Hypothes.is from her website.
I also wanted to use this post as an experiment of sorts to see how sound her script actually is with respect to people using both of the annotation services she mentions.
The text of her post appears below in full and unaltered (as it did on 2017-05-17 aside from my obvious annotations and highlights). It (and my commentary and highlights) is (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) as she originally licensed it.
I’ve spent some time thinking about this type of blocking in the past and written about a potential solution. Kevin Marks had created a script to help prevent this type of abuse as well; his solution and some additional variants are freely available. — {cja}
I have added a script to my websites today that will block annotations – namely those from Genius and those from Hypothes.is. I have been meaning to do this for a while now, so it’s mostly a project that comes as I procrastinate doing something else rather than one that comes in response to any recent event.
I took comments off my websites in 2013 because I was sick of having to wade through threats of sexualized violence in order to host conversations on my ideas.
My blog. My rules. No comments.
The article linked at the bottom of the paragraph is a must read in my opinion and sparked some of my original thoughts last year about this same phenomenon. I suspect that Ms. Watters has been wanting to do this since this article was posted and/or she read it subsequently. — {cja}
I’ve made this position fairly well known – if you have something to say in response, go ahead and write your own blog post on your own damn site. So I find the idea that someone would use a service like Hypothes.is to annotate my work on my websites particularly frustrating. I don’t want comments – not in the margins and not at the foot of an article. Mostly, I don’t want to have to moderate them. I have neither the time nor the emotional bandwidth. And if I don’t want to moderate comments, that means I definitely do not want comments to appear here (or that appear to be here) that are outside my control or even my sight.
This isn’t simply about trolls and bigots threatening me (although yes, that is a huge part of it); it’s also about extracting value from my work and shifting it to another company which then gets to control (and even monetize) the conversation.
Does the script Audrey Watters is using really stop people from annotating her site directly?
Based on my quick test, one can still (carefully) use Hypothes.is to highlight and annotate her site, but the script at least prevents Hypothes.is from showing that annotation. When visiting her site with Hypothes.is’ Chrome browser extension on, it does show that there is one annotation on the page. It then requires some hunting to find this comment.
And this particular post is proof of the fact that it can still be annotated, but without impinging on the sovereignty of the original author or her site. — {cja}
Blocking annotation tools does not stop you from annotating my work. I’m a fan of marginalia; I am. I write all over the books I’ve bought, for example. Blocking annotations in this case merely stops you from writing in the margins here on this website.
👓 Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748) | The Nation
A new study shows how voter-ID laws decreased turnout among African-American and Democratic voters.
👓 You can now upload Instagram photos from its mobile website | The Verge
Instagram users no longer need the app to upload photos. The company is now rolling out the ability to upload photos through its mobile website. You can’t upload videos, add filters, upload to...
👓 A minority report on artificial intelligence | Jeremy Keith
Want to feel old? Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report was released fifteen years ago. It casts a long shadow. For a decade after the film’s release, it was referenced at least once at every conference relating to human-computer interaction. Unsurprisingly, most of the focus has been on the technology in the film. The hardware and interfaces in Minority Report came out of a think tank assembled in pre-production. It provided plenty of fodder for technologists to mock and praise in subsequent years: gestural interfaces, autonomous cars, miniature drones, airpods, ubiquitous advertising and surveillance.
👓 Own your identity | Marco.org
This paragraph in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Why I’ll Never Redirect my Personal Blog to Google Plus scared me a bit:
Google Plus doesn’t have RSS feeds, or email subscription options. Both are important to me; I want to speak to my readers however they want to be spoken to. Some day, we’ll be able to write to and read from any platform in any other platform, just like we can call one phone network from inside another phone network now.
I hope he’s being clever here, because we had that. (And I think we still have it.)
It’s interesting that so much online publishing is moving into a small handful of massive, closed, proprietary networks after being so distributed and diverse during the big boom of blogs and RSS almost a decade ago.
👓 Medium and Being Your Own Platform | Marco.org
Glenn Fleishman responded very well to my semi-controversial tweet about Medium from the other day:
I’ve written a few things on Medium (not paid) because I liked the experience of their writing tools, their statistics, and their reach. I think two of the three items I wrote became featured and had several thousand reads. It’s a wonderful way to write and a wonderful place to post.
But it’s not mine. It’s theirs.
Bingo.
You can use someone else’s software, but still have your own “platform”, if you’re hosting it from a domain name you control and are able to easily take your content and traffic with you to another tool or host at any time. You don’t need to go full-Stallman and build your own blogging engine from scratch on a Linux box in your closet — a Tumblr, Squarespace, or WordPress blog is perfectly fine if you use your own domain name and can export your data easily.
👓 Still Blogging in 2017 | Tim Bray
Not alone and not unread, but the ground underfoot ain’t steady. An instance of Homo economicus wouldn’t be doing this — no payday looming. So I guess I’m not one of those. But hey, whenever I can steal an hour I can send the world whatever words and pictures occupy my mind and laptop. Which, all these years later, still feels like immense privilege.
👓 The Beauty of Amazon’s 6-Pager | Brad Porter
Imagine for a moment that you could go into a meeting and everyone in the meeting would have very deep context on the topic you're going to discuss. They would be well-versed in the critical data for your business.
👓 A Great App for Recording Podcasts | Allen Pike
A year ago I wrote about the modern era of podcasts. In that article, I made a forward-looking statement:
With all this growth, what improvements are we seeing in the tools? As of this writing, a horde of developers are building podcast listening apps. Podcast recording apps, on the other hand?
Well, more about that soon.
In the intervening year, we’ve seen the launch of Castro, Overcast, and the acquisition of Stitcher. It’s been a big year for podcast listening software, but not so much for podcast recording software.
👓 Chrome and Firefox Phishing Attack Uses Domains Identical to Known Safe Sites | WordFence
Update on April 19th at noon Pacific time: Chrome has just released version 58.0.3029.81. We have confirmed that this resolves the issue and that our ‘epic.com’ test domain no longer shows as ‘epic.com’ and displays the raw punycode instead, which is ‘www.xn--e1awd7f.com’, making it clear that the domain is not ‘epic.com’. We encourage all Chrome users to ...Read More
👓 Why Some Farts Smell So Much Worse Than Others | Thrillist
Sometimes a fart escapes without a sound or a smell, but other times farts smell remarkably like rotten eggs. Here's why that happens.