The archival Web—the one you see through the protocol HTTP—will soon be condemned, cordoned off behind Google's police tape, labeled "insecure" on every current Chrome browser. For some perspective on this, imagine if suddenly all the national parks in the world became forbidden zones because nature created them before they could only be seen through crypto eyeglasses. Every legacy website, nearly all of which were created with no malice, commit no fraud and distribute no malware, will become haunted houses: still there, but too scary for most people to visit. It's easy to imagine, and Google wants you to imagine it.
Tag: Google
👓 The need for speed: Google dedicates engineering team to accelerate development of WordPress ecosystem | Search Engine Land
Michelle Robbins (Search Engine Land)Google's partnership with WordPress aims to jump-start the platform's support of the latest web technologies -- particularly those involving performance & mobile experience. And they're hiring WordPress experts.
Contributing back to the community is an interesting way to go, though I’m curious how readily the community will pull the pieces back, particularly into core. This is certainly a better modus operandi than attempting to press forward on AMP technology.
👓 The Google Arts & Culture App and the Rise of the “Coded Gaze” | The New Yorker
Adrian Chen (The New Yorker)Adrian Chen writes about the Google Arts & Culture app’s facial-recognition algorithm and how it relates to the ideas of John Berger and Joy Buolamwini.
A more subtle take on the Google Arts & Culture App than I’m seeing everywhere else.
👓 Google Thinks I’m Dead | New York Times
Rachel Abrams (New York Times)(I know otherwise.)
👓 Google Maps’s Moat | Justin O’Beirne
How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps?
👓 Talk: “Designing away the cookie disclaimer” by Sebastian Greger
This is the transcript of my lightning talk from the beyond tellerrand Berlin pre-conference warm-up on 6 November 2017. It was a condensed version of my longer, work-in-progress and upcoming talk on privacy as a core pillar of ethical UX design. If you are interested in the final talk or know about a conference or event that might be, I’d be thrilled to hear from you.
It’s sad the amount of not caring that both laws and apathy on the internet can make your life just dreadful in ways that it shouldn’t.
I love the fact that people are working on solving these seemingly mundane issues. This is a great little presentation Sebastian!
👓 Google Docs Is Randomly Flagging Files for Violating Its Terms of Service | Motherboard
Let this serve as a reminder that you have less control over your stuff online than it often appears.
👓 Google will permanently disable a control on its new $50 speaker after the gadget listened in on some users | Business Insider
Google Home Mini is losing the ability to use it by touching the button on the top, after a reviewer raised concerns that it was recording without his consent.
👓 What I believe II (ft. Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery) | Shtetl-Optimized
In my post “The Kolmogorov Option,” I tried to step back from current controversies, and use history to reflect on the broader question of how nerds should behave when their penchant for speaking unpopular truths collides head-on with their desire to be kind and decent and charitable, and to be judged as such by their culture. I was gratified to get positive feedback about this approach from men and women all over the ideological spectrum. However, a few people who I like and respect accused me of “dogwhistling.” They warned, in particular, that if I wouldn’t just come out and say what I thought about the James Damore Google memo thing, then people would assume the very worst—even though, of course, my friends themselves knew better. So in this post, I’ll come out and say what I think. But first, I’ll do something even better: I’ll hand the podium over to two friends, Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery, both of whom were kind enough to email me detailed thoughts in response to my Kolmogorov post.
👓 I am disappointed but unsurprised by the news that an anti-diversity, sexist, manifesto is making… | Include
I am disappointed but unsurprised by the news that an anti-diversity, sexist, manifesto is making the rounds at Google. This is not entirely new behavior. Google has seen hints of this in the past, with employees sharing blog posts about their racist beliefs and the occasional internal mailing list question, “innocently” asking if Black people aren’t more likely to be violent. What is new is that this employee felt safe enough to write and share an 8 page sexist screed, internally.
👓 So, about this Googler’s manifesto. | Yonatan Zunger – Medium
You have probably heard about the manifesto a Googler (not someone senior) published internally about, essentially, how women and men are intrinsically different and we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers, it’s just not worth it. Until about a week ago, you would have heard very little from me publicly about this, because (as a fairly senior Googler) my job would have been to deal with it internally, and confidentiality rules would have prevented me from saying much in public.
👓 Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral’ | Motherboard
"It's not worth thinking about this as an isolated incident and instead a manifestation of what ails all of Silicon Valley."
👓 Exclusive: Here’s The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated] | Gizmodo
Update 7:25pm ET: Google’s new Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance Danielle Brown has issued her own memo to Google employees in response to the now-viral memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” Brown’s statement, obtained by Motherboard, can be found in full at the end of this article.
👓 Google to radically change homepage for first time since 1996 | The Guardian
Search company to integrate its app-based feed of news, events, sports and interest-based topics into Google.com page in the near future
Feed reader revolution
The state-of-the-art in feed readers was frozen in place sometime around 2010, if not before. By that time most of the format wars between RSS and Atom had long since died down and were all generally supported. The only new features to be added were simple functionalities like sharing out links from readers to social services like Facebook and Twitter. For fancier readers they also added the ability to share out to services like Evernote, OneNote, Pocket, Instapaper and other social silos or silo related services.
So the real question facing companies with stand alone traditional feed reader products–like Feedly, Digg Reader, The Old Reader, Inoreader, Reeder, NewsBlur, Netvibes, Tiny Tiny RSS, WordPress reader–and the cadre of others is:
- What features could/should we add?
- How can we improve?
- How can we gain new users?
- How can we increase our market share?
In short the primary question is:
What should a modern RSS feed reader be capable of doing?