Read 2020-11-04: New Twitter UI: Replaying Archived Twitter Pages That Never Existed by Himarsha Jayanetti (ws-dl.blogspot.com | The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at Old Dominion University.)
When you visit web archives to go back in time and look at a web page, you naturally expect it to display the content exactly as it appeared on the live web at that particular datetime. That is, of course, with the assumption in mind that all of the resources on the page were captured at or near the time of the datetime displayed in the banner for the root HTML page. However, we noticed that it is not always the case and problems with archiving Twitter's new UI can result in replaying Twitter profile pages that never existed on the live web. In our previous blog post, we talked about how difficult it is to archive Twitter's new UI, and in this blog post, we uncover how the new Twitter UI mementos in the Internet Archive are vulnerable to temporal violations.
An interesting quirk of archiving pages on the modern internet.

👓 New Clues by David Weinberger and Doc Searls

Read New Clues by David Weinberger and Doc Searls (newclues.cluetrain.com)

Hear, O Internet.

It has been sixteen years since our previous communication.

In that time the People of the Internet — you and me and all our friends of friends of friends, unto the last Kevin Bacon — have made the Internet an awesome place, filled with wonders and portents.

From the serious to the lolworthy to the wtf, we have up-ended titans, created heroes,  and changed the most basic assumptions about
How Things Work and Who We Are.

But now all the good work we’ve done together faces mortal dangers.

When we first came before you, it was to warn of the threat posed by those who did not understand that they did not understand the Internet.

These are The Fools, the businesses that have merely adopted the trappings of the Internet.

Now two more hordes threaten all that we have built for one another.

The Marauders understand the Internet all too well. They view it as theirs to plunder, extracting our data and money from it, thinking that we are the fools.

But most dangerous of all is the third horde: Us.

A horde is an undifferentiated mass of people. But the glory of the Internet is that it lets us connect as diverse and distinct individuals.

We all like mass entertainment. Heck, TV’s gotten pretty great these days, and the Net lets us watch it when we want. Terrific.

But we need to remember that delivering mass media is the least of the Net’s powers.

The Net’s super-power is connection without permission. Its almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want.

It is therefore not time to lean back and consume the oh-so-tasty junk food created by Fools and Marauders as if our work were done. It is time to breathe in the fire of the Net and transform every institution that would play us for a patsy.

An organ-by-organ body snatch of the Internet is already well underway. Make no mistake: with a stroke of a pen, a covert handshake, or by allowing memes to drown out the cries of the afflicted we can lose the Internet we love.

We come to you from the years of the Web’s beginning. We have grown old together on the Internet. Time is short.

We, the People of the Internet, need to remember the glory of its revelation so that we reclaim it now in the name of what it truly is.

👓 The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral | Hopgood

Read The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)
Opening keynote for dLRN 2015. Delivered October 16th @ Stanford. Actual keynote may have gone on significant tangents… 1 | a year in the garden A week or so ago, I was reading about the Oreg…
A fantastic read. This makes me want to supplement my commonplace book here on the web with a wiki instance.

👓 Why We Terminated Daily Stormer | Cloudflare

Read Why We Terminated Daily Stormer by Matthew Prince (Cloudflare)
Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We've stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We've taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare's services ever again. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology. Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare. Now, having made that decision, let me explain why it's so dangerous.
Some interesting implications for how the internet works as a result of this piece.

Happy #IndieWeb Birthday to Me!

T

wo years ago today, I officially began to (try to) own all of my own web data and host it on my own server.

It began when I moved from WordPress.com to my own domain at BoffoSocko.com. At the time, I wasn’t aware of the IndieWeb movement, but shortly thereafter I ran across IndieWebCamp.org and began using their principles and philosophy, which seemed to me to be how the Web and the Internet should have worked from the start.

Though I still use corporate-owned social media sites (primarily for increased distribution), I no longer rely on them for being the sole source of my internet presence or identity.

Now, through the boffosocko.com domain and a variety of tools, I post all of my content here on my own site first and then syndicate it out to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and any other useful sites. [Sadly, because of API restrictions I do still natively post to Instagram, but using OwnYourGram, I’m able to programmatically post the same photo on my site simultaneously.] This means that if any of these silos were to disappear, I would still own all of my own content (including comments I make on other sites, which sometimes could be blogposts/articles in and of themselves, or worse, through administrative interfaces could actually not be approved/published, and therefore completely lost as if I hadn’t written them to begin with.)

Also slowly, but surely, I’ve been able to have all of the resulting interactions that take place on my content on many of these silos (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) appear back on my site in the comments section on the original post. This way, if you’re commenting and interacting on this post on Facebook (for example) and you comment there, the comment is ported over to the comment section on my own site where it exists for everyone to see and interact with.

If you’re interested in joining the movement you can see if there’s a meeting in your neighborhood (or even create your own.) For those living in the Los Angeles area, there’s a meeting this week on Wednesday, April 27th! Click here for more details. Later this year, there’s also a bigger Indie Web Camp here in Los Angeles too!

If you think the mission and philosophy of the Indie Web are interesting and would like some help setting something like this up for yourself, I’m happy to help! Just post a comment below or reply to this post (depending on what platform you’re reading this.)

I also want to say a BIG THANK YOU to all those in the indieweb community who’ve helped me come much farther and faster than I would have done by myself!

I’m copying some useful introductory material from IndieWebCamp.org below for those interested:

What is the IndieWeb?

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the ‘corporate web’.

indieweb

Join the IndieWeb

Beyond Blogging and Decentralization

The IndieWeb effort is different from previous efforts/communities:

Perhaps most importantly, we are people-focused instead of project-focused, and have regular meetups where everyone is welcome:

Homebrew Website Club

Homebrew Website Club is a (bi)weekly meetup of creatives passionate about designing, improving, building, and actively using their own websites, sharing their successes and challenges with a like-minded and supportive community. We have adopted a similar structure as the classic Homebrew Computer Club meetings. [1]

We typically meet every other Wednesday* right after work, 18:30-19:30, across cities and online. Some locations also have a 17:30-18:30 Quiet Writing Hour beforehand. Edinburgh is meeting every week, and some cities meet on Tuesdays!