Links
👓 Fitness Tracker App Exposes Security Flaw at Taiwan’s Missile Command Center | The Daily Beast
A ‘heat map’ of Strava users published this weekend revealed sensitive military bases across the world—and hackers could do even more with the data.
👓 Paul Manafort, American Hustler | The Atlantic
Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.
What a fantastic and stunning piece of journalism this is. Maybe one of the better in-depth pieces I’ve seen in the past couple of months.
It does make me really wonder about Trump’s claim to want to “drain the swamp” now that I’m aware of more of Manafort and Roger Stone’s histories and the fact that they seemingly singlehandedly created the swamp.
👓 The Follower Factory | New York Times
Everyone wants to be popular online. Some even pay for it. Inside social media’s black market.
A great story which just touches on the fringes of the reasons why it would be useful for many bots (particular kinds) to be banned from social media websites.
👓 Mysterious 15th century manuscript finally decoded 600 years later | The Independent
Artificial intelligence has allowed scientists to make significant progress in cracking a mysterious ancient text, the meaning of which has eluded scholars for centuries.
Interesting news if it’s really true! Though I do feel a bit sad as there are some methods I had wanted to try on this longstanding puzzle, but never had the time to play with.
👓 Why You Should Put Your Content on Both Medium and Your Own Domain | sendcheckit
How to leverage your own site and Medium without duplicate content issues.
👓 Leak without a trace: Anonymous Whistle blowing | Standardista
Instructions on how to leak data without getting caught Don’t leave digital traces while copying data. Write stuff down on a pad which belongs to you, and take it home. Photograph your screen. Don’t create files with copies of the data you are planning to exfiltrate on your work computer.
A great primer! It’s not easy being an anonymous whistleblower….
👓 TWELP: Twitter Help | Standardista
Estelle Weyl (Standardista)Sometimes Twitter gets things wrong. Very, very, wrong. A few “features” that I think are bugs include Twitter Moments,
To this end, I created a little bookmarklet called “TWELP”.
The bookmarklet creates a kill function that:
- hides promoted tweets by finding the parent tweet containing a
promoted-tweetchild class- hides any “liked” tweets that contain the heart icon, including uninteresting tweets in your stream suck as the fact that your friend Jane liked a tweet of a picture of her acquaintance Joe, who you are not following, eating an oyster. Seriously, who the fuck cares? It also hides the “people who liked your tweet” feature in your notifications. Not sure if that is a feature or a bug.
- The ‘.js-activity-generic’ hides the ‘pat and chris followed leslie’. Seriously, double wtf cares? I am testing in production, so maybe this has some unwanted side effects.
- hides the “Moments” tab by hiding the tab that has the
js-moments-tab class- hides promoted modules that I hate like “In Case You Missed It” and “Who to follow”
- Calls itself once per second so if you scroll, it will continue killing those annoying tweets mentioned above.
- You have to pass window.jQuery to $ because Firefox defines it’s own $. (Thanks to @Potch for that tidbit)
TWELP – You can drag this link to your bookmarks bar, and click TWELP bookmarklet whenever you load Twitter. It kills the “Moments” tab, all ads, and removes the “X liked” tweets.
👓 Podcasts I am Listening To | gRegorLove.com
gRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)This is one of those posts I have wanted to write but kept forgetting to. I was reminded again while chatting with Marty, and when I asked him what podcasts he recommended, he went and wrote a whole post. So it's time I finally wrote mine. I'll try to break mine down into categories, too. Well-known...
👓 Podcasts I am listening to | Jeena Paradies
Jeena (jeena.net)It's interesting to see what others listen to
👓 My Goals, Resolutions, and Budget for 2018 | Anomalily
Most years, I write up my goals for the year, and then evaluate how I did at the end of the year. In 2017, I published 50 goals and evaluated how I did (I gave myself an A-). Now, 50 goals was a lot. So I kept it simpler this year, with...
👓 Extensions in Firefox 59 | Mozilla
Firefox Quantum continues to make news as Mozilla incorporates even more innovative technology into the platform. The development team behind the WebExtensions architecture is no exception, landing a slew of new API and improvements that can now be found in Firefox 59 (just released to the Beta chan...
👓 IndieWeb WordPress Feedback by gRegorLove
gRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)I’m upgrading a friend’s WordPress site and decided to go through the IndieWeb’s Getting Started on WordPress page. Here’s some notes as I go through the process, trying to view it through the lens of someone who isn’t already familiar with indieweb terminology.
gRegor is spot on for a lot of this, but I think the solution may be to leave the IndieWeb-speak versions on the wiki as they are for the Generation 1 crowd and start all over again with some new pages geared specifically toward Gen2+ which don’t include a lot of our specific jargon.
People just want to use their websites in a way that Just Works™, they don’t necessarily want to learn a whole new vocabulary to do so. While I think it’s very useful to know that vocabulary and reframe one’s perspective about the web and how it works, it shouldn’t be a necessary condition for joining in on all the fun.
👓 Medium Acquires Superfeedr by Julien Genestoux
Today’s web is very different from what it was 8 years ago. We’ve said it several times: publishing and consuming content are new frontiers for most of the web giants like Facebook, Google or Apple. We consume the web from mobile devices, we discover content on silo-ed social networks and, more importantly, the base metaphor for the web is shifting from “space” to “time”. Superfeedr, the open web’s leading feed API and PubSubHubbub hub has been an independent player for 8 years. Superfeedr exists in order to enable people to exchange information on the web more freely and easily. Today, we’re excited to announce Superfeedr has been acquired by Medium. In many ways, it’s a very natural fit: Medium wants to create the best place to publish, distribute and consume content on the web. Together, we are hoping to keep Medium the company a leader in good industry practices, and Medium the network a place where this conversation can gain even more traction.
Lemon marmalade by Jeremy Cherfas
Jeremy Cherfas (jeremycherfas.net)One of my dreams, when I first arrived in Rome, was to be able, on a hot summer evening, to walk out to my own lemon tree and pick a still-warm fruit to grace my ice-cold G&T. Sixteen years and four removals later, that tree, bought from a lorry at the side of the road, is still with me and, this wi...
Just as I’ve managed to score a major load of lemons and was looking around for recipes, Jeremy naturally comes up with a brilliant answer.
Also reminds me that I ought to pester Jonathan for his recipe for limoncello as well.