Here’s another long one, since I’ve been too busy/tired to collect my links for a few days. DRM, social media, indieweb, and, as usual, tons of bad news.
Sorry about that.
DRM’s Dead Canary: How We Just Lost the Web, What We Learned from It, and What We Need to Do Next | Electronic Frontier Foundation
The story of how underspecified proprietary DRM became a W3C standard, and what the consequences are. The canary in the title is the “canary in the coalmine”: DRM at the W3C is just one example of how market concentration is killing the open web.
‘There’s no one for right-wingers to pick a fight with’: The far right is struggling to sustain interest in its social media platforms
Because the big web silos like Reddit and YouTube are starting to recognize the consequences of allowing hate speech on their platforms, the far right is starting to get banned from them. They’ve been starting their own platforms, but they can’t even sustain interest in them among themselves.
Medium is only an edge server of your POSSE CDN, your own blog is the origin
POSSE is Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This article suggests a POSSE approach to using Medium. Effectively, your blog is the origin site for your articles, while Medium acts as a CDN to defray your bandwidth costs.
Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y
A history and explanation of a number of biological topics, but mostly how the idea of sex chromosomes came to be, and why and how it is oversimplified. If you end up having to deal with someone who thinks karyotype = sex determination, this is a good article to send them.
‘Transcendental Nonsense’ and Technology Companies: Reframing the Content Regulation Debate - Lawfare
It doesn’t really matter whether Google or Facebook “is” a technical platform or a media company, what matters is the results we want to see from regulation.
Why, Despite Our Media Company’s Record Growth, I Have Been Forced to Lay Off 40% of My Staff - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
I thankfully don’t come any closer to the SV startup/VC world than reading HN, but from what I can tell, this is extremely accurate.
The GOP Plan Is the Biggest Tax Increase in American History, By Far
Most people’s taxes are going to go up, by a lot, under the Republican tax plan. What remains to be seen is, if, next year, people actually connect their big tax bill to their Republican legislators.
Software as a Tiny House – A Quantity of Stuff
An insightful article by JP (Mastodon).
#DropJ20 Podcast Update #3: Police Take the Stand - It’s Going Down
A look at untrustworthy police testimony in the J20 case.