Fear of Screens – The New Inquiry
Why would anyone want to believe that people who are communicating with phones have forgotten what friendship is?
pinboarded
Data Reawakening
As archivists struggle to store the mountain of data on the internet, researchers are trying to use atoms, diamonds, and DNA to let data live on forever.
The Librarians Saving The Internet
You may think that anything uploaded onto the internet is there forever—but the constant churn is a challenge to the archivists trying to backup the web.
Ghosts In The Reels
Even in this era of cloud storage, many data centers still use good, reliable magnetic tape. But as the technology develops at a faster rate, this backup is quickly becoming obsolete. What will become of the forgotten data preserved on the tape of the past?
Re-Evaluating My Digital Self – techKNOWtools
I need to really take a hard look at my digital self. This personal online audit will help to clean up and prevent potential hacks; however, this time I am including bigger questions beyond use/activity — as I plan review platforms terms of service, digital rights, data access, digital security, data extraction, and, ultimately, outlining if there is a purpose/need for “being” in any of these virtual locations. As net neutrality rules are killed and social (+ other) media continue to scale, I have a lot more questions I need to think about for my own work, learning, and life. The last few years there has been a reckoning for social media — more than anyone once thought over a decade ago. “Facebook is just a college thing” and “Twitter is just a fad,” were some of the things once said. Who thought these social networks would impact how we learn, work, vote, share, and more?
Decentralization 2017
Earlier this year, a group out of the MIT Media Lab published a research paper called “Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future?” which is well worth reading. The paper recognizes the threat to the open internet posed by the growing centralization of services and data within a handful of companies. The same group, consisting of Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula, and Ethan Zuckerman, also published an opinion piece in Wired called “Decentralized Social Networks Sound Great. Too Bad They’ll Never Work,” summarizing parts of their paper. Despite the depressing title, the authors don’t seem to think the story is all bad. Still, while they are right about many of the points they make–and their conclusion that there is no technical silver bullet to the growing problem of digital centralization is spot on–it feels to me like they are still unnecessarily pessimistic about the prospects for decentralized social networks.
How to Inspect Web Elements With Your Browser
Most web browsers don't make you download an inspection tool or install an add-on. Instead, they let you right-click the page element and choose Inspect or Inspect Element. However, the process might be a little different in your browser.
How Parents Can Help Kids Navigate the Pressures of Their Digital Lives | MindShift | KQED News
As adults witness the rising tides of teenaged anxiety, it’s tough not to notice a common thread that runs through the epidemic — something that past generations never dealt with. Clutched in the hand of nearly every teen is a smartphone, buzzing and beeping and blinking with social media notifications. Parents, all too often, just want to grab their teen’s phone and stuff it in a drawer. But is social media and the omnipresence of digital interactions really the cause of all this anxiety? The short answer is: It’s complicated.
No boundaries for user identities: Web trackers exploit browser login managers
We show how third-party scripts exploit browsers’ built-in login managers (also called password managers) to retrieve and exfiltrate user identifiers without user awareness. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to show that login managers are being abused by third-party scripts for the purposes of web tracking. The underlying vulnerability of login managers to credential theft has been known for years. Much of the past discussion has focused on password exfiltration by malicious scripts through cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Fortunately, we haven’t found password theft on the 50,000 sites that we analyzed. Instead, we found tracking scripts embedded by the first party abusing the same technique to extract emails addresses for building tracking identifiers. The image above shows the process. First, a user fills out a login form on the page and asks the browser to save the login. The tracking script is not present on the login page [1]. Then, the user visits another page on the same website which includes the third-party tracking script. The tracking script inserts an invisible login form, which is automatically filled in by the browser’s login manager. The third-party script retrieves the user’s email address by reading the populated form and sends the email hashes to third-party servers.
No boundaries: Exfiltration of personal data by session-replay scripts
You may know that most websites have third-party analytics scripts that record which pages you visit and the searches you make. But lately, more and more sites use “session replay” scripts. These scripts record your keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior, along with the entire contents of the pages you visit, and send them to third-party servers. Unlike typical analytics services that provide aggregate statistics, these scripts are intended for the recording and playback of individual browsing sessions, as if someone is looking over your shoulder. The stated purpose of this data collection includes gathering insights into how users interact with websites and discovering broken or confusing pages. However the extent of data collected by these services far exceeds user expectations [1]; text typed into forms is collected before the user submits the form, and precise mouse movements are saved, all without any visual indication to the user. This data can’t reasonably be expected to be kept anonymous. In fact, some companies allow publishers to explicitly link recordings to a user’s real identity.
38 Great Memes That Defined 2017
My Internet Mea Culpa – NewCo Shift
For the last twenty years, I believed the internet prophets of old. I worshipped at the altar of Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. I believed that the world would be a better place if everyone had a voice. I believed that the world would be a better place if we all had no secrets. But so far, the evidence points to an escapable conclusion: we were all wrong. Or, to be generous, if we weren’t wrong, we were so far off on time scale that those who bought into the vision were mislead into thinking that the benefits would come in their lifetime. They aren’t going to.
Thinking about thinking about what to do about technology
A number of events in 2017 have caused more people to do what few people have done until now — ask whether mechanisms and media billions of people have adopted enthusiastically might be more harmful than helpful. A few examples include recent revelations over the use of Facebook as a conduit for weaponized AI propaganda to tip elections and manipulate the public sphere, the widespread recognition that a visible and global fraction of the human population is walking and driving while looking at screens, the failure of Equifax to protect the vulnerable private information of people who never gave it permission to collect that information in the first place, the use of Twitter to threaten nuclear war — by someone with the power to launch it. As someone who wrote in 1993 about thinking critically about (what are now known as) social media, I’m glad the conversation as suddenly become less lonely. I don’t pretend to have definitive answers, but perhaps I can help point the conversation toward more possibly constructive directions by suggesting a few fundamental questions.
Remodal v1. The modal done right.
Responsive, lightweight, fast, synchronized with CSS animations, fully customizable modal window plugin with declarative configuration and hash tracking.
10 great obscure Google tricks for school, life | Ditch That Textbook
Google has a unique work atmosphere. It’s famous 20 percent time program (where employees have had freedom to pursue projects that interest them for 20 percent of their working hours) and atmosphere of collaboration. Thanks to that atmosphere, we have some great tools at our disposal. Unfortunately, there are many that we’ve never heard of — or have heard of but can’t remember how to find. Here are 10 of them that you can incorporate into education or into life in general, and I’ll bet there’s at least one you didn’t know about!
Free, responsive Weather Widget for any Website - WeatherWidget.io
...a free, customizable, responsive weather widget that will always match your website...
Geekbench 4 - Cross-Platform Benchmark
Geekbench 4 measures your system's power and tells you whether your computer is ready to roar. How strong is your mobile device or desktop computer? How will it perform when push comes to crunch? These are the questions that Geekbench can answer.
CopyChar - ⌘+C – Copy special characters to your clipboard
Security Planner
Improve your online safety with advice from experts Answer a few simple questions to get personalized online safety recommendations. It's confidential - no personal information is stored and we won't access any of your online accounts.
Meme Documentation — What’s a meme?
The definition of a meme can be and has been fluid and nebulous. Although no one definition is necessarily better than the other, Meme Documentation aims to outline some of the requirements that make a meme a meme. These are not necessarily the be-all and end-all for defining a meme but rather simply guidelines that help us to decide what constitutes a meme on the Internet.
Meme Documentation
About Meme Documentation started in 2015 to document the memes of the year. Although the blog did not document memes in 2016, it has returned to document the memes of 2017.
classic tumblr memes
With a focus on SJ memes. Messages welcome, but I'm not always able to respond. Ask to tag.
Dynamicland
A physical place where we can grow a culture around a new medium. From 2017 to Covid, Dynamicland was a community workspace in Oakland, California. Through ongoing community hours, open houses, workshops, and residencies, a thousand participants created hundreds of projects that could not have existed anywhere else, and helped define what communal computing looks like. We are currently developing the next iterations of the Dynamicland space. A dynamic medium which is communal, gives all people full agency, and is part of the real world. By “communal”, we mean bringing people together in the same physical space, with a medium that supports and strengthens face-to-face interaction, shared hands-on work, tacit knowledge, mutual context, and generally being present in the same reality. By “agency”, we mean a person’s ability and confidence to view, change, extend, and remake every aspect of a system that they rely on, especially for fluently exploring new ideas and improvising solutions in unique situations. In the case of computing systems, this implies top-to-bottom programmability and composability, in a form that is accessible and human-scale. By “real world”, we mean that material in the medium physically exists, and all of our human abilities and human senses can be applied to it. People are free to make use of their whole selves, every feature of their physical body and of the physical world, instead of interacting with a simulation through an interface. “Real world” also refers to being situated in reality — understanding what’s actually happening and how things actually work instead of just abstractions; awareness of larger contexts — and especially the local reality of local needs and local knowledge rather than top-down centralized mass-produced solutions. Watch the intro https://dynamicland.org/2024/Intro/
Deep Empathy
Can we use AI to increase empathy for victims of far-away disasters by making our homes appear similar to the homes of victims? Deep Empathy gets you closer to the realities of those that suffer the most, by helping you imagine what neighbourhoods around the world would look like if hit by a disaster.
The Impact Field Guide & Toolkit
A set of tools and guides designed to help all of us who are working with film make even greater impact than we do already.
Responsive embedding of Google Maps (or anything embedded really).
A really simple technique for embedding Google Maps 's responsively using the handy padding-bottom percentage trick, which when applied to an element will be calculated as a percentage of the element width - essentially an aspect ratio. This technique should work on anything that is embedded from your social network/service of choice.
Responsive Google Map
Responsive google map that re-centers the pin on resize and load... Every other version I have seen does not recenter!
Create Responsive Google Maps on Any Website
Google Maps make it easy to embed a map in your own website. However, by default, Google Maps doesn't provide responsive support. In this short tutorial, I'm going to show you how to make your maps responsive, using just a few lines of CSS. This technique will work on any website platform.
Kleptocrat
You are a corrupt politician, and you just got paid. Can you hide your dirty money from The Investigator... ...and cover your tracks well enough to enjoy it?
How to view the HTML source code of a web page
All Internet browsers allow users to view the HTML source code of any of web page they visit. The following sections contain information on the multiple ways to view the source code in each of the major browsers. To proceed, choose and entry from the list below and follow the instructions for that section.