Recent Articles

Mike Monteiro:

Twitter would have you believe that it’s a beacon of free speech. Biz Stone would have you believe that inaction is principle. I would ask you to consider the voices that have been silenced. The voices that have disappeared from Twitter because of the hatred and the abuse. Those voices aren’t free. Those voices have been caged. Twitter has become an engine for further marginalizing the marginalized. A pretty hate machine.

Note also:

Actor Rose McGowan, one of the accusers of disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, has had her Twitter activity suspended. McGowan had earlier tweeted “fuck off” to actor Ben Affleck and accused him of lying about his knowledge of Weinstein’s history of sexual misconduct.

For me there’s a key line from Monteiro which tells you all you need to know about many things in life:

But I’ll tell you this: a lot of those people have tried, honestly tried to deal with the abuse on the platform. But when leadership doesn’t want something fixed it’s close to impossible to fix it. And when leadership doesn’t see something as a problem, it’s not getting fixed at all.

Speaking of security, it looks like WPA2 WiFi security is totally fucked. This will likely need patches on your OS and routers. What a fucking mess.

This is a fascinating read and shows the true dangers of networks like Facebook, and Twitter as well. What’s most interesting, and most dangerous is that these networks themselves don’t know how they impact the world until well after the fact.

At its core, Medium has two good things going for it:

1. Design, it’s phenomenal and well considered.
2. Desire to be better. They know what they want to achieve.

The problem with Medium is that they have no fucking clue how to actually accomplish the second thing, and so they quickly erode the trust of writers. If you are serious about writing, it’s the worst possible choice you can make for publishing your words.

Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor, reporting on another side of Facebook, Google, and Twitter during the elections:

For example, these firms offer an extensive array of campaign services — including advising campaigns on everything from the content of ads and other communications to the specific groups they might benefit most from targeting, and how best to reach them. Consider the fact that all three of these firms have dedicated partisan teams that work with campaigns. Staffers work with campaigns to guide advertising buys, boost engagement around online ads, and shepherd the use of their platforms.

Zeynep Tufekci:

In a largely automated platform like Facebook, what matters most is not the political beliefs of the employees but the structures, algorithms and incentives they set up, as well as what oversight, if any, they employ to guard against deception, misinformation and illegitimate meddling. And the unfortunate truth is that by design, business model and algorithm, Facebook has made it easy for it to be weaponized to spread misinformation and fraudulent content. Sadly, this business model is also lucrative, especially during elections.

Tony Romm for RECODE:

In some cases, though, congressional aides appeared disappointed with the information Twitter provided. Some on the Senate Intelligence Committee, for example, fretted Twitter had not done more, and sooner, to patrol its website for Russian misinformation, according to a source familiar with its work. Afterwards, the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, thrashed the social giant’s presentation as “frankly inadequate.”

There’s some good momentum for change with social advertising giants. Will be interesting to see what comes of all of this.

Om Malik:

This brouhaha around Twitter’s 280-character mini-experiment is actually a good encapsulation of how despite often touting disruption, change and innovation, the Valley (aka technology establishment) is often resistant to change, dismissive of change and behaving much like the world it wants to disrupt.

See also: iPhone X, MacBook 12”, Outlier Clothing, Headphone Jacks.

Evan Davis has a great run down of your Merino t-shirt options, as he has tested a wide variety of them. I was actually privy to his thoughts before he published, and it has guided my own buying. I love the Wool & Prince that he loves, but personally like the fit of Oultier’s Ultrafine better. Thing is, you don’t need many of these shirts. I own two Outlier, and one Wool & Prince — that’s basically all my normal wear t-shirts (I have some cotton MartianCraft shirts for PJs) and those three shirts are all I need. Good read.

I mentioned in my iPad Productivity Report this week, that Google Drive is a pain in the ass on iOS. This explains why: they did it to be devious it sounds like. Bastards.

Brian Heater on a new tool Apple us using to find shitty web development/design/marketing/revenue models:

This form of data collection is the first of its kind for Safari, aimed at identifying sites that use excessive power and crash the browser by monopolizing too much memory. Apple is also documenting the popularity of these problematic domains, in order to prioritize which sites it addresses first.