I mean... this is all 100% true, but the problem isn't the tech, it isn't the standard, it isn't even the implementation. It's Google and Apple's sizes and their ownership of browsers. There's only one solution here, it's antitrust action. https://proton.me/blog/big-tech-passkey
Big Tech companies want to chain your passkey to their products. Enter Proton Pass, which allows you to manage and use passkeys across all devices seamlessly.
Great article. The missing piece is that this is exactly what happened to OpenID decades ago.
If we had stood our ground on interoperability back then, there would be no need for passkeys now. There's nothing wrong with passwords at all, if you only need one or two, and each is only used on one system. If identity providers were independent, competitive, and universally supported, passwords would be fine. Then 2FA would be an interesting, but entirely different and less important conversation.
But here we are. We have no problems that can be solved with more technical standards. Anything we try just provides cover for bad actors.
@AltStore was rickety to install, and it only has two apps, neither of which I want.
However. Apple's line is that "no-one really wants an alternative app store". This app store costs under €2/year. Proving Apple wrong is never not worth two euros.
DELIGHTED to say that my latest tech history column is live on Every and they've made this one free-to-read.
Because it covers one of the most overlooked founders of the golden age of computing: Lore Harp McGovern, founder of Vector Graphic who pioneered small/medium business computing.
brilliant story, I'm only halfway through but thank you for posting it - I'm not familiar with Lore Harp McGovern at all so really pleased to be learning about her!
Of course, even if Vector Graphic had made all the correct decisions, that still wouldn't have necessarily led to success. It was a tough business.
In particular, MS-DOS compatibility was a whole different ball game than CP/M compatibility. With CP/M, partial compatibility was standard.
But that's not something most business customers were eager to wade into. So, MS-DOS compatibility wasn't enough - full IBM PC compatibility was needed ... that was non-trivial ...
@isaackuo yeah. it's why i don't think their decision to stick with CP/M was necessarily the wrong one AT THE TIME.
Hindsight is 20/20
I think a lot of people don't realise just how TOTAL IBM's blitz of the business computing - and then home computing markets was.
The path to survivability for Vector was very small once IBM showed up, but they definitely shot themselves in the foot a couple of times to make their chances of survival even worse.
I'm inclined to differ on your description as Jobs as one of the winners of the era - Apple in the late 80s was pretty much crippled, only saved by a tiny minority of obsessive users and enough finance to limp through the 90s and make it to the iPod boom, which IMO was what made Apple the company it is now.
great article! I read a lot of semiconductor history from that same era. It was an amazing time. The industry that those pioneers created almost out of nothing (with no relevant courses being taught in school) is beyond impressive.
It seems I am now legally entitled to smoke weed, but only in my bedroom. Depending on the details of the land survey, I also may need to lean to the left when I inhale.
If there's a kind of cringe porn I can enjoy, the Horizon scandal is it. I'm seeing a bunch of little crimes and sorta-kinda engineering all stacking up to produce catastrophes. Looking forward to the definitive pop-tech-history full-length book.
Sydney’s flag depicts the bringing of the Three Seashells to this land, and also the Three Lions, which became feral and are now considered an introduced pest.
Strongly suspect the author has never actually busted a gut crowning swans all day long just to make a crust. But sure, go ahead and lecture us about how to do it "properly".
@mat “The swan extended another eight feet of neck and gave an imitation of steam escaping from a leaky pipe.” — _Jeeves and the Impending Doom_, P.G. Wodehouse (1926)
@mat Just started watching the glorious Hugh Laurie & Stephen Fry Jeeves & Wooster. It's marvellous, but has me itching to reread all of Wodehouse again.
it also has the Minions Pride Flag on the background of the boat, representing the assistance given to James Cook in his voyage and in the colonisation of Sydney.
A common emblem for medicine depicts one or two snakes coiling up a staff. This symbol, often referred to as a ‘caduceus’, has been frequently used as a pharmacy or healthcare company crest.
THREAD: 7 months of work later, my Globe & Mail investigation into an Ethiopian state Facebook campaign reveals that at least 200 Ethiopian state institutions, from town administrations to ministries & even academic institutions, are using their Facebook pages to misinform & lure vulnerable women into being recruited for domestic worker jobs in Saudi Arabia, despite the grave dangers that enable human trafficking.
Despite ample reports by human rights organizations amplifying horrendous abuses Ethiopian migrants face at the hands of Saudi security forces and abusive employers, Ethiopia's Ministry of Labor is pushing on with a program to recruit 500,000 women, hoping that even a fraction of them could rake in foreign currency into Ethiopia's economy ruined by war. I had reported on the existence of the recruitment program in April. But the Facebook aspect is only highlighted now. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/4/17/ethiopia-recruits-500000-women-for-domestic-work-in-saudi-arabia
To facilitate the mass recruitment, Facebook posts of administrations in mostly rural parts of Ethiopia are spreading blatant misinformation targeting vulnerable women. Posts claim among other things that Saudi Arabia's discriminatory kafala system is abolished, that worker safety is guaranteed, that they can earn salaries as high as $1600 monthly. But in recent months, I have already reached recruits who have faced starvation, sexual harassment, exploitation and enslavement. Some sample posts.
Here are pictures of women brought to recruitment centers before they are processed and flown out to Saudi Arabia. Lured with false promises, the women are especially vulnerable because these are not obscure human traffickers, but the official pages of state media, regional governors, local colleges.
"The Facebook posts will put the women in vulnerable situations, because they trust the source,” says Ekaterina Porras Sivolobova, director of Do Bold, a Middle East migrant worker non-profit.
I believe there may be thousands of Facebook posts coercing women into a career in domestic work. I prepared a sample of 300, with each link archived in case of deletion. Here is an Excel spreadsheet showing just how extensive the campaign is. 300 posts by 200+ institutions in 7 languages by town mayors, rural district authorities, colleges, state media, federal gov ministries and more.
N.B 89 Kenyan domestic workers died mysteriously in Saudi Arabia between 2020-2021.
A state sanctioned campaign to export large numbers of women facilitated by Ethiopia's Ministry of Labor is worthy of being terminated by Facebook, as a blatant violation of their regulations.
We recently launched the Meta Boost program in Ethiopia, in partnership with the Ministry of Labour and Skills, and Summer Media.
The program aims to support and empower small and medium enterprise...
We found this shocking. Meta penned its deal with the Ethiopian gov in the middle of a brutal civil war in which Ethiopian gov elements had weaponized Facebook for amplifying hate speech & inciting horrendous bloodshed. Meta would never sign a deal with Russia, why would it do so with a state engaging at the time in what was the world's worst institutional, misuse of Facebook?
To make things worse, when Meta penned its deal with the Ethiopian Ministry of Labor, Ministry official Nigusu Tilahun described the deal as one that would “prevent the use of Facebook by individuals who spread fake news and strive to create friction between people and government.” Coming from an authoritarian government that detains journalists and critical voices, such comments are hardly reassuring. So again, why would Meta get involved in this?
While looking into the matter we learned that in 2021, Meta hired Helen Yosef Hailu, a former Ethiopian government official who until 2019 was a secretary in Prime Minister Abiy's office. She became Meta's Public Policy Manager for the East Africa region. Here, at the Meta partnership ceremony, she reunited with Labor Ministry rep Nigusu Tilahun, who in 2019 was her former colleague working in the Ethiopian Prime Minister's office. There are screaming potential conflicts of interest.
Large language models (LLMs) are more likely to criminalise users that use African American English, the results of a new Cornell University study show.
Tipoff from @kw217: Kazakhstan, which has not observed daylight saving for 20 years, is turning the clocks back at 0:00 on 1 March 2024, to 23:00 on leap day February 29 2024.
Definitely playing time zones on Hard Mode, Kazakhstan. Thanks for doing some QA on stacked edge cases for us all!
A web app that works out how many seconds ago something happened. How hard can coding that be? Tom Scott explains how time twists and turns like a twisty-tur...
right but it's not daylight savings, the change is permanent: Kazakhstan will change from using two time zones to observing only one time zone in the entire territory: UTC+5.
Perrin pressed forward through the beech woodlands. Where an oak or a larch broke through the tree cover he enjoyed the cool breeze. At a creek he could pick a few hawthorne berries. But as he rested under an old willow, he wondered if he could reach the pine forest before nightfall.
My brain:
Dude is in trees. There are trees and also trees and trees. There was wind. At a water he ate tree fruit. He sat under a tree. He wants to get out of the trees and into different trees.
Heard someone seriously mention "the 30s" for the first time just now. I've been looking forward to the end of our long millennial linguistic nightmare for decades, and finally victory is in sight.
I'm very excited by the recent movement to build #transitous, a single #publictransport routing API based on public GTFS feeds. But this coverage map from transit.land is a shocker. That is, I assure you, not an accurate representation of the world's public transport. There are all kinds of wrong directions you can travel in if this is your starting point.
The best part was the owner of a tiny electronics factory complaining that at one point almost half her staff were out sick at the same time. What on earth could cause that?
I've never had any accountancy training. But at one point zaomengshe.com needed financial reports, and I said "How hard can it be? I'll write some Python scripts." So the one thing I do know about accountancy, is that it is FUCKING HARD with financial partners who are incapable of attaching unique IDs to transactions. Which is all of them.
That's why, although I barely dare to say it, I kinda have some sympathy for Fujitsu here.
Bundestag entscheidet über schnellere Einbürgerungen
Ausländerinnen und Ausländer sollen schneller die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit erhalten können, aber nur unter Bedingungen. Über die Pläne der Ampelkoalition stimmt heute der Bundestag ab. Die Kernpunkte der Reform im Überblick.
This seems like the perfect chance to pitch my phone OS based on neoliberal orthodoxy. Instead of calling malloc() like godless communists, apps bid for memory in an on-device currency. And not just memory! CPU time, network connectivity, storage. Programs can trade off space/time performance based on the device's current market conditions. As the consumer, you can mint as much currency as you like, and allocate it to apps according to how much you value their use. Preorders will open soon, as soon as I get my Bahamas bank account set up. (Not a reply because I believe Charlie has blocked me. And this post isn't likely to do me any favours either.)
Wordpress ActivityPub plugin 2.0.0! FWIW, Bidirectional Comment Federation is the last piece I personally was waiting for to declare this thing "feature complete". It means instead of a discussion on your blog and another discussion on social media, there's now a single conversation. Congratulations @Matthias Pfefferle !
Debugging DNS logs on a laptop is like exploring the crawlspace under civilisation's house. I was perfectly happy not knowing those things were down there. Now I'm gonna have nightmares.
"LLMs also struggle with tasks requiring high-level reasoning abilities like causal understanding, logical deduction, and counterfactual reasoning even though they achieve impressive performance on exam benchmarks."
Which is another way of saying LLMs are the exact opposite of critical thinking. That could be a useful shorthand. "Is critical thinking important in this task?" "Yes" ⇒ "LLM-free zone".
Huge news if true. This would be a worrying escalation that could throw the whole region into chaos, with implications for the supply chain worldwide. #bbchttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-66887236
I would definitely have gone with the headline "Repair company lobbies for law change to permit expanding business into commercial machinery." Sometimes clickbait tactics are used for good, not evil. #ifixithttps://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA
My reaction when Naomi Wu went offline was basically "that's a shame, but you're probably right not to make a big fuss or fight this." Guess I misinterpreted that.
"Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me. Now that they know that I could be dead in a ditch tomorrow and no one would give a shit or say a word I’m 1000x less safe here."
Matthew Exon
in reply to Aram Zucker-Scharff • •Great article. The missing piece is that this is exactly what happened to OpenID decades ago.
If we had stood our ground on interoperability back then, there would be no need for passkeys now. There's nothing wrong with passwords at all, if you only need one or two, and each is only used on one system. If identity providers were independent, competitive, and universally supported, passwords would be fine. Then 2FA would be an interesting, but entirely different and less important conversation.
But here we are. We have no problems that can be solved with more technical standards. Anything we try just provides cover for bad actors.