There have been a lot of articles written over the past few days about how nobody wants it and how shitty of an idea it is:
From that last link from the EFF:
Users and advocates must reject FLoC and other misguided attempts to reinvent behavioral targeting. We implore Google to abandon FLoC and redirect its effort towards building a truly user-friendly Web.
I don’t know how that’s gonna happen when Google makes most of its money off this stuff. This kind of thing is fundamentally what Google has to be. They have no interest in a “truly user-friendly Web” if that means actually making ad tracking harder.
Anyway, a few of the articles I’ve been reading mention a HTTP header you can add to a web page to opt out of cohort calculation. As far as I can tell, websites without advertising1 aren’t included in the experiment so I didn’t have to add it. But I did anyway. Mostly because it was just 1 line of code and a comment:
1// Disable FLoC 2w.Header().Set("Permissions-Policy", "interest-cohort=()")
But considering the reaction the proposal has gotten so far, I don’t really see this going anywhere (at least until they change the methods a little and rename/reword/rebrand it and try again).
This website isn’t a part of any ad networks, and doesn’t make any income from advertising yet. BUT, I will be introducing a Weekly Sponsorship program soon. It won’t rely on ad networks (or anything third party), so FLoC still isn’t really applicable. ↩︎
From Jason Schreier:
Players also didn’t like Stadia’s business model, which required customers to buy games individually rather than subscribe to an all-you-can-play service à la Netflix or the Xbox’s Game Pass. Paying as much as $60 for a single game, for it only to exist on Google’s servers rather than on your own PC, seemed a stretch to some. After all the hype, gamers were disappointed. Stadia missed its targets for sales of controllers and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
There’s something deeply embedded in Google’s DNA that makes it great at solving huge (like exabytes of data huge) technical problems, but consistently struggle at creating actual products. If you need to manage lists of data (photos, documents, search results, messages), Google’s got you covered, but good luck getting an actual product that you’re happy holding onto for years from them.
]]>Parler1: was that micro-blogging social network and app that marketed itself as an alternative to Twitter. Parler emphasized “free speech”, and presented itself as a place to avoid Twitter and Facebook’s unfair moderation policies.
The creators/owners2 of the service believe that Twitter and Facebook (and the entire media really) are controlled by people who are particularly unconcerned with “free speech”, and are quick to silence or ban anyone on the other side from their services. I’ve seen a few influential3 people on Twitter equating this to a (US Constitution) 1st Amendment issue, of which it obviously is not.
So Parler implied that they care about “free speech” and are therefore a good alternative to these services that are trying to silence them. Predictably, the service attracted lots of people who regularly get banned from other web services and communities. This includes lots of conspiracy theorists, Donald Trump supporters, “conservatives”, right-wing extremists, white supremacists, and people who would decide it’s a good idea to storm the US Capitol building (there is obviously a lot of overlap between the these groups).
Of course, it turns out that services that market themselves as free speech alternatives usually end up heavily moderating and banning users who have the opposite political beliefs as them. Parler was no exception, so… 🤷🏾♂️
After the insurrection at the US Capitol, and it first started to become obvious that people from Parler were involved, Apple threatened to remove the iOS app from the App Store unless they improved their moderation practices. Then eventually Google removed the Android app from the Google Play store. Then Apple actually removed them too. Then Amazon stopped hosting the service itself.
In the meantime, other institutions (financial and otherwise) have completely backed away from Parler, Trump, and many of Trump’s supporters4.
At this point, the service is down, the apps are banned, and the company has no real way to survive. Trump supporters and free speech activists are upset about how this turned out. It’s unfair that all these people were silenced for their opinions right?
Nope.
First of all, the 1st Amendment prevents the Government from being able to abridge freedom of speech. This has nothing to do with individual companies (private or “public”) like Twitter or Facebook. This may be a general “free speech” issue, but there are no violations of the Constitution happening when a company decides what’s allowed or not allowed to be published on their platform.
Now if you’re talking about the US Government pushing for or creating a law that says a company (like Twitter) must publish the current Administrations views, that would definitely be a 1st Amendment violation.
Refresher:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So this isn’t a 1st Amendment issue, but there is a general “free speech” discussion here right? Especially in the context of online communities, politics, and social networks. Clearly a bunch of institutions all deciding to leave a company pathetically twisting in the wind like this over “politics” must be… bad?
Not really no.
Contrary to what I keep seeing elsewhere on the internet, I do not think that an organization (including social networking or micro-blogging service companies) should have any expectation to use the platform they built to host any content anyone wants them to in the name of free speech. Nor do I think their moderation policies are even required to be fair. We choose to use social networking services, and sign agreements (lol) that state how we’re supposed to use them. There is no expectation of “free speech” in that, and there shouldn’t be5.
I think people getting upset with Twitter’s policies and then leaving it to start their own service is fine. That’s a good thing. I actually think that people being able to use technology to form smaller, more community based services is much better than everyone trying to sloppily integrate into a giant platform that’s powered by pure capitalism and advertising revenue.
But you can’t then promise “free speech” on your new service and be surprised when you get fucked over after your users attempt to murder people and overthrow a government and nobody wants to do business with you anymore.
I’ve heard a few people say that it’s scary that it was a “monopoly” that was able to crush Parler into nothing but a pile of useless code and fresh evidence for the FBI. But it wasn’t a monopoly that did it. It’s not like executives from Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook sat in a room and made the decision that because of their combined market position, making a coordinated move like this would be profitable for them all6. A bunch of organizations just decided that associating with Parler is bad (morally, politically, financially, legally, etc) and made the business decisions that made sense in this situation.
Which is to not associate with the platform that inspired people to murder a US Capitol police officer.
As it turns out, not thinking through the implications of aiding insurrectionists wasn’t the only mistake Parler made. I’m looking for more of the technical details, but someone going by @donk_enby on Twitter was able to scrape 57 TB worth of data (images and video with EXIF data, private DMs, deleted posts that were never actually deleted7, etc). It sounds like it just happened to be very easy to guess object IDs in their database and start pulling data once their two-factor authentication system went down.
Now with the massive amount of evidence that’s floating around on the internet (including the insurrectionists own recorded and uploaded footage), now these people are being picked up by the Feds left and right. Well… you know. I guess that’s what happens.
Parler was originally supposed to be pronounced “par-lay”, but it didn’t catch on, so now it’s officially pronounced like you probably think it should be. ↩︎
Dan Bongino is one of the people who claims to have purchased an ownership stake in the service. If you’ve ever come across his Twitter or heard him speak, you might not be too surprised by this. ↩︎
A lot of those people are very rapidly losing that influence these days and it makes me very happy to see. ↩︎
This includes many of the Republican senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz who directly supported Trump’s bullshit, and senators like Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, John Kennedy, Rick Scott, Kelly Loeffler, and others who voted to oppose the counting of the Electoral College votes, and people like Rudy Giuliani who are clearly completely broken/compromised and continue to support Trump. ↩︎
I think people are confusing what’s good for “business” for a social network, and how they really should moderate. It’s good for business (in this case, total number of users to advertise to) to have a consistent moderation policy. But it’s better for people for these companies to make real, moral, case-by-case decisions about what’s right and wrong and should be allowed, even if it’s not based on specific written policy. ↩︎
But if they did do something like that, I would expect them to be investigated. The concept of abusing a monopoly is a real and specific thing. ↩︎
This is a pretty normal thing to do in modern databases. You usually have a “deleted” date attribute, that if null
means the object exists, and if present then the system knows it was deleted on that date and isn’t shown anywhere. I do this for posts and objects in my database to be able to restore things. You should NOT do this with sensitive data like on a platform that encourages its users to talk about and plan federal offenses. ↩︎
Both Apple and Google are both either considering or have already removed Parler from their stores.
Edit: It will be interesting to see what happens with all the older articles that have linked directly to his tweets. From The Verge: Trump’s ban from Twitter creates the ultimate case of link rot in posts across the internet
From Wikipedia: Parler is an American microblogging and social networking service launched in August 2018. Parler has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories like QAnon. ↩︎
As you can probably tell from my other posts, I’m really not a fan of the tech industry these days. I have a problem with the level of surveillance capitalism we’re dealing with and how easy it is to passively hand over a lot of data to these companies without even realizing it.
Google is in the news a lot over the years for being one of the biggest examples of it (along with Facebook obviously). If you want to check out a documentary that explains some of the problem, check out The Social Dilemma on Netflix1.
I also just really don’t like the idea of depending on these companies for services that have a huge effect on my life that can disappear for any reason. I recently came across an article about getting locked out of your Google account, and it mentions a Google employee whose husband was locked out of his account and they were still unable to resolve it.2
So over the past few (5? 10??) years, I’ve been slowly making moves to reduce my own reliance on some of the more problematic companies. It’s why I made a push to self host stuff on this server when possible.
Basics - I’ve already been in the Apple ecosystem for a long time3, so it was already easy to use the Apple alternatives to Google stuff (photos, contacts, notes, calendar, file storage, etc). Of course, I have my criticisms of Apple, but I believe they have less of an incentive to participate in surveillance for money since they chose to stick with a decent business strategy: charging consumers for the products they want.
Chrome - I don’t even install Chrome anymore. I use Safari, then Firefox, then Brave for development4 and general usage.
Search - I’ve already set all my browser search defaults to DuckDuckGo a while back, so I don’t start my searches with Google Search. But DuckDuckGo is definitely not as good at technical/code searches for me. I end up putting !g
in my search queries to have it send me over to Google like… a lot. Eventually I’ll find a search engine that works a little better.
RSS/News - People bring up Google Reader a lot when talking about RSS. I used to use it before switching to Twitter for my RSS replacement a while back. But at some point after that I realized relying on Twitter was also a terrible idea, so I started using RSS again, but through Feedly. Then even more recently I installed a self hosted instance of Miniflux to replace that. (See what articles I’m reading here.)
Maps - Apple Maps really isn’t that bad. (Disclaimer: I worked on the Apple Maps team for a year.)
Password Management and 2FA - I don’t use any browsers for saving my credentials. I don’t use Google Authenticator either. I use 1Password for all of it, including OTP.
YouTube - Yeah I don’t know what to do about this one. I have serious fucking issues with the things they choose to either remove or leave up on the website. I believe YouTube is responsible pushing a lot of people towards very hateful/harmful/racist content and normalizing a lot of terrible shit. There is also like… decades of content there that you’ll never see anywhere else. This one just bothers me.
Analytics - I would never use Google Analytics (I use a self hosted instance of Fathom for analytics) and I don’t use any kind of Google (or Facebook) libraries/services for the website.
Google Meet - This isn’t really specific to Google (since Zoom really took off), but part of the reason I’m building WebRTC video chat into this website is so I don’t have to depend on or trust either Google Meet or Zoom to video chat and/or share my screen with any of my contacts.
All of that said, I’ve still been using a Gmail account since around 2007. That’s 13 years of my email being scanned for keywords and my correspondence flowing in and out of the servers of a data collection company.
I already knew I had to get off it eventually. But considering how long I’ve used it, I figured switching would be too much of a hassle.
But after reading some of the stories of people losing their Google accounts, and thinking about next steps with my business and this website, I figured now was the time to go through it and get rid of my last Google dependency.
Benefits
I can finally use this domain (dwayne.xyz) for my email addresses and set up some aliases and organize my communication a little more. Also, if I need to switch off of Fastmail at any point, I can just change DNS settings and I don’t have to go through the switching process again.
Also, theoretically, paying for the service means I’m not the product and my messages aren’t being scanned to serve me ads5. And I can actually expect real support when I need it.
Downsides
I read some reviews of the popular paid email providers and there’s usually a discussion about privacy and the jurisdiction the company/servers reside in. Fastmail is an Australian company with servers in New York and Amsterdam. And they don’t offer end to end encryption like some of the others (ProtonMail usually comes up).
That’s significant to some. It’s acceptable for me right now for a few reasons.
So here’s the order I did things in:
So now with this setup:
Have you been thinking about dropping Gmail? It might not be as hard as you think. For me, signing up for the account, configuring everything, and doing the data import all took maybe 2 or 3 hours. I’m still in the process of updating my accounts, but changing email addresses every once in a while is easy enough.
Overall this was all easier and quicker than I thought it would be and I really do feel more at ease about my digital life than I used to. Definitely worth it (so far).
There were a lot of complaints about it. I thought it was pretty good for a documentary. ↩︎
My first smartphone was a Motorola Q, which was running Windows Mobile. I really liked it a lot! My next one was a Motorola Droid, which was running Android 2.something. ↩︎
I was actually just thinking recently that cross browser development has felt a lot easier lately with some consolidation around browser engines and good implementations of Flexbox/CSS Grid. Anybody feel the same way? ↩︎
That’s their promise at least. I have to put my trust in somebody… but it’s a little easier to do when I’m paying. ↩︎
I was looking into end to end encrypted email solutions, and it really just seems like a huge hassle for everyone involved. ProtonMail doesn’t support POP/IMAP without a separate app that handles encryption/decryption. And PGP is notorious for being difficult to use consistently with your contacts. ↩︎
From the article:
]]>If you’re having trouble keeping track (understandable considering Google notoriously confusing messaging strategy) Chat is the company’s enterprise chat app originally introduced as part of Google’s business offerings. It has features similar to the original Hangouts experience, but has extra upgrades like reactions and reply suggestions. But starting next year, instead of only being available businesses that use Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite, formerly known as Google Apps) the upgraded “Chat” app will be available to everyone who uses Gmail.
“Passwords are one of the worst things on the internet,” Mark Risher, Google’s senior director for account security, identity, and abuse told The Verge. Though they’re essential for security and to help people log in to many apps and websites, “they’re one of the primary, if not the primary, ways that people actually end up getting compromised.”
It’s a strange thing for a Google security executive to say because the last time you logged into Gmail, you probably typed in a password. But the company has been trying to nudge users away from the model for years, or at least minimize the damage. And in the coming weeks, one of Google’s quietest tools in that fight — the Password Checkup plugin — will be getting a higher profile, as it joins the Security Checkup dashboard built into every Google account.
Any time I work on any web project that requires accounts, I always think about how if it can be done without passwords. I wrote the user account system for this website (I’m the only one who has an account right now) and it started out with NO passwords at all.
Originally, logins to this website were only done by entering an email address. If the email matches an account in the system, it would send an email with a login link. Clicking on that link logs the user in and keeps them logged in for a few days.
I eventually added a password field because waiting for the login email was annoying and I didn’t want to rely on a third party email service. 🤷🏾♂️
]]>https://www.businessinsider.com/experts-react-google-brexit-decision-move-uk-data-to-the-us-2020-2
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