The US declared war on TikTok because it can’t handle the truth by Sarah Jeong (The Verge)

The battle over TikTok’s ownership is only one part of a much larger war. The US, China, and Russia have adopted a philosophy of “information-nationalism,” where telling lies about your own country strengthens it, and telling the truth about other countries weakens them. This is an enormous change from the US’s previous internet policy — and likely a bad one.

Glad that Sarah is writing again. ‘This is not to say: "Companies good; government bad." Rest assured, everyone and everything is bad. It’s bad all the way down.’
The Age of the Internet ‘Wife Guy’ (nytimes.com)

He’s not just a husband. The wife guy married a woman, and now that is his personality — perhaps even his job.

cliff wife guy was the first one I watched unfold in real time. I like this, it’s silly
Firefox Lockbox Now on Android, Keeping your Passwords Safe (blog.mozilla.org)

If you’re like most Firefox users, you have dozens if not hundreds of stored logins in your browser. When you use Firefox Accounts you get to take your logins on the web in Firefox Mobile. Today, many of those logins are the same ones used in the apps you download on mobile, so we’ve been workin…

The Internet of Garbage by Sarah Jeong by Sarah Jeong (The Verge)

“The internet is, and always has been, mostly garbage,” argues Sarah Jeong in her book about the intractable problem of online harassment.

this is a good read, looking forward reading to the whole book

Dear Cheryl1 (my NSA angel),

Hi there. I have been reading (but you knew that) about the latest cycle of ad blocking, and how it will be the end of advertising/journalism/the internet as we know it2. It is fun to remember how pop-up blocking was also the end of internet advertising as we knew it!

Anyways, my favorite piece to come out of all this is a talk transcript by the head of Pinboard.3 I encourage you to read it yourself, but here are some choice pull-quotes.

On ad morals:

The ad networks’ name for this robotic deception is ‘ad fraud’ or ‘click fraud’. (Advertisers like to use moralizing language when their money starts to flow in the wrong direction. Tricking people into watching ads is good; being tricked into showing ads to automated traffic is evil.)

On regulation:

When I flew over to give this talk, I wasn’t worried about my plane falling out of the sky. Eighty years of effective technical regulation (and massive penalties for fraud) have made commercial aviation the safest form of transportation in the world.

On smart refrigerators:

Samsung recently got in hot water with their smart refrigerator. Because it failed to validate SSL certificates, the fridge would leak your Gmail credentials (used by its little calendar) to anyone who asked it. All I wanted was some ice, and instead my email got hacked.

On living in San Francisco:

You wouldn’t hire a gardener whose houseplants were all dead. But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can’t make our own city livable.

Seriously, it is ten minutes of reading well spent.

Have a great day,
Craig


  1. The NSA is an equal oportunity employer.
  2. Here is the same guy from that editorial (he is EIC, btw), two months earlier, lamenting the terrible mobile web user experience, which is almost entirely caused by ads and trackers.
  3. My least favorite piece was Marco Arment’s, who, after proclaiming ad blockers the future and creating the most popular one on iOS, probably found out it was blocking ads on his own site.
Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site [Updated] (Gizmodo)

When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.

Full of schadenfreude if you are a fan of:

  • marital fidelity
  • recognizing scams
  • responsible database management

Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site