This article was originally published at blog.vrypan.net on 06-Nov-2019.

Microtargeting is the ability to target a very small segment of people with a tailor-made message.

You want to promote a snack that contains no sugar and no salt? Create different ads that target teenagers, young adults, parents, grandparents, and diabetics in a different way. Is it only available in specific shops? Limit your target audience to people living at a short range around them. Is it expensive? Limit your target group to people earning more than $X per year. That’s any advertiser’s dream come true!

While microtargeting has allowed big…

In the physical world we use physical boundaries to define areas where a set of behaviours are allowed or prohibited.

For example, national laws define what is allowed (what is legal) and what not inside the borders of a country. Of course laws are not the same for all countries. What may be legal in one may be illegal in an other: alcohol consumption, nudity, abortions, homosexuality, religion, freedom of speech, smoking, prostitution, eating meat or specific kinds of meat, carrying a gun are just some examples of activities that are treated diversely by laws in various countries.

It’s not…

ERC721 describes a standard interface for non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. ERC721 calls this kind of tokens “NFT” (Non-Fungible Tokens).

“NFT” Word Choice “NFT” was satisfactory to nearly everyone surveyed and is widely applicable to a broad universe of distinguishable digital assets. We recognize that “deed” is very descriptive for certain applications of this standard (notably, physical property). Alternatives considered: distinguishable asset, title, token, asset, equity, ticket — https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-721.md

It seems to me that the general public will have difficulty grasping what “non-fungible” means and as a result the acronym “NFT” (even if pronounced as “nifties” which is cute…

I’ve been listening to podcasts since 2004 — Scripting News, the Daily Source Code, IT conversations and the like — I even had my own podcast for a couple of years. But it’s only now, 13 years later, that I see non-geek friends asking “Do you have any podcast suggestions” on Facebook.

Which brings the question: Where is social for podcasts?

Where is the place I can show list my subscriptions? How can my friends subscribe to the podcasts I listen to? Where can I see the podcasts most of my friends are subscribed to? How do I create a…

According to torrentfreak.com, “the Pirate Bay tested for a short period (~24 hours) a new way to generate revenue that could eventually replace the ads on the site.”

This “new way of generating revenue” is actually a javascript-based cryptocurrency miner. This practically means that when you visit a page with the specific javascript embedded, your browser will “mine” a crypto currency called Monero (XMR) on behalf of The Pirate Bay.

Mining Monero is CPU intensive and this is why according to the article many TPB (The Pirate Bay) visitors complained that their CPU usage increased dramatically when visiting the site’s…

So far, Apple has tried a couple of times to enter the “social network” scene — and failed spectacularly. But Clips is an interesting approach (and the right one IMHO).

Right now, social content creation and distribution is tightly coupled. We use each social platform’s app to generate the content we share in there. Of course you can use your phone camera app to shoot the photo or video, but 99% of us will then use the platform app to add the extra “something” that seems to be required nowadays: filters, text, effects, etc.

What Clips does is unbundling content…

What if we have to use encryption not to hide our data not from someone but from something? What if we started acting as if the entity interested in processing our private data is not a person but a computer system?

If you miss the freedom RSS used to give us before we started relying on Facebook, read on.

Not so long ago, I used to rely on RSS feeds to get my news and discover interesting things. Now days, RSS feeds have been replaced mostly by Facebook or Twitter. They make it easy to “subscribe” (like, follow, etc.) but then they set their own rules: They decide what to show you and when, they decide how you can interact with posts, they decide how you can search them and how you can reference them. …