Flicker Fusion

The Committee to Project Journalist notes it is now possible to attach a PGP key to one’s Facebook profile. This is another in a series of steps Facebook has taken recently to secure its networks, from HTTPS at every endpoint to enabling connections via Tor. The PGP feature lets anyone add…

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Apple’s Inside Out Platform

Absorbing the news from WWDC this week, I noticed a pattern of how Apple approaches their platforms. And that it seems, well, backwards. Last week…

Two stories about ad blocking almost make a trend. European telecoms want to build ad-blocking into their networks via proxies that would halt most banner-type ads by default. And Adblock Plus has built a standalone Firefox-based browser for Android that would…

Instead of merely waiting for Facebook to deliver Instant Articles to everyone, it’s worth looking for some insights from last week’s launch.

Foremost, it’s always nice to be reminded that performance matters. Page load time has, of course, always…

It was my pleasure to appear as a guest on the excellent Debug podcast last week, not just alongside the gracious hosts Rene Ritchie and Guy English but also the father of the Safari web browser and Webkit, Don Melton. The hook for our conversation was a pair of posts by developer Nolan Lawson…

Frédéric Filloux, who writes an excellent, long-running column at Monday Note, was also thinking about Ad-blockers recently and has a much more dire set of predictions. Filloux has seen an as-yet-unpublished report that says ad-block usage is as high as 30–40% in France and Germany, and sites with…

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The pushback on tech’s encroachment into the real world continues, with Airbnb in the hot seat. They are currently being sued for racial discrimination, to which they’ve responded by claiming that a fraction of their hosts are being…

Paul Ford’s incredible What is Code is one of those magazine pieces we’re going to remember as a master of the form. Yes, it’s a business magazine talking about how computers work, but like Gay Talese profiling Frank Sinatra, Hunter S. Thompson crashing the…