Rolandt

I left home when I was seventeen. I call home almost every Sunday night, no matter where in the world I was. If my dad answered, I’d ask him how he was and he’d tell me about the weather and then say, “Anyway, I think your mother would like to talk to you.” Once my mum was on the phone I’d mostly listen while she caught me up on what everyone else had been up to.

2052 weeks passed between my first call from Kingston and the first weekend in January, when Mum had her stroke. Even if I only called eight weeks out of ten, that’s still sixteen hundred conversations, and I’m finding it a hard habit to break. No matter what else I’m doing or what else I’ve done, I get a little restless as the weekend draws to a close. As silly as it is, part of me hopes that I’ll never get used to not being able to call home on Sunday night.

Martin McKeaveney, shogunpurple, May 25, 2020

Deno occupies the same niche in the developer world as Node.js - it is self-advertised as "a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript." But it's not a replacement for Node.js - as Martin McKeaveney explains in this article, "eno is a fresh take and new ethos towards building, packaging and distributing scripts and applications in the JS ecosystem, built on modern technologies with a particular focus on providing a powerful scripting environment with the tooling you need built in." Some big changes include the elimination of the package manager (you just include Javascript from source directly with a URL) and explicit permission declarations for better security. Deno (probably pronounced 'Dino', if the logo is any guide) was created by Ryan Dahl, the original creator of NodeJS. More from the v1 announcement. Here's how to install (super simple!). Here's the manual.

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I see a lot of founders and startups struggling with explaining what they are trying to accomplish. Many are just focused on how they are going to do the next thing. The next release, the next pitch, the next campaign.

Releasing a product is not an accomplishment in and of itself. Launching isn’t either. Getting a feedback and signs of traction never quite feels like enough.

Why are you doing all this?

Mark Suster wrote an important blog post in 2010: Invest in Lines, Not Dots.

The tl;dr: Relationships are important.

It’s easy to think that when you meet someone once, you’ve MET them. It just isn’t true. A relationship is that line that is formed across a series of encounters.

Products are no different and the sins that we commit are the same as those Mark describes.

Mark says:

“[ . . ] I tell entrepreneurs the following: Meet your potential investors early.  Tell them you’re not raising money yet but that you will be in the next 6 months or so.”

In a world of fast iteration and Running Lean, it’s easy to think of products as the entire picture. It’s one big giant dot that we hope brings us success and a mass of users.

It’s never like that though.

Your Product  is a relationship with your users. Like Mark (and the rest of us), Users invest in Lines, not Dots.

When you have that first meeting you need to not only make a good impression, but you have to tell everyone where you are going. We call it Vision.

Release Early, Then Release With Purpose

Fast product iteration is important: You listen to users, you monitor and assess metrics and you make changes that bring your product closer to perfection.

Perfection is not what you need: Purpose is. Why are you releasing and why should users and customers continue to invest in you and your product with their time, money and feedback?

In looking for perfection (product/market fit?) it’s easy to think it is something that *just happens* and then you are instantly successful. It’s never like that. It takes work and focus, and a vision for how the future is going to be different for your customers because of it.

Vision is what defines the future you see for you and your customers. It’s why they try things for the first time and it’s why they will stick around even when you don’t quite get things right.

It’s easy to miss and it’s easy to get bogged down in the day to day, but if you have it and if you can articulate a vision, then you have a better business plan than you could ever put in a doc or deck.

When you iterate on your product and deliver releases, it should be about taking the customer closer to your vision for your product and why it’s important.

 

 

 

This year, in view of COVID-19, riders were asked to ride individually to a ghost bike, in memory of a fallen cyclist. Fourteen riders contributed photos. Here they are in order of the cyclist death.

Alan Tamane’s ghost bike (2007) has been removed.

Darcy Allan Shepard (2009)

Lindsey Jordan Sanders (2011) in Uxbridge. I don’t think a ghost bike has ever been installed here.

Tom Samson (2012)

Adam Excell (2015)

Steve Hancock (2016)

Gary Sim (2017)

David Delos Santos (2017)

Xavier Morgan (2017)

Jonas Mitchell (2018)

Douglas Crosbie (2018)

Dalia Chako (2018)

Colin Fisher (2020)

Here is a video compilation of the photos.

Thanks to all who contributed.

If the GDPR did what it promised to do, we’d be celebrating Privmas today. Because, two years after the GDPR became enforceable, privacy would now be the norm rather than the exception in the online world.

That hasn’t happened, but it’s not just because the GDPR is poorly enforced.  It’s because it’s too easy for every damn site on the Web—and every damn business with an Internet connection—to claim compliance to the letter of GDPR while violating its spirit.

Want to see how easy? Try searching for GDPR+compliance+consent:

https://www.google.com/search?q=gdpr+compliance+consent

Nearly all of the ~21,000,000 results you’ll get are from sources pitching ways to continue tracking people online, mostly by obtaining “consent” to privacy violations that almost nobody would welcome in the offline world—exactly the kind of icky practice that the GDPR was meant to stop.

Imagine if there was a way for every establishment you entered to painlessly inject a load of tracking beacons into your bloodstream without you knowing it. And that these beacons followed you everywhere and reported your activities back to parties unknown. Would you be okay with that? And how would you like it if you couldn’t even enter without recording your agreement to accept being tracked—on a ledger kept only by the establishment, so you have no way to audit their compliance to the agreement, whatever it might be?

Well, that’s what you’re saying when you click “Accept” or “Got it” when a typical GDPR-complying website presents a cookie notice that says something like this:

That notice is from Vice, by the way. Here’s how the top story on Vice’s front page looks in Belgium (though a VPN), with Privacy Badger looking for trackers:

What’s typical here is that a publication, with no sense of irony, runs a story about privacy-violating harvesting of personal data… while doing the same. (By the way, those red sliders say I’m blocking those trackers. Were it not for Privacy Badger, I’d be allowing them.)

Yes, Google says you’re anonymized somehow in both DoubleClick and Google Analytics, but it’s you they are stalking. (Look up stalk as a verb. Top result: “to pursue or approach prey, quarry, etc., stealthily.” That’s what’s going on.)

Again, let’s be clear about this: There is no way for you to know exactly how you are being tracked or what is done with information gathered about you. That’s because the instrument for that—a tool on your side—isn’t available. It probably hasn’t even been invented. You also have no record of agreeing to anything. It’s not even clear that the site or its third parties have a record of that. All you’ve got is a cookie planted deep in your browser’s bowels, designed to announce itself to other parties everywhere you go on the Web. In sum, consenting to a cookie notice leaves nothing resembling an audit trail.

So let’s go back to a simple privacy principle here: It is just as wrong to track a person like a marked animal in the online world as it is in the offline one.

The GDPR was made to thwart that kind of thing. But is has failed. Instead, it has made the experience of being tracked online a worse one.

Yes, that was not the GDPR’s intent. And yes, the GDPR has done some good. But if you are any less followed online today than you were when the GDPR became enforceable two years ago, it’s because you and the browser makers have worked to thwart at least some tracking.

And tracking remains worse than rampant: it’s defaulted practice for both advertising and site analytics. It will remain so until we have code, laws and enforcement which together stop it.

So, nothing to celebrate. Not this Privmas.

Zoe Kleinman, BBC News, May 26, 2020

Now I've just read in an earlier post "that videoconferencing just isn’t the same as face-to-face" and then I hit this article saying that "we're realising that, for the most part, video chat works." Now no doubt some will want to stuff this difference of opinion inot a generational 'Zoom Boom' thing, but I fall into the latter camp. Videoconferencing is just fine for pretty much any kind of communication I may want to do. You may not like Zoom if you're in the "stand close, give hugs and high fives" teacher demographic, but I would find such behaviour in a teacher inappropriate. Something like Zoom allows me to have my safe space. My point here: we can't generalize about whether videoconferencing 'works' (except in a purely technical sense). What works for you doesn't work for me.

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A client wants members to ask more questions in the community.

Before suggesting tactics, you need to get to the source of why aren’t they asking more questions.

The best thing to do is interview 5 to 10 members and build out a table like that below which finds out what information members needed, where they went for that information, and why they did or didn’t ask in the community.

(click here if image doesn’t show)

Do you notice how valuable these insights are?

We now know not only the types of discussions and content we might create in the community (vendor list, a ‘review my effort’ area, list of examples, trouble-shooting), but also the resistance members have about asking questions in the community.

We know people feel intimidated about having their name attached to a question so we can add and promote a ‘post anonymously’ feature. We can create a button where members could email their questions to the community manager to post.

We know the community is great for questions where there are a ‘variety’ of responses (e.g. examples) so we can promote that as the main call to action to ask a question. It’s the best way to get the most responses.

We can also run a short email series campaign encouraging members to give feedback on each other’s work and remove the self-promotion stigma.

If you want more questions, find out why members aren’t asking questions first. What questions do they have, where do they ask them, and why don’t they use your community. The insights will be invaluable.

Traditionally, plagues were named by the marks they left on the body: smallpox, bubonic plague (after the inflamed lymph nodes known to the Greeks as “buboes”), yellow fever (after the jaundice which accompanied the fever). Before our understanding of microbes, the body was not just the site onto which the disease was inscribed; it was literally the only surface in which the disease could be read, and no plague was real until it demonstrated regular, visible signs on the body.

With modern epidemiology, we’ve gradually moved to naming diseases not for how they look but for what they do: Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome, Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome. But even with AIDS, it took a visual reference, one that marked the body, to make the disease real to the general public. Kaposi’s sarcoma, an opportunistic cancer that had been all-but-unheard of before the emergence of AIDS, became its iconic signature. Not everyone who had AIDS developed Kaposi’s sarcoma (initially, only half of AIDS patients had KS, and within two years that number had fallen to 20 percent), but to have the disease signified that one had AIDS. When Benetton’s Colors magazine ran a satirical piece reporting Ronald Reagan’s death from AIDS, they illustrated it with a doctored picture of him bearing the telltale lesions.

These physical markers are more than just symptoms; they are the means by which we conceptualize the disease into discursive space. Judith Butler, revising Foucault’s formulation that the body is a site on which meaning is generated, argues that the body “is not a site on which construction takes place; it is a destruction on the occasion of which a subject is formed.” Which is to say, the disease is brought to life through its visible destruction of the body.

But Covid-19, as its name implies, has neither a physical marker nor a defined etiology. Technically, it’s a variant of SARS, but is often neither “sudden” nor “acute,” which helps explain a name that’s far more generic, simply an abbreviation of “Coronavirus Disease discovered in 2019. Its symptoms are varied and still poorly understood, even in the medical community, creating an uncertainty that’s been magnified exponentially by misleading, contradictory and self-serving statements and directives from politicians. Perhaps most importantly, there is no single visual symptom that defines the disease. The closest thing to a specific symptom yet identified — a loss of the sense of smell or taste — has nothing to do with outwardly visible signs at all.

None of this is to say that the disease is not viscerally apparent to its sufferers or their loved ones, or to the healthcare workers on the front lines of fighting it. Nor is it to say that none of the potential symptoms are visibly apparent (the CDC lists, for example, “bluish lips or face” as an emergency warning sign). But none of these are unique, stigmatized and easily recognized signs of the disease. And in the absence of a visible stigmata like KS, the only visible marker is a wildly imperfect and misleading one: the mask.

In the absence of any physical markings on the body, the mask is the only visual hallmark we have that the disease exists. And while wearing a mask denotes a desire to slow the spread of the disease, and everyone is advised to wear one outside (not just those who’ve tested positive or have been exposed), they’ve become politically contentious, precisely because of the supposed stigma they convey. The right-wing protests against wearing masks are motivated by many things, but at least a part of it is a fear that to wear a mask is to have one’s body marked by the disease.

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This would not be the first epidemic that complicated the visual record. Influenza doesn’t have the same striking visual markings on the body as other diseases, and flu outbreaks have often confounded our ability to correlate visual images with the illness. Writing in Art in America, Aubrey Knox describes how this problem played out in 1918, when cities initially struggled to depict this invisible killer. “Pictorial records of the Spanish flu,” she writes, “relatively scant by today’s standards, suggest a public vacillation between bravado and horror.” Public health officials posted announcements about the disease and urged people to wear masks, but the graphic effects of the disease on the body (most notably, cyanosis, in which a severe lack of oxygen turned the skin entirely blue) were kept from the public eye. Unfortunately, this strategy did little to slow the spread. In time, public health images were complemented by newspaper photographs of overflowing, freshly dug mass graves, and other evidence that the public health system had been overwhelmed. A full page spread from a Philadelphia newspaper at the time reads “Preparing to Bury City’s Dead” across the top, displaying a group of laborers digging trenches for mass burial, along with a photograph of embalmed corpses, and another captioned “Row after row of unburied dead.”

The Philadelphia photographs do not convey the effects of the flu on the physical body (the corpses in the photographs not explicitly visible); instead they illustrate both the scope and the speed of the virus through the rise of temporary infrastructure: the ad-hoc morgue and the mass grave. Other photographs from that time tend to be of similar, temporary structures: emergency wards and makeshift hospitals. A widely circulated collection of images from National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology show a series of emergency hospitals and converted barracks, from Camp Funston, Kansas to Aix-les-Bains, France, each with rows of cots, makeshift dividers between patients, and masked nurses.

In the absence of marks on the body itself, the Spanish flu photographs show the marks on the body politic. These images can only show the scope of the pandemic to the extent that it has overwhelmed existing infrastructure, and in as much as they document the Spanish influenza, they also document the public health and policy failures that exacerbated the crisis. (The need for mass graves in Philadelphia, after all, stemmed from that city’s notorious decision to go ahead with a Liberty Loans parade that spread the virus to thousands of spectators.) These images of temporary architecture provide a topographical representation of the disease — the lesion on the city itself.

As the Covid-19 crisis in New York City has spiraled out of control, the temporary field hospitals set up in Central Park, the refrigeration trucks as temporary holding spaces for bodies too numerous to be processed by funeral homes, and the medical ship USNS Comfort all seemed poised to occupy that visual space: striking and anomalous presences that give a material weight to the pandemic. As with Philadelphia’s mass graves, such interruptions were double-edged, making real both the disease’s seriousness and the failure of government to take it seriously. But even so, their impact was short-lived: the Comfort left New York after barely a month, treating only 182 patients, and the Central Park field hospital has also closed down. As the curve is flattened and we settle into the long duration of the crisis, it seems that we will not have these easy visual referents to point to as evidence of the pandemic.

The locus of the tragedy has returned to existing hospitals, their existing infrastructure no longer strained. And while this signals a short-term success, it also heralds a return to the invisibility of the virus. The real site of the Covid-19 crisis remains the interior of the hospital — a place that has largely been placed off-limits to photojournalists.

Much of this has to do with patients’ privacy rights and restricted access to hospitals, which are not public spaces. But as Lauren Walsh, director of the Lost Rolls America archive and author of Conversations on Conflict Photography, notes, historically, American media has tended to show more “visuals of faraway suffering rather than photos that display our own suffering, particularly when it comes to graphic images and pictures of the dying and dead.”  Despite prolific recent visual coverage of wars in the Middle East, victims of famine in Yemen, or sufferers of diseases like Ebola, she suggests, there’s a squeamishness with looking at pictures that “hit too close to home” — and this may be the case with Covid-19, too. When explicit images of Americans suffering do get circulated, online and in the media, they tend to be more often than not marginalized populations: Black victims of police violence, or gay men dying of AIDS.

Squeamishness aside, some have argued that a visual record may be ultimately vital for understanding the devastation that Covid-19 has wrought. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, in an op-ed for the New York Times, lamented the lack of visualization of the current crisis, and in particular the lack of images from inside the hospitals that have become the de facto plague wards in America. It is a lack, she claims, that has hampered our ability to empathize or even understand fully what we’re facing. “Images force us to contend with the unspeakable,” she writes. “They help humanize clinical statistics, to make them comprehensible.”

In their absence, a different kind of image has become the hallmark of Covid-19: the photograph of the empty street. First in a series of photo-essays out of northern Italy, this soon became the means of documenting the extent of the crisis: not by visibly marked bodies but by the absence of any bodies whatsoever. In a series by Marco Di Lauro for Getty Images, empty shopping malls and plazas predominate, and the few figures seen crossing the Piazza del Duomo are dwarfed by the gothic cathedral in the background.

The images convey a sense of desolation, but only to a point, and the accompanying captions are crucial to anyone not already familiar with these locations. One photo, of a city sidewalk with a few squat housing blocks in the background, and a solitary figure making his way down the street, is augmented by a line that explains: “Roads and squares in the Bicocca University neighborhood usually full of hundreds of university students are seen empty on February 26, 2020 in Milan, Italy.” Without the context, it could just be a remote suburb, or early enough on a weekend morning that everyone is still asleep.

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The pox and the emergency ward, the two usual ways of visualizing a plague, have been replaced instead with the mask and the empty street. Both of these are images of absence: the absence of visible, marked skin behind the mask, and the absence of normal urban density. And as the presence of absence, they remain relatively unstable in their ability to convey meaning.

In the wake of social media and easily manipulated images, the ability for a single image to speak in a straightforward and uncomplicated manner has vastly diminished. The rise of Truthers who maintain that documentary images signify exactly the opposite of what they appear to show (be it the World Trade Center collapse or the Sandy Hook shootings), and the ability of hoaxers to spread viral images during catastrophes (sharks swimming in the New York Stock Exchange during Hurricane Sandy) has made it almost impossible for a photograph to convey a single, unequivocal message. Any simple correlation between an image and its truth is shattered (if it ever existed at all), and the image of the disaster no longer has any real capacity to shock a population into awareness, let alone empathy.

Covid-19, you could say, does not belong to the previous category of pandemics from the Black Death to AIDS, as much as to a more recent group of maladies: diseases like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Gulf War Related Illness, and Chronic Lyme Disease — sometimes classed as “Contested Illnesses,” ailments that are not immediately visible to the medical gaze but which are experienced as real by their sufferers nonetheless. They are diseases which, in Joseph Dumit’s words, “you have to fight to get,” those which require arguing with doctors until a positive diagnosis is achieved (or turning to alternative medical practices for treatment).

Invisible and at times elusive, Covid-19’s symptoms are varied and sometimes unrecognizable, and its reach is subject to constant political revision. For every documented death accompanied by a positive diagnosis, there are an unknown quantity of deaths at home, deaths of Covid-19 that did not include a positive diagnosis, deaths by opportunistic diseases complicated by undiagnosed Covid-19. This combination of bureaucratic incompetence, politicized suppression of numbers, and failure of an overwhelmed medical infrastructure, has resulted in grieving families left having to fight for recognition that their loved ones’ deaths were due to Covid-19. It is a disease marked as much by absence as presence: the absence of tests to detect pathogens in the body, the absence of medically recognized vectors or symptoms clusters, the absence of a positive diagnosis, the absence of insurance reimbursement for treatment.

In such a contested space, there is a newfound political power in denial. David Abrams, a clinical psychologist and professor of social and behavioral science at New York University’s School of Global Public Health, argues that people refusing to wear masks may be in part acting out of a refusal to admit that they’re frightened by this new, invisible enemy (“Putting on that mask is about as blatant as saying, ‘Hey, I’m a scaredy cat,’’ he told CNN), as well as an attempt to deny the reality of the moment: “If everybody started wearing masks, suddenly, the old way of life is gone. You’ve suddenly admitted that this is the new normal. But you don’t want to believe that.” The maskless face has become its own kind of terrible signifier, of a community bonded over their refusal to believe in the invisible menace all around them, forging a social bond in a time of uncertainty and anxiety. If the mask is the closest marker we have to an objective, undeniable presence of Covid-19, to refuse this unique identifier is to refuse the plague altogether.

We seem to be torn; on the one hand, there are those struggling to find some way to manifest the scope of the tragedy — the cover page of the Sunday, May 24, 2020 issue of the New York Times lists 1,000 victims of the Coronavirus in a sobering rollcall that takes up the entire front page and two more inside. Such strategies are, for now, at best provisional (the Times lists only one percent of the total, and thus can’t convey the staggering weight of the loss of life) and will require a constant reimagination and revision.

On the other is a segment of culture who seem to think that by refusing such visualizations, they can make the disease disappear altogether. This kind of magical thinking, of course, still leaves these individuals acutely vulnerable.

When it comes to the new workplace environment, the concept of Working Anywhere is truly here. We work in an Office. At Home. Or Elsewhere.

Those are the three categories that exist. Sure, some pundits will try to divide up the "Elsewhere," but for simplicity sake, let's just call those places-the hotels, cars, airplanes, coffee shops, restaurants, fast food locations, co-working facilities, the beach, a park bench, boats, ships, all elsewhere.

The "Elsewhere" category will be the area that has the most growth, challenges and opportunity. Over time people will get bored being at home. With education shifting to the home as the classroom, people will be looking for an escape hatch. A breather. A place of solitude, where they can collect their thoughts. For those solo at home, this won't be as needed as often, but for those houses full of working couples and families, kids or parents, WFH won't be the panacea it is for the solo act.

For those places in the "Elsewhere" category, much like we've seen lately with working from home, there will be the need to "upgrade" everything from WiFi gear, and the actual broadband connections to the work surfaces, chairs and even the people managing them. Think about how often you went into a coffee shop or restaurant and suffered through sputtering broadband. How the uploading of that PowerPoint just seemed to take forever. And don't think those speeds weren't to have you order another cup of coffee or Big Mac. It has to do with the aging infrastructure in the ground and on the property. No longer is 802.11n good enough. And having a pokey DSL line that is all of 5 megs on the upload being shared by 20 people isn't going to cut it. Not in an era where "Elsewhere" is where you head for that ZOOM, UberConference or Teams call. 5G can't come soon enough.

But there's also going to be, at least for the short term, the need to clean, disinfect , wipe down, air out and overall insure that the "Elsewhere" space has been made safe for the next visitor. We'll likely see signs similar to what appear in restaurant windows, where a place has been rated by some inspector. We've all seen those ratings signs, and in some cities even read the weekly reports that are listed in the local newspapers, as a way to let the public know which facilities are taking safety, as well as your health and welfare seriously.  

We'll also like see the digital equivalent to the rest room has been cleaned by so and so and at what time posted in the "Elsewhere" space. These types of notification systems will be first undertaken by those who take safety and your health seriously. Those conscientious types, who recognize that being ahead of the curve is what will make those "Elsewhere" locations practical and usable.

State, county and municipalities will all quickly follow suit, with their inspectors being tasked to make sure that "Elsewhere" is as safe, and conforming to local codes as the office buildings and restaurants are. Park benches that were never cleaned, except when it rained, will start to be washed regularly. New types of germ fighting disinfectant sprays will be applied, just like what hospitals and hotels are now using.  We'll also be seeing more "Out of Service" signs more often, as cleaning takes on a new meaning, with increased frequency, and visibility.

This will lead to the digitizing of the "open hours," "closed" and "cleaning hours" where local shops and stores, buildings, eateries, and even outdoor venues will be able to post their schedules on Google Maps, so patrons don't arrive during the "disinfectant time" or don't arrange to meet someone where they can safely sit and converse only to find that the space has been shuttered for it's timely refresh.

For shopping malls which have been dying off of late, this could breed new life into them. Food courts could become new "small communal" gathering spots. The eateries and cafes that are facing closure would have more space in the open air and covered spaces. Given their locales, they are ideal for remote work, and their ownership groups have the scale and resources to retool, reshape and bring about consistency to operations. Malls already have strict rules about stores opening and closing ON TIME, not when they feel like it. They are used to scheduled cleaning, deliveries and operational maintenance.  They have WiFi. All they need to do is upgrade things and sell memberships.

Oh, and the already established co-working facilities like WeWork and Regus will all need to retool. Space and people tracking will become the norm. Open air business lounges, much like the airline lounges at airports will need constant monitoring. Apps that have NFC to handle check in, check out. Sensors to monitor how many people are in spaces of certain sizes will all become the norm, as will badges with RFID embedded will keep track of who is where. Office monitors, much like hall monitors in schools from days gone by will become commonplace-though they may be robots, helping to make sure that only the approved number of people are in a defined space. Services like CLEAR, long fighting for purpose beyond airports and sports facilities will be en vogue like never before.

Tech for "Elsewhere" will see a rapid boom. Not because it's needed but because operators of "Elsewhere" will be looking to prevent social shaming, litigation and the most important thing. The loss of their business or property. 

Highlights

• The Network panel is now showing even requests rejected by CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing). All rejected requests are using red color as you can see in the following screenshot. Note that there is also corresponding warning in the Console panel for each rejected request.
  
  
• Console panel error inspection has been improved significantly and it should be possible to see all properties of an error object directly in the Console panel (by expanding the error object) in a lot more cases. You can also right  click on an error object and pick “Inspect object in Sidebar” from the context menu (bug). In addition to that you should be also able see callstack for unhandled rejected promises (bug)
  

  

• The Network panel is showing name of the related Add-on responsible for blocking an HTTP request e.g. uBlock Origin or Adblock Plus (bug)
  

  

• It is possible to manually block HTTP requests using drag-and-block. Just drag a request from the panel list and drop it onto the Blocking side panel (bug) 
  

  

• Updated password heuristics model to version 4.0 in order to bring password generation to even more websites.
  • Seeing a substantial increase in usage of Firefox’s password generation:
    
    
  • (Number of passwords generated, normalized by the number of sites without an existing saved password)
• It’s now possible to directly search for strings like “class.method” without having to prefix them with a question mark, and we correct the most common suffix typos, like mozilla.ogr
• Relatedly, the address bar can now recognize custom domain suffixes using browser.fixup.domainsuffixwhitelist.yoursuffix (.test, .example, .invalid, .localhost, .internal, .local are set by default)
• Opening PDFs from Firefox’s download panel now opens the PDF directly within Firefox

 

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Fixed more than one bug

• Andrew Swan [:aswan]
• Farooq AR
• Itiel
• Martin Stránský [:stransky]
• Etienne Bruines

New contributors (🌟 = first patch)

• Julian Shomali converted URL bar DTD strings to fluent
• 🌟 Kushal Jain (:Kage) resolved case sensitive issue in the Cookies panel
• 🌟 Kyle Knaggs fixed the pretty print icon
• Manas fixed the way how HTTP header values are displayed

 

Project Updates

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Andrew Swan contributed the changes needed to handle updates for built-in extensions (the one bundled into the omni.ja) Bug 1571876, which was also a blocker for completing the migration of some system addons into built-in (e.g. Screenshots as part of bug 1568270), and another change to avoid checking the blocklist for built-in and system addons (Bug 1633396), which is likely helpful to avoid some additional work during the startup

 

WebExtensions Framework

• Fixed a regression in Firefox 76 related to the runtime.onConnect API event (Bug 1635637), the regression has been reported on bugzilla for Amazon Assistant extension (but it was likely going to affect some other extension), thanks to Tomislav for quicking working on a fix (and Rob for helping on quickly investigating the reasons behind the regression).
• :baku fixed a regression that was going to break “Reddit Enhancement Suite” in Firefox 77 (Bug 1635490)
• Fixed a regression in Firefox 78, related to the webRequest event listeners, that was likely going to affect Adblock Plus (Bug 1638581). Fixing this regression did also fix Bug 1638476 (related to the new “blocking by extension” feature part of the devtools network panel)

 

WebExtension APIs

• Additional parts of the new rust-based browser.storage.sync backend landed in the last two weeks (Bug 1623245, Bug 1634191, Bug 1637169, Bug 1635688, Bug 1637165), Thanks to the markh and lina!
• Contributions:
  • The new browser.tabs.goForward and browser.tabs.goBack API methods are now also supported on GeckoView / Fenix (Bug 1633328). Thanks Atique for contributing this new API on both Firefox Desktop and GeckoView!
  • browser.downloads.download now remembers the most recently used directory when the API call does also use the “saveAs: true” option (Bug 1395207). Thanks to Mark Smith for contributing this enhancement!

 

Developer Tools

• Console panel – On Nightly you can inspect an error object in the sidebar. Just right click on the error object and pick “Inspect object in Sidebar” menu action (Bug 1634432)
  

  

• Debugger panel – map scopes for Logpoints. This feature allows using original variable names within a logpoint (if source map is available) (bug)
  

  

• About:debugging – See/change remote URL from about:devtools-toolbox. This is handy features allows the user to change URL of remotely debugged page directly from DevTools. No more typing on small phone keyboard (bug)
  

  

• Network Panel – Headers panel facelift (better summary info + expandable URL & query arguments inspection). You’ll fall in love with the new side panel Bug 1631295

  

• Fission – Call for Fission feedback (+ RDM shipped to DevEdition)

 

Lint

• Kwan landed a set of patches to ensure that we don’t throw bare `Components.results` items in Javascript, instead ensuring they are wrapped in `Components.Exception`.

 

New Tab Page

• The team is experimenting with a new card treatment for stories that link to videos.
• The team is also experimenting with moving the popular topics element a bit further up the page.

 

Password Manager

• Disable the OS authentication prompt from about:logins due to abnormally high failure rate (Fx76 and Fx77). One reason was:
  • Some users are confused about which password/PIN to enter in the OS re-auth dialog from about:logins – new Windows dialog strings
    • We will do a study in Fx77 with the new strings (along with bug 1631879) to see how much they improved the success rate of authenticating. UX will also make a recommendation for next steps when they are finished with another project.
• Remember that a Windows accounts has no password to limit future failed authentication attempts 
• Allow user to remove the saved login/password from the doorhanger when being asked to update it
  
  

  (Login update doorhanger with a dropdown on the secondary action to “Remove Saved Login”)

• Fix login autocomplete when a field’s parent is a Shadow Root
• Update new password heuristics model to version 4.0 in order to bring password generation to even more websites.

 

PDFs & Printing 

• Firefox opens infinite tabs when set as the OS default file handler for PDFs
• pdfs with content-type application/octet-stream are downloaded without confirmation, even though Preview in Firefox is enabled
• Should be able to view PDFs even if the response HTTP headers include Content-Disposition:attachment
  • 
    
• Labeling of default app handling in preferences is confusing for PDF files
  
  

 

Performance

• bigiri working on running the snippets code entirely within the content process.
• emalysz has a patch in review which shows a consistent 25% improvement in startup times on Windows reference hardware by changing the list of DLLs we preload during startup
  
  
• florian landed work to exit(0) at the end of mochitests on opt builds, saving infra time.
• Gijs and emalysz landed several patches to lazily insert panels and popups into the DOM only as needed.
• dthayer is working on patches to eliminate omnijar reads during typical startups by expanding the scope of the startup cache, allowing us to avoid IO and lazily open omnijar files.
• emalysz is experimenting to see if we can decrease the shutdown terminator’s timeout setting without substantially increasing overall shutdown hangs, with the hope of limiting time spent waiting for a hung shutdown (for instance, during OS shutdown).

 

Remote Protocol (Chrome DevTools Protocol subset) 

• Contributor Etienne Bruines implemented offline mode for Network.emulateNetworkConditions to allow testing frameworks to verify the correct offline behavior for web applications. Thanks, Etienne!
• The Runtime.executionContextCreated and Runtime.executionContextDestroyed events are now correctly emitted when subframes are created and destroyed. To not break users of Puppeteer while further work for frames needs to be landed, both events are temporarily put behind the `remote.frames.enabled` preference, and not sent out by default.
• The Network.requestWillBeSent event has been updated to include request headers and document URL.
• The Network.responseReceived event is available now. Some data about the response, such as security state, will be implemented later.
• loaderId of document request is now included in Page.lifecycleEvent 

 

Search and Navigation

• Modern Search Configuration
  • We have just finished landing a set of patches for integrating our partner distribution engines into the configuration. This allows us to manage these in a better way and reduces the amount of special code for distributions.
• Improving region detection
  • Region.jsm has now landed, work is under way to move the SearchService region handling across to it.
  • Next up will be moving other consumers of the region preference to use the jsm.
• Cleaning up the search service
  • With modernisation now almost shipping, the next steps will be to start a late spring clean on the search service. This is mainly aimed at cleaning up the startup code and handling of configuration changes, though other areas will be included as well.

 

Address Bar

• Search suggestions are now highlighted differently, only non typed words and tail of typed words are highlighted – Bug 1636696
• The team continues working on improving results matching and composition, a few things we’re currently looking into:
  • historical and tail search suggestions
  • experiments about new search experience
  • more consistent search or visit heuristic when typing
  • Improved autofill and scoring

 

User Journey

The multi-stage about:welcome project is underway

In the month since I wrote The Anti-Amazon Alliance, there has been two significant announcements from two of the principals in that alliance:

• Shopify announced the Shop app
• Facebook announced Facebook Shops

Many have argued that these announcements are related to each other: Shopify needs to build a customer-facing application in order to take-on Facebook, and the announcement of Facebook Shops is why. My takeaway is the opposite: the inevitability of Facebook Shops — thanks in part to a surprising culprit — is precisely why Shopify should not spend much time on end-user acquisition.

The Anti-Amazon Alliance Redux

In The Anti-Amazon Alliance I noted that brick-and-mortar retail served two functions: discovery and distribution. On the Internet, though, those functions have been split between two different value chains: Facebook is the top-of-funnel for discovery, while Amazon dominates search-driven distribution; the genesis of that article was driven by the news that Google was re-focusing Google Shopping away from pay-to-play to being a search engine that listed products from anyone, thus joining the Anti-Amazon Alliance.

One of the most important companies in making both of the non-Amazon value-chains work is Shopify, which is a platform, not an Aggregator. Google and Facebook may collect the customers, but it is Shopify (and WooCommerce, its open-source competitor) that provides the infrastructure for merchants to actually sell things online; Shopify is also working to help merchants get the things they sell into customers hands with the Shopify Fulfillment Network, which I wrote about in Shopify and the Power of Platforms. At last week’s Reunite Conference the company announced that it now owned-and-operated seven warehouses across the U.S., has built an R&D center to improve warehouse operations, and has incorporated 6 River Systems in the form of “Chuck” robots to help with order fulfillment.

One particularly clever component of the Shopify Fulfillment Network is that the same templates a merchant uses to customize their website also translate seamlessly to custom packaging; when you receive a package from a Shopify merchant — the goal is two days, anywhere in the world — it appears as if it came from that merchant, not from Shopify. That’s part and parcel of being a platform: you win when those on your platform win, even if customers never even know you exist.

This is also why I didn’t agree with Shopify’s decision to rebrand their Arrive tracking app as the Shop app: it demotes merchants relative to Shopify itself (and the attempt to maintain some sort of brand prominence confuses the user experience).

Facebook Shops

Those that disagreed with my opinion on the Shop App generally cited Facebook and the fact that the social network is capturing an increasing amount of value from the direct-to-consumer space. I wrote about why this is happening earlier this year in Email Addresses and Razor Blades:

The problem is that in the process of depending on Google and Facebook for marketing, the DTC companies gave up their planned integration in the value chain, and the associated profits, to Facebook and Google:

The actual integrated players — Google and Facebook — integrate customers and research and development to dominate marketing; DTC may have online retail operations, but that is a modularized — and thus commoditized — part of the value chain (and meanwhile, Amazon was in the process of integrating retail and logistics).

However, suggesting that Shopify take responsibility for directly acquiring customers (as opposed to building tools to help merchants do so) is not only out of step with Shopify’s position in the value chain, but there is also no particularly good reason to believe that Shopify will be any better at this than their merchants. What Facebook is capable of in terms of customer acquisition is not trivial — that is precisely why they are able to charge a premium for it.

What is more concerning for Shopify — at least at first glance — is the possibility of Facebook backwards integrating, a la Facebook Shops. From the Facebook Newsroom:

Facebook Shops make it easy for businesses to set up a single online store for customers to access on both Facebook and Instagram. Creating a Facebook Shop is free and simple. Businesses can choose the products they want to feature from their catalog and then customize the look and feel of their shop with a cover image and accent colors that showcase their brand. This means any seller, no matter their size or budget, can bring their business online and connect with customers wherever and whenever it’s convenient for them.

People can find Facebook Shops on a business’ Facebook Page or Instagram profile, or discover them through stories or ads. From there, you can browse the full collection, save products you’re interested in and place an order — either on the business’ website or without leaving the app if the business has enabled checkout in the US.

And just like when you’re in a physical store and need to ask someone for help, in Facebook Shops you’ll be able to message a business through WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram Direct to ask questions, get support, track deliveries and more. And in the future, you’ll be able to view a business’ shop and make purchases right within a chat in WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram Direct.

Bad news for Shopify, right? Except note the last paragraph:

We’re also working more closely with partners like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, ChannelAdvisor, CedCommerce, Cafe24, Tienda Nube and Feedonomics to give small businesses the support they need. These organizations offer powerful tools to help entrepreneurs start and run their businesses and move online. Now they’ll help small businesses build and grow their Facebook Shops and use our other commerce tools.

While Shopify did write a blog post about Facebook Shops, the partnership merited a mere 18 seconds in the Reunited Keynote; this doesn’t feel like something Shopify is super thrilled about, and for understandable reasons.1

Shopify’s Business Model

Shopify’s original business model is labeled “Subscription Solutions”; merchants pay a subscription fee to use the Shopify platform — the price ranges from $29 to $299 per month — and can use the payment provider of their choice. When Shopify IPO’d Subscription Solutions was 60% of their $67 million in quarterly revenue.

Over the last five years, though, “Merchant Solutions” — which are a percentage of transactions, usually from using Shopify Payments — has been the primary growth driver. Last quarter it was Merchant Solutions that was 60% of Shopify’s $470 million in quarterly revenue.

This shift in Shopify’s business model is almost certainly why the company appears to be uncomfortable with this evolution of their “partnership” with Facebook. Sure, Facebook Shop integration will be a feature of Shopify’s Subscription Solutions, but Shopify will be locked out of sales made via Facebook Checkout, which means no Merchant Solutions revenue, and by extension, no participating in the upside of its merchants’ growth.

What makes this a particularly bitter pill to swallow for Shopify is that Facebook’s move is really good for those merchants (and a far better solution than the overly complicated Instagram Shopping beta that didn’t integrate with outside services). At this point I’m going to assume that those of you who have bought a product from an Instagram ad outnumber those of you who haven’t,2 and the truth is that it is a pretty janky experience tediously filling in all of your shipping and billing details. Sometimes it is easier to just abandon your purchase for that item you had no idea existed 30 seconds ago.

Facebook Checkout, on the other hand, would mean a purchase that is completed in seconds, not minutes. After all, if anyone knows who you are, it is Facebook!3 That is going to mean a lot more conversions on Facebook and Instagram ads in particular — and Shopify isn’t going to see an incremental cent.

Firefighters and Arsonists

It is very important to note that Facebook is setting itself up as the solution for a problem it played a major role in creating. To examine iOS specifically, Apple provides a user-friendly solution to the payment problem: Apple Pay. Apple Pay, though, is limited to Safari and SFSafariViewController objects; the latter is the most straightforward way for developers to add a browser to their application — it looks like Safari, and has a button in the lower-right corner to load the page in Safari.

Compare and contrast an SFSafariViewController webview (in this case, from Twitter’s app) to what you get in Instagram:

What Instagram4 has done is basically build their own browser within Instagram. It still uses iOS’s WebKit engine — that is an iOS requirement, which means that Chrome uses WebKit as well — but it is not otherwise controlled by Apple. And that, Apple has decreed, means no Apple Pay, which means that the purchase experience is worse in Instagram and Facebook than it could have been had either Facebook used SFSafariViewController or if Apple relaxed its policies around Apple Pay.

Notably, both Facebook and Apple are motivated by opposite sides of the same coin: Facebook uses its own browser because that allows it to capture far more data than they could from SFSafariViewController; Apple, meanwhile, puts a sandbox around SFSafariViewController for the purpose of keeping user data away from 3rd party developers, and incentivizes usage by both making SFSafariViewController far easier to use and also including benefits like Apple Pay integration.

The conclusion I am sure many of you have already arrived at is to be grateful for Apple’s policies and irritated at Facebook’s. After all, Apple is just looking out for the user, and Facebook is looking to exploit them, right?

In fact, it’s a bit more complicated than that, and cookies are a good example. Remember that a whole bunch of those Instagram advertisements are from Shopify merchants, all of whose websites are hosted on the same infrastructure. Image if Shopify could set a cookie when a user made a purchase on one website, and then when the user visited another Shopify website they were already logged in with all of their payment information ready to go. Notably, Shopify has built this infrastructure — it’s called Shop Pay — but you have to log in on every distinct Shopify website.

The reason for this rigamarole is that for the last three years Apple has been leading the charge towards the elimination of 3rd-party cookies of the sort I just described. There are good reasons for this, specifically the elimination of 3rd-party trackers primarily loaded by advertisements. There are, though, real casualties along the way, including Shopify and its merchants.

I wrote about these tradeoffs last year in Privacy Fundamentalism:

Technology can be used for both good things and bad things, but in the haste to highlight the bad, it is easy to be oblivious to the good. Manjoo, for example, works for the New York Times, which makes most of its revenue from subscriptions; given that, I’m going to assume they do not object to my including 3rd-party resources on Stratechery that support my own subscription business?

This applies to every part of my stack: because information is so easily spread across the Internet via infrastructure maintained by countless companies for their own positive economic outcome, I can write this Article from my home and you can read it in yours. That this isn’t even surprising is a testament to the degree to which we take the Internet for granted: any site in the world is accessible by anyone from anywhere, because the Internet makes moving data free and easy.

This, unfortunately, better described the world of 2017 than the world of 2020. Yes, websites are still freely accessible, and thank goodness for that, but it is ever more difficult for those websites to be supported by critical infrastructure like Shopify (or, in my case, Stripe and WordPress). Privacy is a good thing, but so is entrepreneurship and competition; maximizing one without any consideration of the others leads to unintended outcomes.

Facebook Shops is a perfect example: it is going to succeed because it is good for Shopify’s merchants, but the reason it is good for Shopify’s merchants is because Facebook and Apple effectively teamed up to make it impossible for Shopify to fix the payment problem on their own.

This makes me sad: the part of the Internet that fills me with the most optimism are platforms like Shopify and Stripe and Substack that make it possible for individual entrepreneurs to try and build their own businesses with world-class tools at their disposal; making it hard to utilize those tools primarily benefits established companies and apps.5

Shopify’s Platform Prospects

This is the harsh reality for Shopify and anyone else competing in a value chain with an Aggregator: you are not going to beat Facebook at their own game, particularly given the technical limitations increasingly facing infrastructure providers. At the end of the day overcoming Facebook’s skill at acquiring customers must be the responsibility of the merchants themselves: what works — and what will always work, as long as the web exists — is creating something so compelling that people will go to you directly, and yes, fill out a payment form.

This, though, is why I remain so excited about the Shopify Fulfillment Network. I’m not completely sold on Shopify’s approach — I thought it might make more sense to try and create a common interface for merchants to interact with independent 3PL providers, as opposed to building out Shopify own logistics service (but I could very well be wrong about this) — but I absolutely endorse the company making massive investments in this space.

First, this is a service that no merchant can build on its own; it is a perfect example of how a platform can create something for an ecosystem that would not exist otherwise. Moreover, this is specifically what is needed to fulfill the promise I laid out last year, of Shopify as an Amazon competitor, not because users choose to go to Shopify, but because they have no reason to know that Shopify exists.

Second, this is a service that Facebook Shops is going to make more valuable, not less: all of those merchants increasing sales thanks to Facebook Checkout still need to ship their things, and there is zero chance that Facebook ever integrates into the real world.

Third, this is a service no one else is going to build. Yes, it is very difficult to build fulfillment centers and develop robots and employ lots of workers, but within that difficulty is an escape from competition, i.e. a far more reliable way to make sustainable profits in the long run.

I am also bullish about Shopify moving into banking and financial services; yes, there is certainly more competition here with the likes of Stripe — another Shopify partner6, but this is another area where taking on the sorts of risks that an Aggregator never would (and never should) makes sense for a platform provider.

A Reason to Build

In my response to Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build essay, I suggested three different ways the tech industry could make more of a difference in the world of atoms, not just bits; the second was as follows:

Second, invest in real-world companies that differentiate investment in hardware with software. This hardware could be machines for factories, or factories themselves; it could be new types of transportation, or defense systems. The possibilties, at least once you let go of the requirement for 90% gross margins, are endless.

That reminded me of these two “warnings” in Shopify’s most recent earnings report:

• Our expectation is that the gross margin percentage of merchant solutions will decline in the short term as we develop Shopify Fulfillment Network and 6 River Systems Inc. (“6RS”).
• Our expectation is that the continued growth of merchant solutions may cause a decline in our overall gross margin percentage.

In short, building fulfillment centers and developing robots and employing lots of workers isn’t great for margins. It is, though, at least in the ultra-competitive markets that Shopify operates in, good for building a moat. This is certainly something that Amazon discovered long ago; I wrote in 2018 in Amazon Go and the Future:7

This willingness to spend is what truly differentiates Amazon, and the payoffs are tremendous. I mentioned telecom companies in passing above: their economic power flows directly from massive amounts of capital spending; said power is limited by a lack of differentiation. Amazon, though, having started with a software-based horizontal model and network-based differentiation, has not only started to build out its vertical stack but has spent massive amounts of money to do so. That spending is painful in the short-term — which is why most software companies avoid it — but it provides a massive moat.

In this view, the upside of building in the real world is rooted in just how difficult it is; given that we have reached The End of the Beginning, it may be the highest upside available.

1. This paragraph originally said that Shopify didn’t write a blog post; I apologize for the error
2. Please don’t tell me if you haven’t
3. In all seriousness, the company was honest that they will use Facebook Shop behavior for ad targeting, which lends credence to their promise to keep purchase methods private.
4. And Facebook, but not WhatsApp, which simply loads links in Safari
5. This, by the way, suggests that Substack was smart to keep everyone on the same domain; I generally believe that you should always have your own domain, but the truth is that Apple’s overzealous cookie policy has increasingly made that a liability
6. Interestingly, the wording in Shopify’s annual report about their relationship has shifted in the last year, although not dramatically
7. That article, by the way, wrongly predicted that Amazon would not license Amazon Go, and also mischaracterized Marx’s view of automation. The latter hurts more.

Nikki Sylianteng @nsylianteng
How group video calls should work pic.twitter.com/IV1BQvQiYw

jump (inside) @JodiesJumpsuit
Anyone who has had to ask a dog owner to please follow the rules in a park knows you’re going to get either entitle… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

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There’s finally more information being released about Vancouver’s Slow Streets in a press release that came out Monday, but still no overall “plan” available on the City’s website. The intent is to have Slow Streets on roads across the city on roads that are wide enough to maintain resident parking, and also to allow for local vehicle use of the same streets.

The Engineering Department is planning on temporarily sharing the road with pedestrians, rollers and cyclists on fifty kilometers of “Slow Streets.  The  first twelve kilometers have already been opened, and is described in  this article   by Gordon Price. Gordon talks about the the Lakewood, Ridgeway and Wall Street sections of Slow Streets. The streets have jersey barriers of different kinds either on the street or at the street’s side, indicating that it is a slower street and use of the road is also being purposed for walkers, rollers and cyclists to maintain physical distancing.

There are two reasons for doing this: one, to provide destination oriented routes for people not in vehicles; and secondly, to provide a way for families and others to exercise in a safer environment with physical distancing that could not be met on the sidewalks.

This presentation on the Covid-19 Mobility and Public Life Response which was given to Council last week provides  more background and rationale for the City’s response. In a survey conducted in April of downtown mobility, the City found that walking had declined by 40 to 50 percent, commuter cycling had declined by 35 to 50 percent, and transit usage had declined by 80 percent.  And if you see less vehicles downtown, you are right~there’s 48 percent less vehicles coming in and out of the downtown, with a 39 percent decline of vehicles coming in and out of Vancouver as compared to April 2019.

The City’s three pronged approach besides the “Room to Move” outlined above also includes “Room to Queue” which is  providing expanded street space for people to queue outside of businesses. This can mean taking over the parking lane if needed outside of businesses. And to facilitate deliveries, “Room to Load” will provide special priority loading zones for business deliveries of quick drop off/pick up of items. The City also intends to work with local businesses to provide expanded patio spaces on road surfaces.

While there is a graduated approach to opening businesses and services, the City is aware that the use of private vehicles in the post-Covid city  could dramatically increase, as automobiles are seen as “safe, secure” types of travel. The intent of these measures to facilitate easier travel by walking, rolling and cycling is to provide potential alternatives towards a more “equitable and sustainable transportation system”. 

The City intends to implement the fifty kilometer network of Slow Streets between now and July, and follow up with monitoring and public feedback between July and September. Past September the City will be establishing how Slow Streets have performed and ascertain any future role as the Vancouver emerges from the Pandemic phase of civic life.

 

Images: GlobalNews & Georgia Straight

 

 

 

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

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At the City of Vancouver where Council meetings  are turning out to be more of a cave spelunking expedition through the finer points of  Robert’s  Rules of Order, there’s been   well meaning motions to consider alcohol in public places and parks. The point ably made is that in terms of equity, not everyone has their own back yard  or outside space to drink a beer in during the pandemic.  Of course lots of people are already ingeniously decanting and imbibing in parks and public spaces, it’s just not sanctioned. Yet.

Master of municipalities CBC’s Justin McElroy has a two minute video on the CBC twitter site mulling over the possibility of “you being able to crack open a cold one in a place like Dude Chilling Park”.

One main  point missing in this idea of allowing individuals to carry their own alcoholic beverages to beaches, parks and city spaces.  People drinking alcohol will need to use washroom facilities more frequently. Where are the washrooms?

I have written over several years about why we need to have accessible public washrooms because every member of the public needs to go. It seems odd that during the pandemic we should not  be considering the universal installation of drinking fountain/water bottle stations, hand washing facilities, and of course, public washrooms before any provision regarding alcohol.

Lloyd Alter in Tree Hugger is even blunter, saying that we have to stop building roads and start building bathrooms. He equates the lack of washrooms with that of the budget for highways: “Authorities say providing public washrooms can’t be done because it would cost “hundreds of millions” but never have a problem spending billions on the building of highways for the convenience of drivers who can drive from home to the mall where there are lots of washrooms. The comfort of people who walk, people who are old, people who are poor or sick — that doesn’t matter.”

Lloyd Alter points out that post pandemic  washrooms that are touchless and sterilized will be important, and private companies, Starbucks and shopping stores  are not responsible for providing them.

As Lloyd observes ” This was always a public responsibility, but got dropped in North America with the growth of the suburbs and the mall and the privatization of public space…The trouble is a dearth of civic responsibility. We don’t need just a better restroom. We need a better country.”

And what if public washrooms are not provided? Not providing those facilities restricts older people and children’s access to the outdoors and is especially hard on people with “lower incomes, essential workers and homeless.”

How is it that we rely on Starbucks and restaurants as places to use the washroom? How will that work as restrictions ease during the pandemic?

Images: CBC.ca

 

There are numerous obvious connections between Brexit and the Dominic Cummings lockdown affair that has dominated the last few days. For one thing, the very existence of the present government is down to Brexit, its composition is based on the central test of Brexit loyalty, and its advisers, from Cummings downwards, came from the old Vote Leave campaign team.

But in any case both Cummings and his supporters have repeatedly tried to tie the story back to the Brexit divide in order to reframe it in the culture war terms that are their comfort zone. The reason, though, why his behaviour has become so huge an event is because it reveals so many of the paradoxes and flaws within that culture war to the extent that, for perhaps the first time since 2016, the Brexiter vs Remainer battle lines have been transcended.

The paradox of populism

At the core of this is the central paradox of populism. Brexit was presented as the triumph of ‘the people’ over ‘the elite’, and the years since the Referendum have repeatedly cast all the conflicts it has given rise to in those terms (hence, ‘will of the people’, ‘enemies of the people’, and the equation of remainers with the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’). Yet this is a precarious construct, given the fact that the country was and is more or less evenly split – making ‘the people’ an unconvincingly small proportion and ‘the elite’ a preposterously large one – and the self-evidently elite nature of its leaders.

The idea that the largely male, public school and/or Oxford educated Brexit leaders – a category that takes in Johnson, Gove, Farage, Cummings, Carswell, Lawson, Rees-Mogg, Hannan, Redwood and many more – are anything other than a privileged elite is plainly ludicrous. It is a fiction which is constantly vulnerable to obvious inconsistencies, but although they are often pointed out (Rees-Mogg’s investment fund company, Lawson’s French Chateau, Redwood’s advice to investors) this has no cut through with their supporters.

Why? It is not, I think, that those supporters fail to spot the privilege of their leaders. It is that this isn’t the kind of privilege to which they object. Such figures – Johnson, most obviously, Farage, certainly, even Rees-Mogg, surprisingly – are seen as being, despite that privilege, still in some way ‘ordinary’ and, perhaps, more important, as ‘authentic’. More than anything, they may be privileged but they are not what their supporters mean by ‘the elite’ which, instead, is associated with the supposedly finger-wagging, won’t let us say what really think, prissy, moralistic, do-gooders. The Human Rights Brigade. The PC Brigade. The girly swots. The bleeding-heart liberals.

It’s an amorphous group which, together, constitutes a ‘them’ to which the ‘us’ – ordinary, common sense people and their perhaps not ordinary in the ordinary sense but still common sense and authentic leaders – are opposed. For years we suffered as the ‘silent majority’, but with Brexit we found our voice. Within this is another, and crucial, dividing line. As brilliantly depicted in Jonathan Coe’s ‘Brexit novel’, Middle England, the elite in this meaning are ‘constantly telling us what to do and say’. They are interfering. They are authoritarian. They force us to be other than ourselves, and so to be inauthentic, unlike the flamboyant leaders who we revere for having kept their authenticity. They make us follow their rules.

Taking back control

In this cultural universe, ‘taking back control’ was a doubly potent slogan. It was about freedom from EU control, but also freedom from the control of them – who, not coincidentally, were opposed to Brexit – freedom to ‘talk about immigration’, freedom to celebrate Christmas not ‘Winterval’, freedom to fly the St George Flag without being sneered at. In this way it was, of course, partly about nationalism – about ‘us’ as a nation – but also about internal divisions – about ‘us’ versus ‘them’, those who for so long had ruled over us but were now exposed as traitors and saboteurs.

So Brexit provided an umbrella that could link the hard-core libertarianism of a very small ideological minority with the resentments, victimhood and perceived humiliations of a much larger group. And the spines of that umbrella were ‘freedom from the rules’.

Almost all the high-profile fights of the post-Referendum period were framed by this. Domestically, these ranged from the Miller Case on Parliamentary approval for triggering Article 50 through to the row (and court cases) over Prorogation. They were battles over whether ‘the rules’ (laws, conventions) had to be followed or whether ‘the will of the people’ trumped such niceties. In relation to Brexit itself, the distinction between rule-taking and rule-making is what shifted its meaning from ‘single market membership’ to the present stance whereby any and every trace of ECJ involvement must be expunged.

This is also one of many reasons why Brexit has proved so impossible to deliver. For its simple foundational fantasy of national freedom from the rules has constantly been exposed by the complex intricacies of reality. That reality includes the need for transnational regulations if trade is to be done smoothly – free trade in the modern world is not so much about freedom from tariffs as shared rules to eliminate the non-tariff barriers of national regulations.

Sticking a finger in the eye of the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ was easy enough, but doing so to hard-nosed trade negotiators – whether of the EU, US, or anywhere else - something much more difficult. Hence, in the end, Brexiters have been reduced to claiming that they never promised it would be easy, or even economically desirable, but all about some ill-defined sense of sovereignty. The ultimate paradox of this aspect of Brexit is that the last-ditch defence of freedom from the rules is championship of adherence to WTO rules.

Enter coronavirus

Into this culture war, the coronavirus pandemic arrived. By this time, the Brexiters were firmly in control of government and those such as Johnson and Cummings, ideologically and psychologically invested in rule-breaking, were suddenly confronted by a situation which required the imposition of new and unprecedently draconian rules and restrictions on everyday life. Small wonder that they did so belatedly, reluctantly and, in Johnson’s case, with a nod and a wink that rules were there to be broken. As Bobby McDonagh observes in The Irish Times, there is “a striking correlation between Brexit indoctrination and virus insouciance”.

As I and others have remarked several times before, Brexiters are far more comfortable with campaigning than governing. As they have found over and over again, it is far easier to stand on the side lines denouncing government ‘betrayal’ of Brexit than delivering it. This is not coincidental, since the promises of Brexit are undeliverable, partly for the reasons given above. But coronavirus revealed a deeper paradox, which is the impossibility of ruling when your politics are defined by rule-breaking. Forced to confront it, Johnson and Cummings opted, however reluctantly, for the rules of lockdown.

But here the culture war took an unexpected turn. Because what was revealed were two diametrically different responses from Brexit supporters. Some of the most high-profile of them became, as discussed in a recent post on this blog – lockdown sceptics. Yet amongst plenty of rank and file leavers a different version of cultural identity held sway, and one they shared with plenty of remainers.

This was the traditional image of the British – and for once it was the British, not just the English - as a ‘naturally’ law-abiding people of orderly queues, fair play, pulling together for the common good, and ‘all in it together’. A people who, in fact, did not disdain but played by the rules. Indeed Johnson himself, with his constant invocations of Second World War unity, mobilised exactly this cultural theme, and it proved to be remarkably powerful. Most people have followed the rules, despite the hardship, and in some cases tragedy, that entailed.

The Cummings row

So, finally, the incipient distinction between ‘the people’ and their anti-elitist yet self-evidently elite leadership was exposed in a way which had cut through. The ‘freedom from rules’ umbrella of Brexit was blown inside-out by the wind of coronavirus. And the trigger for this was Cummings’ exposure as a lockdown rule-breaker and, with it, of what Fintan O’Toole this week called “the unpardonable snigger of elite condescension”.

It’s this charge of elitism and double standards which has been the central theme of the criticism of Johnson’s defence of Cummings, in outlets as diverse as The Spectator and The Guardian. The biter has been well and truly bit.

Cummings’ response to this deployed two of his favourite techniques.

One was ‘to do the unexpected’. In this case, that meant the unprecedented event of a Special Advisor holding a Press Conference. But, here, he had fallen into the trap he accuses his opponents of, that of not understanding how politics looks to ‘ordinary people’. For, outside the despised political bubble, few will know or care that this was an unusual event.

The other was to engage in gaslighting, using a swirl of detailed information and disinformation to make opponents doubt their own grasp or memory of events. In the end, at the very least, all the debate – as with the dishonest Referendum claims about NHS money or Turkey’s accession – serves to create an impression that there are two sides to the story, no one really knows the facts, so who can say what the truth is? At most, the core detail is what sticks in people’s minds.

This time, it didn’t work – or it worked in ways he did not intend. For the most part, people have responded by ignoring, or mocking, all the extraneous detail and holding on to the central fact that, unlike millions of others in similar situations, Cummings broke the spirit and letter of the rules. Referring to some supposed (and in fact questionable) exemptions in the detail of the regulations cut no ice with those who simply referred to the letter Johnson had written to each household. In fact, it has ironic parallels with the way that Brexiters treated Cameron’s pre-referendum letter promising to implement the result as trumping the legal wording for the Referendum Act itself.

A turning point?

It’s always easy to imagine that current events betoken a major watershed when, in reality, it is only retrospectively possible to see such patterns. But the Cummings debacle does at least illustrate the fragility of populist politics, and the way that riding the tiger of such politics always carries the danger that ‘the people’ mobilised against one kind of elite will turn upon that which led them – as Jennie Russell pointed out in an article in The Times last year (£).

It certainly illustrates the stark differences between campaigning and governing, and the incoherence of a campaign based on rule-breaking becoming a government which must, in all events but especially those of crisis, create and enforce rules.

Both of these points will remain salient whether or not Cummings survives in post. His fate may, though, have an impact on how easy or difficult it becomes for the government to secure compliance with current and future coronavirus regulations, with all the consequences for human lives that will have. For with every ministerial announcement that he was within his rights to make his own interpretation of the rules comes the erosion of the possibility of the population at large adhering to them.

Marshall Headphones hat drei wunderbare Bluetooth-Lautsprecher, von denen ich zwei dauernd verwende. Stockwell II ist der kleine und kompakte. Als einziger Marshall-Lautsprecher ist er nicht besonders laut, was ich aber überhaupt nicht vermisse, wenn ich ihn neben den Gartenstuhl stelle. Durch die Anordnung seiner Treiber klingt er aus allen Richtungen gut und kann eine kleine Gruppe von Menschen bestens chillen lassen.

Tufton ist der Sumo-Ringer unter den batteriebetriebenen Lautsprechern. Den nehme ich für eine Party draußen. Auch aus zehn Metern Entfernung im Freien unterhält er eine größere Gruppe. Dafür ist er mit 5 kg ziemlich schwer. Kilburn II ist beinahe so laut wie der Tufton aber nur etwas mehr als halb so groß. Diesen Speaker hatte ich als ersten aus dieser Reihe kennengelernt.

Tufton gibt es nur in schwarz mit dem silbernen Grill, Kilburn II und Stockwell II ist in vier Farben verfügbar: Black, Indigo, Grey und Burgundy. Beim Stockwell II kommt noch "Black and Brass" wie oben abgebildet dazu. Farben sind Geschmacksache. Mir persönlich gefallen die verlinkten Black mit dem schwarzen Lederiemen und rotem Samt auf der Innenseite. Den Stockwell II habe ich in Indigo. Finger weg vom Stockwell ohne II. Der taugte nicht. Alle anderen haben einen schönen vollen Klang und wirken teurer als sie sind.

Tom Warren, The Verge, May 26, 2020

Microsoft's Fluid Framework is similar to Google Docs, except that it integrates with other Office365 applications, including Teams, and allows people to embed various other objects into the docs. It was first announced last year, and released as a preview for enterprise Office365 customers just this past week. I've been playing around with it, and while it's still a bit clunky, it feels like something that could evolve into a power workspace type tool. Think Google Wave, but without Google's awkward user interface. See also: TechCrunch. If you're on Office365, here's more information and the instructions to get started.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

I hope you're going to be able to hear my tiny violin over the shitstorm. Work sucks - we're taking a beating. It's really weird and very unstable. Started the day completing and submitting a new grant, with a fun and keen group of museums. There's hope, as usual. But that hope has taken a good kicking over the last few days, to the tune of about £90k worth of possible stability disappearing.

In recent months, millions of Mac users have begun making audio and video calls with Zoom, Webex, and many other VoIP apps. As a result, those same users have also found themselves annoyed by the often sub-par quality of audio heard through these services. Fortunately, our product SoundSource can help make things sound a little sweeter.

With SoundSource’s ability to apply effects to any audio, it can enhance what you hear on calls. As folks have figured this out, we’ve seen a number of tweets like this:

With just a minute or two of configuration, SoundSource can make your calls sound better. We’ve posted a new support article with full instructions for improving audio on voice calls. Give it a read, then test things out yourself with SoundSource.

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Bonus content: If you want to spice up your calls with music, sound effects, or other audio, our previous post on using Loopback to add audio to voice chats has you covered.

AWS services explained in one line each

Impressive effort to summarize all 163(!) AWS services - this helped clarify a whole bunch that I haven't figured yet. Only a few defeated the author, with a single question mark for the description. I enjoyed Amazon Braket: "Some quantum thing. It’s in preview so I have no idea what it is."

Via Hacker News

When Steve Howard was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island in the spring of 2019, I made it my life’s mission to create the conditions that would allow him to drive his Mitsubishi i-MiEV from his home in Summerside to work at the Legislature and back, something that required a charge in Charlottetown where chargers are few and far between.

So in December I purchased a Kia Soul EV, and with it came an EVduty level 2 charger, which I installed off my driveway this winter.

Making my driveway ready to receive Steve’s car.

Which it did this morning:

I’m quite proud that our house can provide the energy infrastructure for the transportation of the Green Party Shadow Critic for Transportation, Infrastructure, and Energy.

Matt Webb, Interconnected, May 26, 2020

Yes, a month long conference is a neat concept. And yes, it's about rethinking the underlying purpose of conferences, as Web Directions co-founder John Allsopp writes. "There’s also a second 'Job' we uncovered–helping develop people’s sense of connection and belonging to a professional community." But a month long conference is also a MOOC - at least, the way we did MOOCs. And these things will all begin to blend - courses, conferences, online learning in general, will gradually become more social and community-oriented. Oh yeah, and they'll also be more open and less expensive.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Keith Keating, Chief Learning Officer, May 26, 2020

I looked at the image that accompanied this article, a graph of lifelong learning and unlearning, and I asked myself as a lifelong learner whether I actually ever unlearn anything? I don't think I do. I mean, sure, it's possible to forget, but that's not what is meant by unlearning. It's also possible to change beliefs, and that gets a bit closer, but it's still not what is meant by unlearning. This article is actually pretty light and doesn't tell us anything at all about unlearning, just some vague nicities like "Lifelong learners prosper in this new, increasingly flexible and dynamic global economy. Lifelong learners invent and reinvent themselves whenever they find or create the opportunity." But really, it's nothing to do with any of that - it's about staying curious and following your interests wherever they may lead. If you're just chasing this elusive goal of "exceeding your employer's expectations" or whatever, lifelong learning is just another burden. Don't make it one. Don't "reinvent yourself" - everything you've already learned is an asset ('money in the bank', as they say). Don't plan your learning based on fear. Follow what works for you.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has hinted that alcohol delivery through restaurants could continue even after the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

Ford replied to a question from the media asking if regulations regarding alcohol and cannabis delivery would return. He indicated that the government will have to look into it, but suggested that new ways of doing business should be implemented.

“I’ve spoken to many CEOs and they’ve realized there’s a better way of doing things that are going to benefit not just the customer but benefit their staff and their employees,” he said during a press briefing on May 25th.

In late March, the Ontario government made it legal for restaurants to offer alcohol as a take-out and delivery option due to the pandemic. This meant that restaurants could sell alcohol through apps like Uber Eats and SkipTheDishes with their food orders.

Restaurants were not required to undergo a sign-up process, and were allowed to start selling alcohol beverages for takeout and delivery. The only requirement is that alcohol can only be sold if it accompanies a food order.

This new measure has been set forth until December 31st, but it has been unclear if the government plans to extend it. These new comments from Premier Ford indicate that this may be a possibility.

In April the government temporarily allowed cannabis delivery and curbside pick-up from authorized retail stores, in an effort to help the fight against the illegal cannabis market. Ford hinted that these measures could be extended as well.

Via: @robertbenzie

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The Cowichan Valley School District in Vancouver Island, British Columbia has purchased iPads that will help families and teachers with education at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Additionally, Rogers is equipping the tablets with three months of free cellular data, while Apple is throwing in free books, apps and videos.

The initiative is intended to offer new educational opportunities for learners while teachers “plan a more fulsome online educational experience,” according to a Cowichan Valley School District press release.

Families will return the iPads for classroom use once schools reopen. As it stands, schools in B.C. will be able to reopen on a part-time, optional basis starting in June. Therefore, the iPads will help with educating kids who remain at home.

Last month, Apple and Rogers also partnered with Ontario’s Ministry of Education to provide 21,000 iPads to low-income families.

Source: Cowichan Valley School District Via: iPhone in Canada

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U.K.-based Arm announced a slew of new IP, including new CPUs, GPUs and NPUs. The new IP will likely form the foundations of upcoming systems-on-a-chip (SoC) found in smartphones in the future.

To start, Arm unveiled its newest Cortex-A78 CPU. The company says it’s the most efficient Cortex-A series CPU it’s designed yet. It offers a 20 percent increase in sustained performance over the previous A77 CPU within a 1-watt power budget. Further, Arm included a focus on 5G in the chip. Finally, Arm says the new Cortext-A78 can more efficiently handle compute workloads, making it able to better handle on-device machine learning (ML).

On top of that, Arm says the Cortex-A78’s performance-per-watt makes it perfectly suited for use in foldable and large-screen devices.

Along with the A78, Arm also announced the first CPU to come out of its Cortex-X Custom program. The program allows for greater customization and differentiation beyond the typical Cortex product roadmap and can enable more powerful performance for specific use cases.

As such, the new Cortex-X1 CPU is Arm’s most powerful offering to date, boasting a 30 percent increase in peak performance over the Cortex-A77.

On the GPU side, Arm announced the new Mali-G78. Once again based on the Valhall architecture, the G78 delivers a 25 percent increase in graphics performance compared to the Mali-G77. Additionally, the Mali-G78 supports up to 24 cores and is more power-efficient, making it easier on mobile device battery. Arm announced a new sub-premium GPU tier, which includes the Mali-G68. It sports all the same features of the G78 but with support for up to six cores.

Finally, Arm’s new neural processing unit (NPU), the Ethos-N78 brings 25 percent more performance efficiency, giving devices greater ML capabilities. The N78 is highly configurable, with options ranging from one TOP/s to 10 TOP/s.

Those interested can learn more about Arm’s new IP on the company’s blog.

Image credit: Arm

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Philips could be planning to release a couple of new versions of existing Hue smart lights if recent leaks are accurate.

According to German website Hueblog, Philips is planning to release a new Lightstrip Plus and an update to its Hue Bloom light.

Given the first Hue Lightstrip was released way back in 2013, it makes sense for a refresh to be on the horizon. This new take on a smart Lightstrip aims to be more versatile by not being required to be plugged into a controller. This also means third-party manufacturers can create their own devices capable of working with the Lightstrip Plus.

More interestingly, Hueblog’s report states that Philips is launching a new connector tool that lets you cut and reconnect pieces of the Lightstrip Plus, allowing for far more customization than the current Lightstrip is capable of. For example, I have a Lightstrip behind my TV stand, but it’s slightly too long. With the original Lightstrip, your only option is to wrap it around behind the TV. There are also rumours that Philips is releasing a new version of its outdoor Lightstrip measuring in at 2m and 5m in length.

On the other hand, the new Bloom looks nearly identical to its predecessor, with most of its upgrades being inside the smart light. For instance, the previous version featured 120 lumens, while the new Bloom is capable of 500 lumens. The smart light is also getting Bluetooth support, which means it can work without Philips’ Hue Bridge.

It’s unclear when these new Hue Lights are launching or how much they’ll cost. That said, given Hue rumours usually pop up a few weeks before the release of a new product, they’ll likely appear on store shelves soon.

Image credit: Hueblog

Source: Hueblog 

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OnePlus CEO Pete Lau has said that his company plans to get back to making affordable phones.

After the pricey OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro released in Canada, people began to wonder if OnePlus had shifted its formula to offer two high-end phones a year while selling last year’s device at a discount to hit the lower-cost market.

This isn’t a bad strategy, and I still recommend the OnePlus 7T to my friends, but it wasn’t what the company was initially known for. When OnePlus launched, it made its name selling smartphones with excellent specs and a great design at a low price. The company called these phones “flagship killers.” While they had some trade-offs, for the most part, the value was almost unbeatable.

While Lau doesn’t specifically mention a new smartphone, this shift would mark a return to what helped OnePlus build its brand. Rumours indicate this cheaper OnePlus device will be called the OnePlus Z. Lau also said in a recent Fast Company interview that people will get the first glimpse of this new strategy with an announcement for the India-based market.

Later this year is when North America is rumoured to get OnePlus next low-cost smartphone, according to the interview.

This is big news for Canadians because OnePlus doesn’t have any carrier partnerships in Canada, so you can only buy its phones directly from the company. This means you need to pay the full price for the phone at the time of purchase. This isn’t a huge deal if the phone costs $500 CAD or so, but once you start getting near $1,000 or more, it gets a lot harder to consider a OnePlus device when you could get a smartphone from Samsung, Google or Apple phone for $0 upfront on a contract.

Source: Fast Company

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Sometimes it feels like Apple files patents specifically to throw tech bloggers off. In this case, however, this actually seems like a minor refresh that might be released someday.

Apple has filed a patent for the iPad Pro Magic Keyboard that features a slot in its hinge that the Apple Pencil can slide into, according to Patently Apple. Currently, the only way to store the Apple Pencil is to attach it to the top of the iPad Pro magnetically. While this works and is clearly better than having no location to store the Apple Pencil at all, the stylus can still easily fall off since the magnetic connection isn’t super strong.

The patent, called ‘Accessories for portable electronic devices,’ features a description that doesn’t say much. Instead, it’s the included photographs that show off how the pencil slides into the hinge. Currently, the Magic Keyboard’s hinge is home to a USB-C pass-through port, so it’s likely the Apple Pencil would only be able to slide down one side of the Magic Keyboard.

Below is a brief excerpt from the patent filing:

An exemplary accessory device can include a first segment coupled to a second segment via a first hinge assembly. The accessory can include a third segment coupled to the second segment via a second hinge assembly such that the second segment is positioned between the first and third segments. The accessory device can be arranged between a closed configuration and a configuration of a stand that supports the portable electronic device at a viewing angle. 

The patent was initially filed by Apple back in August of 2017 but was only recently published. This indicates that there’s a possibility this is a scrapped design for the Magic Keyboard that Apple decided wasn’t practical.

As usual, it’s important to keep in mind that this is just a patent. This means that the design might never make its way to a future version of Apple’s Magic Keyboard. Still, given how subtle of a redesign this would be to the Magic Keyboard, I’d bet we actually see this new version released in the future.

Source: Patently Apple Via: 9to5Mac

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