For more than a year I’ve been caught up in the day-to-day drama of a bunch of loosely-affiliated YouTube couples driving their customized camper vans through Central and South America. Given the seasons and travel patterns related to them, many of them reached Patagonia just as the pandemic hit, and they’ve all been documenting the process of getting stuck or getting home. As a collection, they’re an interesting slice through onc particular type of experience of social distancing and quarantine:

Trent & Allie are an American couple who made it all the way to Ushuaia, where the road ends at the tip of South America, and then back north to Buenos Aires before they could travel no farther. They made it back to family in Washington, DC in the nick of time, and documented their flight from Argentina over three videos: Trying to Escape the Pandemic, We Had to Abandon Our Van and Is it Too Late to Fly Home?

Kaylee and Nate, who go by The Nomadic Movement, traveled with Trent and Allie through Mexico and Central America, but they parted company in Panama when Kaylee and Nate decided to stay an homestead. They have chosen to remain there, and talk about being quarantined in their Forced Into Quarantine In Our School Bus.

Sara and Luca, who call their channel Leave Everything and Wander, are an Italian couple who drove all the way from Alaska to Ushuaia. They document their struggle to find a way to quarantine there in Stranded Abroad.

Christian and Aubry Matney also made it to the end of the road in South America, and they’ve chosen to ride out the pandemic in El Calafate, Argentina, which they document in Van Life in a Pandemic: Quarantine Day 1 and Van Life in a Pandemic: Trapped in South America.

Elsewhere in the world–because the YouTube algorithm does not only prod me to watch drives to Ushuaia:

Eamon & Bec, and Canadian couple who shipped their van to Europe and drove south into Morocco, opted to leave their van in there and fly home while it was still possible, which they vlogged in Abandoning Our Van in Africa.

Jason and Nikki Wynn, who call their channel Gone with the Wynns, are former #Vanlifers who moved on to sailing. They’d previously left their catamaran in Tonga for a holiday break in the U.S., and made a mad dash back to Tonga hoping to ride out the pandemic at sea. They almost made it, but they got quarantined in Fiji, which they describe in We’re Stranded.

We’ll be covering a lot of ground in the upcoming series of posts so I wanted to lay out a bit of a map of where we will be going over time. Like in the early days of cloud computing, there is much confusion around Robotics, RPA, AI, ML, big data, and even infrastructure. I […]

The post The Robotics / RPA / AI / ML / Data / IaaS Stack appeared first on Troy Angrignon.

TL;DR: Many issues can be resolved (easily) through a few reasonable steps. We start by listening and being respectful. Once we understand the problem, we offer an explanation and propose how we might make it right. I am not a customer service expert. That said, I often find myself in a support role. Sometimes I […]

The post How to Deal with Customer Complaints appeared first on Eric Karjaluoto.

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

From Dianna:

How we buy coffee beans in these days – a genuine back-alley transaction.

A virtual hand slap to the good folks at Revolver for supporting our caffeine needs.

OK, fair warning, this didn't work for me, though the problem may be either me, my reading of the instructions, something undocumented, or a glitch on the site. But it's an interesting enough idea that I'm passing it along anyhow. The idea here is that you can create a Google spreadsheet of tagged open educational resources and connect it with an online search service (called Elasticsearch) to search and browse your OER collection (I tried using appbase.io, but there are other cloud Elasticsearch providers out there. This may seem pretty basic, but I can easily imagine this basic application extended with, eg., content-harvesting functions, content summarizers, automated metadata generators, or other analytics services. What would be great is if this worked just by following simple instructions, without programming needed, but we're not quite there yet.

So I'm pacing myself by writing this post on a rainy Sunday to give myself time on a sunny Tuesday to add a few extra minutes on the bicycle. Because, yes, taking care of yourself is the top priority, as Lawrie Phipps writes. But note: this has always been the case. When people ask me about it - whether it's personal self-care, personal learning, career management, whatever - I have always responded with that old adage passed on my the sailors who worked on the top sails: "one hand for the ship, one hand for yorself." And note: self-care has more than just the physical, social, emotional and spiritual dimensions listed here. Self-care for me includes learning, creativity, challenges and adventure.

This is starting to wander deep into sheer QA incompetence territory, and I’m seriously wondering whether I’ll ever upgrade from Mojave at all.

SSH might not be something Apple sees as being essential to most of its user base, but it’s likely the most critical tool for anyone who uses a terminal these days. And they’ve broken it somehow.

How can I trust any of the rest?

This is a “must do” checklist if your using Zoom with your classes! Thanks for sharing @mullalyteach pic.twitter.com/VKiOad27Ei

— Phil Hintz (@phintz) March 30, 2020

Zoom hat gerade einen Lauf. In der Cloud gehostete Videotelefonie, Meetings mit 100 Teilnehmern bis 40 Minuten kostenlos, 300, 500, 1000 Teilnehmer, je nach Lizenz. User lieben die Software, weil sie narrensicher zu bedienen ist.

Aber Zoom hat auch eine dunkle Seite. Das Unternehmen bedient sich einer Reihe fragwürdiger Methoden, die nach und nach ans Licht kommen.

• Der Windows Client leaked Credentials, wenn man eine passende URL schickt.
• The Intercept berichtet, dass die Calls nicht end-to-end-encrypted sondern nur transportverschlüsselt sind, auch wenn die Werbung dies behauptet.
• Motherboard sagt, dass Zoom Email-Adressen leaked, weil die Software fälschlicherweise annimmt, dass Teilnehmer zum selben Unternehmen gehören.
• Apple schritt ein, weil Zoom einen geheimen Web Server auf Macs installierte, um die Installation zu vereinfachen.
• Vice berichtete, dass Zoom heimlich Daten an Facebook sandte. Zoom hat diese Praxis mittlerweile beendet.
• Zoom überwacht seine Benutzer und meldet, wenn ein Konferenzteilnehmer das Videofenster mehr als 30 Sekunden nicht im Vordergrund hat.
• Auf Macs nutzt Zoom typische Malware-Praktiken, um die Software zu installieren, ohne den Nutzer zu fragen.
• Zoom verbirgt die Tatsache, dass man eine Konferenz betreten kann, ohne die Software zu installieren.

Nachdem Zoom wegen seiner Privacy Policy hart kritisiert wurde, hat das Unternehmen sein Verhalten angepasst. Trotzdem bleibt ein Schatten auf dieser Plattform. Man kann sich dort nicht sicher fühlen.

Do you keep getting recommendations for data vis books, maybe even buy them, but don’t make it a priority to read them? Let’s read these books together – and let’s discuss them, to get more out of them. That’s what the Data Vis Book Club is about. Please join us! Here’s what we’ll read next.

After a super well-received Data Vis Book Club in which we discussed six (yes, that was too many) data vis papers, we’ll get back to reading a book. I’m happy to announce that our next one will be the new “Data Visualisation – A Handbook for Data Driven Design; second edition” by Andy Kirk. It’s a dense book, so we’ll focus on reading chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8.

That’s 10am on the US west coast, 1pm on the US east coast, 6pm for readers in the UK & Portugal, 7pm for most other Europeans and 10.30pm in India.

Andy himself will take part in the conversation as well, joining around 45min into the discussion and answering all our questions.

Like always, everyone is welcomed to join! Just open the notepad at the correct date and time and start typing. Many participants will be new to the conversation – we’ll figure it out as we go.

Should you read this book?

Andy Kirk is the founder of the data visualization platform “Visualising Data”, which is crazy 10 years old. If he doesn’t post on his website, Andy travels around, consults and trains people in data visualization. Now that the coronavirus keeps him from traveling, he’s offering online courses. The Data Visualisation Handbook’s second edition we’ll read was published last fall; the first edition is available since 2016.

So should you read this book? I asked Andy. What’s the one thing he hopes people take away from his book? That’s what he replied:

My one thing would be to elevate the importance of the little details that comprise the anatomy of any visualisation work. As creators we are responsible for every single thing that ends up on our screen or page, so it all boils down to positioning visualisation as a game of decisions.

To make the best decisions, you need to be familiar with your options and aware of the things that will influence your choices. In this book I’m attempting to assist beginners and intermediate visualisers navigating through that decision-making process. I want to help them recognise the many different decisions they are going to need to make, and when. I’m then providing them with an awareness of the many available options (eg. here’s a menu of charts) but then equipping them with the critical thinking skills to reason what should be their ultimate choice.

Sounds good to you? Then read the book with us!

But why do we only read a few chapters?

This time, we’ll do something new: Instead of telling y’all to read the whole book, we’ll focus on discussing chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8. That’s because Andy’s book – as you will notice once you hold it in your hands – is a fairly big one, densely filled with information.

In this way, it’s similar to Tamara Munzner’s “Visualization Analysis & Design” that we read in 2018. Back then, we tried to split the discussion up into two sessions – and nobody showed up for the second one.

So we’re trying a different approach this time: I asked Andy to name the “must-read” chapters; the chapters that come with the most interesting information even for advanced data visualization designers. Of course, every chapter in his book is worth reading, so it was a hard decision for him – but we decided on five chapters that will give you a good idea of what this book is about.

A man and his book.

Consider reading the rest of the book, too, if you feel like the five chapters were a great use of your time!

How does the book club work?

1. You get the Data Visualisation handbook. Ask your local library to order it for you (if it’s still open), buy it, borrow it from a friend, ask around on your preferred social network.

2. We all read the book. That’s where the fun begins! Please mention @datavisclub or use the hashtag #datavisclub if you want to share your process, insights, and surprises – I’ll make sure to tweet them out as @datavisclub, as motivation for us all.

3. We get together to talk about the book. This will happen digitally on Tuesday, 12th of May 2020 at 5pm UTC over at notes.datawrapper.de/p/bookclub-andykirk.

It won’t be a call or a video chat; we’ll just write down our thoughts. The discussion will be structured into three questions:

Three questions

During the conversation, I’ll ask these three questions in the following order:

1 What was your general impression of the book? Would you recommend working through it, and if so, to whom?

2 What was most inspiring, insightful or surprising while you worked through the book? What did you learn that you didn’t expect to?

3 Having read the book, what will you do differently the next time you visualize data?

For each question, you can prepare an answer in 1-2 sentences and paste it into the notes once I ask the question during the conversation. If you can’t find the time to prepare anything at all just come by and chat – we’ll quickly get into discussion mode.

After going through the three questions within ca 45min, Andy will join us to answer questions we might have about the book.

More questions?

Here’s a short FAQ for you, in case you have more questions:

So what will happen, exactly, during the book club?

A digital book club is a new experience for many of us. See how our book club discussions have looked like in the past:

You can also read the review of the first book club, to learn how people found the experience.

This is what others have said about some of the last book club discussions:

• “Just wanted to say this was my first time joining the book club and I JUST LOVED IT! Thank you everyone! This experience was incredible.”
• “Such a great experience connecting with the authors and fans of this unique book that I love.”
• “Great experience! It was fun reading all of the questions and answers as they popped up and to scroll up and down the screen to check out any new comments.”
• “OMG! First time that I do it and I just loved it!!! I like that I can write everything I’m thinking about live and comment on other people’s ideas easily.”

Why don’t we do a call? Why the notepad?

Because it works well for introverts & people who prefer to stay anonymous in the discussion. Plus, the documentation of our meeting writes itself.

I can’t make it on this date / this time.

Do you have a lunch date? Vacation? Need to bring the kids to bed? No problem! The conversation will be archived in the notes and can still be extended over the next day(s).

I’m very, very much looking forward to working through Andy’s new book with all of you. If you have any more questions, write in the comments, at lisa@datawrapper.de or to Lisa / Datawrapper on Twitter. Also, make sure to follow @datavisclub (we have more than 4000 followers 🎉, so it’s likely you already follow us), to stay up-to-date and get a dose of motivation from time to time.

In passing, an observation…

Many OU modules require students to provide their own computer subject to a university wide “minimum computer specificiation” policy. This policy is a cross-platform one (students can run Windows, Mac or Linux machines) but does allow students to run quite old versions of operating systems. Because some courses require students to install desktop software applications, this also means that tablets and netbooks (eg Chromebooks) do not pass muster.

On the module I work primarily on, we supply students with a virtual machine preconfigured to meet the needs of the course. The virtual machine runs on a cross-platform application (Virtualbox) and will run on a min spec machine, although there is a hefty disk space requirement: 15GB of free space required to install and run the VM (plus another 15-20GB you should always have free anyway if you want your computer to keep running properly, be able to install updates etc.)

Part of the disk overhead comes from another application we require students to use called vagrant. This is a “provisioner” application that manages the operation of the VirtualBox virtual machine from a script we provide to students. The vagrant application caches the raw image of the VM we distribute so that fresh new instances of it can be created. (This means students can throw away the wokring copy of their VM and create a fresh one if they break things; trust me, in distance edu, this is often the best fix.)

One of the reasons why we (that is, I…) took the vagrant route for managing the VM was that it provided a route to ship VM updates to students, if required: just provide them with a new Vagrantfile (a simple text file) that is used to manage the VM and add in an update routine to it. (In four years of running the course, we havenlt actually done this…)

Another reason for using Vagrant was that it provides an abstraction layer between starting and stopping the virtual machine (via a simple commandline command such as vagrant up, or desktop shortcut that runs a similar command) and the virtual machine application that runs the virtual machine. In our case, vagrant instructs Virtualbox running on the student’s own computer, but we can also create Vagrantfiles that allow students to launch the VM on a remote host if they have credentials (and credit…) for that remote host. For example, the VM could be run on Amazon Web Services/AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Linode, or Digital Ocean. Or on an OU host, if we had one.

For the next presentation of the module, I am looking to move away from the Virtualbox VM and move the VM into a Docker container†. Docker offers an abstraction layer in much the same way that vagrant does, but using a different virtualisation model. Specifically, a simple Docker command can be used to launch a Dockerised VM on a student’s own computer, or on a remote host (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean, etc.)

† We could use separate linked Docker containers for each service used in the course — Jupyter notebooks, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, OpenRefine — or we could use a monolithic container that includes all the services. There are advantages and disadvantages to each that I really do need to set down on paper/in a blog post at some point…

So how does this help in distance education?

I’ve already mentioned that we require students to provide a certain minimum specification computer, but for some courses, this hampers the activities we can engage students in. For example, in our databases course, giving students access to a large database running on their own computer may not be possible; for an upcoming machine learning course, access to a GPU is highly desirable for anything other than really simple training examples; in an updated introductory robotics module, using realistic 3D robot simulators for even simple demos requires access to a gamer level (GPU supported) computer.

In a traditional university, physical access to computers and computer labs running pre-installed, university licensed software packages on machines capable of providing them for students who can’t run the same on their own machines may be available.

In my (distance learning) institution, access to university hosted software is not the norm: students are expected to provide their own computer hardware (at least to minimum spec level) and install the software on it themselves (albeit software we provide, and software that we often build installers for, at least for users of Windows machines).

What we don’t do, however, is either train students in how to provision their own remote servers, or provide software to them that can easily be provisioned on remote servers. (I noted above that our vagrant manager could be used to deploy VMs to remote servers, and I did produce demo Vagrantfiles to support this, but it went no further than that.)

This has made me realise that we make OUr distance learning students pretty much wholly responsible for meeting any computational needs we require of them, whilst at the same time not helping them develop skills that allow that them to avail themselves of self-service, affordable, metered remote computation-on-tap (albeit with the constraint of requiring a netwrok connection to access the remote service).

So what I’m thinking now is that now really is the time to start upskilling OUr distance learners, at least in disciplines that are computationally related, early on and in the following ways:

1. a nice to have — provide some academic background: teach students about what virtualisation is;

2. an essential skill, but with a really low floor — technical skills training: show students how to launch virtual servers of their own.

We should also make software available that is packaged in a way that the same environment can be run locally or remotely.

Another nice to have might be helping students reason about personal economic consequences, such as the affordability of different approaches in their local situation, which is to say: buying a computer and running things locally vs. buying something that can run a browser and run things remotely over a network connection.

As much as anything, this is about real platform independence, being open as to, and agnostic of, what physical compute device a student has available at home (whether it’s a gamer spec desktop computer or a bottom of the range Chromebook) and providing them with both software packages that really can run anywhere and the tools and skills to help students run them anywhere.

In many respects, using abstraction layer provisioning tools like vagrant and Docker, the skills to run software remotely are the same as running them locally, with the additional overhead that students have a once only requirement to sign up to a remote host and set up credentials that allow them to access the remote service from the provisioner service that runs on their local machine.

Recently on Twitter there was a maintainer of a Python project who had a couple of bugs filed against their project due to builds failing (this particular project doesn't provide wheels, only sdists). Eventually it came out that the project was using a pyproject.toml file because that's how you configure Black and not for any other purpose. This isn't the first time I have seen setuptools users use pyproject.toml because they were "told to by <insert name of tool>" without knowing the entire point behind the file. And so I decided to write this blog post to try and explain to setuptools users why pyproject.toml exists and what it does as it's the future of packaging in the Python ecosystem (if you are not a conda user 😉).

PEP 518 and pyproject.toml

I've blogged about this before, but the purpose of PEP 518 was to come up with a way for projects to specify what build tools they required. That's it, real simple and straightforward. Before PEP 518 and the introduction of pyproject.toml there was no way for a project to tell a tool like pip what build tools it required in order to build a wheel (let alone an sdist). Now setuptools has a setup_requires argument to specify what is necessary to build a project, but your can't read that setting unless you have setuptools installed, which meant you couldn't declare you needed setuptools to read the setting in setuptools. This chicken-and-egg problem is why tools like virtualenv install setuptools by default and why pip always injects setuptools and wheel when running a setup.py file regardless of whether you explicitly installed  it. Oh, and don't even try to rely on a specific version of setuptools for buildling your project as there was no way to specify that; you had to make do with whatever the user happened to have installed.

But PEP 518 and pyproject.toml changed that. Now a tool like pip can read pyproject.toml, see what build tools are specified in it, and install those in a virtual environment to build your project. That means you can rely on a specific version of setuptools and 'wheel' if you want. Heck, you can even build with a tool other than setuptools if you want (e.g. flit or Poetry, but since these other tools require pyproject.toml their users are already familiar with what's going on). The key point is assumptions no longer need to be made about what is necessary to build your project, which frees up the packaging ecosystem to experiment and grow.

PEP 517 and building wheels

With PEP 518 in place, tools knew what needed to be available in order to build a project into a wheel (or sdist). But how do you produce a wheel or sdist from a project that has a pyproject.toml? This is where PEP 517 comes in. That PEP specifies how build tools are to be executed to build both sdists and wheels. So PEP 518 gets the build tools installed and PEP 517 gets them executed. This opens the door to using other tools by standardizing how to run build tools. Before, there was no standardized way to build a wheel or sdist except with python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel which isn't really flexible; there's no way for the tool running the build to pass in environment details as appropriate, for instance. PEP 517 helped solve that problem.

One other change that PEP 517 & 518 has led to is build isolation. Now that projects can specify arbitrary build tools, tools like pip have to build projects in virtual environments to make sure each project's build tools don't conflict with another project's build tool needs. This also helps with reproducible builds by making sure your build tools are consistent.

Unfortunately this frustrates some setuptools users when they didn't realize a setup.py files and/or build environment have become structured in such a way that they can't be built in isolation. For instance, one user was doing their builds offline and didn't have setuptools and 'wheel' in their local cache of wheels (aka their local wheelhouse), so when pip tried to build a project in isolation it failed as pip couldn't find setuptools and 'wheel' to install into the build virtual environment.

Tools standardizing on pyproject.toml

An interesting side-effect of PEP 518 trying to introduce a standard file that all projects should (eventually) have is that non-build development tools realized they now had a file where they could put their own configuration. I say this is interesting because originally PEP 518 disallowed this, but people chose to ignore this part of the PEP 😄.  We eventually updated the PEP to allow for this use-case since it became obvious people liked the idea of centralizing configuration data in a single file.

And so now projects like Black, coverage.py, towncrier, and tox (in a way) allow you to specify their configurations in pyproject.toml instead of in a separate file. Occasionally you do hear people lament the fact that they are adding yet another configuration file to their project due to pyproject.toml. What I don't think people realize, though, is these project could have also created their own configuration files (and in fact both coverage.py and tox do support their own files). And so, thanks to projects consolidating around pyproject.toml, there's actually an argument to be made there are fewer configuration files than before thanks to pyproject.toml.

How to use pyproject.toml with setuptools

Hopefully I have convinced you to introduce pyproject.toml into your setuptools-based project so you get benefits like build isolation and the ability to specify the version of setuptools you want to depend on. Now you might be wondering what your pyproject.toml should consist of? Unfortunately no one has had the time to document all of this for setuptools, but luckily the issue tracking adding that document outlines what is necessary:

[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools >= 40.6.0", "wheel"]
build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"

With that you get to participate in thePEP 517 world of standards! 😉 And as I said, you can now rely on a specific version of setuptools and get build isolation as well (which is why the current directory is not put on sys.path automatically; you will need sys.path.insert(0, os.path.dirname(__file__)) or equivalent if you're importing local files).

But there's a bonus if you use a pyproject.toml file with a setup.cfg configuration for setuptools: you don't need a setup.py file anymore! Since tools like pip are going to call setuptools using the PEP 517 API instead of setup.py it means you can delete that setup.py file!

Unfortunately there is one hitch with dropping the setup.py file: if you want editable installs you still need a setup.py shim, but that's true of any build tool that isn't setuptools as there isn't a standard for editable installs (yet; people have talked about standardizing it and sketched it out, but no one has had the time to implement a proof-of-concept and then the eventual PEP). Luckily the shim to keep editable installs is really small:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import setuptools

if __name__ == "__main__":
    setuptools.setup()

You could even simplify this down to import setuptools; setuptools.setup() if you really wanted to.

Where all of this is going

What all of this comes down to is the Python packaging ecosystem is working towards basing itself on standards. And those standards are all working towards standardizing artifacts and how to work with them. For instance, if we all know how wheels are formatted and how to install them then you don't have to care about how the wheel is made, just that a wheel exists for the thing you want to install and that it follows the appropriate standards. If you keep pushing this out and standardize more and more it makes it much easier for tools to communicate via artifacts and provide freedom for people to use whatever software they want to produce those artifacts.

For instance, you may have noticed I keep saying "tools like pip" instead of just saying "pip". That's been entirely on purpose. By making all of these standards it means tools don't have to rely solely on pip to do things because "that's how pip does it". As an example, tox could install a wheel by itself by using a library like pep517 to do the building of a wheel and then use another library like distlib to do the wheel installation.

Standards also take out the guessing as to whether something is on purpose or not. This becomes important to make sure everyone agrees on how things should work. There's also coherency as standards start to build on each other and flow into one another nicely. There's also less arguing (eventually 😉) as everyone works toward the same thing that everyone agreed to earlier.

It also takes pressure off of setuptools. It doesn't have to try and be everything to everyone as people can now choose the tool that best fits their project and development style. Same goes for pip.

Besides, don't we all want the platypus? 😉

How are you holding up, really?

These are such spectacularly weird times, absolutely unlike anything else we’ve ever faced. Part of me feels OK with it all, but I’m noticing that there are certain tasks my brain can deal with and others that I’m REALLY struggling with. How about you? What’s the canary in the coal mine that tells you your brain isn’t quite as on board with this scale of change as you thought?

One thing I’m trying to do – as well as develop strategies to eventually get some PhD writing done – is to get better at all the things that I’m doing to distract myself. Mostly that’s making music (obviously), and photography. I bought a new lens about two weeks before we got locked down, so it’s been good getting to know what that makes possible. And for my troubles, I end up with a bunch of new promo shots. Next up: video! Going to film some stuff for my Bandcamp subsribers soon…

Hope you’re finding enough ways to stay in touch with people and get space to be honest about how all this is impacting you. Stay safe, friends. x

Here are some of the pics from Tuesday:

Maybe you’ve noticed it already: Since last Friday, Datawrapper comes with a redesigned user interface that helps you refine how your bar charts look like – and we’re very excited about that. This change concerns all bar charts, split bars, stacked bars, grouped bars and bullet bars.

This blog post explains why, and what changes exactly. If you want to dive in immediately, simply create a bar chart here or hover over the stacked bar chart below and click “Edit this chart” in the top right:

“Customize colors”: Drag & rename categories

You can still create the same great-looking bar charts with Datawrapper. We changed the user interface for the bar chart options, but we haven’t changed what you can do with them. With one exception: the “Customize colors” feature. You can now

• change the order of colors in the color key by dragging & dropping the items in the list
• change the text of the category in the color key. If two categories have the same color and the same text, they will show up as one category.

See how it works in practice here:

With these new options, there’s no need anymore to drag columns or rename them in Excel or in step 2 of the Datawrapper chart editor (“Check & Describe”).

The same options with a cleaned-up look

Besides adding options to the “Customize Color” feature, we did a thorough spring-cleaning of the bar chart options: Categorizing them in a new way, gently rephrasing them where needed and aligning them more properly. All of this hopefully makes creating bar charts more intuitive; more simple. We believe that our new interface is easier to “read” than the old one, so that you spend less time searching for options.

We also made the structure of the options more consistent across our bar chart types where possible. It doesn’t make sense to offer the same options in all chart types. But you will now find similar features in similar places, be it in stacked bars or bullet bars.

Also new: Our interface now only shows the options that are relevant for you. If you don’t want to show values, for example, there’s no need for options such as “Value alignment” or “Number format”. So we don’t show them if you turn off “Show values”.

One of many switches you’ll find in our new interface.

Behind the switches, you will find more specific settings when needed. This makes for a cleaner look and enables us to add new, specialist features in the future without overwhelming data vis beginners.

More helper texts

Last, but not least: More helper texts. We want to help you as best as possible along your journey to create a beautiful chart – be it with our Academy, little question marks next to options or our support. We’re thrilled to now offer more explanations directly in the interface, e.g. to answer the question why you can’t use a certain option in a specific case:

There’s more to come

If you’ve used different Datawrapper visualization types before, the helper texts and switches are nothing new. And indeed: Our locator maps, pie and donut charts, column charts and our tables already have the new interface. Soon you’ll find the blue switches in our dot plots, range plots and arrow plots, and in the next coming months in all our visualization types.

All our bar charts come with the new look. Next up are dot plots, range plots and arrow plots.

Thanks to our software engineer Simon Jockers for working on this project for weeks on end! We hope you like the result. For some of you, the new interface might be a bit of a change. If you’re a heavy Datawrapper user, it might take some time to get used to the new placements of your favorite settings. We believe it will be worth it. If you have any feedback, question or worries about this change, do let us know at support@datawrapper.de. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Although I work from home pretty much all of the time anyway, I’m rubbish in online meetings and tend to get distracted, often by going on a quick web trawl for things related to whatever happens to be in mind just as the meeting starts…

So for example, yesterday, I started off wondering about mortality stats relating to “the thing”. Public Health England publish a dashboard with some numbers and charts on it but it’s really hard to know what to make of the numbers. You can also get COVID-19 Daily Deaths from NHS England reported against the following constraints:

All deaths are recorded against the date of death rather than the date the deaths were announced. Interpretation of the figures should take into account the fact that totals by date of death, particularly for most recent days, are likely to be updated in future releases. For example as deaths are confirmed as testing positive for COVID-19, as more post-mortem tests are processed and data from them are validated. Any changes are made clear in the daily files.

These figures will be updated at 2pm each day and include confirmed cases reported at 5pm the previous day. Confirmation of COVID-19 diagnosis, death notification and reporting in central figures can take up to several days and the hospitals providing the data are under significant operational pressure. This means that the totals reported at 5pm on each day may not include all deaths that occurred on that day or on recent prior days.

These figures do not include deaths outside hospital, such as those in care homes. This approach makes it possible to compile deaths data on a daily basis using up to date figures.

If the conditions for adding counts to the tally for covid deaths are people who test positive post mortem, then the asymptomatic boy racer who kills themself in a motorbike accident whilst making use of open roads will count, but that’s not really the sort of number we’re interested in.

The ONS (Official of National Statistics) look like they’re trying to capture the number of deaths where “the thing” is the likely cause of death (Counting deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19)), adding a Covid19 tab to the weekly provisional mortality stats release along with a related bulletin and covid19 deaths breakout collection:

I don’t think these stats are even labelled as “experimental”, so from my humble position I think the ONS should be commended on the way they’ve managed to pull this new release together so quickly, albeit with a lag in the numbers that results from due process around death certificate registration etc.

One thing that is perhaps unfortunate is that the NHS weekly winter sitreps stopped a few weeks ago; these stats track several hospital and critical care related measures at the hospital level, but they’re only released a few months a year. Whilst continuing the release would have added a burden, I think a lot of planners may have found them useful. (I hope the planners who really need them have access to them anyway.) By the by, some daily data collections relating to managing “the thing” were described in a letter from the PHE Incident Director at Public Health England’s National Infection Service on March 11th.

I also note the suspension of various primary care and secondary care data collections, which means that spotting various side effects of the emergency response activity may not be obvious for some time.

As far as the ONS go, they have published their own statement on ensuring the best possible information during COVID-19 through safe data collection as well as a special ONS — Coronavirus (COVID-19) landing page for all related datasets they are able to release.

[April 2nd, 2020: the ONS have also started publishing several more “faster” society and economic indicators.]

Pondering the ONS response, I started wondering whether there’s a history anywhere of the genesis and evolution of each ONS statistical measure. In my “listen to the online meeting as radio while doing an unrelated web trawl”, I turned up a few potential starting points relating the the history of official stats, including this presented paper on the evolution of the United Kingdom statistical system, which looks like it might have appeared in published form in this (special issue?) of the Statistical Journal of the IAOS – Volume 24, issue 1,2 .

The Royal Statistical Society’s StatsLife online magazine also has a History of Statistics Section tag which pulls up more possibly useful starting points…

Broadening my search a little, I also found this briefing on sources of historical statistics from one of my favourite sources ever, the House of Commons Library; in turn this led to a more general web search on "sources of statistics" site:commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings which turns up a wealth of briefings on sourcing UK stats in particular subject areas.

And finally, for anyone out there who does have proper skills in the area and the ability to commit resource, there are various initiatives out there looking for volunteers. In particular:

• an initiative co-ordinated by The Royal Society:  Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic (RAMP) — A Call for Assistance, Addressed to the Scientific Modelling Community

• a call from the Alan Turing Institute for research projects on live datasets: Call for COVID-19 rapid response data science taskforce

Others with less specific or specialist skill might consider many of the other opportunities for technical sprints in communities that might typically lack access to cognitive surplus in developer communities. For example, this initiative exploring and developing Digital Tools for churches during the Coronavirus. (Don’t let “churches” put you off: for “church” read “body of people” or “community” and go from there…)

Grocery store shelves have been cleaned out of supplies, despite the fact that there is currently no lack of food in the country. Although the empty shelves may be worrisome, there is no need to grab that last box of keto pea protein linguine if it’s not something you already eat.

Panic-buying every jar of pasta sauce in the store may also affect those who don’t have the means or the space to stockpile, in particular people who don’t have the financial ability to spend hundreds of dollars on groceries at once. “That is probably about half of us, especially during this time when many of us are not working or can’t work, with limited incomes or no incomes coming in,” says Lorrene Ritchie, director of the Nutrition Policy Institute at the University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. “The last thing a family in that situation can do is go out and spend $500 on groceries.”

Here are tips on how to shop for food responsibly, without overstocking your bunker.

Last year, my wiki went down at dougbelshaw.com/wiki. For reasons too boring to go into, I was unable to resurrect it. This made me sad, particularly because there was some stuff on there that didn’t exist anywhere else.

After a brief period of mourning, I got on with my life. Noel De Martin, however, decided to do some digging via the Wayback Machine, and found several pages, which I’m copying-and-pasting to my blog for posterity.

What follows is a snapshot of my ‘Collaboration style’ page from October 2016.

This page is influenced by Peter Drucker’s excellent short book Managing Oneself and the section of Gwern Branwen’s website on his own collaboration style. Although slightly tangential, I’ve also always found Buster Benson’s Codex Vitae a useful thing to return to on occasion.

Right now, I’m 35. I was in formal education for 27 of those years, and had an employer for 11 of them. I’m now a consultant and everything I do is what comes under the broad umbrella of ‘knowledge work’:

Knowledge workers have high degrees of expertise, education, or experience, and the primary purpose of their jobs involves the creation, distribution or application of knowledge. (Thomas Davenport, Thinking For a Living

The problem is that this means that it’s difficult to know how to fit into the big picture. Here’s how Peter Drucker puts it:

[M]ost people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong.

[…] [K]nowing the answer to these questions enables a person to say to an opportunity, an offer, or an assignment, “Yes, I will do that. But this is the way I should be doing it. This is the way it should be structured. This is the way the relationships should be. These are the kind of results you should expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am.” (Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself)

In other words, you should always be on the front foot. Don’t accept other people’s expectations, but (as Socrates exhorted) we should know ourselves well enough to be able to accept or reject work based on introspection.

The person who has learned that he or she does not perform well in a big organization should have learned to say no to a position in one. The person who has learned that he or she is not a decision maker should have learned to say no to a decision-making assignment. (Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself)

Using these two examples as an initial lens, I do enjoy taking decisions when I feel like there’s been a proper process leading to that point. I certainly do not enjoy working within large organisations. I dislike hierarchy and bureaucracy intensely. I’m also quite different in terms of emotional make-up at different times of the year. As an ambivert, I find that the more extroverted side of my personality comes out between the spring and autumnal equinoxes, and for the other half of the year I’m more on the introverted side. I guess this can be frustrating for people who assume (or expect) consistency.

Elsewhere, Drucker mentions that another important question to ask oneself is, “Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment? I find this a false binary. While I don’t appreciate arbitrary deadlines (usually a function of an oppressive hierarchy) I structure my own fairly predictable environment. However, I mix this up by frequent flights into serendipity in both my reading and travel, as well as taking fallow days where I’m purposefully ‘unproductive’. These ‘Doug days’ as I’ve come to call them, are the reason I strive to work a four-day week.

Even people who understand the importance of taking responsibility for relationships often do not communicate sufficiently with their associates. They are afraid of being thought presumptuous or inquisitive or stupid. They are wrong. Whenever someone goes to his or her associates and says, “This is what I am good at. This is how I work. These are my values. This is the contribution I plan to concentrate on and the results I should be expected to deliver,” the response is always, “This is most helpful. But why didn’t you tell me earlier?” (Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself)

I’m strong on values and don’t like them compromised. I set great store by my logical approach, although I do try to temper that with empathy. The thing that I cannot stand more than anything in co-workers (and, indeed, my children) is when it’s obvious that the other person isn’t trying their best. There’s always cases where there’s genuine reasons for soft-peddling, but most of the time I expect people to bring their A-game.

My contribution to projects is often to problematise (assumed) simplicity, or to do the reverse – to simplify the complex. In this, I bring to bear my undergraduate philosophical training, as well as my postgraduate studies around ambiguity and metaphor. I find that we as humans think primarily through metaphor, even when we don’t realise, and don’t realise that there are different types of ambiguity.

Knowledge workers in particular have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference? (Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself)

The difficulty in working in a field like edtech is that (as I argued in a recent post) it’s not really a coherent field or discipline. As such, it’s difficult to see where the boundaries are, and therefore what needs to be done. I suppose I bumble along as best I can using my knowledge and skills, but I certainly think there’s many of us who would benefit from adding scaffold around us.

Last year, my wiki went down at dougbelshaw.com/wiki. For reasons too boring to go into, I was unable to resurrect it. This made me sad, particularly because there was some stuff on there that didn’t exist anywhere else.

After a brief period of mourning, I got on with my life. Noel De Martin, however, decided to do some digging via the Wayback Machine, and found several pages, which I’m copying-and-pasting to my blog for posterity.

What follows is a snapshot of my ‘Daily reading’ page from July 2017.

This page helps list out the sites and services that constitute my digital information environment. It’s too difficult to decide, especially in this day an age, where ‘entertainment’ starts, and ‘information’ begins, so I’ve included everything I look at regularly.

Newspaper

• The i (print subscription)
• The Guardian (digital subscription)

Aggregators

• Alltop
• Arts & Literature Daily
• Hacker News (although I tend to use hckr news)
• Nuzzel
• popurls
• Product Hunt
• Skimfeed
• Spigot
• Techmeme

Newsletters

I try out other ones, but these are my favourites:

• Austin Kleon
• Benedict Evans
• Crossed Lines
• Dialogic Learning Weekly
• Documentally
• EdTech Factotum
• Education Design Lab
• EFFector
• Farnam Street Brain Food
• Freshly Brewed Thoughts
• Go Weekly
• Hack Education Weekly News
• Jocelyn K. Glei
• The Journal
• Nesta
• Offscreen Dispatch
• OLDaily
• Orbital Operations
• Product Hunt Daily Digest
• Read Write Respond
• Recomendo
• Remotive
• Ryan Holiday’s Reading Newsletter
• The School of Life
• Seth Godin
• Sunday Dispatches
• The Sprint
• TL;DR
• Traces
• Visual Thinkery
• We Seek

Podcasts

As with the newsletters, I subscribe to other podcasts on a regular basis, but here are my go-to ones that I wouldn’t want to miss:

• 99% Invisible
• The Adam Buxton Podcast
• The Contrafabulists
• Hardcore History
• Freakonomics Radio
• Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4
• From Our Own Correspondent (BBC)
• In Our Time (BBC)
• Invisibilia
• Philosophy Bites
• Song Exploder
• Team Human
• Thinking Allowed (BBC)

Routines

• Lifehacker / How I Work
• My Morning Routine
• The Setup

Internet culture

• Emojipedia
• Giphy
• Kaomoji
• Know Your Meme

Music

• Brain FM
• Hype Machine
• SomaFM

Hastings Street, 1945 from the Vancouver Archives.

Diana Sampson provides some wonderful images from the archives on the Facebook group Nostalgic/Sentimental Pictures of Vancouver. This photo of Hastings Street must have been taken after the end of World War Two as there is toilet paper streaming on the street. That was rationed during the war.

You can see the road striping showing where vehicles are to park,  the tram tracks and the granite insets abutting the street curb. There’s a few things  unusual in this photo.  The stationer’s sign projects directly across the city sidewalk. And the pedestrians are walking on the left side of the sidewalk instead of bearing to the usual right.

Fatalities from Covid-19 range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. Nobody knows for sure. These predictions are based on statistical models, which are based on data, which aren’t consistent and reliable yet. FiveThirtyEight, whose bread and butter is models and forecasts, breaks down the challenges of making a model and why they haven’t provided any.

Tags: coronavirus, FiveThirtyEight, modeling

In many cities right now, supporting your local restaurant means ordering takeout or delivery, but even if you’re not dining in a crowded restaurant, you may be wondering how vigilant you should be about the food that comes via these delivery services. (You may be wondering about sanitizing your groceries, too, which we’ve also addressed.) Here are the best things you can do when you’re receiving delivered restaurant food.

As more and more people move to remote work and increased social distancing measures, people’s behaviours are changing significantly.

For some, the changes are good. Communication platforms, like Microsoft Teams and Skype, as well as Slack and video conferencing services like Duo have seen massive upticks in use. These shifts are fueled by people working remotely or using these tools to keep in touch with friends and family.

However, not all behavioural changes are good. Podcasts, for example, are suffering thanks to changes caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. One might think the opposite would be true — if people have more time on their hands, they’d listen to more podcasts. But data from Podtrac, as reported by The New Consumer, shows the opposite.

Podtrac, which analyzes podcasts publisher data, shows U.S. podcast audiences are down 10 percent over the last two weeks.

Further, The New Consumer reports that Marco Arment, the developer behind popular iOS podcast app Overcast, saw a 20 percent drop in user sessions for his app. Arment cited Apple’s analytics and noted that weekend usage seemed unchanged.

While the data doesn’t address Canadian podcast fans, podcast audiences are likely down here as well. For myself, I’ve listened to maybe two or three podcasts since transitioning to working remotely in the second week of March. Usually, I’d listen to one or two podcasts a day while commuting to and from the office.

Other podcast listeners at MobileSyrup said they were listening to fewer casts while their viewership of streaming services like Netflix was up. On the other hand, MobileSyrup managing editor Patrick O’Rourke said his podcast listening was up, in part because he played episodes in the background while gaming or doing tasks around his house.

Although podcast listening as a whole is down, not all types of podcasts are. The New Consumer notes that news podcasts have grown alongside the pandemic, while other genres like comedy, sports and true crime have dipped.

What’s most interesting about the data is seeing how much something like podcasts depends on people’s routines. Likely, many people listen to podcasts while commuting and, with a significant increase in remote work, people don’t have their commutes to listen to podcasts anymore. It remains to be seen if the trend continues, or if people find new time to listen to podcasts again.

Source: Podtrac, The New Consumer Via: 9to5Mac

The post People are listening to less podcasts, potentially due to less commuting appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Famous game developer Niantic has bought the San Francisco-based 3D mapping startup 6D.ai.

Neither company has shared the terms of the deal, but Niantic has confirmed the acquisition. 

6D.ai is working on developing a 3D map of the world that can run in the cloud and on everyone’s smartphones. This is a lofty goal, but it’s something many people claim we’ll need for high functioning and multiplayer capable augmented reality.

This is something that more established tech giants like Apple, Google and Uber are also working on for a variety of reasons. While Niantic isn’t as large of an operation as those outfits, it does have a significant bankroll. Last year, it’s estimated to have made roughly $900 million USD (approximately $1.2 billion CAD).

Niantic doesn’t only need this AR tech for Pokémon Go. It also has something that it calls ‘Niantic’s Real World Platform,’ and TechCrunch reports that this is where 6D.ai’s code will make the most impact.

That said, the primary examples the company gives are from Pokémon Go. On its blog, Niantic says, “experience Pokémon habitats in the real world or watch dragons fly through the sky and land on buildings in real-time. Imagine our favourite characters taking us on a walking tour of hidden city gems, or friends leaving personal notes for others to find later.”

The Real World Platform is a set of tools to help developers build AR experiences for games and enterprise use cases.

Source: Niantic Via: TechCrunch

The post Niantic buys 3D mapping startup to boost its AR technology appeared first on MobileSyrup.

With the ongoing public health crisis caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, many companies have cancelled upcoming events.

Microsoft is no different, having already cancelled the in-person Build event in favour of an online event. Along with Build, Microsoft has also cancelled its in-person MVP Summit and Inspire 2020 partner conference. However, the company could go much further.

According to a report from ZDNet, Microsoft plans to make its external and internal events for fiscal year 2021 digital events. The company’s fiscal year 2021 runs from July 2020 until June 2021. The news comes via sources within the company.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to ZDNet that the company would switch its events to digital ones for the remainder of 2020. The full quote is below:

“In light of the challenges presented by Covid-19, we are adjusting our event calendar and strategy. For the remainder of 2020 we are embracing the opportunity to experiment with new platforms to provide our partners, customers and developers the highest quality, digital-first experiences.” 

Additionally, when asked about 2021, the spokesperson said “We will continue to evaluate the event landscape, but that is what we have to share at this time.”

ZDNet goes on to report that Microsoft officials began notifying internal teams on March 31st about the decision to cancel most of the fiscal year 2021 events. The company’s thinking is that by cancelling the conferences early, it gives teams more time to develop better digital events to take their place. However, Microsoft hasn’t decided to make every event in fiscal year 2021 digital.

Given that we don’t know how long the COVID-19 pandemic will last, this could be a wise move from Microsoft. The company appears to be getting out ahead of potential cancellations to ensure the replacement is optimal.

Source: ZDNet

The post Microsoft reportedly going digital with most events extending into 2021 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Zoom is reportedly leaking users’ email addresses and photos and giving strangers the ability to start a video call with them.

This latest report comes from Vice, and indicates that there is a flaw in Zoom’s ‘Company Directory’ setting. The setting adds other people to a user’s list of contacts if they made an account with an email address that shares the same domain.

The setting is supposed to make it easier for people to find their coworkers within the same company. However, several Zoom users are reporting that they signed up with a personal email address and that Zoom grouped them together with thousands of other people.

By being grouped together, their personal information has been shared with thousands of people who are now able to call them.

A Zoom user told Vice that they were able to access 995 people’s names, images and email addresses after they were pooled together with other users.

Zoom blocked the domain after Vice contacted it about the issue. The company notes that it “maintains a blacklist of domains and regularly proactively identifies domains to be added.” It should be noted that most popular domains, such as Gmail and Outlook, are already blocked.

There is also a section on the Zoom website that allows users to request other domains to be blocked by the ‘Company Directory’ feature.

It seems that as Zoom gains popularity amid the COVID-19 pandemic, issues around the platform are coming to the surface. For instance, last week, Vice noted that Zoom was sending analytics data to Facebook. The platform had to then update its iOS app in response to the issue.

Lawmakers in the U.S. have asked the platform to implement security measures as its popularity continues to surge.

Image credit: Zoom

Source: Vice

The post Zoom leaking users’ email addresses and photos through flawed feature: report appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Do you sometimes feel glad, sad, bad or mad during a Sprint? Do your emotions cover an array of feelings from Sprint-to-Sprint? If so, SprintMojis are for you!

Hand-crafted from real-world, Sprint experiences, SprintMojis help you communicate just how you feel before, during or after a Sprint!

Let's explore some uses.

Are you happy and optimistic at the start of your Sprint?

Did you get a bunch of unplanned work mid-Sprint?

Did you abandon all good practices and perform all sorts of nastiness just to finish everything at the end of the Sprint?

SprintMojis are the perfect visualization for all of your Sprint feelings!

Use them in retrospectives, use them in stand up meetings, use them in chat tools or even on niko-niko boards.

WARNING: Sprintmojis are not recommended for those who have studied Lean and abandoned Sprints (or fixed-length Iterations) in favor of pull-based systems, flow and kanban.

Okay, so without further ado, here are your full set of Sprintmojis (with a download link below)! Special thanks to Julius Jervoso for the illustrations!

Want the full set of SprintMojis images? Simply click here for the archive.

The post SprintMojis appeared first on Industrial Logic.

Slack now has an app to integrate Microsoft Teams call features into its own chat app.

The new Microsoft Teams Calls beta app arrived mere days after Slack revealed it was working on the integration. However, the app only allows Slack users to launch Teams calls from Slack. It doesn’t allow Slack users to participate directly in a Teams call through the Slack app.

Regardless, the new integration will certainly be a welcome one, especially in workspaces where smaller, individual teams may use Slack while the organization as a whole uses Teams.

Slack users can set Microsoft Teams Calls as the default calling provider with the app. Further, they can see who’s already in a call and when the call started before they join it. On top of that, Event reminders from the Outlook Slack app will support the ability to join Microsoft Teams calls direct from Slack.

However, Teams isn’t the only new integration coming to Slack. The chat platform will launch VoIP phone integration with Zoom, WebEx, Jabber, RingCentral and DialPad. Slack users will be able to call phone numbers directly within the app using these VoIP providers.

The new integrations come as Slack says calling has grown 350 percent in its app. The increase happened over the last month, fueled by businesses transitioning to remote work in response to COVID-19. Further, Slack says it’s having a record-breaking surge in users.

All the new integrations will be available starting today. The Teams Calls app is already accessible from Slack’s website.

Further, the company is in the process of rolling out a major redesign of its platform, which is hitting new users first before making its way to existing users.

Source: The Verge

The post Slack launches new integrations for Microsoft Teams calls appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Today I attended a session at the OER20 (online!) conference entitled At the scale of care. Not only was it a great session in its own right, but it got me thinking again about ‘untakedownable’ websites.

You see, the problem, as presenters Lauren Heywood, Jim Groom, and Noah Mitchell pointed out, is that, if we use the metaphor of a house, we can never control our address.

This is something I’ve been concerned about for ages, but particularly over the last five years. For example, see:

• Digital Literacy, Identity and a Domain of One’s Own (September 2016)
• Future Infrastructure, Future Skills, Future Mindsets (October 2017)
• New blog: Doug, uncensored (October 2017)

In fact, my thinking around this took me to decentralisation, and directly to my work on MoodleNet.

As Jim mentioned in answer to my question at the end of the session, it’s like the ‘dirty secret’ of the internet is that we’re all sharecroppers in a rentier economy. Why? Because we can never truly ‘own’ our address on the internet; we can only ever (as Maha Bali and Audrey Watters have both discussed) pay money to a central registry.

We can do better than this. I’ve experimented with ZeroNet and, to a lesser extent, IPFS. The latter was actually used to circumvent the government’s crackdown on ‘illegal’ Catalan elections while I was in Spain in late 2017.

I don’t think I’m quite ready to give up on the web as a platform, but I am sick to my back teeth of the way that it is controlled by interests that don’t align with my own. Given that I make my living online, this concerns me professionally as well as personally.

There are several approaches to decentralising ownership of the ‘address’ system on the web. First, let’s just check we’re on the same page here and define some terms. When I’m talking about ‘addresses’ then technically-speaking I’m talking about the Domain Name System, or ‘DNS’:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a system used to convert a computer’s host name into an IP address on the Internet. For example, if a computer needs to communicate with the web server example.net, your computer needs the IP address of the web server example.net. It is the job of the DNS to convert the host name to the IP address of the web server. It is sometimes called the Internet’s telephone book because it converts a Website’s name that people know, to a number that the Internet actually uses.

Wikipedia (Simple english version)

The DNS system is extremely important, but also, because it depends on an ‘official’, more centralised registry, quite brittle. For example, governments can censor websites and web services, or hackers can target them to take them offline.

As you would expect, many people have already thought about a fully decentralised DNS. Using this system, people and organisations could truly own their address. I actually have one of these: dougbelshaw.bit

Of course, nothing happens when you click on that link, because you’d need a special plugin or separate browser that understands the non-standard DNS system. So this is where it starts getting reasonably technical and regular web users switch off and go back to looking at pictures of cats.

It’s important that there needs to be some kind of ‘cost’ to reserving domain names, no matter how decentralised the system is. Otherwise, someone could just come along and snap up every possible permutation.

That’s why, inevitably, things point back to the blockchain, and in particular, Namecoin. This satisfies Zooko’s Triangle:

This is better than the way ZeroNet works, for example, where each site has a long address more confusing than a unique Google Docs URL.

However, let’s just think about the steps involved here:

1. Open a namecoin wallet
2. Buy some namecoins
3. Use your namecoins to buy a .bit address
4. Set up your website to resolve to the .bit address
5. Ask your website visitors to either install the PeerName browser extension or set up NMControl to act as their computer’s local DNS server

So after all of this, you’re still left with the need to ask website visitors to change their browsing habits — and to do so on a non-decentralised DNS site. In addition, the Namecoin FAQ states that .bit ‘owners’ may have to pay renewal fees in future.

So that’s the current state of play for web-based decentralised DNS systems. Outside of the web, of course, things can work very differently. Take Briar messenger, for example:

It uses the BTP protocol, meaning it can be fully decentralised, and works over a number of different connection types:

Bramble Transport Protocol (BTP) is a transport layer security protocol suitable for delay-tolerant networks. It provides a secure channel between two peers, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, authenticity and forward secrecy of their communication across a wide range of underlying transports.

Briar project

So for example, just like other delay-tolerant protocols, such as Scuttlebutt, Briar is extremely resilient.

As ever, Open Source projects are more secure and robust than their proprietary counterparts. This is the reason that Open Source software runs much of the ‘backoffice’ services for online services.

The real difficulty we’ve got here, and I make no apologies for highlighting it due to this particular crisis, is capitalism. In particular, the neoliberal flavour that hoovers up ‘intellectual property’ and farms users for the benefit of surveillance capitalism.

Over the course of my career, people have told me that they “just want something that works”. Well, it’s well beyond the time when things should just technically work. It’s time that things ‘just worked’ for the benefit of me, of you, and of humanity as whole.

How domain names resolve might seem like such a small and trivial thing given the challenges the world is facing right now. But it’s important how we come out of this crisis: are we going to allow governments, Big Tech, and the 1% to double-down on their ability to repress us? Or are we going to fight against this, and take back control of not only our means of (re-)production, but our homes online?