Happy New Year, Gentle Reader!
- Never Forgive Them – “You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value… I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else.”
- Net neutrality eviscerated by appeals court ruling
- Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too) – “Native apps are a pain for everyone involved. Developers pay hefty app store fees, jump through approval hoops, and juggle multiple platform versions. Users? We’re stuck with constant updates, wasted storage space, and apps that don’t even work on all our devices.”
- ARIA in HTML – hot off the press! It’s as glamorous as me in new boots and manties, so read it!
- A progress update on reading-flow – “aims to solve the issue where the source (and therefore tab) order of a page gets disconnected from layout when using CSS grid layout or flexbox”. Available to try in Chrome Canary.
- Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos (2 Jan 2025) and Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks (3 Jan 2025). I’m old enough to remember December 2024 when Apple said [PDF] “Apple’s high standards for privacy and security are what set us apart… We will never abandon our bedrock commitment to our users’ privacy and security”.
- Government Internet Shutdowns Cost $7.69 Billion in 2024 – “Our annual report analyzes every major intentional internet shutdown in 2024”
- Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers – “It undermines a long tradition of designing and building infrastructure in the public interest.”
- The Google Antitrust Ruling: Proposed Remedies – Alex Moore (Open Web Advocacy) discusses with Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell (Igalia)
- W3C Advisory Committee Elects Technical Architecture Group – TL;DR: Hadley Beeman, Marcos Cáceres, Sarven Capadisli and Xiaocheng Hu join continuing TAG participants, Daniel Appelquist, Matthew Atkinson, Dapeng (Max) Liu, Tristan Nitot, Martin Thomson and Jeffrey Yasskin.
- Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 – I’m no LLM-fanboi, but Simon Willison is a sensible chap whose judgement I trust
- What’s the best way to protect banking apps on Android? – Tezza Eden investigates
- WCAG 3 December 2024 Update & Thoughts from the Co-Chairs
- Online Safety Act’s obligations spark concern among small site owners (UK)
- State of Linux on the MacBook Pro 2016 & 2017 – troubleshooting hints if things aren’t working correctly
- Congo files criminal complaints against Apple in Europe over conflict minerals
- My Interview with Linda DeMartino, the Voice You Hear in Otis Elevator Cabs by an elevator geek