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Author: Daniel Appelquist

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The following is an excerpt from a post from all the members of the Samsung Internet Developer Advocacy group on web ups and downs foe 2018. I encourage you to go read that post and hear what others in my group had to say.  On the negative side, we’ve seen the rise of notification spam and spammy notification permissions requests. For example, many sites have started to ask for permission to send push notification on first visit. This antipattern has the potential to poison the well for push notifications, as people will quickly experience notification fatigue. Browsers will have to take a stronger role in 2019 in policing who gets to ask you permission, mirroring the role they’ve been playing in blocking web tracking. 2018 has been a roller coaster ride but I am definitely seeing some signals that make me upbeat about the future of the web. For one, we have had the rise of progressive webapps and the adoption of PWAs by big web brands. These days, on my Android phone, I am using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Starbucks, Uber, Lyft, Mastodon, and Google maps almost exclusively through PWAs. Speaking of web tracking?—?I think it’s positive that we’ve seen tracker blocking becoming mainstream. Samsung Internet shipped this function earlier this year (as an opt in). Firefox on desktop also has started to block some trackers by default and will be doing more in 2019. This reflects the unfortunate truth that the ad tech industry needs to be reined back and people are taking matters into …

Ups & Downs of the web 2018 Read more »

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If you’re like me and you hate everything Facebook has become and everything they do as a company but you keep using it because nice people you really want to stay in touch with are on it, then here are a few simple tips to minimise your Facebook exposure: 1. Disable Facebook Platform. Instructions are helpfully provided here: https://www.facebook.com/help/211829542181913/ After doing this, you will no longer be able to use Facebook to log in to other sites. That helps to remove Facebook’s power. If you already use Facebook to log in to other sites then this can be bit of a pain but it’s worth it to extricate yourself from Facebook’s platform. 2. Isolate Facebook. Using the Brave browser that blocks ads and tracking is one way. (Brave is my primary browser these days.) If you use Firefox, install Mozilla’s Facebook container extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/…/fire…/addon/facebook-container/ that will automatically isolate your Facebook usage from your usage of other websites. In Chrome or Opera, use a good third party tracking blocker such as Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger. (On my Firefox installations, I have Facebook container, Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere installed). This limits what Facebook can know about your comings and goings on the rest of the web. 3. Delete any Facebook apps from all of your mobile devices. Sorry – this is an important one. Installing any Facebook app (including Facebook Messenger) gives Facebook unlimited access to information about you all the time. Delete the apps. Instead, use Facebook via the web browse and ensure you also have a tracking blocker installed on your …

How To Put Facebook in a Box Read more »

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Today, I have sent the following letter to Chuck Schumer, senator from New York State and Senate Minority Leader urging him to take further strong action regarding the horrific abuse of human rights that is currently being perpetrated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Dear Mr. Schumer, First of all, please know that I am a U.S. citizen, formerly a resident of (and still a voter in) Brooklyn, NY. I am also a member of Democrats Abroad, where I have been active. Furthermore, I am an immigrant (currently living in another country than my country of birth) and a father of two. I am writing to you to express my outrage at what is currently happening on the U.S. border. As reported in the New York Times, 5-year-old children are being kept in cages due to a rule change put in place solely by the Trump administration and implemented by an increasingly fascistic ICE agency. There can be no other description for what is going on here than ethnic cleansing and I cannot help but see it as part of a general slide into authoritarianism based on a racist ideology that brands some people as “animals” due to their ethnicity or country of origin. What is happening here seems like it must be against the law on child cruelty grounds alone. However, so far you and your office have remained mostly silent on this issue. Why? What are you waiting for? I call on you to vociferously support the efforts of your senate colleagues to pass …

An Open Letter to Chuck Schumer Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Misc No Comments

For what it’s worth, I’ve moved this blog over onto new host (Tsohost) that supports one-click installation and auto-renewal of LetsEncrypt certificates. So now, after years of hammering on about moving the web to https, I’ve finally made my own web site secure. Yay!

By Posted on Posted in Web 1 Comment

Does the URL need defending? The URL has been under attack seemingly since the beginning of the Web. When I was busy launching web sites for magazines and journals in the mid-90s, I remember a radio ad (have no idea what they were advertising) where a clueless sounding guy complained: “I just double-u double-u double-u don’t get it!” Back then, the future of the Web and indeed the Internet as a ubiquitous communication medium was far from certain. Scores of voices, including big successful companies like AOL and Microsoft, were still pushing a more “cable TV” type approach to the delivery of digital content and services. In this model, service providers got to control the experience,  and be a funnel for delivery of services to people. Content providers that partnered with AOL would publish their “AOL keyword” on advertisements. Then AOL-competitor Microsoft Network tried to sew up exclusive content deals with newspapers – they wanted to be the sole source for news online. And remember – at this time, if you wanted to use AOL or Microsoft Network (or any of their competitors) you would have to “dial up” to that service, use their client and  then everything you saw from then on would be controlled by that company. People rejected this approach in favor of the open web. People learned to decouple Internet access from the services they used, the web browser became the way people experienced online services giving those providers direct control over the user experience without any intermediary, and the URL became the cornerstone of …

In defense of the URL Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Blogs, Web 2 Comments

Jeremy Keith’s post on owning his own words has reminded me about the importance of running your own blog in your own space that you control. Of course, I’ve long been a supporter of this idea, but I’m afraid the ease-of-use of Medium has pulled me over to the dark side where I’ve recently been more prolific. Of course, the “barrier to entry” that Jeremy cites is not the only reason I moved to Medium. It is easier to compose there, largely because of the great work they’ve done on a web-based editor. But the main reason I started posting on Medium has been engagement. I simply get more engagement (views, ??s, comments, re-shares, tweets) on my Medium posts than I ever did on my blog. Case in point: I wouldn’t have read Jeremy’s original post if I hadn’t seen it on Medium (sorry, Jeremy). There’s a value to the platform that Medium provides. But there’s also a value to owning your own words. I’m also a little disappointed that Medium keeps trying to push their app on me when I’m on mobile devices instead of building a great progressive web app, but that’s a different story. I run this blog on a self-installed WordPress. So today I’m experimenting with a WordPress plugin for Medium which may allow me to have my cake and eat it too. I’m going to use the blog as the primary platform and see whether I can still get the same level of engagement on Medium. Update: After making this post, …

Sigh… Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Technology, Web No Comments

I posted the following on Medium earlier today. Basically I have just had it with Lanyrd’s downtime and the seeming unwillingness of parent EventBrite to make any investment in this important service. Let me know what you think and more importantly suggest some alternatives. Dear EventBrite and Lanyrd: WTF?

By Posted on Posted in Technology 1 Comment

So one question I get asked a lot about my Apple Watch is “how do you use it?” (Or sometimes ”how often do you use it?”) From my experience with the Apple Watch thus far, this isn’t the right formulation. In one sense you’re always “using” it because it’s always on you. It isn’t usually something you affirmatively use though. It’s more about the notifications and the ways in which it can replace (mostly with better / easier overall user experience) some functions of the iPhone. At right is my boarding pass for a recent flight I took to Vienna to speak at the Uberall App Congress. I presented this image at the end of my talk (which was about how app developers should better make use of the web) to illustrate a point. I was able to get my Austrian Air boarding pass on my wrist without the need for a special Austrian Air app either on my phone or on my watch. The check-in took place on the web site (used from my phone’s browser in this case) and the passbook boarding pass was delivered by email. Once the boarding pass was in passbook, it magically loads into the watch. When the time for the flight drew near, a notification appeared on the watch bringing me directly to the boarding pass. The only slightly cumbersome bit was scrolling down to the 2d barcode with luggage and passport in hand – certainly no less cumbersome (and accident-prone) than fishing out your phone to do the same. The …

How do I “Use” Apple Watch? Read more »

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Let’s face it, PGP is pretty old school. It’s like pocket-protechor old-school. I’ve personally taken several runs at trying to get PGP up and running. The problem has always been: once I get PGP working, there’s nobody to send encrypted email to. PGP just has never had enough scale to get even close to mainstream. Enter keybase, which is trying to revolutionize the way people use and think about PGP with a friendly web site and integration into services such as Twitter, reddit and github. I finally cajoled an invite out of a friend today and have been giving it a whirl. My first impression is that Keybase does not entirely solve the problem of making public-key encrypted email work better. For one: if you want to incorporate PGP email into Apple Mail, you still have to download and install GPG tools, and the command line keybase tools (which require Node and NPM). And though there is some integration between the GPG tools and the Keybase tools, it’s fiddly and requires lots of command line usage (e.g. to make sure people you “track” on the Keybase web site also have their public keys imported into your GPG keychain so you can send them encrypted emails from within Apple Mail. AND you have to use GPG tools to manually add additional email addresses into your key, if you generated the key with Keybase. So that’s a pretty high bar if you want seamless PGP email from the desktop. I haven’t even tried to get it running on …

Keybase: Reinventing PGP For the 21st Century? Read more »