Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

I was supposed to get a call from a reporter to talk about space junk right after the goat sale, but he just emailed to say that Toronto is flooding and he just got off the phone with Weather Canada and has to write that up right now.

Which is so extremely 2024: "Sorry I can't do the interview about garbage that billionaires dropped on you from orbit, climate change is causing too many problems in my city right now"

I think reasonable people can disagree on the nuances of privacy engineering here...you can get really in the weeds of epsilons and trust boundaries.

Mozilla need to understand that that isn't what is happening here.

The fact is this is a new data gathering vector, it doesn't matter how privacy-preserving it is, it should be subject to *new, informed, and proactive* consent - rather than being automatically enrolled in an experiment.

Two updates to this thread.

Update 1: In this thread I complain Mozilla does not provide specific technical details about this feature. It turns out there *is* a document with the technical details, on Github:

https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment

It also explains (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Origin_Trials) which sites are participating in the feature.

I am linking this document because I believe the first five words do more to discredit what Mozilla is doing here than anything I could say:

"Mozilla is working with Meta"

According to https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight, the median weight in KB for desktop:

126 months:

HTML
2010: 20KB;
mid 2024: 33KB;
Increase of 65%.

Images
2010: 229KB;
mid 2024: 1,062KB;
Increase of 464%.

JavaScript
2010: 89KB;
mid 2024: 640KB;
Increase of 719%.

- - -

107 months:

Video
mid 2015: 173KB;
mid 2024: 3,872KB;
Increase of 2,238%.

I reckon that in the era of AI the JS gradient is gonna steepen significantly

So this, from Firefox, is fucking toxic: https://mstdn.social/@Lokjo/112772496939724214

You might be aware Chrome— a browser made by an ad company— has been trying to claw back the limitations recently placed on ad networks by the death of third-party cookies, and added new features that gather and report data directly to ad networks. You'd know this because Chrome displayed a popup.

If you're a Firefox user, what you probably don't know is Firefox added this feature and *has already turned it on without asking you*

Can't face riding your bike up that last hill?

Germany: We've got you covered!

The Zacke ("Spike") in #Stuttgart, an electric rack railway that pushes a wagon of bicycles uphill.

🧵

"Edinburgh's council announced on Tuesday that it had moved to exclude adverts and sponsorships for "high-carbon products and services" that "undermine the council’s commitment to tackling the climate emergency." The ban covers airlines, car companies that advertise SUVs and cruise operators, as well as "all firms and associated sub brands or lobbying organisations that extract, refine, produce, supply, distribute, or sell any fossil fuels."" https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2024/05/30/this-scottish-city-just-banned-suv-and-airline-ads-heres-why/ 😍

STATEMENT ahead of @internetarchive oral arguments in their appeal for the right to own digital books: "The right to read without fear of being punished for what you read has never been more under threat."
https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-06-27-statement-on-internet-archives-oral-arguments-in-appeal-for-the-right-to-own-digital-books/

TED offered a vision of the world where complex societal issues could be solved with a lightbulb moment and a well-designed PowerPoint presentation.

Climate change? There's an app for that.

Poverty? A social entrepreneur with a TED talk has it figured out.

It was a worldview that flattered millennials' sense of ourselves as changemakers while conveniently ignoring the systemic barriers to real change.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/ted-talks-the-picotop-of-millennial-pop-intellectualism

Excuse me while I go ugly-cry: “Gilead’s experimental twice-yearly medicine to prevent HIV was 100% effective in a late-stage trial, the company said Thursday.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/20/gilead-prep-lenacapavir-succeeds-in-phase-3-trial.html

Deliberately undermining one of the most powerful tools against the threat of global pandemics from novel emerging infectious diseases is not only evil — it’s stunningly shortsighted zero-sum thinking that puts the US population at risk as well.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

In UI circles you sometimes see a (usually derogatory) label of "hover tunnel" given to a UI widget, like a clickless contextual menu, which requires you hover over an element then continue to hover over specific elements in order to keep the widget active. I would like to propose the term "Reverse Hover Tunnel" for the current YouTube front page, where you must move the mouse in strict and meticulous paths to avoid it beginning to autoplay random crap, possibly forever showing it as 10% watched

How fast can you assemble and disassemble your #EMC chamber? Magnets are still not perfectly aligned but it sounds and feels great when they jump on place! This chamber is #EMARD idea and design. Material is leftover that I get every time I order PCB stencil. @NGIZero

“Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow”

https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/10/generative-ai-is-not-going-to-build-your-engineering-team-for-you/

> By not hiring and training up junior engineers, we are cannibalizing our own future. We need to stop doing that.

Any industry that stops hiring entry-level workers is in for a very, very bad time a decade down the line.

Good piece on the #HungaTonga eruption and it's (tiny to non-existent) impact on our climate from @andrewdessler .
I think my biggest takeaway from the attribution work is that (some) people will do almost anything to avoid accepting human emissions are driving climate change. https://open.substack.com/pub/theclimatebrink/p/the-real-lesson-of-the-hunga-tonga

Microsoft really needs to clean up their management teams for Windows.
It would really not be that hard for Windows to be good, trustable OS.

That they fuck up this hard is really just a cycle of absurd incompetence that seems to wave over every other Windows release.

Somehow competent product managers make it in after every fucked up release and then after a while things repeat.

I participated in an expert meeting at the Ministry for Agriculture on the use of wood for energy & products. Good that such meetings are being held.

But it's mind-boggling every time how very deep the differences in perspective, assessment & recommendations run btw scientists, & with industry, biomass interest groups, NGOs.

The seductive pull of "But it grows back! Therefore it's green!" remains strong. Someone said "let's not consider forests a CO2 museum". But a plantation is not a forest.

HandBrake now supports encoding to FFV1, the professional digital preservation video codec! All it took was a suggestion in a Github issue, and the maintainers were happy to include it. Now if some of you #digipres colleagues would test that it works as intended, that would be even better. https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/releases/tag/1.8.0 #handbrake #ffv1