Previously I’d given my thoughts on a Propublic article on a bill currently making it’s way through the Senate to ban the IRS from making a free online tool for filing. Turns out if you dig a little deeper you’ll find more of the good work from Propublic showing Intuit actively burying their free version making it as difficult to nearly impossible for regular people to find it.

To effectively bury its free filing service, TurboTax included a snippet of code in the page’s robots.txt file instructing search engines not to index it. 

Instead of pointing users toward its free file tool, TurboTax funnels the vast majority of users toward its paid and premium services, whether they qualify for free filing or not.

TurboTax and H&R Block hide their free tax filing tools from Google on purpose

Wow. I mean just wow. I really struggle to see how anyone can argue that this is in the best interest of the general public.

Giving my first conference talk today at Github headquarters for Reactathon. It’s gonna be a blast, tune in live. And follow along at home if you’d like, slides. A huge thanks to my wife and family for all their support and feedback, it really does take a village. ☺️

Messaging platform Telegram claims to have had a surge in signups during a period of downtime for Facebook’s rival messaging services.

Telegram Get 3M new signups during FB’s outage

I have a theory that fb could easily be displaced or replaced by something else, that doesn’t necessarily have to be better, just available and easily accessible. It’s clear that privacy isn’t the catalyst to get people to migrate. So that lends the question, what will get people to move to a more secure, private focused platform?

In the year of content I’ve been thinking a lot about how blogs and self publishing have made a comeback in some areas from those that want to take back control of their content. Moves away from Medium for self hosting, moves away from twitter for Micro.blog, and of course the #deletefacebook trends. So how to get the mainstream to move from these centralized, locked in platforms to more open friendly places? I have no idea really, so I’ll list something out more as food for thought.

1. Easy to engage
2. Connection with most of the people they know
3. Easy to share images and re-share
4. Marketplace, options, the idea of not being locked in. The idea of take your content / timeline with you
5. RSS is an implementation detail, not a feature.
6. People understand the idea of subscribe and share.
7. Public vs Private sharing. The ability to share with select people.
8. Clean, ad free interface. The tracking and aggregation is needs to curtailed. So what is the business model? Free / Pro / Business tiers ? I dont know. :-/
9. Cross models Reddit, wordpress, micro.blog ?

So what would a open platform using open internet standards look like ?

By creating a Firefox account you can increase convenience while decreasing your exposure to some harmful parts of the web. An account unlocks the full potential of tools like Lockwise, which securely manages passwords, and Monitor, a service that notifies you when your email has been part of a known data breach.

We’re offering privacy protections by default as you navigate the web because the business model of the web is broken, with more and more intrusive personal surveillance becoming the norm. While we hope that people’s digital rights and freedoms will ultimately be guaranteed, we’re here to help in the interim.

Chris Beard, CEO of Mozilla

I like that Mozilla has put in effort to diverse their offerings and become less dependent on the money from Google for default search. The idea of privacy as a product is red hot right now, while most feel opportunistic I would say this is very much inline with what Mozilla has always strived for.

A yearly theme is a great way to keep a general focus for the long run. This is different then goals or actions. This is more like a guiding North Star. I picked up the idea from Rely FM’s Cortex which just had their yearly theme episode.

My theme this year is gonna be Creating Content. I’ll go into more detail as we progress, but really less consuming content and more creating, whatever form that happens to take.

“Given the escalating crime and lack of public safety resources, Baltimore was a great place to try something new,” Frame said of the new market. “Citizen can now help Baltimore residents in the way it has helped New York and San Francisco, with real-time notifications that let a user escape a burning building or rescue a four-year old from an abductor. Citizen, with its real-time information, may be just what Baltimore needs.”

Taylor Hatmaker @ TechCrunch

Um, yeah. The Article goes on to compare the app to popular neighborhood sharing Nextdoor, which if you’ve ever checked out is a dumpster of bias and negative gossip.

There is always a time during the week when I think, “what have I been up to this week?” What do I have to show for being on the computer at night, checking my phone 139 times a day? What do I get out of this? In the spirit of ‘More Content’, I am giving time tracking a shot. So were all on the same page, here’s a short description of time tracking.

Historically, time-tracking has been being used as the simplest way to measure work and calculate payments. In today’s world, it is often used as a source of essential data on how work is performed, what can be improved, and what trends of the work process require closer attention. Advanced time trackertools are used for collection and analysis of this vital information.

[www.actitime.com/time-trac...](https://www.actitime.com/time-tracking/time-tracking-software-essay)

For my goals, I am more concerned with what trends of work have been done. I haven’t set any goals yet, I won’t even know where to start, but i figure the information gathering stage is good enough. Along with that I’ve forced myself to Pomodoro Technique every activity I do for side work. I’ve got my Toggle Time running now while I write this. And we’ll see what the graph shows in a week, and then a week after that.

For course there are plenty of apps and tools to help with all this tracking. Mac Stories has a great run down of Siri Shortcuts that will run a lot of the manual process of time tracking, removing all the excuses I have come up with to avoid it. And the really, I just want to be more productive with the time I have, and not commit more time than I already am to content. We’ll see ..

Washington Post

CBP said copies of “license plate images and traveler images collected by CBP” had been transferred to the subcontractor’s company network, violating the agency’s security and privacy rules. The subcontractor’s network was then attacked and breached. No CBP systems were compromised, the agency said.

Trusted with a back door because they need it to keep us safe?

Not a lot of fun when you’re doing Tailwinds, which is awesome, in Emotion, also awesome, but the macro has been updated.

So. After some struggles I got it working. This really had nothing to do with any of the above libraries and more my own naïveté with them.

And duplicates to boot. 😩 🤞

Ok. All better there too. 😴

Facebook agrees to some kind of privacy law, which for some reason is very hard for new entrants to adhere to. Amazon may try and instantiate itself as basically the national e-commerce monopolist, kind of like a Bell-regulated monopoly.

Jonathan Shieber for Tech Crunch

When I hear big tech companies say, “we’d love government regulation” what I hear is something similar to what Jonathan points out. That monopolist regulation that makes it even more difficult for new or existing companies to compete, further entrenching these big companies.

the focus should be less on the global ambitions of these technology companies and more on the practices they’ve enacted to stifle competition.

We’ll see if congress can keep their eye on the ball, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Your cable nightmare might soon be over. The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) has unveiled the specifications of USB 4.0, as Engadget reports. And USB 4.0 looks a lot like Thunderbolt 3.

Romain Dillet

I feel like ‘might’ in this instance is a pretty big stretch. I’d love it to become reality, but the promise of a unified standard to use on all our devices isn’t realistic. Look no further than the latest rename scheme from USB gen 3v2 🙄

WebAssembly is an exciting technology that is advancing the web in new and interesting ways. It opens up all sorts of possibilities and additional languages to target the browser that were previously not possible before. If you’re not familiar with WebAssembly , let’s do a lighting intro and then dive into the ways we can leverage this fantastic feature.

WebAssembly , or Wasm for short, let’s us deliver compiled code to the browser that can parse and execute leaps and bounds faster than our bundled JavaScript can. But don’t worry, it’s not going to replace JavaScript or great tooling like Webpack or Babel. It’s here to supplement and help with the heavy lifting to make our web apps run at almost native speeds! Today we can write C or Rust code that with compile to Wasm and be able to interact with our existing JavaScript web applications improving developer and user experience alike.

Great use cases for leveraging the power of Wasm could be anything that is computationally heavy to be done in the browser rather than server side. Like gaming engines, image shaders or manipulation. You might be using Wasm today and not even know. Popular tooling library source-map, that lets developers match exact source files from their bundled output, is now up to 5 times faster by replacing a couple of the most intensive mapping portions of the library with Wasm! If this has piqued your interest and want to explore WebAssembly in further detail check out the resources below. If you’re already using Wasm I’d love to hear details of implementing it the good and the difficult.

Jesse Tomchak

Given the Mac love with Mini and iMac this year, if it continues, I could see having a Mac desktop and an iPad Pro for mobile / feet up work.

This might change with the a new redesign of the MacBook Pro. A year in, I’m super happy with my Surface Book. I’ve also found myself booted in Linux for some situations. And the WLS (windows linux subsystem) is fantastic.

I could also be making up a need for me to eventually get a iPad Pro. And that’s ok. 😉

And then Apple comes along and introduces a security feature to Safari that requires a confirmation click when any link in a web browser attempts to open an external app. Zoom, which likes to pass around web links as a way of driving users into conference calls, didn’t look at this security measure as something to help keep their customers secure—it viewed it as an addition of friction by the platform owner.

Zoom saved you a click—by giving you a security hole

Jason Snell is able to very articulately sum up the events and motivation behind Zoom creating a locally running server, and believing that it was ok to do in the first place.