I gave a talk at my local meetup for React, the part I left out of my previous post was the meetup was hosted at my work. This had the added benefit of home court advantage (sports ball) I knew more people in the audience that usual, and was very comfortable. The side effect that I didn’t anticipate was the following day. I had a couple people, people not on my team, I might recognize them in the halls, maybe even say hi to them from time to time. These people stopped me and complimented me on my talk last night! ♥ This absolutely made my day. It really extended the excitement, the buzz, the high I get when I present something I like in front of a group that I really look up to.

This has an adverse effect that I’m never ready for, the crash. Coming down emotionally from a talk is, for me is physically painful. I am not sure you would categorize it as a chemical withdraw of good feelings, but that is the best way I can describe it. While I recover, my show is running late, I need to get it out the door, but I feel like nothing more than crawling into bed for the weekend.

To all those who attended and took the time to provide feedback, I sincerely thank you.

The cable lobby working towards their investor bottom line, not in consumers best interest.

Powell said there is “common ground around the basic tenets of net neutrality rules: There should be no blocking or throttling of lawful content. There should be no paid prioritization that creates fast lanes and slow lanes, absent public benefit. And, there should be transparency to consumers over network practices.”

Cable lobby asks for net neutrality law allowing paid prioritization

Its sounds like Powell is advocating for Net neutrality, but is a cable lobbyist at this time. In his next breath he uses words like, no need for regulation and “light touch”. I simply can’t trust any angle from cable companies that have time and time again abused their position and monopoly over a must have utility service. In a space with absolutely no competition or incentive to actually serve consumers these companies will continue to take advantage until they are forced to by government. Don’t tell me the market will regulate itself. There is no competitive market in the ISP space. It’s a joke.

I’ve had a growing number of articles in my feed that illustrate the constant behavior of telecommunication companies. As you can imagine it’s not the good kind.

AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break—it cut 23,000 jobs instead

Charter squeezes more money out of Internet users with new cancellation policy

Ajit Pai-proposed upgrade to 25Mbps starts paying off for rural ISPs – but it’ll take a decade. 😂

Best of all, the FCC’s chairman doesn’t seem interested in keeping them honest.

Ajit Pai refuses to investigate Frontier’s horrible telecom service

TechCrunch

He also argued that while Twitter could “do a bunch of superficial things to address the things you’re talking about,” that isn’t the real solution.

“We want the changes to last, and that means going really, really deep,” Dorsey said.

Maybe they could throw in a few of those “superficial” systems just for kicks. A real solution would be face the problem head on, and stop fairly loose terms like “changes to last” and “go really, really deep”

More specifically, Rodgers asked about the frequent criticism that Twitter hasn’t found a way to consistently ban Nazis from the service.

“We have a situation right now where that term is used fairly loosely,” Dorsey said. “We just cannot take any one mention of that word accusing someone else as a factual indication of whether someone can be removed from the platform.”

That term is used to apply describe, um, Nazis and their behavior ?!?

Tech Crunch

The title of this article alone could only exist in 2019.

I know, you’re likely going to tell me “welcome to the party”, about just how blatantly gross Facebook’s actions towards users and their data have been for a long, long time. And you’re right. I’ve largely been absent from FB, still have an account, since college, but the platform has never really resonated with me. Twitter, on the other hand, I check an unhealthy amount per day. Let’s chalk up the bad actions of FB that has come out, just in the last 7 days:

• Facebook Project ‘Atlas’, paying teens to install their snooping VPN with enterprise certs.
• Facebook blocks Ad Transparency Tools
• Facebook Friendly Fraud, kids unwittingly spending money connected to their parents credit cards.

Now for most companies they would be in full PR mode. Interviews, opinion columns, talk shows, the spin machine out in force. For Facebook it seems more like just business as usual. The logic is most people using the service are unaware to the level that FB is targeting them to feed the monster advertisement and revenue machine, or they know and simply don’t care. There have been waves over the past year to #deletefacebook, and that might raise awareness, it might just be noise in the thundering hose of content and ads.

Here’s what I know. A lot of people like Instagram and What’s App, I mean a lot. Anecdotally, I haven’t seen people checking facebook or talking about it as much as the previously mentioned 2 apps. I do feel like something has to give sooner or later. Most like FB’s deceitful practices will quietly find their way into all their products like a cancer sooner or later. Maybe regulation and strict privacy rights for users will force change, or another service that offers to connect you to people will come along and spark more joy than facebook does. When that happens, you can properly thank facebook, and delete your account, like I did today.

AT&T lied to investors in order to hide the failure of its DirecTV Now streaming TV service, a proposed class action alleges.
AT&T told investors that DirecTV Now was succeeding even as its subscriber base fell due to price increases and the discontinuance of promotional discounts, said the complaint filed Monday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint accuses AT&T and executives including CEO Randall Stephenson of violating the US Securities Act by “knowingly or recklessly” making false statements to investors and failing to disclose problems that were affecting DirecTV Now sales.

ars Technica

Big corporations can totally monitor and self police their behavior, uh huh, sure. 🙄

Some

Type Option represents an optional value: every Option is either Some and contains a value, or None, and does not.

Oh. Some is part of Option types in Rust, like datatypes in Haskell. We either have Some(value) or we have None. Ok. Good to know.

Myspace has apparently lost most or all of the music files uploaded by its users before 2015, and it told users that the data was corrupted beyond repair during a server migration. Myspace apparently admitted the problem to concerned users seven or eight months ago, but so few people noticed that there wasn’t any news coverage until the past 24 hours.

Myspace apparently lost 12 years’ worth of music, and almost no one noticed

Pretty good reason to continue to beat the drum about owning the content and context of publishing things onto other platforms. Consider this same scenario with all of your instagram images in 10 years? So much of our digital life is scattered across a number of closed platforms, when they’re gone, so is your content. I think services like WordPress and Micro.Blog are leading the way in making it easy for everyone to own and Stewart where their own content goes.

Pretty sure at this point most people have heard of Slack or used Slack. The chat app that has made huge inroads into enterprise and small communities alike. I used to have a Slack with friends that replaced or irc channel, now I have more than 1/2 a dozen across a variety of groups and work. It’s a lot of messaging. 🙄 Slack is currently poses for IPO, and valued around 7 billion, which brings up the point –

Is there any reason for Microsoft not to buy Slack for $20 billion? Seems like a perfect fit and at $20 billion could be a bargain.

@jyarow

I agree with Jay, Slack (right down to the new rgb color scheme from their new logo) would be a good fit for the new MS.

Hell. I’ve already got a dozen groups on my Surface Book. 😉

Spurred by Ron Miller’s piece Someone could scoop up Slack before it IPOs.

But the Reuters report describes the use of enterprise certificates to distribute pirated versions of popular iOS software like Minecraft, Spotify, and Pokémon Go. For example, a free version of Minecraft (which is normally a premium app) is distributed by TutuApp using the method. Another pirate distributor, AppValley, offers a version of the Spotify app with the ads that support Spotify and the music artists stripped out completely.

Samuel Axon @ ArsTechnica

I’m going to make a bet that WWDC in June Apple will announce, or simply roll out a new policy and process for enterprise certs for the entire iOS platform. My second bet, it’s not going to be friendly, easy, or enjoyable to use. A reckoning is most certainly coming.

There is something about a new setup. You get to start over, clean, void of distractions. The possibilities are endless. That is the part I really enjoy, like many I assume. I recently set up this publishing site, a backend to manage it, a service to backup and secure the data, and on and on. I also setup a physical desk in my house for the first time in 10 plus years. Getting space set up, the monitor just the way I like it. All of this was fun to do.

The opposite of a new setup is – consistency. Coming back to something again and again. Slowly chipping away at the progress until you’ve achieved something. This is more akin to getting in shape, writing that great american novel you’ve always talked about. There is a long arduous process involved. For a lot of use it is a constant state of self doubt lows, and small achievement highs.

It will come as no surprise that one of these is vastly more rewarding that the other.

“We are aware that a small number of users are having issues with their third-generation butterfly keyboard and for that we are sorry,” the company writes. “The vast majority of Mac notebook customers are having a positive experience with the new keyboard.”

TechCrunch

I am so past the keyboards, after having struggles with a 2017 MacBook Pro myself. I day dream about a Mac Mini (now that they are refreshed) and an iPad Pro lifestyle in the future, but I am still very happy with the capabilities of my Surface Book going on more than a year now. The one thing I miss daily?

$ brew install

I really do like RSS, so many of the things I enjoy and rely on everything are build on the back of this simple open protocol. 😍

Struggles administrating wordpress are real. Not what I want to be spending my time on.

Most of these politically motivated sites do not disclose who is paying for them, and in many cases, the content does not include bylines

GOP funds messaging sites that look remarkably like trusted local news

None of this article is surprising. The pollution of misinformation and echo chamber bias has been running ramped unchecked for years. I wish I knew a silver bullet resolution, but like everyone struggle with my own bias and opinions. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Open to practical suggestions.

In light of “meaningful regulation” from UK lawmakers Facebook continues to pat itself on the back for all of its “progress” they’ve made in the name of user privacy. 🙄

Facebook praised itself for recent changes it’s made, but the company said it’s willing to face tougher laws. Facebook’s statement continued:

We are open to meaningful regulation and support the committee’s recommendation for electoral law reform. But we’re not waiting. We have already made substantial changes so that every political ad on Facebook has to be authorized, state who is paying for it and then is stored in a searchable archive for seven years. No other channel for political advertising is as transparent and offers the tools that we do.

Facebook is a law-breaking “digital gangster,” UK government report says

But it recently came out that a legislator in Montana was attempting to have the state officially renounce the findings of the scientific community. And, if the federal government decides to believe the scientists and do something about emissions, he wants the Treasure State to somehow sit those efforts out.

Montana legislator introduces bills to give his state its own science

I remember reading about the battles between science and the church back in the Middle Ages. And look at us, centuries later, politicians are still at odds with the power and truth that science brings when it’s not convenient to their agenda. 😡

Lack of leadership in open source results in source-available licenses

Amazon’s behavior toward open source is self-interested and rational. Amazon is playing by the rules of what software licenses allow. But these behaviors and their undesirable results could be curbed if industry associations created standard open-source licenses that allowed authors of open-source software to express a simple concept:

“I do not want my open-source code run as a commercial service.”

It will be interesting to see how open source licensing evolves over the next couple years with the ever increasing grow of cloud services. 🤔

Little Spoon gets $7M for its organic baby food delivery service

subscription-based service delivers meals — a fixed $3 apiece — to customers’ doorsteps. To date, Little Spoon said it has delivered 1 million meals

I’m not sure what this says, good or bad about the current state of parenting ?

I often have thoughts about all the things I can learn or knock out as the weekend approaches. Won’t it be great to take time out to figure out X, or know how exactly to do Y? My plans are usually so beyond doable in a single weekend, even if I don’t have anything else planned. Things like ready that entire book cover to cover. These things are technically possible, but with even the slightest amount regular things to do, like laundry and the grocery store, these things are unrealistic. But won’t it be great? Yeah of course it would, but it’s definitely not practical.

I realize more and more, maybe it’s getting older, or having kids to steward, but the mind frame I try to put things in is less big push, and tons of little tiny pieces that I can chip away at. One small nibble at a time, that’s what is successful. I know that. It still doesn’t stop me from constantly setting up my weekend or time off to some level of disappointment when I don’t read that entire book, or complete that whole project start to finish. I guess there’s always next weekend.

Podcasts as an industry is going to experience same defining change sooner rather than later.

Spotify begins testing curated podcast playlists

The bigger goal of these tests is to improve podcast discoverability, an issue that plagues the industry.

The podcast industry expected to create $1 billion in annual revenue by 2021

the industry generated an estimated $479.1 million in revenue in 2018 and is expected to produce more than $1 billion by 2021, according to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC

😳 that’s quite a bit of growth !!!!!

Tim Cook recently penned an op-ed in Time Magazine, You Deserve Privacy Online. Here’s How You Could Actually Get It.

“I and others are calling on the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation—a landmark package of reforms that protect and empower the consumer. Last year, before a global body of privacy regulators, I laid out four principles that I believe should guide legislation:”

Tim Cook

Tim goes on to outline several key points that any legislation would include. Things like avoid collecting unnecessary, consumers have the right to know, and the right for consumers to access and delete their data that companies have.

Following up Tim’s op-ed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has announced a new bill American Data Dissemination (ADD) Act

“provides overdue transparency and accountability from the tech industry while ensuring that small businesses and startups are still able to innovate and compete in the digital marketplace.”

Marco Rubio

Here’s the catch, in the text of the bill as it currently stands is the phrase, “shall supersede” , which has wide sweeping implications. Jon Brodkin’s article at ARS Technica, Sen. Marco Rubio wants to ban states from protecting consumer privacy goes into the reaction from several groups, and sufficed to say, none of them are positive. Super seeding any state action in this area clearing isn’t going to stand. California for instance, has already passed privacy law in 2018 that was passed unanimously.

To say that things in the privacy data sector are heating up this year is an understatement, while federal and local governments historical move very slow, this battle will likely play out over the next several years. You can bet that it will be a hot issue in the run up to the 2020 election.

I talked about themes the other day. One I didn’t mention, but wanted to outline was, read more. I love to read, but I don’t ever make it a priority in my daily life. When I was younger traveling the world, before iPhone and Kindle’s, I would always have a couple paperback books with me. What I remember and still feel, is reading is a different kind of relaxing. It feels less vegging out, when watching a movie. Not better, just satisfying a different type of down time. Make no mistake, I won’t be missing G.O.T. Or West World, but more reading is in my future for sure, maybe I’ll start with some Recommendations

I came across RRS feed in the early 2000’s through great Indie apps on the Mac like Net News Wire and others. It was a great was to aggregate all the news for hundreds, and when things got really crazy more than a thousand sites into a single convenient location. You could sync all the read articles, star and favorite ones you wanted to keep around, and share via IRC or AIM the ones you thought your friends should see, or even email something to family member or co-worker. It was a deep well of knowledge, and easy to flip through a couple times a day and stay in the know. This same publish and subscribe model of RSS is the underpinning to podcasts, which makes it beyond the reach of a single company, but also makes discovery a bit of a challenge.

You could set your watch to the regular occurance to which someone will announce that RSS is dead, today it just happened to be MotherBoard with an article, The Rise and Demise of RSS . With quotes like –

The future once looked so bright for RSS. What happened?

MotherBoard

In Author, Sinclair Target’s, defense the article is a well written history as it played out from the 90’s up til today. And I think is correct, that RSS isn’t consumer friendly or easy to understand. But I don’t think it needs to be. The gritty details of how SMS isn’t something consumers pour over, they just send their messages and have a certain level of expectations in regards to what will happen on the other end. RSS powers podcasts subscriptions, and regular people find, listen to, and are coming to the medium in big numbers than ever!

Point is RSS isn’t every exciting to most people. The question I’d pose is, what is exciting that you can do with a feature powered by RSS ?