7/4/2024
Two unrelated events — the birth of someone’s baby close to me and a site that generates random ugly avatars — led me to rethink the exposure to which I submit, almost always voluntarily, on the internet.
My face is in several places. Back there, before the facial recognition algorithms and the generative AIs, I thought it would be good to show the face to pass… credibility? Confidence? I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t even a necessity as it’s today, because we didn’t have AIs that wrote convincing gibberish. Simpler times.
I started thinking about removing some of the photos from my face from the internet. I deleted some photos of obvious places that are under my control, such as social media and my website, and found that it takes time for search engines and some platforms to “notice” the update or even delete the images. I was reminded that, also in a very literal sense, the internet doesn’t forget.
Then I realized that I posted dozens of videos on YouTube showing my face. Maybe it’s a lost case.
Still, I decided to use a silly avatar where possible: an orange ball with a smiling face. You can see it on this site’s footer.
Before that, I tried to use one of the ugly avatars I mentioned up there. I replaced my picture with it on Telegram and right after I got an email from someone thinking my account was hacked.
5/4/2024
In March 2024, I ran an experiment in my Portuguese-written blog: I stopped distributing its content on social media (Mastodon, mostly) and messaging apps (Telegram and WhatsApp channels). It has a small following in a few places — ~2,9k on Telegram, ~450 on WhatsApp and three Mastodon profiles (two with autopost) that sums ~5k followers.
The result was that… little has changed.
The blog got ~107k unique visitors who viewed ~172k pages. Compared to the average of the previous six months, the March figures were 33.7% and 30.3% higher, respectively.
The reason for this increase, however, was an uncontrollable external player: Google. On March 27th, I posted a link in our readers forum of a Brazilian viral anonymous Google spreadsheet with reports of bad companies to work for. Google, for any inexplicable reason, put this link in front of many pairs of eyes, and almost 38k people arrived at my blog in the few days remaining in March.
(This created tragicomic situations, such as people posting anonymous reports of toxic companies in the comments of the blog and one that threatened to sue me if I didn’t take down the spreadsheet.)
Continue reading »
2/4/2024
In September 2023, Google announced the end of Google Podcasts in favor of YouTube Music. At some point after that, an exact date for the closure appeared: April 2nd, 2024.
It turns out that this deadline only applies to the United States. In a post on the Google forums for podcasters, dated March 18th, a company employee, Cory Peter, explains that Google Podcasts will be discontinuing in the rest of the world on June 24th. Those who trust the Google’s app to listen to podcasts have almost three months to export their subscriptions to another app.
27/3/2024
I don’t expect much from a Mastodon app: just on that’s lean and stable; a no-frills approach.
For some reason I can’t explain, until recently I hadn’t tried Mastoot. (I suspect I confused it with Mast, which I tried and was horrible; people need to think of more original names for these apps.)
Mastoot, developed by Bei Li, is… simple, as it states on its App Store description. It has no advanced features nor is it very customizable — you can change the icon and accent color, and customize the sideways sliding actions. And that’s it.
For a while, Mastoot was slightly neglected by its creator. Not anymore. Coincidence or not, Bei Li said that Mastoot development began again, and he’d “like to start with minimal and prioritize features driven by user feedback this time”. Also, he will “implement features at a relatively slower pace to ensure quality”.
As it’s right now, Mastoot is a delight to use. Oh, and it’s free.
22/3/2024
In the mid-1990s, a war was waged in the email inboxes of those who were already online. It was at this time that HTML email arrived, creating heated discussions in BBSs, mailing lists, and IRC channels.
It’s very likely that most — maybe, you — don’t know what I’m talking about. Let’s go back, so we can all be on the same page.
Email messages can be sent in plain text (text/plain), just like files saved in Notepad, or in HTML (text/html). In this second format (or “MIME type”), the messages are created as if they were pages of a website, which opens a Pandora’s box, I mean… many possibilities, such as rich formatting and images mixed with the text.
HTML email has some obvious disadvantages, such as less security due to hiding links and loading remote media. An incidental problem is that, unlike web browsers, email clients/apps do not follow web standards — each one renders HTML differently, which makes the design of newsletter layouts, for example, a hellish endeavor.
Another problem with HTML is that messages in this format are heavier, because they have invisible parts (headers and the HTML code itself) and visible (images, in particular) that the pure text counterpart doesn’t have.
Nowadays, this may not be a problem, thanks to the ubiquitous fast internet connections. In the 1990s, with the very slow links of dial-up, it mattered.
Continue reading »
20/3/2024
The enforcing of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) on March 7th greeted EU citizens with a browser choice screen when opening Safari on iOS 17.4 or setting up a new Android device. (I don’t know the reason for this distinction.)
The results seem encouraging at first glance. At least, the companies benefited from the measure are excited:
No wonder only Brave released absolute numbers. And low numbers. When Opera boasts a 164% increase in new users, one should ask: 164% on top of what?
On Twitter, Brave’s profile posted that “when consumers get a clear choice of iOS browsers, they’re choosing alternatives to Safari”.
Ok, they’re really choosing, maybe in a more beautiful icon contest. (Brave’s is slick, indeed.) I think there are more important questions after the browser choice screen that need to be answered, especially if people are using the alternative browser chosen in it.
Perhaps it’s important to remember that it is not as if it were impossible to install alternative browsers before, nor something complex. (Changing the default browser, possible since iOS 14 released in 2021, maybe yes, but even that isn’t that complex.)
The other big issue of browsers on iOS, the mandatory use of the Safari rendering engine (WebKit) by all other browsers, homogenizes the competitive market. This is truly an artificial advantage that Apple imposes on rivals.
DMA, among other things, forces Apple to accept browsers with engines other than WebKit. None is available yet. It may not be worth the effort to maintain two apps, one with WebKit and the other with its own engine only for the European Union. To be seen if any browser will follow this route.
Safari is a very good browser on iOS. I dare to say it’s the best — largely due to the deep integration with the OS and exclusive features, such as support for extensions. It’s these disloyal exclusivities that should be in the crosshairs of legislation aimed at fostering competition.
Most of the DMA’s obligations seem to hit the target. (Some consequences are surprising, they are difficult to anticipate; that’s why I say it “seems”.) The browser choice screen — and that of web search engines on Android, by extension — is not one of them.
In fact, we have seen this story in the past, Microsoft and Windows in the 2010s, in the same European Union.
In March 2010, when the screen of choice popped on European Windows PCs, there was a jump in the use of alternative browsers to IE, but at the end of the program, in 2014, Firefox and Opera had smaller market shares than four years earlier. Only Chrome went up, like a rocket, demolishing IE’s former leadership. I guess that it was not because of the mandatory browser choice screen on Windows.