Writing

A fantastic job by Eric showing the various limitations of HTTPS and why, while it may be important, it is just one small aspect of keeping your site secure.

Ethan was inspired by an Ursula Franklin lecture (I really have to read that book) to write a bit more about what we, as a community, can do about AMP. It looks a bit grim, as he points out.

And today, right now, I don’t think we need to look further than AMP to see an example of what Franklin’s talking about. As of this moment, the power dynamics are skewed pretty severely in favor of Google’s proprietary AMP standard, and against those of us who’d ask this question: What can I do about AMP?

But he goes on to point out that we can, and should, still speak up about our concerns and rally together:

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth speaking up, individually and collectively, and writing about our concerns. Quite the opposite. In fact, that’s why I signed an open letter on AMP, alongside twenty other concerned colleagues. (If you or your organization has a GitHub account, you can sign it, too.) Perhaps together, we can make the issue more visible, and make more people and organizations aware of our concerns. So while there might not be much I can do about AMP, maybe there’s something we can do.

The results from Joy Buolamwini's research on facial recognition accuracy are disappointing to say the least.

Microsoft’s error rate for darker-skinned women was 21 percent, while IBM’s and Megvii’s rates were nearly 35 percent. They all had error rates below 1 percent for light-skinned males.

Those are bad numbers, but they shouldn't be surprising—not when we're training these algorithm's with a poorly constructed data set.

One widely used facial-recognition data set was estimated to be more than 75 percent male and more than 80 percent white, according to another research study.

The stakes are just too high for us to continue to build technology without making sure we're taking off our blinders and accounting for our biases. Oversights like this leave people out, at best. At their worst, they are capable of doing even worse.

Paul shares how he was able to get his CSP working with nonce values and service workers.

I really like Remy's approach to syndicating to Medium: use IFTTT to monitor the RSS feed and trigger a webhook that will push the latest post to Medium using their API.

There are many ways we exclude people from using our sites: poor performance, poor accessibility and, as David Okwii points out, not considering other contexts when designing things as basic as a form:

Look at that form. It has fields like street address, state/province/region, apartment, zip code? What is that? I can only tell you that I live in Kanyanya, a Kampala suburb. If you need my exact home, then I’ll either have to send you a GPS location via apps like Whatsapp, Telegram, or Google Maps, or engage you in a long phone conversation in which I’ll try to describe landmarks, building and trees leading to my house. But street address, zip code? Hell no.

I can’t tell you how many times I have reached this step in shopping process and just froze. Several of my friends have had the same experience and yet this terrible form continues to be used by several upcoming online stores such as Rocket Internet’s Jumia. In the end, users just resign and simply buy stuff from the old-school brick-and-mortar stores.

Some advice from Ethan to new designers and developers. While I can't personally vouch for Ursula Franklin (I'm adding it to my list to read), I do 100% agree with this:

Set up a blog somewhere, anywhere, and write as much as you can. If I’m in a position to hire you, I don’t just want to see the quality of your final mockup, your finished set of templates: I want to learn how you got there. I want to read what worked, what didn’t, and the decisions you made along the way.

Facebook's Free Basics—an app that provides people in certain countries around the world free access to a subset of the web—has never sat quite right to me, but I've never taken the time to dig in deeply myself.

Thankfully, it looks like the folks at Global Voices did. There's a 36-page PDF report available detailing their findings, as well as several country-specific reports. Their key findings certainly don't make me feel any better about the app:

Free Basics might not speak your language: Free Basics does not meet the linguistic needs of target users.

Free Basics features little local content, but plenty of corporate services from the US and UK.

Free Basics doesn't connect you to the global internet – but it does collect your data...

Free Basics violates net neutrality principles: Free Basics does not allow users to browse the open Internet.

Global Voices research findings suggest that most of the content offered via Free Basics will not meet the most pressing needs of those who are not online, and that the data and content limitations built into Free Basics are largely artificial and primarily aimed at collecting profitable data from users.

A handy validator for testing Webmention implementations. Should come in handy very soon.