A billion rights don’t make a wrong

Except for a few books and thousands of long-since-tossed magazines and newspapers, all my writing is on the Web.

Some of that died long ago. For example, David Bunnell (four days older than me, and for whom I was often mistaken) did nothing (to my knowledge*) to save the archives of Upside, which contained an enormous sum of early Net and Web history, and to which I contributed a single essay, not long after The Cluetrain Manifesto came out.

But lots more is still up. Alas, Google now considers them dangerous, because they are known to the world by the Web’s founding protocol—http—and not by its encrypted version: https. So Google calls all the millions (billions?) of http sites dangerous and scares visitors away. One example is the Linux Journal page linked to by the image above.

In Let me say this: Fuck Google, Dave gets this right. His explanation here is required reading for anyone who cares about history and archives. Bottom line: Google’s not secure message means this: “Google tried to take control of the open web and this site said no.”

Grayed matter

Also gone are all the digital archives of Fast Company, Industry Standard, Business 2.0, and Red Herring, which competed with Upside in the early days of the Web. Pieces written by David Weinberger and Chris Locke, two of Cluetrain‘s co-authors, are also erased from the Web’s whiteboard.

I agree

Dylan Tweeney says  AI is going to increase demand for human writers.

OMGF

This was bad.

Warning: Severe Public Service Wolf Crying

The Monroe County Alert System just ran their sirens all over town for more than a minute. They do this once a month at noon. Do they need to? Do they also need to warn that there will be a “severe thunderstorm” when what’s coming is typical summer afternoon thundershower? Or warn that “severe flooding” might be coming from the same? Yes, I appreciate warnings about approaching tornadoes. Thanks to that (and all the weather apps on my phone), I was able to shoot some tornado video back in February. (You get to hear the sirens on that one.) But I’m close to canceling the alerts, because they come too often and not for real emergencies.

_________

*As I recall, he wanted the whole thing gone when it went bankrupt. But I might have that wrong, and I welcome correction. He was a good guy, and a born journalist and publisher. I liked him, and he passed way too young.

In wasted dollars

Our species began to get civilized when it invented clothing: the original privacy tech. But that was in the natural world. In the digital one, we are still naked, and privacy is just a promise you get from “consent” (cookie notice) agreements and settings. It’s a fail. Example: the GDPR Privacy Monitor examined 97,000 websites and found that—

• 55% displayed no consent (cookie choice) banner
• 80.4% continued tracking after the user clicked reject
• 68% activate third-party tracking before the user has given consent
• 66.6% set cookies before consent

And the consent management platform (CMP) business weighs in at $4.1 billion.

We now return to hiss

WMEX/1510, which in its heyday was Boston’s main top 40 music station, has signed off for a final time. The station had a cursed transmitter history you can read about at the opening link. When I lived in Arlington, Mass from 2007 to 2013, the transmitter was nearby in Belmont, using four towers in a parking lot in an industrial part of town. It was 50,000 watts at the time. Killer signal, but a doomed site. I shot it in 2008. Here’s the photo album. In the late Teens, after a period of silence, it moved to the 1260 AM site (built for what was then WNAC) on a tidal swamp south of town. Then only 10,000 watts and just 100 watts at night, it operated as an oldies station. I shot that site too, from an airplane on approach to Logan in 2011.

What we’re watching is the slo-mo heart failure of the AM broadcast band. Knowing that, I like to document what was there before it’s gone.

In case there is a reason

This piece (first of three in a series) about Zoom’ privacy practices was written more than six years ago, and I haven’t revisited the topic since then. But I thought it might be worth bringing up.

You can deal with the identity piece at IIW

I just learned that Reverse Alignment is a thing. It addresses—

Large, coordinated investments in the human and institutional side of the AI transformation. They span identity, privacy, markets, governance, work, and knowledge. They share an architecture, and they share a method. No single sector can deliver any one of them alone.

We found a clubhouse!

Reason: Kids Are Using NPR Podcast Comments as Secret Group Chats.