Democratized Engineering

Worth your time to read the whole piece, especially the Cathedral / Bazaar analogies…

In fact, you could say that bad engineering, just like good engineering, has helped turn technology into the most powerful force for change in the 21st century. Engineering has been incredibly democratized and it’s been good for engineers. Today’s engineers are in greater demand than ever.

And yet design—and designers—seem perpetually threatened by democratization. I’ve been a designer for two and a half decades and I’ve seen this again and again.

Source: In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible + Subtraction.com

The dangers of thinking “They’ll get it because they’re young”

So very true despite the stereotypes (spoken as a former college / high school / middle school teacher turned tech consultant). Parents have a big burden to bear in helping their young and old children make wise decisions about how and why to use the web. Just assuming “they’ll get it because they’re young” is very dangerous.

What is surprising about this data is that while education is a factor in online security literacy, age is less so. Users aged 65 and older were seemingly just as knowledgeable as users in the age range of 18-29; while online literacy bias in general is weighted toward younger users, the Pew survey suggests that overall there is a shared standard of what we know and what we don’t know.

Source: Why did we give our data to Facebook in the first place? – Scientific American Blog Network

Paying for everything you do

What about the users?

Advertising isn’t why Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook or, presumably, what gets him out of bed in the morning. Engineers and designers whose identities are invested in changing the world don’t want that work tarnished by association. But the decision to pay for everything Facebook does by selling advertising means–whether he likes it or not–Mark Zuckerberg is just as much the CEO of an advertising company as a social network. The sooner Facebook reconciles this for itself and its users, the less vulnerable it will be to stories like last week’s.

Source: Admit It, You Don’t Really Understand Facebook

1.1.1.1

DNS is an important and overlooked backbone structure of how we interact and communicate with the web. If you think that Facebook and Google knowing so much about you is weird, you definitely don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of probing what your Internet Service Provider knows about you based on all the traffic that flows through them and their DNS services that you subscribe to.

I’ve been using Google’s 8.8.8.8 DNS for many years, but excited to see another new player that promises complete encryption and privacy. Granted, Cloudflare is becoming a point-of-failure worry given how much heavy lifting they do as a content delivery network for many sites (including this one), but more competition is a good thing in this case (especially if they aren’t advertising companies).

Unfortunately, by default, DNS is usually slow and insecure. Your ISP, and anyone else listening in on the Internet, can see every site you visit and every app you use — even if their content is encrypted. Creepily, some DNS providers sell data about your Internet activity or use it target you with ads.

We think that’s gross. If you do too, now there’s an alternative: 1.1.1.1

Source: 1.1.1.1 — the Internet’s Fastest, Privacy-First DNS Resolver

Google is killing goo.gl and we’ll see more web rot

Google released goo.gl link shortening service back in 2009. URL shorteners were popular at the time (and since) for all sorts of purposes. Sites and services have relied on goo.gl and bit.ly etc for years to mask complex links and encourage sharing or easier verbal communication. But like all things having to do with the web, you should plan for the future and realize that services come and go (another reason I’ve kept my own blog here since 2006).

I know lots of sites and designers that use goo.gl links in production… it’s going to be a headache to switch all those out.

Google announced that it is shutting down its URL shortening service, goo.gl. The company says that new and anonymous users won’t be able to create links through the goo.gl console as of April 13th, but existing users will be able to use it for another year, after which it will be discontinued completely.

Source: Google is shuttering its URL shortening service, goo.gl  – The Verge

NASA receives response from Voyager 1

Build things that last…

“The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters,” said Jones, chief engineer at JPL.

Source: NASA receives response from Voyager 1 spacecraft 13 billion miles away after 37 years of inactivity | Technology Startups News | Tech News

Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded in our increasingly computerized society, and if the extent of it came to light there would be broad demands for limits and regulation. But because this industry can largely operate in secret, only occasionally exposed after a data breach or investigative report, we remain mostly ignorant of its reach.

Bruce Schneier – Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

Thinking Religion 145: Thinking About the Term “Partners”

Dr. Thomas Whitley and The Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss the term “partners” in its modern context and whether or not it is performative for certain couples. That leads to a discussion about the role of social media in our lives if we could, in fact, delete Facebook.

Source: Thinking Religion Episode 145: Thinking About the Term Partners

Massive MyFitnessPal Data Breach

Annnnd I just restarted my MyFitnessPal account last week after picking up the Apple Watch again.

Great.

I guess it’s just a given now that any sort of online service you sign up for is going to eventually have a data breach of some sort. Here’s to Two Factor Authentication and user-friendly hashing of login credentials.

Roughly 150 million people who are MyFitnessPal users were impacted by a breach, which Under Armour discovered earlier this week. An “unauthorized party” acquired data about MyFitnessPal users in late February 2018, Under Armour announced on Thursday.

Source: Massive Under Armour data breach through MyFitnessPal hits 150 million people – Business Insider

What did Jesus look like?

I’ve taught a series on depictions of Jesus numerous times at churches and for Sunday Schools of all flavors. This is one of the best pieces I’ve ever read on the subject. Thorough, but approachable.

Plus, there’s a connection to my beloved Dura Europos…

However, there is one other place to look: to the synagogue Dura Europos, dating from the early 3rd century. The depiction of Moses on the walls of the synagogue of Dura-Europos is probably the closest fit, I think, since it shows how a Jewish sage was imagined in the Graeco-Roman world. Moses is shown in undyed clothing, appropriate to tastes of ascetic masculinity (eschewing color), and his one mantle is a tallith, since one can see tassels (tzitzith). This image is a far more correct as a basis for imagining the historical Jesus than the adaptations of the Byzantine Jesus that have become standard.

Source: – ANE TODAY – 201803 – What did Jesus look like?