Until now, Apple would let you store your Photos on their iCloud cheaply and easily with one condition: at one point Apple would have access to see them, unencrypted. Now with their new Advanced Data Protection setting, you can stop them being able to. Because now you have the power to put your Photos under lock and key by encrypting them, and only you’ll have the keys to decrypt them.

All this talk of data & crypts giving you the death stare? Let me break it down for those of you who like me still remember sending holiday postcards. Imagine you’re on vacay with your Polaroid camera, which prints your poolside pics. You’re sightseeing so you don’t want your luggage overflowing with photos, so you lick an envelope and airmail them ahead, flying through the clouds, to Tim Cook’s place in California to take care of until you’re back. Tim’s short on space in his penthouse suite so he’s shedding the envelopes and storing the photos in a closet under lock. He’s always promised to only take yours out and mail you them in a newly sealed envelope when you request them. But what if he puts the wrong person’s swimsuit pics in? Or his house gets raided by the FBI who force him to unlock the door? Or robbers simply break down the door and the whole roomful of unsealed pictures gets stolen?

Tim Cook may run the most sophisticated tech company ever to have existed, but Apple have now admitted that in the virtual realms, this latter breach into their storage containers – by virtual criminals – is more likely than ever. So when you send Apple your Photos – or Notes or Bookmarks or Files or even Backup snapshots of your iPhone apps - best to put them under a lock that no robber can break! That way they’ll be under your lock in Apple’s storage, and all the way back to your end. That’s why it’s called end-to-end encryption, what privacy nonprofits like Signal and Proton Mail have always done with your data. Now Apple are making the laudable effort to implement this for zero extra cost across their iCloud – except for Calendars, Mail & Contacts, which they argue 3rd parties like your calendar-scheduling tool or email app need to be able to peek into – and calling it Advanced Data Protection. Protects your data? Hell yeah. Advanced? Well, it’s as simple as going to iCloud Settings and turning it On! The hardest it gets is keeping those keys you seal your virtual packages with safe. Fortunately, there’s already a physical device you carry in your pocket which can act as your key: your iPhone itself! All you’ll need to do is unlock your Apple device with your biometrics or PIN, and you’ll be able to download those Photos to view! But just like with front-door keeys to your house, you’re probably best to make a copy (‘recovery key’), and give one to a friend or neighbor (‘recovery contact’), just in case you lose that Apple device! But if you are lucky enough to buy Apple, head to iCloud Settings now and turn on Advanced Data Protection. Next time you’re by the pool, you can snap away on your iPhone without a care in the world! Except to get that perfect sunset lighting on the pina colada..

This was originally written for an unsuccessful job application to EFF, with the prompt:

In three paragraphs or less, how would you describe Apple’s new Advanced Data Protection for iCloud to someone who has never heard of it but wants to learn more? How would you explain the pros and cons?

I wanted to make it available for people to share with non-technical family members who don’t think it’s worth clicking a couple buttons to make the most of their (currently UK-threatened) freedoms to multiply prime-numbers to circumvent privacy-breaches by BigTech and governments.

I found it was more reliably turned on via iOS rather than Mac which falsely claimed still not available here.

Wondering which alternatives I use for the final 3 non-encrypted? I use Proton for Calendar & Mail & (email) Contacts. I currently have phone numbers just on Light & i Phones, no Cloud backup. May need to briefly re-enable iCloud though to update Light Phone, cos the most popular .vcf export app looks even more invasive.

Let’s make the most of our online freedoms, while they last.

New phone-number leaks (from scraped-data):
1 LinkedIn (Greed) 👎: 2m salespeople bout to get a lot more ‘inbounds’. Makes you wonder if it’s worth all the actors & singers tryna give everything away on this platform to get hired.
plus Meta (5&7) get hit again. half a billi WhatsAppers (incl 1in6 Brits) bout to get invited to a load more GCs! In case you’re wondering why I invite fans to a Signal group instead..

2 TikTok (Gluttony) 👎: I might just bring myself to syndicate a post monthly to TT if they didn’t block visiting their website on a VPN:

3 YT (Sloth) 👍: I cleared 75k channel views (meaning “Swan Centre” is now less than half my views XD didn’t stop me encoring with it at the MadHatters party which I teased)

5 IG (Pride) 👍: Tho I’m aware it’s TikTok clone by stealth, as an artist I like being able to add my music to any IG post, like I recently did with Another Year to tease this New Years all about another name..
Hope we can add songs from web soon.

6 Twitter (Anger) 👎: Elon thinks he can change the world by releasing a few emails showing genuine debate over 3 difficult days where they eventually made right choice. Barely merits audacious PR name #TwitterFiles. Ur not actually brave freedom-preserving hero Ed Snowden geezer.

Beware SOCIAL
Share “SOCIAL” 🎵

See you in 7

[edited immediately to add number 2 and ensure numbers format correctly]

You’ve read the first edition of

“Last month in SOCIAL”

New monthly series of short blog articles, which I will be using as my signoff post disconnecting my blogposts from syndicating to SOCIAL for each FirstWeek.
I will cover the major updates from the 7 Big Socials, with a particular focus on how changes affect indie creators in the arts, including my own personal experience.

I will return to SOCIAL on the 2nd Monday of the month, as usual with the standard format of a vlog on YT (& Vimeo).

The 7 SOCIALS I cover are the 7 Deadly Sins in recent diss-track “SOCIAL”. It has organic viral potential to spread an urgent & useful message. Please listen to and share “SOCIAL” at Ceru.Li/sten-social

CDNs like Cloudflare can inject privacy-friendly analytics code, even on GoDaddy Websites!

How it should work: inserting HTML code

Inserting privacy-friendly analytics code is easy. My fave is SimpleAnalytics - but this applies to similar competitors like Plausible & Fathom too - you just need to paste 2 lines of HTML somewhere on the website. Don’t worry that the 1st line is a script tag means that it’s Javascript running, and the 2nd line covers the 1% of Javascript-disabled web-users, just copy and paste the thing as HTML.

Modern Website Builders like Squarespace or Webflow are so common SimpleAnalytics has bespoke guides for them. Otherwise you have to just be creative at finding how to embed HTML. On Carrd, this is as simple as Embed block, and choosing Inline rather than Visible. With Micro.blog it’s knowing the hack that all Markdown recognises HTML, so you can just stick it in the Footer.

When it doesn’t work: restrictive website-builders like GoDaddy

But what if you aren’t on a really restrictive platform and can’t add custom-code? This is usually the case with free products, but it is also a case with one of the biggest beginner paid website-builders: GoDaddy. Believe me I’ve tried everything and my complaint to the company was met with deaf ears.
I suspect this might also be the case with some recently hacked-together simple landing-page builders like LinkTree, Mailchimp too.

Since May ‘21, I was faced with a difficult decision:
a) keep using the Google Analytics service provided, which means knowingly burdening my users with a cookie (and a cookie banner to be GDPR compliant) that will make it even easier for a surveillance capitalism company to track them
b) accept not having a good idea of website traffic.

I opted for option b, and went through the following phases:
i) rely on GoDaddy’s own analytics tool (which it claims is cookie-free) to gain an approx gauge of monthly visits, until I realised they were wildly changing retrospectively
ii) use Cloudflare’s free Web Analytics which only takes a 10% sample which is wildly inaccurate for small websites. I Proxy my traffic through the Cloudflare CDN because it is Free and am not considering upgrading to their business-priced plans ($20/mo+) anytime soon.
iii) fly blind. It does make me less motivated to write News posts when I can’t know whether 5 or 500 people visit them, especially with some of the potentially viral ones I have coming.

Turns out there was no trade-off all along. If GoDaddy won’t let me inejct code, someone else will after them. Here’s how to do it:

How to inject analytics script on any website using a CDN like Cloudflare

Firstly you need to be using a Custom Domain. Owning your analytics is one of the key reasons to own a domain. Otherwise the data belongs to the website-builder and you’re reliant on them and can’t implement workarounds like this! (Check my DomainH.ac university to help select a dope one).
Secondly, point your proxy your domain through the CDN. In the case of Cloudflare, that means using their NameServers like X.ns.cloudflare.com and then logging onto their website and setting the A Records to Proxy 🟧☁️ (so Cloudflare can do advanced things like adding extra code when delivering the GoDaddy code) rather than DNS Only ⬜️ (just acting as DNS which is a glorified phone-book passing on the address GoDaddy’s code lives at).

Option A: use Cloudflare App (like SimpleAnalytics)

Recently, Adriaan has made the website onboarding amazing, with prompt to tell him your website tool. I had never bothered clicking Show more knowing GoDaddy wouldn’t be there, but I recently noticed Cloudflare was there and followed very clear instructions, you can also find on their own help page here.

Quick plug for SimpleAnalytics: Adriaan is amazing at taking feedback, and I pay a decent $9/month because of his dedication to improving his product.
You can get a free month if you use my referral link (and follow his uniquely transparent cookie-setting process!).

Option B: try Cloudflare Zaraz

Presumably this should work for other privacy-friendly analytics, not to mention any other scripts you wanna inject, which don’t have a Cloudflare App.
I actually thought of this first before checking if Adriaan had indeed written about Cloudflare. So I have still not yet tested it, but here is what I think you would do: click the Zaraz tab at bottom left on Cloudflare, and choose the Custom HTML block:

Then paste the code in there (I mean it even explicitly says it can run Scripts!)

Will update if anyone reaches out saying it works! There is probably a similar approach using less user-friendly CDN competitors like Fastly and Amazon CloudFront.

Option CBA: hire me to implement this for you

This is just one way I can make your website Moderner!

Appendix A: the limits of Privacy

Sweet, so now my listeners are free from Google. Oh no wait, YouTube:

Oh and also search-indexing - which now includes other video.

Yup, as usual with privacy, it’s impossible to be a perfectionist. But if you can easily make it 80% harder for people’s privacy to be stripped in 20mins, then do it.

As for Cloudflare, are they that much more trustworthy/privacy-friendly than Google? It’s a good time to be asking, given that they’ve just freely released Turnstile, an alternative to Google captcha. It’s possible that their freemium model will lead them towards surveillance models via their free products, so unless you have a specific Proxy use-case like this / Page (forwarding) Rules, it’s probably best just to set DNS Only.

Video content just got a visibility boost: Google is indexing every website’s video embeds and listing them on Videos search.

I read a recent book-review on the success of Google’s choice to acquire YouTube in 2006. Just like Meta with WhatsApp & Instagram, within 3 years it had ousted the unbusinesslike community-minded founders and it was running as a successful arm of YT ad’s campaign, culminating in last year’s move to play ads on non-monetised channels like mine.

But it seems that hosting 62% of businesses content, and YouTube by Google itself being the 2nd most used search engine tool by consumers (after Google by Google), doesn’t quite feel enough like monopoly for the Silicon Valley outfit. So they’re beefing up Google’s Video search functionality, to cover more than just YouTube videos. In fact I believe they hope to (and may already) identify & organise 100% of videos embedded on the open-web.

what users see: videos SERP

Let’s take a search I hope anyone wanting to find 3m chunks of music-video amusement would love to make: ‘cerulean sounds video’.

The YT bias begins right on ‘All’ search, outranking my official website not just once, but twice with Capitalisation!

(side-note on StarNow result: I’d originally considered hiring a - ‘larger size’ - actor to play Boris in my latest ‘Become an MC’ music video, which ended up being much more meaningful with me in!)

Then, on the Videos tab, page 1 is almost entirely YouTube. But what’s new is that once you get down to page 2 you start to see videos ‘from’ a wider range of websites:

When independent websites like mine are featured, it’s almost always to showcase YouTube embeds, and hover Previews decrease leakage. However, 1st party social competitors are featured: TikTok and Facebook notably:

Notable absences are: Instagram (though I suspect that’s due to password-walling) and Vimeo. The latter is sinister: Google sees it as a direct competitor to YT so has long excluded it - along with DailyMotion. If you wanna see a fairer fight in action, head to Duck (which serves Microsoft Bing rankings) where you’ll see a lot of Vimeo (though unfortunately that’s not always a good things for more privacy-minded Vimeo users!).

Behind-the-scenes: video indexing

Though all my websites are entirely divested of Google Analytics scripts, one of the few Google tools I continue to use (via my Proton email) is Google Search Console. you don’t have to sellout users, just your own DNS settings, and it can be a good tool to gain insight into how (Google’s skewing of) open-web search is gaining you visits.

I was recently informed over email that my videos had been ‘indexed’, a rollout coming to all websites. Let’s see which ones:

Mostly YouTube, though 2nd from bottom is a Vimeo embed. Let’s look at different types of video embed for each platform:

1) YouTube hosted

They seem to take into account whether you’ve tied a playlist behind it

• specific video: www.youtube.com/embed/3MX…
• specific video with playlist behind: www.youtube.com/embed/ycC…
• Playlist which updates to latest: www.youtube.com/embed/vid…
  GoDaddy’s only claim to website-builder supremacy is figuring out this videoseries syntax. When you follow it though, YouTube get this from a link with no v= param and auto adds an empty v= param which is actually creates a stock-video: youtu.be/9xp1XWmJ_… so not sure if these are actually indexed correctly

2) Vimeo hosted

I am surprised the’ve tried to index it as vimeo.com/723468542 is set to Hide from Vimeo!

Where I do have an embed of a Public Vimeo vimeo.com/333771723 the URL they’ve indexed player.vimeo.com/video/333… can’t actually be displayed.

Video not indexed

If you specifically don’t want an embedded video to be indexed, I think the only way to ensure this is to ensure the page it is on is not indexed. And no, despite what most intelligent techies - include the founders of this Micro.blog platform - think, a robots.txt page alone may not be enough:

stick a meta robots noindex tag on instead.

Many videos also don’t get indexed due to errors, most commonly for me:

1) Could not determine prominent video:

“When Google indexes a page it looks for videos on the page. If any videos are found on the page, Google will try to index the best candidate on the page.”

“Google was unable to find a video that could be considered prominent enough to qualify as the video for this page. We recommend fixing other issues before fixing this one. In some cases, this issue might be caused by rendering issues in Googlebot, so you might not be able to fix it, but you should ensure that the video is reasonably prominent on your page. Try using the URL Inspection report’s live test on your page and examine the screenshot to see the page as Google sees it. (Inspect the page URL, then click Test live URL > View tested page > Screenshot). If the video is outside of the initial screen position, you’ll need to try another test method.”

Just Curator.io embeds e.g www.youtube.com/embed/LYa… I actually removed YT from homepage Curator embed to avoid any downranking due to duplication.

2) Video not processed

“Video not processed Google detected that the page has at least one video on it, but decided not to index the video.”

Those URLs are just the blog page URLs themselves, so probably just some early-product gremlins from the Goog!

Conclusion

For better or worse (definitely worse) Google’s search monopoly means it’s the de facto gatekeeper to open-web content. So if you’re a content-creator interested in reaching people beyond a single-silo, you have to pay attention to how Google showcase your content.
This latest change suggests Google - like Meta with its FB review and botched Gram one - is looking at TikTok’s explosion and re-evaluating it’s future product to push video harder.
So there’s never been a better time to start creating entertaining videos to reach people, and in particular artists need to move up the multimedia food-chain: words < audio < video

“[don’t] print some book which nobody reads Try making a sound 3-minute song
Music’s the food I love, play on “- ‘Lit’ - MC Beastly

And then be sure to make a music video for it!
Admittedly that track didn’t get visuals, but the S1GHT tracks on the concept-album did.
Plus I’m 2-tracks off converting the debut MC Beastly record into a full half-hour visual album, which I’ll re-distribute to music-streaming too via new tool DistroVid.

Check my #SavvyIndie resources or reach out to me for 1:1 coaching on making lit content for the internet and marketing it through the open-web.

Oxford Summer Courses left their 16-17 Computer Science syllabus pretty open, so I focussed it on web-design because you don’t need specific Apple hardware, all their friends can use the product, and they learn coding basics in multiple languages.

I guided them through 2 projects over the 2-week course:

1 Customizing Retro Website

Just like a previous 1:1 student who’s now gone on to study CS at QMU, using my w4.rner.me OG website homage page as a code template, they added CSS to customize it as much as possible!

peterelchapo.github.io/retrowebs… customized to a Dark Mode with CSS:

kadilbek.github.io/qadylbek went for a some colourful gradients, and also styled buttons, as well as playing with HTML media embeds:

Cool to see so many people standing on the shoulders of the Original Giants of the internet like Tamara Munzner

2 Interactive website project

I guided them through a 2-step process, of low-fidelity prototype followed by working website. Students who hadn’t picked up coding as quickly, or really wanted responsive sites were encouraged to use Webflow as an alternative.

iamoghy.github.io/RetroLand is an exceptional effort from a student who came to class with basic website experience, so I pushed him to add JavaScript interactivity, which you can see in this .gif:

Namely, a Flickity image carousel, and a Form to direct users to relevant links.

Bonus points for incorporating the retro vibe from the first exercise too!

Conclusion

Academic-year Computer Science syllabus need to be radically overhauled. In 2-years of say A-Level, students would not create anything of the level shown here in 2-weeks, mainly because there is so much distracting focus on learning a wide-range of terminology and history of computing, rather than the basics of implementing a user-experience.
Apart from the last example, these 2 students and their 4 other peers had never published a website before, and all of them were able to publish something in the end. As they get better, I suspect they might update these websites or unpublish to make room for better sites, but I wanted to acknowledge the brilliant tech teenagers can create when given the right guidance.
If you know teenagers who could benefit from working with me, either in a summer-school setting like this, or a larger workshop or even a more focussed 1:1 online, please visit Lea.rner.me

He’s been giving me some helpful advice about getting started distributing my own podcast.xml file. Would welcome anyone else’s

Impressed at what he’s got out of his own Microcast: as well as a series interviewing his Mum about moving from Eastern Europe, the audio version of his brilliant Micro Camp talk is cool cos on Apple Podcasts the thumbnail image changes as it goes through the sections (honestly not sure what black magic this is: whether due to exporting from Final Cut or to do with timestamped comments)

I honestly love that he’s doing his research on such a practical creative topic he lives and breathes.
I wouldn’t wish a PhD on anyone, but if you’re gonna, do something like this

As selected by my 16/17 y/o students this week.
Was fun to see a few of them send for Esteemed Institutions given we’re at Oxford, though one did pick on her 2ndry school’s poor IT dept!

Do you agree with their categorisations? Is Craigslist actually beautiful with its blue simplicity?!
Let me know, and I’ll feed it back to my class.

Good

iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 mini - Apple (UK) www.apple.com/uk/iphone…

Save the Rainforest rainforest.arkivert.no

Discord | Your Place to Talk and Hang Out discord.com

Women’s Clothes, Shop Women’s Fashion & Trends Online | SHEIN UK www.shein.co.uk

SAPO www.sapo.pt

Bad

i.e. poor UX

Pokémon Bianco e Nero pokeworldwifi.forumfree.it

CAVS Fellow and alumnus Christopher Janney’s “Passing Light” in Performance at San Antonio International Airport – Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) act.mit.edu

ZARA United Kingdom | New Collection Online www.zara.com/uk/

Fnac - Cultura, Tecnologia, Lazer www.fnac.pt

Ugly

i.e. poor visual design

THE BIG UGLY WEBSITE thebiguglywebsite.com

Home - Liceo Vasco Beccaria Govone www.iliceimondovi.edu.it

Home - Yale School of Art www.art.yale.edu

Personal & Business Car Leasing | LINGsCARS www.lingscars.com

craigslist: london, UK jobs, apartments, for sale, services, community, and events london.craigslist.org

See the podcast mic that’s propping up the artwork in the thumbnail for my album-launch interview video?

I use this Tula mic cos it sounds much better than the iPhone X camera’s built-in mic, especially for the audio-only podcast version @Jasraj put out.

However, it records audio at a different speed due to different frame-rate. Here’s them synced in 1st minute:

But by the middle they are different. I’ve marked the same audio-spike on cam then mic:

It’s a few seconds / hour slower (in the region of 0.1%). This poster presents a direct technical fix:

But here’s my easy fix: how-to solve it by retiming clips. You could presumably do similar manual-fix in any NLE incl. Final Cut, Premiere Pro & DaVinci Resolve, but here’s how-to:

in iMovie

0) Make sure they start at same point, then put mic-audio in it’s own separate audio section down bottom, unattached to video (always a good idea if don’t want to mix up)

1) Mute slower channel (video for me) and listen for final audio on faster channel (mic for me). Super-zoom in to get precise. Put a marker on slow channel. For us this happened at the post-record bro-hug (which you hear about at the end of the!)

2) Cmd-R on slow-clip for Speed Editor. Drag to speed-up clip until Marker snaps with end of fast-clip

3) And voila, everything before is magically synced up, e.g. the mid-point before which was off:

(updated numbers Jul 13th)

Want to be 100% sure that your domain name is uncensorable e.g. by a trademark owner? Register at a critical TLD: a TLD which is itself a critical or negative word. I’ve coined ‘critTLD’ for short as a new WORD.
Why? A site that is actively critical of a brand is self-evidently not pretending to be the brand: brands don’t tend to criticise themselves, so you can’t be accused of “passing off” (Appendix for deets).

Critical gTLDs

.sucks $250/yr

invented the game.

I believe in the mid-2010s specific major IP legal cases were won on this one to set the precedent. Probably why it’s so expensive.

I’ve manually trawled TLD-List.com ’s 1k+ gTLDs for other critical words. I’d welcome any extra suggestions (bonus points if it’s a ccTLD DomainH.ac/k).

Clearly critical

.fail $22
.gripe $21 (w/ Sav or Porkbun)

Likely critical

Except certain specific contexts, I’d deem brandname.thesetlds to be a critical phrase:

.lol $16
.rodeo $6 (Porkbun) .report $13
.review(s) $8($16)
.cheap $21 (w/ Sav)

Maybe

.icu (“I see you” 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿)
.ooo $24
.mom $28 (Porkbun)

I’m aware there’s also some associated with adult websites, but I don’t do that part of the internet anymore.

An Example: Trump’s new venture

We’ve just observed the anniversary of the Trumpist botched Jan 6th coup, so let’s check in with what the walking brand is cooking up now:

Oh a new brand!

And Social Media. Because politicians these days wa.rner.me/2021/04/2…

When building the tech which beta’d at TruthSocial.com, Mr. Trump didn’t have much respect for Mastodon’s open-source license (see Mashable article), and has eventually done the bare minimum to escape legal ramifications. I downloaded the folder on their “Open Source” page so you didn’t have to: and yup it’s literally a (now 2 month old) fork of Mastodon’s GitHub:

Yup, TruthSocial seems like a brand which will recognize trademark strategy. In fact, I imagine they will positively respect trademark-proof domaining.

And it will be necessary, given that Trump’s lawyers seem to be trying to own the ‘truth(social)’ (HuffPost exposé).

I’m too poor to afford this - and have too positive an internet presence to execute on it effectively - but good satirists (shouldn’t be too hard, he turned ‘Toots’ into ‘Truths’) to snap up one of the following available domains. The internet needs great parody & criticism to make sure this wonderful technology doesn’t systematically favour populists, as it has seemed in the 2010s. Let me know if anyone ever grabs:

TruthSocial.Cheap

This one would be perfect for a site explaining how TruthSocial was built on the cheap as an uncrediting knock-off of an existing social media project. Unfortunately not that cheap to register at $21 ironically.

TruthSocial.Gripe

The same price, which upsets my stomach, but this could be a good base to collect all the ways Trump’s social media venture screws over its users as we go, rather than waiting for a Frances Haugen to pop up in 2031.

And here’s two TLDs whic usually aren’t crit-TLDs, but can possibly be argued as such in the context:

TruthSocial.Mom

I don’t go in for the sort of sexism-ageism double-whammy that the ‘Karen’ trope plays on, but if you do, this’ll be the one for you to poke fun at the Republican variant, who’ll post dramatic messages about why they’re done with SocialMedia & Technology companies, on a platform run by T MEDIA TECH.
Go quick on this one, cos lawyers might snap this one up as a posiTLD for the Big Man to award Mother’s Crosses or the suchlike to the best Family gunplay photo posters (early odds on Lauren Boebert).

TruthSocial.ist (NameSilo: $15)

You’d have to explain to the judge how a DomainH.ac/k works, the ‘Socialist’ pun could work well for a parody of the times Trump has contravened his stated economically conservativism and acted like a pinko commie (as Mark Manson puts it) - such as claiming £3m+ in foreign state aid (recent Guardian exposé on UK furlough).
Unfortunately given it’s a Turkish (Istanbul) domain you might have to deal with the censorship whims of another populist strongman.

Conclusion

As I say on my homepage, I like:

“Keeping negativity & confrontation offline as it’s better there”

But if you’re someone who doesn’t mind a bit of that, and also dislikes having your digital assets requisitioned by IP lawyers, crit-TLDs could be the ones for you!

Appendix

A1. Domain Name Trademark

When a brand has the spare change to register their name as a trademark, they are often legally empowered to control your use of a domain name containing that word, as Harry & Meghan tried to with Archewell.Name - with the (often spurious) justification that you are “passing off” - i.e. pretending to be their brand, and in extreme examples can aim to seize ownership of the domain.
In many cases their claim will be frivolous (late in that case), or you can find friendly hosting providers.
Got an Intellectual Property (IP) lawyer in the fam, so you find out interesting things like how to avoid that possibility.

A2. TruthSocial to avoid

.feedback

It’s business model is to actively ransom brands & their critics by charging an extortionate amount to host their generic templated version of TrustPilot.
A business model Trump himself would be proud of!
Ironically, internet.bs, one of the few providers to retail the TLD, is using a ccTLD which should arguably be on the list: that of the Bahamas 🇧🇸. I asked their support whether their choice of TLD was ironic in which case I’d add them to the DomainH.ac roll of honour but they claimed they’re playing it straight as their Bahamas based (though I’m not sure if there’s anything straight about that anyway).

TruthSocial.Rodeo
A guy has created a mini-social media using paid software called MightyNetworks.com. I fear he’s not critical enough!

TruthSocial/ Handshake Name
Handshake names have the potential to completely render this whole topic obsolete. The NFT system behind HNS is claimed to be uncensorable because it’s fully decentralised.
New brands like Trump’s are in danger, as they aren’t on the Alexa top 200k protected list.
This one did eventually go (NameBase biding page), with top bidder staking 250HNS ~= $(w/o carbon credits)100. You’d probably have to put in an extortionate bid now: the carbon credits (read my recent exposé) I believe you should purchase would probably blow the bank.

A3. Character Limit: can Trump stay brief enough for Mastodon?

Fox News thought Trump had created a social media platform months ago:

In fact it wasn’t a “platform” or “space”, it’s simply a blog, as long time blogger John Gruber pointed out.

And barely that! As Micro.blog founder Manton Reece observed, it’s a “half-baked” blog!

On a superficial look, they look like Trump tweets: a bit of CAPS LOCK and some Unnecessarily Capitalised sections like in a Dickens Novel.

But upon closer analysis (not quite as close as my buddy Bhargav’s was of his tweets) it looks like he had help:

I mean 2000+ characters at College Reading Level. He must have help!

So how well thought through was this? It began with no pre-amble - no “Hello World”, no intro post - on March 24th just this:

And since then, the devotion to brevity which Twitter demanded has slipped, and one also suspects with it his patience for doing it himself.

Dom Cummings’s has bizarrely abandoned with his remarkably successful longform personal blog, in favour of the Substack fad - he can’t even be bothered to pay the $50 (less than 1 of his annual subscriptions) to Substack to use a custom domain.
Hey even Trump’s lot figured out how to buy one of those!

The official Mastodon.Social & Mastodon.Online which I’m on both use a 500 character limit.

Will TruthSocial stick with that? And will Trump be able to manage posts of that length himself? Let’s find out.

My brother Ben has unfortunately been on both ends of this in the past week.

Identity Theft

A couple of his kind friends alerted him they’d received messages from a Catfish ‘Ben’ who copied his current Facebook profile photo:

Apart from the fact it only used first-name (I believe it should show full-name) this seems fairly sophisticated, because the message hits lots of identity groups hoping for a match on a shared interest. Incidentally, Ben’s friend noticed the mention of people with disabilities, which gives this incident a sinister air.

His first assumption was that his FB password had been hacked. But when I looked at his messages I noticed he’d also been on the receiving end of similar behaviour:

Being Catfished

He’d accepted a friend request purporting to be a decent irl acquaintance. Then received these on Messenger:

That’s quite bold catfishing going for audio calls. I don’t know whether they’re voice actors…

Anyway they are blocked & reported:

If anyone else receives messages from Ben - or anyone else - we’d encourage you to do the same please.

‘Catphishing’

A new WORD to describe this new type of phishing which is more personal than just a blanket email. The scammers have clearly been watching MTV.

Yet another FB security issue

The design weakness exploited here is the semi-detachment of Messenger from the core Facebook app a few years ago, when they started to poo their pants about a mass exodus from their core app (a fear which has been fully realised by an unethical corporate rebrand). Because they’re in separate apps, it’s not natural to quickly check the profile of the person.

Users have given so much data to FB, and yet they are more interested in using it to build ad targeting profiles, than bolstering security - e.g. by disallowing / human reviewing copycat account creation (simple photo & name match scan).

Moreover, their data security is about as tight as Zuck is with “uardo” since that laptop smash-up: family members whose phone numbers were breached in April 2021 still haven’t been notified by the shapeshifting company.

I’d encourage others to consider the ever-growing list of reasons NOT to make Facebook your ‘home’ online where friends look for a definitive point of truth. Even ‘Mr. Facebook’ himself Ben Warner got me to make him a personal website for that purpose.

‘crypto gratia crypt’ is my Latin motto for cryptocurrency speculators.
Where ‘ars gratia artis’ meant art for art’s sake, it means:
“Crypto for the sake of burial”, burial as in:
a) hoarding
b) human climate extinction which this accelerates

Ignorance is Bliss: Shorting the Speculation Fever

Firstly, let me declare relative ignorance on the topic of cryptocurrency. Since I discovered it doing my Master’s in Computation, I made a conscious effort to ignore it, explained by the ‘burial’ observations, which I’ll go into in more detail now:

b) Energy (Over)use

I was researching for my ‘(temperature’s getting) high school musical’ Snowflakes in SoCal!, for which I’d concocted a wicked liberal-satire plot in which enviro-influencers were unwittingly causing accelerated climate change by the VR they used to disseminate their message. I asked VR expert Prof Marc Downie at UChicago for advice on making this ‘outlandish’ idea realistic - maybe the cloud-computing on high-fidelity VR is exorbitant - and to my surprise, he straight-facedly said something to the effect of:

That’s actually highly likely. It’s already happening with Bitcoin mining farms

As I discussed in the pre-pandemic Kickstarter launch (a platform I won’t be using since they’ve joined the crypt..) video, BTC already had a larger carbon-footprint than Vegas, and it’s only skyrocketed with the price since.

a) Speculative Hoarding

I was in California with a friend who’d ran a ‘signal service’: he sent out a Telegram to the group every time he’d make a trade and they’d follow suit, to try to manipulate the market. Clearly they are primarily speculating to hoard, with no concrete view of useful blockchain use-cases which cryptocurrency might enable. This is why the Vegas fact is so shocking: the Bitcoin speculative market is like a poorly ventilated casino… with no free drinks.

As someone who struggled with online gambling as a teenager, I knew the bitcoin casino wasn’t for me. The neural cost is simply too high. Show me a crypto speculator who doesn’t check the price on their smartphone on a daily basis. I know at least 6, including one who took out a loan of £16k before a BTC dip forcing them to sell their BMW. I’ll stick to my Skoda thanks.

I did briefly flirt with ‘shorting’ Bitcoin, by placing bets against the price, because I believe the only way is down as governments either ban it, or adopt GovCoins (perhaps based on more efficient alt-coins). However, eToro take margins on these & as far as I’m aware it’s not yet possible to lock in these bets for over a year to avoid the neural cost of day-to-day price-gambling.

Hence, I like to say I’m ‘shorting’ the entire crypto speculation market, by placing a bet that keeping my (next to zero) assets in Fiat won’t lead me to end up in ‘Unbanked poverty’ as Dusty’s family find themselves in ‘Snowflakes’, and I’ll enjoy this decade gambling-free.

Potentially useful blockchain

I was lucky enough to spend a semester taught closely by Cory Doctorow , an advocate of ‘crypto’, when that simply meant the mathematics of encryption - essentially based on the fact that when you times two prime numbers together, it’s almost impossible to figure out what those numbers were in retrospect (a little bit like trying to get bread from toast). The use case he has consistently been excited in is communication encryption to avoid government surveillance: as near-perfected in non-profit form by Signal (so successful even Zuck uses it).

But what about ‘Blockchain’ itself? I don’t fully understand its inner workings, but I gleaned it’s USPs:

1. Transparency

Ironically, the encryption technology seemed to be able to provide a publicly auditable (audible?) system.

I briefly tried buying $10 of Civil, an attempt at democratising online journalism, but was never charged when the ICO failed.

2. Prove ownership

I became aware of NFTs, and the concept was an elegant extension of the transparency value: declare to the world where ownership of a (digital, because physical is self-evident) asset.

Unfortunately, this was potentially even more energy intensive. Plus, transactions had to take place in cryptocurrency, necessitating an initial crypto buy.

I’d asked Cory whether cryptocurrency was a useful innovation, and he responded along the lines of:

no, because of the danger of a 51% attack

So I asked my buddy if any of the major coins avoid that, and he assured me Ethereum did. I also read it was more efficiently designed, so energy use was about a tenth of Bitcoin’s. So I was to buy Ethereum.

Another risk point: how to buy. My friend Calvin worked at Binance (10% off) in Tokyo and backed them, so I made an account and bought the minimum amount ($15) of Ethereum.

Now to experiment with an actual useful blockchain, and not bury the world:

Handshake Domain Names

The international Domain Name System (DNS) is inefficient. The whole point of domain names is a consistent familiar place for users to find you online. It has lifetime value, and is rarely something you’d want to give up on a yearly basis, and if you do it should probably go to someone who holds it at greater lifetime value - not a speculative hoarder or SEO hacker.

Hence, the current system of users essentially renting domain names annually, often at great cost ($30+ for fashionable ccTLDs .io & .ai) doesn’t make sense, except for the countries who extract rent from their TLDs, especially if they make nice DomainH.ac/ks like Ascension Island’s there. Wouldn’t it be neat if brands didn’t have to register across TLDs. And users just typed in a single word, without needing to remember the TLD too. It might decrease our Google-reliance!

Anyway, Namebase.io came up with an ingenious idea: have websites live AT TLDs themselves, which are lifetime-owned… i.e. NFTs! They are attempting to reclaim the rent from this $1bn industry. They’ve created a seemingly independent open-sourcey Handshake.org to run the blockchain, so perhaps at least some of that won’t just go into their pocket..

Yes there are promising centralised approaches which don’t require blockchain: eg .music. But it seems plausible a decentralised approach will just sweep away traditional-TLD DNS. Yes, it could be another project. But Namebase put on a good show: their brand alone is promising because it piggy backs on Coinbase’s.

So as a web designer, I thought: this is probably the least-bad NFT I’ve seen. I’ll give it a go.

Carbon Offset

Unfortunately to buy HNS without US gov registration you need BTC. Whilst I’m willing to let slide my low-energy Ethereum transactions, and plead ignorance on HNS’s credentials, I felt a moral imperative to mitigate the carbon emissions this middleman trade would entail.

Yes, carbon offsetting is not itself a climate emergency solution. But it is a good mitigation for necessary transactions like this.

However, it’s another transaction which requires research to mitigate risks & downsides.

1. Choosing a provider

I immediately disregarded blockchain-based solutions, such as the willfully hypocritical ‘ClimateCoin’.
An internet comparison recommended a seemingly Aveda-backed Nature.eco who had a single one-off project

Yes it looks complacently virtue-signal-bait with its attempt to tie in a general post-colonial charity vibe. But hey, it’s something.

2. Estimating tonnes of CO2

This is heinously hard, and I’m sure the bright minds of r/WallStreetBets could do well to put their minds to a simple carbon offset estimator, however inaccurate.

I quickly got estimates from two approaches which seemed to line up:

One is the average transaction estimate of ½ ton CO2:

This converts to needing ~10bucks of carbon offset:

The second is to use a blockchain-approaches estimate:

Assuming (expensively) ‘transaction fees’ here simply means dollar equivalent transacted - in my case $60 per transaction - this lines up to about $3 per transaction.

Although I suspect this is probably closer for my small transaction, I couldn’t find any definitive evidence that the trading a smaller amount of BTC like I did actually reduces the transactions energy use, I went with the idea that my transaction was ‘average’ to hopefully also account for the ETH, HNS & NFT purchase, and went with a round tonne overall:

(If anyone can provide a more accurate overall estimate which is higher, I’ll gladly purchase the difference.)

Using my Handshake Domains

I won all my auctions (auction details are public, I can post a how-to if anyone’s interested though). Yeah I didn’t get the one I want (my artist-name cerulean/ ) but I’m keeping 200 HNS in wallet in case the owner ever decides to offer on sale (pls!).

laurencewarner/ is now setup at a dLink: the simple link-page auto-provided
w4.rner/ same for an example of a sub.domain
Ourss/ : I’m waiting til Jan 26th launch

Browse on Brave (soon Opera) to view Handshake domains. Otherwise, stick HNS.to/ infront.

In future, I plan to explore cloning my GitHub Pages sites like w4.rner.me using this tutorial (and ). I need to check if there’s a duplicate content SEO danger with the hns.to in which case I’ll use this Template.

I will follow up with another post after FirstWeek about a bid offer I made, and any more info on HNS carbon footprint specifically, as I shared this article with Johnny Wu.

Conclusion

Don’t be like the complacent ‘snowflakes’ in my musical: justifying crypto speculation as a socially progressive move like “at jack”.

I’m not saying don’t experiment with investing a small amount of time & money into exploring blockchain use-cases. I’m saying:

a) pick ones you’ll actually use within a month

b) don’t overdo it, especially on the energy-use

While carbon-offset can be a useful lever, the best approach is moderate your usage. With smartphones, I advocate a week off each month. Given the seemingly exorbitant energy-use of Bitcoin, I would look to make no more than a transaction per month (high-frequency crypto traders, I’m looking at you).

Don’t send humanity to the crypt, just because your friend told you about the latest tulip called ‘crypto’.

Thanks for reading

Wanna donate to support an indie blogger taking the time out from being an artist to write about money without receiving any?

PayPal.me/lpwarner

Or if you insist on BTC: wallet deposit code: 1PnXY4DKh83o4G8vNSopcSCQrgf9rWDhYL

I guess you might aswell make it at least 10 bucks worth to justify it, cos you will carbon-offset, right?

I added (privacy-friendly) Plausible Analytics in October 2020, 4 months after joining in June, so I’ve been able to track page traffic for 2021 (plus a couple months before)

Most Popular

Top 5 Posts

(overall page rank)

1. (2.) FirstWeek vlog | Dec these vlogs got surprisingly high engagement on YT! I’m bringing the routine to my main YouTube.com/CeruleanSounds next year with the Punkt MP02 phone!

2. (4.) Micro.Camp Day 2 Live | Watch my Talk! really happy this got some proper watches, as well as dozens on YT

3. (5.) Jasraj & I podcast likewise for this, thanks to @jasraj promotion. Now I’m Premium, I’ll definitely offer to do a microcast each time I meet an M.b-er in person!

4. (8.) FirstWeek Vlog | Nov so happy to have found a form of content where I can bundle about 3 different strands: tech review, arts review & intermittent life update into a package people want to watch!

5. (9.) Meta.com investigative journalism (#tech) I’m glad an deep industry-specific piece made the cut (the other 4 are more general holistic content). Really this tech exposé had the potential to be number 1. I went full Bellingcat and researched the scurrilous background of Facebook’s recent headline-grabbing rebrand (+ wrote a comic imagined retelling of how it happened). I’m still waiting to hear this story from any other source.

Top 5 Pages

1. (1.) home I should probably start customizing theme to condense the content!

2. (3.) about the first link in top nav! Now I’ve got SA hash-mode, look out for more visits to the Follow Me anchor from the footer’s new Subscribe link

3. (6.) Tech Articles ‘& Tech’ top navigation, more popular & engaging than its predecessor ‘The Arts’, which probably shows where M.b-er interests lean

4. (7.) Light Phone Vlogs strangely only 1 inbound from the YouTube descriptions, but I think in-app browsing getting miscategorised to l.instagram.com.
   I’ve feature req SimpleAnalytics to identify this issue

5. (10.) Tech Microblog a slightly meta category, collecting my posts about Micro.blog service itself (yup this Article itself will be in it!). Most traffic from people looking for more tips after seeing my Videos explainer on Help.Micro.blog. I’ve been pretty active there, you can see my top contributions, thanks to Discourse’s own analytics.

Overall Website

For all (dozen or so) of my sites on SimpleAnalytics I have (current rolling avg) monthly page views of 300. I’d love to see Adriaan beef out this feature, i.e. to group subdomains, to help get a birds-eye view across multiple domains.

My primary creative home on the web CeruleanSounds.com is only being tracked by GoDaddy Websites own tool, averaging 100 visitors, which probably equates to about the same page views, as I reckon avg pages per visitor is more towards 3 than 2.

So according to Plausible, at 1.5k+ unique visitors across 15 months, this Micro.blog website was averaging 100 monthly visitors too. And on the last 12 months view, you get a sense that the trend is definitely upwards

I look forward to seeing the trend continue the same way on my new SimpleAnalytics public dashboard now.

Thank you for your support, and for visiting my personal blog website.

Appendix

How I calculated

Time on site x visitors

Time on site can be skewed upwards by people leaving the page open. Particularly me: Plausible doesn’t have Simple’s neat Firefox Extension to discard your own visits! I’ll discard anything where average is 5+m often expected consumption time. Here’s those Hon. Mentions Posts:

(micro) Teasing RSS Project though I do hope it will get a lot of attention when OURSS.SOCIAL goes live next month 🕸🎶

(micro) Marshall Steinbaum. I know it had high-visits but someone must have left it open cos it’s short as hell to get

NoCoDB launch this was a decent innovative article, but not worth half-an-hour of average reader’s time. 8 Google visits. Added rner.me to Google Search Console so I can understand this stuff in future.

Plausible as go-to M.b tracking option

Here’s the all-time dashboard:

I’d recommend it for 2 reasons:

1). It’s the cheapest for low-traffic sites at $6/mo

2). Even if you cancel after 1st month, they keep collecting in the background (even if you change domain & 301 redirect). It’s a little cheeky, but in theory you could collect a year of data for $12 by renewing sub at end of year for a month and exporting.
However, I’d recommend actually supporting a service across your websites on a monthly basis, as I do with Simple.
I will leave the Plausible script in, so I can sanity check both their & Simple’s data in a year’s time.

I wanted to document high-level of my Plausible data publicly, before I end my subscription with them tomorrow, especially as SimpleAnalytics cannot import their new data export.

I’ve finally figured out how to add SimpleAnalytics, which is hereafter publicly available at https://SimpleAnalytics.com/wa.rner.me.

At the start of the pandemic, I was shortlisted by OXFO for a venture remotely guiding groups of teenagers in practical internet projects, like coding an old skool HTML-only website.
Now that tutoring is just a side-hustle for me, I’m having to work on my mission to push CS education “by doing” literally 1 by 1. And I’m happy to say my first 1:1 6thForm student has just published his first website: S4VV4.com.
It’s based on the code template of my olde Master’s student webpage which lives at W4.RNER.me.
I licensed the code under Creative Commons, because mine in turn was a tip of the hat to early 90s websites. In particular Tamara Munzner’s, who was kind enough to let me play about with the idea of a homage.

There’s a serious pedagogical point here, which is that we sometimes need to be launched to a place ahead of our current understanding to catch up. The Latin quote in my footer means “we stand on the shoulders of giants”, and I’m proud to be able to support folks like Savva myself now, via my online CS tutoring.
I market my services at the subdomain Lea.rner.me. I may use a modern website builder there, but the design principles of minimalism & templating are the same as they’ve ever been on the web.

(soz blurry, full digital version)

Imogen West-Knights is clearly a brilliant writer & wordsmith.
BLLW is almost as good as good a privilege-parody Twitter as Titania McGrath, and in about 2 years time we’ll be able to read her words printed onto hardback for like £20, as she’s getting a novel published.

But I don’t believe she’s ever showed real interest in technology, in particular Virtual Reality (unless you count Love Island, which sometimes seems like it!).

So whilst it’s cool to hear a very well written take of watching a tech launch:

one of the most dispiriting pieces of media I have ever watched

The Guardian are in danger of making one of the biggest errors in tech media that Doctorow calls ‘criti-hype‘: that is accidentally hypeing an evil BigTech company in the guise of criticising them.

Specifically, scaremongering around the fate of the ‘digital world’, in particular taking a “they’re coming for our jobs” rhetoric to:

it’s coming for the metaverse

is actually counterproductive in fighting Zuck.
Assuming ‘the metaverse’ is even an important concept worthy of analysis actually plays into FB’s game.
There’s no reason a co-linear virtual world - based on a word dreamt up in a Neal Stephenson fever dream - is A Big Thing. Why not just call BS - as I have - and point out that the name was plucked for expediency out of their existing domain name ownership, and keep calling them more accurate names (like FakeBook).

Or pick up from the theme in your main coverage of the fact that FB have failed to even run the name through one of their (no doubt spookily good AI) translators:

Maybe we could have had an opinion piece riffing on how this brilliantly hammers home Haugen’s revelations that Facebook consistently under-resources non-English-language moderation.

Instead we get a normie writer parroting Zuck’s language.

Cool creative kids: you’re don’t become smart just by stealing the nerd’s glasses!

I could understand picking a non-technical writer here for the ‘FB destroyed reality angle’ if it was a devoted anti-FB campaginer (like Tanya Goodin, or a yoof from the Log Off Movement). But she’s not: she’s just another educated young Brit who gradually slid to the gram over the past half-decade and couldn’t even be bothered to delete their discoverable profile with 912 friends. Doesn’t seem like someone who’s really putting money where mouth is when it comes to disowning Facebook, and some of the contactability benefits it brings.

I know a name & background (yeah I recognise her from my short stint stooging for some oily Old Etonians called Oppidan Education, who she’s still actively working for!) like that can get you a long way at the Grauniad, but with actual experts like John Naughton on hand over at Observer, and many exciting young techies turned writers, why choose an unpublished novelist and pop culture pundit on this one?

Whilst tech innovation is often over-hyped, it is sometimes earth-shatteringly important, and it takes an expert to tell the difference.
Grauniad: if you wanna be the smartest paper, pick the smartest writers for the topic. Otherwise you’ll bleed readers to The Times.

And if you needed proof that the ‘forever’ notion backed into the concept of ‘the metaverse’ is overhyped, and the Facebook network’s recent blackout wasn’t enough, look at your owns tory:

Hey, according to the data everyone’s been as teetotal as me these past two years!

Cheers! 🍻

(see #arts news)

Truss is gonna beat him at his own game. Foreign Sec activities are waayyy more IG friendly than Chancellor. Rishi needs to pivot to Twitter, or even better Micro.blog :D

“Hang around the barbershop long enough and you’ll get a haircut”

I wrote in my “No Time to Die” review

the bloodshed will have history wagging its finger

True to form, the Grauniad already are!

(see #tech news)

Listen on Apple Podcasts

18:30 At least they advertise they don’t know what they’re talking about but Tori’s mispronounce of Travis Scott at was quite spectacular!

23’ VR Carolina is the future hi-fi on lo-fi? Facebook think They can live without Apple or Google In VR land

25’ If AI software gets smarter, then hardware fidelity can get worse

26’ shocked that a man who can use ‘orthogonal’ for opposite, can then use ‘phenomena’ for singular

27’ this puzzle hits home to some culture in general, where like in the music where modern use it has more ratchet, for example punk and hip-hop, but it is the most rapidly produced and listened genre

30’ 0.5% of users over half of App Store billings. Couple hundred dollars a month of Candy Crush

34’ holler at casual flash web games. They are genuinely the only games I go back on family. Call of duty is some addictive violence bait. But the game where you drive the motorbike round is fun!

35’ why do all 12 y/o have smartphones? I really hope step-sis holds out on her Flip

Zuckerburg & Chan, before

Meta.com’s ‘incredible journey’

Jan 23, 2017:

Meta acquired by Chan Zuckerburg Initiative (CZI), the Initiative’s first acquisition, including the Meta.com domain, which now contains invitation to Reserve your friend account on Meta.Org: “Meta uses AI to analyze and organize all biomedical research, so you never miss out.”

Feb 2019:

Meta.com now redirects straight to meta.org, which still merely contains a waitlist signup. They claim:

Aug 2019:

It’s still on waitlist

The only thing Meta seemed to be forever was in-development!

Late 2019-2021:

Meta.org finally launches, after 3 years, again with the salient promise:

Meta is ad-free and free to use, forever.. Backed by the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative

It seems to have been worth the wait. The right problem for the right time: just on the eve of the Covid pandemic, in which many of the breakthroughs (e.g. BioNTech vaccines) did come from innovative researchers drawing from diverse research streams in biomedicine.

I’d love to hear from any researchers who’ve used the platform, and whether they think it will be sufficiently replaced.

Oct 27, 2021:

Less than 2 yearr after launching, CZI decided to close down Meta.

Meta.com starts redirecting to about.Facebook.com/meta, because Zuck is rebranding Facebook Inc. as Meta Ventures Inc.

On Meta.org, CZI write a Sunset Article:

They say they will refocus on “more specifically defined domains”. Well I guess if you read ‘domains’ as ‘web domains’, then I guess that is kind of true. Whatever biomedical philanthropy limps on will have an internet presence at some random subdomain, rather than ** literally the company’s new homepage**, which is the real reason they are sunsetting.

See my sketch below on how I imagine C & Z might have made this decision.

Oct 28, 2021:

about.Facebook.com/meta becomes the homepage of the big announcement of the conference called “Facebook Connect 2021” (presumably named before this little rebrand), and is the spearhead of Zuck’s attempts to rescue his company from negative PR & a plummetting share price.

Let’s be clear: Zuck has actually siphoned an asset from his supposedly charitable arm which is actively engaged in tackling the global pandemic, for superficial branding purposes.

Some wags don’t even think was worthwhile, e.g. @danielpunkass:

@cdevroe:

But then CZI is an LLC owned by Zuck, so I guess we shouldn’t actually expect any philanthropy.

March 2022? :

once Meta.org is sunsetted, I predict a new Meta.com and Meta.(otherTLDs) webpages will be launched, as part of Zuck’s bid to build Meta Platforms, Inc. the world’s biggest company.

There’s only 1 thing that’s forever for Zuck and it ain’t philanthropy.

A Sketch

The Place: the Work Room, the physical clone of Zuck’s Workplace Horizon Work Room, Menlo Park, California, where he has several interns Working From (his) Home.

The Time: Last week, just after Zuck banned Priscilla from turning on the TV for fear of seeing “that woman” Frances Haugen

Zuck: ‘Intern! Cleggy says we need a new parent company name, and fast. I’m obsessed with short futuristic brand names, do we have anything in our domain ownership roster? Maybe about the metaverse. Intern?!’

intern: ‘nope nothing in our company database.’

Zuck: ‘how about the CZI database?’

intern: ‘you’re charity database, but that’s meant to be a totally separate organisation!’

Zuck: ‘and you’re meant to be at school.”

intern: ‘ughh well there is that Meta.com & Meta.org, but you said those would be for philanthropy forever’

Zuck: ‘haha yeah! Priscilla believes it when I say things are forever. Like on our wedding day!’

Priscilla: ‘what’s that Mark?’

Zuck: ‘oh hi Priscilla! Queen of my Californian Desert! Saving so many lives every day with all of our acquisitions!’

Priscilla: ‘ahhh.. yes every since the first frog we kissed”

Zuck: ‘who are you saying looks like a frog?”

Priscilla: ‘no honey I meant Meta.com. The first company we made charitable ‘forever’ with a princely acquisition.’

Zuck: ‘Yeah I know we said forever. But I think it’s time to focus it on, on..’

intern: “more specifically defined domains”

Zuck: ‘more specifically defined domains’

Other Promises

Let’s imagine what other promises might not be kept. Please engage & repost with any other commitments CZI have made which you think should now be doubted. It’s also going to be worth looking at other similar ‘Philanthrocapitalism’ efforts including “Good Ventures” by Zuck’s old pal Dustin Moskovitz, who lets his wife Cari Tuna take care of day-to-day operations, but would presumably nick a domain if needed.

Their “Giving Pledge” was vague enough to start!
In their open letter to their son, they pledge to give 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during our lives” . Who knows, maybe this latest piece of linguistic gymnastics will allow them to escape yet:
a). ‘ughhh, we don’t have any Facebook shares anymore, we have Meta shares’ b). ‘my life is continuing on in the metaverse as an avatar controlled by you my son’

How about promises around ‘Meta’ itself? Even the meagre (<1% of the $10bn annual R&D) $50m “to ensure the metaverse is built responsibly” fund could probably be cancelled at a moment’s notice on Zuck’s whim.

As I wrote in my first piece in this series on FakeBook’s rebrand - last night’s quick-response piece - Internet 3.0 cannot be trusted with the ‘visions’ of a handful of billionaires. Let’s make it better!

I will follow this up with a 3rd (and hopefully final) piece about Zuck’s claim in his Announcment speech (here’s a version without the filler) that the metaverse will “help the environment”. I believe this will also be an unkept promise, and I’m putting forward a more likely future in Snowflakes in SoCal!.

Appendix: the prehistory of Meta.com

Meta.com which has been continually registered with GoDaddy since 1991 (!) making it one of the earliest registered domains.

This time series gives a sense of the visit volume to the domain:

Here were some of the early efforts:

[Meta Inc. changed its name from Sciencescape Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_(academic_company), bought the domain and put up this waiting page in the mid-2010s:

I guess it was active in 2016, though the Wayback Machine pages won’t load for me, until the CZI acquisition.

Incidentally, there was another company of the name of Meta - who lived at MetaVision.com - working in AR, who’s founder made Forbes 30 under 30 for his 2013 patent on an AR eye glass. The company went downhill (probably ahead of its time) and dissolved in 2019.

I wouldn’t have said this had he kept it as a really useful charitable inititiative, but now I feel confident to say: I hope Zuck’s Meta goes the same way.

Correction

9th Feb: “initiative” title typo

This quick reaction is based purely on Guardian article. Will write fuller piece by end of week once digested.

1. This is premature, and mainly a capitulation

An Alphabet, Inc. style differently-named parent company is primarily a way to de-risk the company from the fate of it’s (weakest) app of the name Facebook. As M.G. Siegler pointed out in his overhyped, but still potent article: when they eventually created an umbrella company “they called it Facebook, which was dumb”. It shows a sense of pride in Zuck individually, because it was the one app of the family he actually designed rather than acquired. Dumb pride.

The Meta rebrand should primarily be seen in the light of rectifying that dumb prideful decision. This represents failure for Mark Zuckerburg. Full stop.

And the failures have been mounting up. Since I started blogging alone, I’ve covered: heinous privacy breaches resulting in class actions, the most widespread breach of personal phone numbers ever and the final straw this week’s Haugen’s whistleblower that they knew this bad stuff was coming.
They really needed some positive PR. The fact that the main app’s catastrophic impact on society has made it a dirty word in the press is the only reason this change has happened.
Do not let him pretend that he wants to be making this admission of defeat. There’s been a lot of corporate therapy applied to him here over the past couple of months, probably primarily from wiser heads like Clegg, Sandberg.

Sometimes the greatest success can come out of failure. Perhaps the failure of Facebook App needed to happen to force them to do a strong pivot that might pay off for them this decade:

2. A proactive play for Siloed XR (Extended Reality)

When I was workshopping Snowflakes in SoCal!, a musical which takes place later in the decade, about a climate activist trying to run a FirstWeek FlipPh.one digital detox campaign for the XR age, I spoke to Prof Marc Downie, a VR visionary, about what widespread XR might look like.

He described a lacklustre vision of corporate platforms giving us ad-filled AR. This has been realised pretty well in “Square Eyes”.

Likely this tech would be powered in a way society didn’t truly understand.
In our imagining with extremely carbon-intensive cloud computing, by a multinational tech company hybrid so ubiquitous our characters don’t even really feel the need to discuss whether it’s primarily Shenzen or Silicon Valley owned.
All to deliver experiences we’ve somehow become hooked on.
We wanted to depict a world which neither wants nor understands the tech placed upon it, but is addicted nonetheless.

And this move from Mark Zuckerburg looks set to make this more likely a reality.

Non-corporate entities seeded Internet 1.0, but they’ve been slow off the mark ever since. I mean look at this Micro.Blog tech I’m using to publish this blog post. An approach to social media designed to support the human users was only invented a decade after Zuck’s hooky tech was launched.

Zuck is basically saying: “I’m losing my lead in Internet 2.0, so I’m gonna announce we’re playing a new game: Internet 3.0”

It probably means we will all suffer through pop culture getting dragged down as young people get addicted to half-hearted horrible XR attempts (probably under the Instagram brand) for most of the mid-decade.
It probably means a much worse end goal: too centralised, too manipulable, not enough clear consumer rights etc.

Open/indie web activists everywhere: we didn’t expect round 3 to begin this quick, but it has. We urgently need to imagine better XR futures than Zuck, and deliver them a year, not a decade later, and convince people it’s worth waiting that extra year or so for ours than buying into his when their Instagram feed prompts them to.

Where my ethically designed XR social apps at? I’m waiting for you.

Anti-FB dominating the front-page!

Main paper:

Times2: so poignant what was said about “designing away childhood”

For more brilliant testimony from brave young people, watch back the stories from FirstWeek FlipPhone

Brilliant to see this negative PR spilling into tangible effects in the Business pages:

And Australia continue to lead the way trialling a better way forward for protecting youngsters.

Britain need to trial such a program of banning underage users from porn sites first. As the main story showed they themselves are open to it (whereas FB are still clinging to the dream of Instagram for Kiddos), and the urgent moral case is most clear.

Then they should extend it to social media. As De Souza points out in main story, they have face scanning tech to KNOW these so-called 13 year olds are 11, so they can’t play dumb forever.

Meanwhile, a “tech company” whose actually innovated something tangible is having more long-term success:

Maybe Facebook should stop trying to clone TikTok, and re-focus on making Oculus really good and safe for children & their data, so we can avoid using Chinese XR hardware.

That would be a real innovation to help people in the West!

While Western governments across the Atlantic are channeling Facebook’s mentality of trying to control information:

and murderously punish those who dare to share:

Come on savvy people, the only moral way to make money from Facebook is Class Action lawsuits! Still waiting on mine…

After C4’s expose of Exxon’s anti-campaigner tactics, this is no surprise. If they can’t hire you (see above) they will try to destroy you.

We have to fight alike and support the efforts of orgs like Bellingcat to turn these methods on the powerful.

As you can see I’m trialling bundling my posts about newspaper stories on my two areas of expertise (arts & tech) into two larger articles. Arts one here. I just think Twitter is so full of hot-takes already it makes more sense to showcase stories in the same universe of topics side-by-side to give them some perspective.

Following from my shocking Customer service experience with FB this week, it seems that none of the big socials have really figured out how to scale up user data ownership. That’s not surprising: they are overgrown lumbering beasts with tiny per-user profit margins. Good customer service on data costs them double (helps users leave), so it’s not surprising they are bottom of the pile.

But I think when it irks me is when they try to talk a good game about it.
I preferred TikTok when it was first a Chinese import, not pretending to Western values.

Now they’re pushing “educational” content, and more recently slapping on their front page a big banner about positive privacy & user rights changes:

But how did the Westerners pushing “good values” fare. Well Chinese data scientist Sophie Zhang joined FB “make positive change”, but they gave her no support to actually do so.
It’s a bit like TikTok’s data export feature: they tell you you’ll own your data and then actually getting it works something like this:

The 12 Days of Miss-mas

Day 1. Request first export

I requested txt first so I could quickly human validate:

Day 3. Receive Inbox noti it’s arrived

Noti buried in app, must go via hooky home page:

Day 4. Unlock

Even if you avoid all the Social login trapdoors and sign in with password, they’ll still re-prompt you for it:

Day 5. VIew on iOS browser

TaDa!

Day 6. Try passing to Desktop browser

Passing the url (which contains a redirect url) to desktop browser, you get to a page like:

Clearly wants me to be logged in, but also curious it seems to think it’s JSON when I requested txt.

When I try to log in to another tab from TikTok.com, or do the password verification via Web Inbox, I was met with the spinning circles:

This was true across my custom Firefox, but also vanilla Brave (Chromium) & Safari.

Poor web experience isn’t surprising given how Chinese (read: mobile-first) TikTok is, but I can’t really excuse them for iOS (iPad) experience.

Days 7-12. Repeat for JSON export

Did anyone have a better experience?

Would love to know if anyone actually got data out in a useful form. This was largely a stress-test as I privitise my short-lived @CeruleanSounds presence, but we ultimately decided just to double-down on @Spitfire_Bars because frankly MC Beastly is the only part of me unprincipled enough to use a tech service (same for vanilla Facebook, and hopefully one day the gram) which shows its user this little respect.

But anyway I do hope to grow @SpitFire_Bars into tensK followers there with short-vids, so it would be nice to know we can readily extract the content at a couple days notice.

or on YouTube

0:00 New Feature + Camera Angle
1:45 Directions How-to (New Feature!)
6:45 My Creative Week Vlog: 💿 Heath McNease & Michael Clancy 📚 “Touch” & “Hamlet, Revenge”
14:25 (forgot to add) #BURNER

- 🔗

Apple petition
Light Phone Directions Tool
Extended notes : Partnered with mapmaking company HERE. GPS hardware activated for first time with software install

–

FlipPh.one to join me on a week-long smartphone detox this year. Pick your month: I’ll be doing it every one! You don’t need to drop 300 bucks on a Light Phone II, but if you do you might find it easier: TheLightPhone.com.

Ahh I now understand the point of the post was to point out the flavours of metacrap by customizing them. But that misses the point that a single og: tags in 2018 would have been just fine on all platforms.

Agreed it’s a DRY violation in principle, but it’s a small one (1 metacrap versus 8+). Also in reality most tools (certainly the services themselves) automate their creation from the content. Admittedly as @Moondeer has discovered the M.b. plugin for Twitter is janky.

Also, if a single piece of Repeat Yourself is such a concern, are you anti-RSS?

My Talk

“Micro.blog Mothership for your #SavvyIndie Creative Journey”

It’s all about getting the most out of a single M.b. subscription, with focus on Categories & Cross-Posting.

Talk Notes

Members of the Hub can view it alongside other talks on Vito. Apparently they will eventually be added to Micro.Camp for posterity.

Here was some of the reactions:

Was happy it’s provoked people to think about getting savvy with the tech they’re paying for. Reply here for strategic advice for anyone’s individual setup.

I’m particularly keen for this to reach creatives not on M.b. yet to inspire them as to what could be possible if they choose a better base for their online presence, so please do share this post with them! They can contact me for advice getting off to a good start here.

Notes from Other Talks

• Getting Started with Sketchnotes by @cm & @ChrisWilson

• Want to Write a Book? You Probably Already Have! by @PatrickRhone

In-between stuff

Yesterday, I shared a clip of “Ever After” playing.

Here’s the second track “Way Back Home” in action. Particularly cool that it losed it out to @burk’s awesome logo:

“All the photos you see in the slideshow are from A Day In The Life of Micro.blog, a 24-hour global photochallenge. You can see them all at micro.blog/discover/…” - @jean

Overall

Thank you @manton, @jean & @burk !

Hope that it’s gonna be IRL next year, at least for 🇬🇧 gang

It would be a Micro.Blog virtual gathering if I didn’t blog about it.. right?!

1. The State of Micro.blog, plus Q&A by @manton & @jean

Jean can’t stomach using Marketing Slogans.

I do, so I’ll relay!

Micro.blog is:

The Social Media where it’s OK to Apologise | My tweak: Never too late to Apologise

Social Media where it’s OK to respond to a post 3 months later

Social Media for Cold Takes | (as opposed to Hot Takes)

@PatrickRhone clearly DOES do marketing slogans. He came up with: “Micro.blog is Slowcial Media”

1b. Q & A

My unanswered questions @manton :

Search Indexing: “Why are Micro.blog profiles not Google indexed (right?), but Help.Micro.blog is?”

”@jean I reckon I’d probably put my hat in the ring for a paid UX design position”

2. The Joy of Long-form Writing by the mighty @jasraj

looking forward to seeing the lad tomorrow down at his local Parkrun, to do our own lil’ IRL Conf Breakout!

2a. 1st Meetup: Books 📚

Great to briefly put a voice & moving-face to @pimoore, and the mightily big-brained @chrisaldrich who I’m keen to learn more about his entertainment work.

Recommended the Best of Britain: Sherlock Holmes & PG Wodehouse, and found many like minds.

3. Learning in Public on Your Blog by @kimberlyhirsh

She was also in the Books talk. Really great piece about offering up lessons of your learnings.

Interesting companion to Jas’s talk.

Raises the big question: is there a trade-off of sharing your journaling? Does it make you lose energy to do the solo journaling? You might say: “oh I’m just sharing it now”, but the truth is you are probably only sharing certain things.

In-between stuff

My Cerulean Sounds were played! In particular, two tracks from Smalltown Dreamer: A-Side!

Such an honour to be accompanied by visuals from the community, including amazing artists @MikeHendley & @kaa.

Live text chat

Here’s some of my faves (to do Kimberly proud, here’s the tool I found to create the collage):

Members of the Hub can view & respond to all my posts here.

It has come to my daily “Screens Off” time (9pm) here in the UK.

Look forward to watching the rest of today back, and tuning into all of tomorrow’s (incl. Movies meet🍿 ) Live!