Do you know what the Fermi Paradox is? Take 20 minutes to read this article and I promise you’ll never look at the stars the same way again.
Aside Archives
Grist.org, the environmental journalism non-profit I’m on the board of, has received a Knight Foundation grant to “allow newsrooms to better measure audience engagement, beyond clicks and page views, by creating an open-source WordPress plugin that will measure ‘attention minutes’ to determine how long users are interacting with content.” I’m excited to see what they come up with, and that it will be open source, perhaps it’s something we can incorporate into Jetpack down the line. If hacking on that sort of thing and saving the planet is interesting to you, Grist is hiring WordPress developers.
Propublica has a piece on canvas fingerprinting done by the ad service that uses the trojan horse of sharing buttons, AddThis: Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block. Regardless of the usefulness of this particular technique, which seems to not be effective enough to stick around, services like AddThis and ShareThis will always spy on and tag your audience when you use their widgets, and you should avoid them if you care about that sort of thing. That’s why we put sharing buttons into Jetpack that are much more privacy (and performance) friendly.
You can now count on a “Snowden Sunday” every few weeks: some jaw-dropping revelation that if you had suggested it a few years ago people would have dismissed you as a tin-foil-hat-wearing paranoid. Now the hardest part is not becoming numb. Here’s the latest from The Washington Post: In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are. Bonus: CIA employee’s quest to release information ‘destroyed my entire career.’
iOS 8 WebKit changes finally allow all apps to have the same performance as Safari. I was just asked about the future of the mobile web at last night’s WP talk in Singapore. (Which had about 300 people there, great turnout!) There are still a lot of issues for the open web in a closed mobile world, but things like this are a great step in the right direction. Another reason I can’t wait for iOS 8. Hat tip: Matt Bumgardner.
Brad Stone at BusinessWeek reports Automattic has acquired the great service Longreads, which you can also read about on our blog. See also: Techmeme.
In April and May, there are Automattic team meetups and events happening in Budapest, Napa Valley, Pender Island, New Orleans, Barbados, Cardiff, Konstanz, Playa Del Carmen, Portland, Toronto, Saratoga Springs, Palermo, Edinburgh, and Lisbon. Did I mention that we’re hiring?
Two cool new WordPresses launched on VIP: Nate Silver’s new FiveThirtyEight site, and the Facebook Newsroom, which I believe is the first WP-powered Facebook site. (Hopefully the first of many!) Also congrats to 10up and Beyond respectively for working on each of these sites.
Another Sunday, another round of stories from the Snowden files. I hope people don’t become fatigued of these continuous revelations, and it leads to change. Another good read is from the Atlantic How Americans Were Deceived About Cell-Phone Location Data. Precise but misleading language is a dangerous tool.
Very honored to be on Time’s 30 under 30 list alongside some amazing folks across a number of fields. I only have about another month of being under 30, so good to be on these lists while I still can. 🙂
Have you seen the famous Automattic / WordPress shuffleboard? That and more in this excellent profile and interview by Debra Winter in SOMA Magazine.
As written about by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Techdirt, Automattic is fighting back against two cases where we feel the DMCA has been used abusively for censorship and bullying. Read more about it here.
Comscore, whose accuracy is generally between a Lotto Quick Pick and a drunken dart throw, says Google Maps usage has fallen since Apple Maps came on the scene. The Guardian has a good overview: How Google lost when everyone thought it had won.
We shouldn’t be surprised that in the absence of choice, people take the path of least resistance. What’s missing in these discussions is how it’s criminal Apple gets away with not allowing alternative defaults for maps, browsers, calendars, and any number of other areas, which means every time you click a link or address in the OS it opens Safari or Apple Maps, in my opinion inferior apps. Some developers get away with this by having settings to set Chrome or Google Maps as your default, like Tripit just added, but this is implemented in a hacky, per-application way, and every app puts their setting in a different place if they support it at all.
If Microsoft did this a decade ago we’d call for the DoJ to reopen their investigation. Apple has the best phone, best tablet, and in many ways the best operating system — we should not give them a pass for this blatantly self-interested and user-hostile stance. Defaults matter.
The story around badBIOS, the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps, is fascinating and surprising. The capabilities of sophisticated attackers right now vastly outstrip the defenses of any computer user or company. The news that the NSA had broken into the networks of Google and Yahoo, unfortunately, wasn’t surprising given Google’s move to encrypt traffic between datacenters early in September.
Today Akismet blocked its 100 billionth spam. 100,000,000,000. Billion with a B. We had to tweak the counter on the homepage to handle more numbers.
As just written about in TechCrunch, the WordPress.com blog, and Cloudup’s blog, Automattic has acquired Cloudup, a really slick service that makes easy to share every type of media from a very talented team. The service isn’t open to the public, but if you use this link to signup there are a couple hundred invites for ma.tt readers.
Hunter Walk is Not Just a WordPress User, Now Also an Advisor to Automattic. Really excited to have him involved!
Dave Pell on building the NextDraft platform. Spoiler: It’s WordPress, but a really cool implementation of it across a blog, iOS app, and newsletter. I wish more publishers worked the same way.
Jay Rosen (and Barry Eisler) on the surveillance state’s efforts to make journalism harder, slower, less secure. The gist: why would they destroy hard drives they know there are copies of, and detain couriers they know they’ll have to release?
I’m really excited about the launch of WordPress.com Connect. Yes Facebook et al offer similar APIs and have more users, but there are two key differences. First is Automattic is not an advertising-driven company, so our priorities around users are different than ones who are. Second is that these APIs are the basis for interacting with any element of an entire website hosted on WP.com or not, meaning themes, widgets, posts, content, CSS… any company that does something that ultimately ends up on a website should be looking at the APIs on developer.wordpress.com and pushing us where there isn’t one yet.