computers-R-stupid

You probably already know much of this stuff from a history of GIF animation in this month's Popular Mechanics -- yes, that Popular Mechanics...

...but it's worth a read. It gets the tech details and web politics of GIF usage mainly right without going too near the Duchampian, Barthesian "art" aspect -- the closest it comes is a consideration near the end of a Reddit whiz's "carefully crafted" movie loops.

As for the web politics, the piece is an extended infomercial for Giphy (pronounce it with a hard G and feel good about yourself) as a solution for cross-platform GIF delivery. The idea is you have this persistent animation filetype that works across browsers in a world dominated by "social" companies that want to keep you in their walled gardens, with their own proprietary video-delivery methods. Giphy aspires to be the go-to "cloud" storage place for GIFs that preserves them in their native format but also transcodes them so the social giants can all access them. Once GIFs have a reliable central location where they can be created, stored, and tweaked, people will stop saving them to their individual devices. Then, the GIF as a free-floating entity will finally shrivel up and die -- there will only be Giphy. There are still some awkward copyright issues to be worked out, as in, those GIFs you thought you were perma-linking might be suddenly replaced by YouTube-like take-down notices.
One thing I learned was that Nick Hasty, who was Rhizome's tech guy for a while, is now Giphy's tech guy. He's quoted with some old school fervor about what makes GIFs great but I doubt anyone else at Jiffy (or their tech backers) cares about any of that. Hasty says:

GIPHY believes in the experiential magic of viewing an infinitely looping series of images. While we have encoded all our GIFs into the most popular video formats and make those available on our site, the fact that GIFs play everywhere, can be copied and pasted, dragged and dropped, and don't force you to open a different interface or app for viewing, make them a better choice for what we're doing than any alternative formats.

They're changing GIF consumption in order for it to stay the same, or something. Monetize me, baby.

(hat tip EP)

Followed a link to a Wired story of minor interest (about tooth flossing); they allowed me to read about three paragraphs before a big pop-up appeared smarmily announcing HERE'S THE THING WITH AD BLOCKERS...
They wanted me to subscribe or turn off Ghostery, I suppose. I took option number three, IT'S A BIG INTERNET, FULL OF CONTENT BESIDES YOURS... and clicked away from the story.

People are talking about LA writer and art world mainstay Dennis Cooper losing his blog -- presumably for risqué content even though Google has been hosting it for 14 years. We don't really know what happened yet; apparently Google didn't know he had a notable rep and gave him their standard passive-aggressive "down the memory hole" treatment, which includes not talking to the account-holder.

My glib response earlier this week:

tommoody: @photos (i) he's a dope for not having a backup, (ii) he must have run afoul of some "community guideline" BS for blogger, (iii) this was obviously going to be a problem as soon as Google bought blogger (i.e., 15 years ago)

Ars Technica has a longish post on the state of play regarding HTTPS. What it's good for, what it's not, who is pushing it, how browsers are reading it, etc.

The present humble website converted to https a couple of years ago after the divine Google decreed that it would be giving search preference to such sites. Since it's Google, there had to be an ulterior motive; the Ars article says it's because Google's competitors can't scrape search results from https -- is that true -- how creepy is that.

Being hustled in this fashion was horrible but for tommoody.us the only downside has been (i) paying some additional cash for the certificate and an IP address (still pretty cheap) and (ii) older pages with http image tags get the "partially secure" yellow warning flag in browsers.

To elaborate somewhat on (ii) -- according to the predominant, ultra-picky browsers, my posts with images prior to July 2014 don't rate the little green "secure lock" icon. The posts themselves are encrypted but because I used "http" in the text of the post at the time I uploaded the images, dumb browsers treat this as insecure, even though my host redirects all the http image requests to https before they reach the browser!

If I had better command line skills I would edit my MYSQL tables to convert all instances of "https://www.tommoody.us/images/..." in the text of posts to "https://www.tommoody.us/images/..." But I don't.

The Ars article mentions a change-in-the-works to the prevailing web protocol (W3C) that might solve this problem:

To prove that Barnes actually does care about URLs, he's the co-editor of a W3C specification that aims to preserve all those old links and upgrade them to HTTPS. The spec is known as HSTS priming, and it works with another proposed standard known as Upgrade Insecure Requests to offer the Web a kind of upgrade path around the link rot Berners-Lee fears.

With Upgrade Insecure Requests, site authors could tell a browser that they intend all resources to be loaded over HTTPS even if the link is HTTP. This solves the legacy content problem, particularly in cases where the content can't be updated (like, for example, The New York Times' archived sites).

Both of these proposals are still very early drafts, but they would, if implemented, provide a way around one of the biggest problems with HTTPS. At least, they'd prevent broken links some of the time. Totally abandoned content will never be upgraded to HTTPS, neither will content where the authors, like Winer, elect not to upgrade. This isn't a huge problem, though, because browsers will still happily load the insecure content (for now at least). [emphasis added by TM]

Probably by the time this W3C spec gets adopted Google will have forced us bloggers who aren't part of the Google Plus/Zuckerberg Hoodieverse to change our sites to something else entirely (moan).

Update: An emailer amends my statement "my host redirects all the http image requests to https before they reach the browser" to note that "your server sends a 302 redirect to the browser, telling it to make another request for the HTTPS url; the browser performs two requests." The point is the image is encrypted by the time it reaches the browser and the "yellow flag" designation is unfair.

The same emailer also suggests that I google "mysql change http urls to https" and thinks that leads to a non-command-line solution. Well, yes, that's the first thing I did, and Word Press recommends using phpMyAdmin to edit the MYSQL database. That requires what I called "command line skills" and I'm not comfortable with their suggestion, since every site has its own little nuances. I'd rather lobby for browser makers to be less aggressive about tainting sites with yellow flags.

Update 2: Thanks to mb for fixing this using phpMyAdmin -- those piss-yellow triangles no longer show up for my innocent, older posts.