general

From Marco.org (via Barry Ritholtz) comes another rabble-rousing post on RSS, the death of Google Reader, and the open web vs Facebook and its would-be clones:

The bigger problem is that [the big players] abandoned interoperability [with their current APIs]. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).

Google resisted this trend admirably for a long time and was very geek- and standards-friendly, but not since Facebook got huge enough to effectively redefine the internet and refocus Google’s plans to be all-Google+, all the time.

And:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. "Sunset" it. "Clean it up." "Retire" it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Previous rabble-rousing posts, and here's one more quote from the Adactio post that Marco.org also linked to:

I think that the presence or absence of an RSS feed (whether I actually use it or not) is a good litmus test for how a service treats my data.

Instagram doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my uploaded photos.
Twitter doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my tweets.
Facebook doesn’t provide an RSS feed of my band’s updates

It might be that RSS is the canary in the coal mine for my data on the web.

Canaries and litmus tests are a mixed metaphor but you get the point.

Webster's defines update as "another change to Firefox you didn't ask for." Using this open source product often feels like sitting in coach as deranged Wikipedians argue in the cockpit about notable ways to steer the airplane.
The latest annoyance looms in version 23 (hat tip Joel) when they remove the "enable Javascript" checkbox from preferences. The discussion intrigues even though the "user is an ass" crowd prevailed:

saint:

The ability to disable JavaScript is now obfuscated, and users are deliberately discouraged against manipulating their JavaScript preferences. This is wrong, and inhibits a user's understanding of what happens when they load a web page.

The following is not an acceptable work around:
about:config > javascript.enabled

This destroys a non-technical user's grasp of the differences between static HTML and programatically manipulated HTML. It hides the setting amidst hundreds of other obscure settings, and does not emphasize the extremely powerful tool that JavaScript is, and the fact that it is optional.

snob:

I would like to echo Mikko's welcoming of this feature. As a web developer, we have become ever more reliant upon JavaScript to allow for some of our more advanced functionality to exist.

When leveraging SaaS platforms, developers are often limited to what they are allowed to do with backend code base, forcing use of client-facing scripting languages.

Having this option seen by average, non-technical users allows for them to essentially break this client-facing scripting language without good reason. One may argue that having this option readily seen by average users may encourage them to question whether they need JavaScript, "if it can be turned off, there must be something scary about it, might as well just turn it off, don't know what it does but definitely don't want my identity stolen somehow..." *click*.

For users who know they need to have javascript disabled, they will know that they need to go into the config and manually turn it off, something the average user wouldn't know to do. It's 5 clicks, instead of 3. I feel this is an acceptable increase in steps if it allows for less users being able to unintentionally hobble their web browsing experience because of unwarranted paranoia. Once it's added to dev tools, may be even less steps to turn it off, ultimately.

JS, like CSS, should not be able to be turned off so easily by users. It's an essential part of the modern web. [emphasis added]

A running list of Firefox "fixes" that have to be unfixed:

Stand-alone images centered in an ugly brown fleld (fix).
Hiding "http" in address bar (fix).
Blurry images from zooming entire page rather than just text (fix - except).
Automatic scaling of pages dependent on how the user sets operating system display preferences (fix).

minor edits for clarity, tone

Update: A reason someone might want an easy way to disable Javascript.

1. Your best reason is number 1 (or 10 if you do it Letterman-style)
2. After that you start straining for reasons
3. By 3 no one is smiling
4. Everyone got your point in number 1
5. Most people aren't clever enough writers to keep readers engaged through 10 reasons
6. You repeat yourself
7. You repeat yourself again
8. Now you only need two more reasons to pad this out to 10
9. Readers perk up for the home stretch
10. You're done -- no one read this far

Juan Cole, you're great, but please stop doing top 10s

The Mozilla Zine describes a problem that appeared yesterday with the update to Firefox version 22:

Firefox version 22 now uses the operating system's DPI [dots per inch] instead of Firefox using [its] own. This might result in larger text and graphics (might be blurry) in the UI [user interface] and the content especially if you use a DPI greater than the default of 96.

Not "might be blurry" -- since I use 125% display resolution on Windows, what I saw yesterday on Firefox was horrible -- pictures zoomed up and fuzzed out and text filling the browser window.

The link above offered a fix. Enter "about:config" in the Firefox address bar and "set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1 instead of -1." This restores the view to what it was before Version 22.

I assume this is only a Windows issue and will only affect people who have enlarged Windows text on high res monitors in Control Panel/Display. Enlarging the font size in Windows does not change the size of images (and certainly doesn't fuzz them out) but it does in Firefox - dramatically, due to its having incorporated obnoxious allover zoom in earlier versions.

I've been using Firefox because it's "open source" but the developers don't seem to get that fuzzy images are bad. This discussion of DPI and such was very rancorous but the critics seem to have been shouted down.

Good post from Greg Palast on the US Supreme Court's invalidation of certain 1965 Voting Act provisions. As usual, the NY Times and other mainstreamers called the decision historic without explaining well what was going on. Something about Section 4 something? Next article. Palast minces no verbiage:

Last year, the GOP Secretary of State of Florida Ken Detzner tried to purge 180,000 Americans, mostly Hispanic Democrats, from the voter rolls. He was attempting to break Katherine Harris' record.

Detzner claimed that all these Brown folk were illegal "aliens."

But Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act requires that 16 states with a bad history of blocking Black and Brown voters must "pre-clear" with the US Justice Department any messing around with voter rolls or voting rules. And so Section 4 stopped Detzner from the racist Brown-out.

[...]

We can go from state to state in Dixie and see variations of the Florida purge game. It quickly adds up to millions of voters at risk.

Yet the 5-to-4 Court majority ruled, against all evidence, that, "Blatantly discriminatory evasions [of minority voting rights] are rare." Since there are no more racially bent voting games, the right-wing Robed Ones conclude there’s no more reason for “pre-clearance.”

Whom do they think they're fooling? The Court itself, just last week, ruled that Arizona's law requiring the showing of citizenship papers was an unconstitutional attack on Hispanic voters. Well, Arizona's a Section 4 state.

Palast says it's a political move by the court to prevent another Obama: "The Republican court knows that to swipe 2016, they had to replace the Voting Rights Act with a revival of the Katherine Harris act."