onfocus

"A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements."

I’ve seen slogans like ‘abolish police’ on protest signs and that didn’t make sense to me. Now I see that slogan more like a question: what type of society do we want to be?

Klein: Over the past couple of nights, as you’ve seen the collisions between police and protesters, what has that looked like to you?

Skinner: It looks like what we designed.

We ramped up police for a war on terror and now we’re getting a war.

"The ongoing protests following the killing of George Floyd were caught up in violence again on Saturday, as police all over the country tear-gassed protesters, drove vehicles through crowds, opened fire with nonlethal rounds on journalists or people on their own property, and in at least one instance, pushed over an elderly man who was walking away with a cane."

The state is asserting its ability to continue to operate outside the law.

The Board was presented with a unique and complex situation – impacting one of the largest registries with more than 10.5 million domain names registered. After completing its evaluation, the ICANN Board finds that the public interest is better served in withholding consent as a result of various factors that create unacceptable uncertainty over the future of the third largest gTLD registry.

This is a relief. The .org top-level domain is not being sold for parts after all.

"Today, Firefox is enabling encrypted DNS over HTTPS by default in the US..."

So strange to see a tech company put energy into consumer privacy but I’ll take it.

My guess is that no one could figure out how to set up a job in Windows Task Scheduler so they do cert renewals by hand and their cert renewal person was sick on renewal day. (Sorry to joke, but this gives me real flashbacks and it's nice to know even corporations can make basic mistakes.)

"Rogers Communications said a landslide damaged a fibre cable and caused the outage."

Amazing that one cable could be that critical to such a wide geographic region.

As a collector of dumb domain names I am shocked (!) by this performance report. How could anyone go for these idiotic TLDs? Also wondering: is .shocked available?

My alternate headline for this: Twitter CEO makes the case that Mastodon has a superior architecture for social media; forms group to invent it. The Mastosphere has been chatting about this quite a bit with worries about embrace, extend, and extinguish. It wasn’t received well is what I’m trying to say. Mastodon BDFL Eugen was more diplomatic.

Anil on links and the web we’ve settled for:

"So let’s look at all the apps that live under our thumbs, and interrogate the choices they’re making, and then imagine what they would look like if we demanded that our tools don’t tie our hands."

"[$50 billion] sounds like a lot, but it could be a bargain compared to adding a lane to I-5, the current north-south corridor linking the megaregion."

Co-signed!

"But everything that looks good doesn’t necessarily work well. In fact, those two traits are opposed more often than not: efficiency tends to look messy, and good looks tend to be inefficient."

I really enjoyed this essay about perceived efficiency and complexity. Especially with the Chesterton’s Fence kicker. Understanding an existing system before changing it is important.