onfocus

First, a big congratulations to friend of the blog Anil Dash, new CEO at Fog Creek. And a 2nd big congratulations on their launch of Gomix—a hosted community app builder. I love the view source philosophy behind it. It'll be fun to see what people build with it.

And here are some recent links:

The State of Things

• New York Times: The Array of Conflicts of Interest Facing the Trump Presidency (closed loops)
• Washington Post: Trump's stock holdings may give him a personal stake in rules on banks and oil firms
• New Yorker: Now Is the Time to Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About
• Politico: Trump inherits Obama boom
• New York Review of Books: Trump: The Choice We Face

Media

• MIT Technology Review: Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It's Too Much Like TV (by mefi's own hoder)
• Facebook's Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible With News ("The last thing Facebook wants is to contradict you in any way.")
• The Guardian: Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

Designing Things

• Mike Monteiro: How To Fight Fascism
• Nielsen Norman Group: The Distribution of Users' Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
• GDS design notes: We've updated the radios and checkboxes on GOV.UK

Hail Mary

• Lawrence Lessig: The Equal Protection argument against "winner take all" in the Electoral College
• Electors Trust
• New York Times: Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump

Online Community

• Fusion: What GitHub did to kill its trolls
• Buzzfeed: Silicon Valley's Most Popular Forum Bans Stories About Politics
• Keeping Instagram Safe: More Tools and Control (added anonymous reporting for self-injury posts)

Security

• FBI to gain expanded hacking powers as Senate effort to block fails (thanks for fighting this, Ron Wyden)
• Buzzfeed: After Trump's Win, Secure Messaging App Signal's Downloads Increase 400%

Supplemental

• EFF: Power Up Your Donation
• It doesn't look like anything to me (via @codinghorror)
• So bad it's good: Toto - Africa (many more at mefi)
• Christmas Gifs ( NSFW )

Another mid-week link dump. I'm trying to link beyond our new national nightmare a bit. If you only have time for one, make it The Great Silence. And then make time for Vicki Boykis' post about blogging. (Maybe I need to prioritize instead of categorize, hmm.)

The State of Things

• John Scalzi: Three Weeks In
• @quinnnorton: Let me say something to my friends about the political emotion of the moment.... (breathe, strategize, use reason)
• Kottke: Is liberal democracy in trouble? "Warning signs are flashing red."
• George Lakoff interview: A Brain Scientist Explains How To Turn Trump Into A 'Loser' (eg. FiveThirtyEight runs the numbers)

Media

• Atlantic: A Reflexive Liar in Command: Guidelines for the Media
• Politico: The New Rules for Covering Trump
• AP: Writing about the 'alt-right' (new internal style guideline for accurately labeling racists)
• The News (music industry veteran on handling disruption)

Designing Things

• Maciej Cegłowski: Who Will Command The Robot Armies? ("What we need to do is grow up, and quickly.")
• 7 web design dos and don'ts (Monteiro: "It's time to grow up.")
• Gina Trapani: We’re All Frauds ("...get really comfortable being uncomfortable...")
• Om Malik: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum
• Leigh Alexander: It’s Time For a New Kind of Power Fantasy

Online Community

• Vicki Boykis: Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people (via @mathowie)
• Gizmodo: Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart

Security

• The Guardian has moved to https
• More Than 1 Million Google Accounts Breached by Gooligan
• Ars Technica: Firefox 0-day in the wild is being used to attack Tor users
• Motherboard: The Entire Internet Will Be Archived In Canada...

Supplemental

• The Great Silence (beautiful short story via @fraying)
• Lin-Manuel Miranda to Produce 'Kingkiller Chronicle' (whoa, LMM and Patrick Rothfuss working together!? )
• Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS ($5/month)

This just keeps going. If you only read one article from these links, make it the NY Times article about conflicts around the globe.

Corruption

• NY Times: Potential Conflicts Around the Globe for Trump
• Vox: Donald Trump is now questioning the legitimacy of the election he won
• Atlantic: An Erosion of Democratic Norms in America
• Washington Post: Trump Foundation admits to violating ban on 'self-dealing'
• @amjoyshow: how kleptocracy could happen here...

Media

• Intercept: Some Fake News Publishers Just Happen to Be Donald Trump’s Cronies
• NPR: We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs
• Huffington Post: Media Helps Boost False Claim That 'Millions' Voted Illegally
• How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads
• @jayrosen_nyu: Evidence-based vs. accusation-driven reporting
• BBC Radio: Cambridge Analytica CEO interviewed by John Humphrys

Hail Mary

• Daily Beast: The People Chose Hillary Clinton

Extra

• Coping with Chaos in the White House (living with narcissistic personality disorder)
• Dave Pell: America’s Achilles Heel (celebrity)
• What you can do to save America from tyranny
• TPM: This Is Not the Natural State of Things (July 2016)

The soundtrack for these links is the Butterfield Blues Band, Born Under a Bad Sign:

I took a little break from compiling links but the web did not take a break from creating them. So I bring you a new consternation of think pieces. (Pretty sure that's the collective.) No algorithms were knowingly used in collecting these links.

Corruption

• Donald Trump: Corrupt AF
• @JoltedToad: Trump Foundation admits to violating federal law by using funds to support campaign...
• NY Times: Donald Trump's Caldron of Conflicts
• LA Times: How Trump could use the presidency to help his own business interests

Media

• Fascism and The Historical Irony of Facebook’s “Fake News” Problem
• Pando: Why has Facebook changed its mind on fake news? Thank the Germans
• ProPublica: How Journalists Need to Begin Imagining the Unimaginable
• I can’t just stand by and watch Mark Zuckerberg destroy the internet.

Hail Mary

• Jill Stein: Election Integrity depends on YOU!
• The Guardian: Jill Stein requests Wisconsin recount, alleging hackers filed bogus absentee ballots
• CBS Philly: An Audit Of Pennsylvania Election Results? Already Underway
• Bruce Schneier: Hacking and the 2016 Presidential Election
• Washington Post: Electoral College must reject Trump unless he sells his business...

Practicing Cryptography

• A practical guide to securing macOS
• Decent Security on router configuration

Tech

• flarum: Delightfully simple forum software.
• trigger-happy (open source IFTTT clone in progress)
• Paul Ford: Get Me Central! (A quick explainer)
• Everything you ever wanted to know about building a secure password reset feature

Extra

• @jbushnell: I took a look at the Professor Watchlist so you don't have to...
• Washington Post: Americans keep looking away from the election’s most alarming story
• On Bullshit and the Oath of Office: The "LOL Nothing Matters" Presidency
• Kottke: Five Steps to Tyranny
• Inspirational Images: 1, 2, 3, 4

Once again, LOL. (Lots of links.) If you only read one link from this pile, make it Alex Steffen's The Politics of Optimism. It's easy for me to get bogged down in the news of the world and withdraw. This helped. It reminded me of my favorite Chomsky quote that I should just have tacked up on my monitor:

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

And now, this:

Action

• We're His Problem Now (weekly call to action spreadsheet)
• @hels on action focus
• @mulegirl on repetition
• Comic: How to Call Your Reps When You Have Social Anxiety
• Artblock (when you're blocked... via @scottandrew)

Corruption

• US Law: Bribery, Graft, and Conflicts of Interest (via @mathowie)
• ThinkProgress: Trump poised to violate Constitution his first day in office...
• Washington Post: For foreign diplomats, Trump hotel is place to be
• Wall Street Journal to PEOTUS: Liquidate

Media

• Dan Gillmor: Facebook, Google, Twitter et al need to be champions for media literacy (@dangillmor is an essential daily read)
• EFF: Tech Companies, Fix These Technical Issues Before It’s Too Late
• Vox: Don’t let Donald Trump’s antics distract you from what’s really important
• Rough Type: Meet the new gatekeeper, worse than the old gatekeeper

Hail Mary

• USA Today: Still time for an election audit
• Time: The Electoral College Was Created to Stop Demagogues Like Trump

History

• Richard Florida reading list (via @timoreilly)
• The President and the bomb (via @jdhamblin)
• Waxy: Teaching good manners to soldiers in the 1940s
• Jacobin: Vengeance Is Mine (I hate reading election post-mortems, but this has some good looking-forward in it too)

Extra Extra

• To get it done, write it down (mathowie talks with the original lifehackers)
• You Are Not Paid to Write Code ("...code is a nasty byproduct of being a software engineer.")

Friday links are really happening on Friday this time. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad.

Denormalization

• Joshua Foust: The Abnormal Presidency
• Matthew Yglesias: We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions
• Sarah Kendzior: We're heading into dark times
• Bertrand Russell: Letter to a fascist

Filter Bubbles

• Jeff Jarvis: A Call for Cooperation Against Fake News
• Christina Xu: Watching the Election from The Post-Truth Future
• @AthertonKD: the loop

(thanks, @rustyk5.)

Hail Mary

• #HamiltonElectors

Politics

• Overton Window
• Anti-democratic thought
• Age of Enlightenment

Global Extra

• Foreign Affairs: Global Trumpism
• ZDNet: Britain has passed the 'most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy'
• Aodhán O'Riordáin: Senator launches stinging attack...

Tech Stuff

• SQL Server running on Linux? It happened.
• Skyliner (new AWS automation service)
• Firefox Focus (more secure iOS browser)

The soundtrack for these links is Adrian Holovaty's awesome rendtion of For No One:

Yet another round of hand-picked links from the link mill.

Normalization

• Joshua Foust: This Is Not Normal
• NYT Magazine: A Time for Refusal
• Vox: The Rise of American Authoritarianism (March 2016)

This is a fitting update by @hbons. Though it can't hurt to take another look at the original this is fine and the 2016 update: this is fine.

Filter Bubbles

• Asha Dornfest: This is what happens when we stop paying for quality journalism
• Paul Ford: Facebook, 2016
• Buzzfeed: This Is How Facebook Is Radicalizing You
• MTV: Shirtless Trump Saves Drowning Kitten (Confusion is an authoritarian tool)

Extra Extra

• Wyden Introduces National Vote by Mail Act
• Dem introducing bill to abolish Electoral College
• Rebecca Solnit: How to Survive a Disaster (her Hope in the Dark is free right now)

Tech Stuff

• Securing Your Digital Life Like a Normal Person
• Visual Studio for Mac (ms on a roll?)
• Kill the newsletter! (go RSS, but run this on your own server)

The links are coming in too fast to wait until Friday.

Practicing Cryptography

• Signal (I use it)
• EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
• How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour (+ mefi discussion)
• Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration (beyond the basics)

Normalization

• What Normalization Means
• @RojaBandari on life in a dictatorship
• @igorvolsky on normalization

Filter Bubbles

• Tim O'Reilly: Media in the Age of Algorithms
• Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash
• Fake News Does Better on Facebook Than Real News

Hail Mary

• On "faithless" (but democratically faithful) electors
• Flip The 37
• Texas elector threatens not to vote Trump

Extra Extra

• jessamyn on Librarian Resistance
• @editoremilye on how to talk to your member of congress (calling is best)
• alternate support structures

Friday link dirge. My self-prescribed media fast is not going well. If for some reason you're able to keep up with your own river of information and need more, here are some links that stood out to me this week.

• Autocracy: Rules for Survival
• @leahmcelrath on the road ahead
• @sarahkindzior on the road ahead
• The biggest threat to democracy? Your social media feed
• The 'Filter Bubble' Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming
• The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse
• Silicon Valley Is Worried That Trump Is Going To Grab Them By The Data
• Petition: Appoint Garland Now (Senate Has Waived Its Rights)
• Reid Statement on the Election of Donald Trump
• Tim O'Reilly: How We Fight
• Elizabeth Warren: President-Elect Donald Trump
• Mike Monteiro: Let Us Now Praise Ordinary People

RIP Leonard Cohen, thank you.

Friday Link Party!

Developing Things

• Benjamin Button Reviews The New MacBook Pro (A+ apple snark)
• WordPress Without Shame
• Taking PHP Seriously
• Awesome Node.js projects
• Refreshing The Verge (note amp and fb instant juggernauts)
• Here's to more HTTPS on the web (won't hurt pagerank, honest)
• Web fonts, boy, I don't know
• Five Ways to Cultivate Gratitude at Work

Politics

• The real Clinton email scandal...
• Election Profit Makers Mixtape (D+9)
• Samantha Bee: 100% Valid Theory

Online Community

• kottke.org memberships (support kottke!)
• How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth
• Trump bots are out-tweeting Clinton bots 7 to 1 (is your crazy uncle even real?)

Extra Extra

• musicForProgramming
• Improved Initiative (neat D&D combat tracker)
• Hamilton Mixtape (Dec 2, 2 tracks now)

Time for Friday links.

Developing Things

• The Mercury Web Parser (scraping for content)
• Configuring DNS Tips (your TTL is too low)
• Parsing JSON is a Minefield (everything is vague to a degree you do not realize...)

Good News

• The NYT buying Wirecutter and Sweethome (mathowie on what the media missed)
• A State That Takes Voting Seriously (Oregon voting is the best)
• GifCities
• Wikipedia and Internet Archive fixing one million broken links (cool URIs do change)

I Wish People Would Just Blog Already

• Vine Lament by @samsanders
• Management Advice by @marcprecipice
• A Tale of Discovery by @mwichery

Online "Community"

• Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race
• Important News about Vine

Extra Extra

• The "432 Hz vs. 440 Hz" conspiracy theory
• Rod of Asclepius vs. Caduceus
• Best of Luck with the Wall

Time for a good old-fashioned context-free link dump.

Developing Things

• How the Web Became Unreadable
• A critical analysis of the iOS 10 lockscreen experience
• The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services and Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison
• favicon-cheat-sheet

Lifehacks

• Make the iPhone Volume Buttons Great Again (sorry)
• Deep work in practice (aspirational)

Politics

• Parasocial interaction
• Dunning-Kruger effect
• Reasonable Person Standard

Online Community

• The art of hosting good online conversations (1998)
• Instagram launches suicide prevention tool

Extra Extra

• The Most Patient Man on Television
• Guardians 2 Trailer
• Hand of the King Card Game
• Stutterer (fantastic short film)