onfocus

The rise of mass social platforms has been at the cost of a truly independent, truly open internet. But it's still there. You can still build anything on it, free of platforms and the overreach of monopolists and oligarchs.

This is the way. The mass media is not helping right now but there is a vast network of people sharing information that you can tune into with a little work.

“I don’t recall seeing an ‘NTSB Board’ being fired during the middle of a plane crash investigation,” Frost said in a recent SANS newsletter. “I can say that the attackers in the phone companies will not stop because the review board has gone away. We do need to figure out how these attacks occurred, and CISA did appear to be doing some good for the vast majority of the federal systems.”

If you never investigate crimes did they really happen?

Their cancellation, first reported by STAT News, worries local researchers, doctors and patients, who fear that the Trump administration, in its drive to cut spending, may stall or even cut off vital funds that pay for research on cancer, dementia and other conditions. NIH distributes about $40 billion a year in grants, and right now in Oregon, over $500 million in funded projects are in progress, supporting more than 5,000 jobs.

We're finding out what happens when people who hate this country run the government.

Some of my favorite tricks for finding RSS Feeds to follow

This is a nice collection of RSS hacks. I still use a feed reader every day—it’s my primary window to the web. I can’t imagine giving up that control to someone else’s decisions.

...the Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating, companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.

This feels very accurate to me. I think it's something we need to acknowledge so we know the hazards of using these monopoly services.

“Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components to a new nonprofit organization,” Mastodon says in a blog post, “affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”

It’s so important to have other models of organization. We don’t have to live in a world where a few monopolies own the entire social web. Participate with the world you want to see.

Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

Practical art for modern living.

Walmart, John Deere, Tractor Supply and other companies are changing or walking away from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. But Costco believes DEI helps its “treasure hunt” shopping atmosphere, and it is standing behind its efforts.

This is the way. Happy to see this.

They’re buying magazines we love, closing their print operations, turning them into digital-only, laying off the actual journalists who made us trust in their content in the first place, and hiring third-party companies to run the affiliate arm of their sites.

Trusted media brands are cashing in on search engine affiliate marketing with thin gruel content.

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then shared with third parties and used for targeted ads.

My guess: worth it. They probably made 20x that on advertising. It will have little to no impact on future sales. What are their customers going to do, switch to the OS that takes a screenshot of what you’re doing every five seconds?

But these older profiles are instructive, because they show that Meta’s AI primarily creates the exact type of AI spam that has taken over all of Meta’s platforms recently and which have become a running joke. They also show that Meta is not particularly good at this, and that users do not want this.

Makes sense that instead of protecting their users from garbage AI interactions, Facebook's reaction is to copy and monetize.

As the Coast Guard sped toward the cruise ship, Pam was still on the phone with the Norwegian employee in Miami, begging her to tell the ship to wait. As they approached the looming 14 white decks, she got an update: The captain was refusing their request. They would not be allowed to board.

Turns out the cruise industry is not a customer service industry. This is quite a saga and that last line is really something.