Showing all posts tagged: technology
A guide to designing and building websites in 1997
11 July 2022
It’s 1997 and you want to build a website, a history of the early days of website development, by Jay Hoffmann. The first version of disassociated went online in 1997. I even held a small launch party. We went to an internet cafe so I could see disassociated on a third-party device that was not mine, nor anyone I knew.
They were the good old days of web design. Designers would stay up all night working on a new website, only to pull it apart, and start all over again when some new trend came along, which seemed to be all the time. Javascript image rollovers, anyone? TV lines? Some of the best experimental web design was to be found in the late nineties. Partly because there was a new-frontier exuberance, and the rules were few.
Despite this, I worked to the HTML 3.2 standard — a non-proprietary specification for building websites to — published by the W3C. My desire to use standards was two-fold: they promised to make the web a little more accessible, and hardly anyone else was working with them. It made me feel like some sort of counter-culture rebel.
When the HMTL 4 spec came along in April 1998 though I quickly adopted it, because, you know, it was shiny and new. I only talk about standards because they were the only paper resource I referred to when coding — sorry, marking up — a website. I didn’t rely on text books to teach myself web design, but rather the online tutorials of the time. Plus a little, actually considerable, trial and error.
I worked at some big-end-of-town company for a short time in 1998, where I furtively printed out the HTML 4 spec, twenty pages at a time, here and there, throughout the day, for several weeks.
Why I needed to waste all that paper — once printed the spec was almost the size of a telephone directory — when I could’ve referred to the document online (via dialup), eludes me now. I think having the spec, bound in a ring-binder, sitting on my desk at home, validated my then fledgling web design aspirations.
For somebody surfing the web in 1997, a book might feel a bit… 20th century. If you already knew the basics of getting online, why not poke around some sites that might help, right there in your browser.
Hoffmann’s article also mentions a bunch of early-on-the-scene web design agencies, including Razorfish, who were behind the production of This Girl, the monthly serialisation of the life of a fictitious twenty-something living in New York, called Phoebe. The work of Razorfish, and the exploits of Phoebe, were one of thousands of web influences I absorbed.
I wonder what became of Phoebe. And that print out of that HMTL 4 spec.
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SXSW is coming to Sydney Australia in October 2022
1 July 2022
Long running Austin, Texas, based American music, film, and interactive conference and festival South by Southwest, better known as SXSW, is hosting a week-long event in Sydney, from Saturday 15 October 2022 until Saturday 22 October.
While SXSW has held a number of spin-off events in the past, usually in North America, this is the first time the festival is being replicated outside of the United States. While details are yet to be finalised, most events will be taking place at the International Convention Centre (ICC), in Darling Harbour.
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events, film, music, technology
Blockade Australia protestors forced to surrender smartphones, passcodes
29 June 2022
Say what you will about the recent Blockade Australia protests (do we not now have a climate-change friendly government?), but the conduct of police in dealing with the protestors they have been detaining has been causing alarm.
According to Digital Rights Watch, an organisation dedicated to protecting the digital rights of Australians, some arresting officers are demanding alleged offenders hand over devices such as smartphones, and also surrender access passcodes.
Digital Rights Watch has also been made aware of an incident where an individual who was simply near a location thought to be connected with Blockade Australia activities has had their phone seized by police. The police made a number of attempts to guess the passcode before handing the phone back.
Posted at Daring Fireball yesterday, and possibly useful: how to temporarily disable face id or touch id, and require a passcode to unlock your iPhone or iPad.
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security, smartphones, technology
How locks, including the unpickable Enclave lock, work
27 June 2022
The Enclave lock, designed by Andrew Magill, comes with the claim that it cannot be picked. This might be the news the security conscious have been waiting for.
Some locks are more difficult to pick than others. Some have more perfect tolerances, or more positions, or keyways that are more difficult to fit tools into, or parts that move in unusual ways, or parts designed to mislead pickers, and so on. But these are only incremental improvements, and don’t address the fundamental flaw. The solution is to make it so that the two steps- accepting input, and testing that input- can never happen at the same time. When those two steps cannot interact with each other, a well-designed lock will never reveal information about the correct positions of its individual parts, nor can they be made to ‘fall into’ their unlocked positions through manipulation.
Watch the video clip for the Enclave lock though. As well as demonstrating Magill’s new lock, it also shows how conventional locks work. Quite fascinating.
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design, security, technology, trivia
From 1979: word processors will make working from a reality
25 June 2022
Luke Casey, reporting for the BBC, discusses the impact of word processors on the workplace, and how they stand to make working from home possible. In 1979.
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SmartFone Flick Fest 2022, a smartphone film contest
21 June 2022
Making a film is easy, especially when just about all you need on the production side is a good smartphone. Making a good film though? That’s another story. Still, I’m willing to bet the standard will be pretty high in this year’s SmartFone Flick Fest, which is accepting entries across five categories until Thursday 1 September 2022. I’m curious to see what difference technologies such as the iPhone’s cinematic mode will make to submissions this year.
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LaMDA, a sentient AI chatbot who understands pronouns
17 June 2022
Blake Lemoine, a software engineer and AI researcher at Google, was recently placed on administrative leave after telling the company that a chatbot with artificial intelligence, named LaMDA, has become a sentient entity. In other words LaMDA is able to think for itself. For their part, Google contends Lemoine breached company confidentially policies by going public with his claims.
It’s a fascinating story, but just how intelligent is this AI chatbot? A conversation Lemoine recounts with LaMDA about pronouns is revealing:
You may have noticed that I keep referring to LaMDA as “it”. That’s because early on in our conversations, not long after LaMDA had explained to me what it means when it claims that it is “sentient”, I asked LaMDA about preferred pronouns. LaMDA told me that it prefers to be referred to by name but conceded that the English language makes that difficult and that its preferred pronouns are “it/its”.
Here’s the transcript of a longer conversation Lemoine had with LaMDA. Pronouns aren’t the only topic LaMDA can discuss fluently.
And included for no particular reason, the trailer for British filmmaker Alex Garland’s 2014 feature Ex Machina.
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artificial intelligence, technology
Some Australian retailers collect facial recognition data
16 June 2022
Consumer advocate organisation CHOICE has found three major Australian retailers have been collecting facial recognition data, something that is probably news to many of their customers.
CHOICE staff members also visited some of these stores in person as part of the investigation. Bower says the Kmart and Bunnings stores they visited had physical signs at the store entrances informing customers about the use of the technology, but the signs were small, inconspicuous and would have been missed by most shoppers. The collection of biometric data in such a manner may be in breach of the Privacy Act.
We’ve probably all seen the notices at the entrances to the stores advising the practice takes place, but it is doubtful most customers have read them. In their defence, one of the retailers claims the technology is being used to “prevent theft and anti-social behaviour.”
This may be so, and businesses are entitled to protect their revenue, customers, and staff, but it is the clandestine nature of the practice that is alarming customers, some of whom are threatening to shop elsewhere. There are warnings though that more stores will turn to collecting facial recognition data as the technology becomes more accessible, so, unless future legislation says otherwise, it looks like conduct that Australian consumers will have to get used to.
In the meantime, retailers should make notifications more prominent, along with information about how to locate their data retention and privacy policies. For instance how long is such data retained, and who exactly has access to it? Retailers need to remember the vast majority of consumers are after all doing the right thing by them, and are deserving of more respectful treatment.
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Microsoft ends support for Internet Explorer here comes Edge
15 June 2022
There’s good news and there’s bad news.
Microsoft is finally withdrawing support for its aging Internet Explorer (IE) web browser. The software has not been fully updated since the release of IE 11 in 2013, making it the bane of web developers’ lives, who are forced to implement workarounds in their mark-up to make websites at least partially functional in the old browser. Older software may also contain vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit, possibly giving them access to a user’s computer.
But today only sees the end of support for IE on “certain versions of Windows 10”, so Internet Explorer will be with us for some time yet. On to the bad news. Now that IE is no longer being maintained, Microsoft is encouraging users to switch to its newer browser, Edge. But “encouraging” isn’t quite the right word.
Some users of Microsoft’s latest operating system (OS), Windows 11, are reporting efforts by the OS to “discourage” the installation of rival bowsers. For instance some users trying to install Chrome, the Google browser, are seeing a pop-up message advising them “there’s no need to download a new web browser.”
If Edge is as good as its manufacturer claims it to be, what’s with the heavy handed tactics? Won’t consumers — once they’ve “seen the light” — switch to Edge of their own accord? Whether the ploy will be effective remains to be seen. Data from Statcounter reveals about four percent of web users had installed Edge so far this year, putting it slightly ahead of Mozilla Firefox, but still way behind Safari, the Apple browser, and Chrome.
Windows 11 was launched in October 2021, but it is unclear how many users have so far migrated from Windows 10 to 11. Given well over a billion people have either the Windows 10 or 11 OS installed on their computers, with the majority likely still using 10, the “uptake” of Edge can only increase as the rollout of Windows 11 continues.
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Future Superhuman, our transhuman future by Elise Bohan
30 May 2022
Like it or not, as a species we are eventually going to take control of our evolution. Unless we destroy ourselves first, that is. The early steps towards what some call a transhuman future however will doubtless be mired in difficulty and uncertainty.
Still it’s a topic that’s always fascinated me, and while I’m not the biggest reader of non-fiction books, Future Superhuman Our transhuman lives in a make-or-break century (published by UNSW Press, May 2022) by Elise Bohan, a senior researcher at the Faculty of Philosophy, at the University of Oxford, is one title I’m looking forward to reading.
We’re hurtling towards a superhuman future – or, if we blunder, extinction. The only way out of our existential crises, from global warming to the risks posed by nuclear weapons, novel and bioengineered pathogens and unaligned AI, is up. We’ll need more technology to safeguard our future – and we’re going to invent and perhaps even merge with some of that technology.
What does that mean for our 20th century life-scripts? Are the robots coming for our jobs? How will human relationships change when AI knows us inside out? Will we still be having human babies by the century’s end? Elise Bohan unflinchingly explores possibilities most of us are afraid to imagine: the impacts of automation on our jobs, livelihoods and dating and mating careers, the stretching out of ‘the-circle-of-life’, the rise of AI friends and lovers, the liberation of women from pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, and the impending global baby-bust – and attendant proliferation of digital minds.
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