WDRL — Edition 267: Econom(log)ical Limits of Work, Privacy Wilderness and UX for Tech Diets.

Celý článek

Hey,

I see a lot of people struggle with their jobs, how to keep up to date, how to find purpose in what you do, how to earn money while staying within your ethical constraints. This all can be overwhelming and it happens to me regularly, too. I’m struggling to find projects I want to work on that finance my life. I considered changing jobs seriously way more than once, and yet, I can’t find a better solution than to improve my view on what I have, and the way I work. This is by far more interesting than to switch the job and face the same issues again after some time. I yet have to figure out how to make Colloq and this list a financial source for me because it’s the project I want to work on and earn money with, it’s my way of building for the web how I believe the web should be. I grow more and spend more time in my garden than ever before, yet I struggle with the idea of selling the stuff to a market — it makes it a duty.

For now, I realized again that I want to work with the web, project-wise I’m not fully on the one I want to earn money with — yet. I also don’t want to work only on the web, my mind, my body urges me to do something crafty — and I do, just not for a living. Things may change over time again, the thoughts of switching jobs will not go away. But in little steps I realize that what I currently have is good already.

News

• Safari went ahead by introducing their new Intelligent Tracking Protection and make it the new default. Now Firefox has changed the default and set their Enhanced Tracking Protection to on as well, protecting users out of the box from being tracked too much. There are two more well-known browsers out there that are missing these defaults — maybe on purpose, maybe by lack of interest but it’s up to us to choose which one we use.
• Chrome 75 brings support for the Web Share API, already implemented in Safari, and lower latency on canvas contexts.
• Safari Technology Preview Release 84 is now bringing Safari 13 features: Warnings for Weak Passwords, dark mode support for iOS, support for aborting Fetch requests, FIDO2-compliant USB security keys with the Web Authentication standard, support for Sign in With Apple to Safari and to WKWebView. It also brings Visual Viewport API, ApplePay support in WKWebView, screensharing via WebRTC, and an API for loading ES6 modules.
• There’s an important change to Apple’s AppStore Review guidelines that requires developers to offer Sign-in with Apple in their apps in case they support third-party sign-in, once the service is available in public later this year. So if you provide Facebook or Google login already in your app, prepare to add Apple’s service as well.

Generic

• We all rely on so many Open source projects and yet, here’s what it looks like to live off an open source budget — most authors are below the poverty line, forced to live in cheaper countries or not able to make a living at all from their public service of providing reliable, open software for others who use it in their commercial projects.

UI/UX

• With so many dark patterns in the software and websites we use daily, Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga call for a Tech Diet for users and how designers can help. The next products will hopefully not be invasive, dragging people into unnecessary spent time on a service but be useful and an assistant only when needed.

Tooling

• The IP Geolocation API is a free real-time IP to Geolocation JSON API with detailed countries data integration that is based on the Maxmind Geolite2 database and open source.

Security

• Aaron Parecki wrote a pretty complete post about Sign in with Apple, that walks through the process of setting it up step by step.

Privacy

• Anil Dash on questions and tries to find an answer for whether we can trust a company in 2019?
• Kevin Litman-Navarro analysed over 150 privacy policies and shares the insights in this visual story. Not only it takes about 15mins to read them in average, most of them require a college degree or even professional career to understand them. Nicely shown, you can see the history of how hard the policies are to read over time, also linked to when GDPR was introduced.
• Privacy is often still seen as in the 18th century. But the circumstances are different, there’s more to protect our own data from being access by others, there’s a wild appetite from companies to store more and more data about more people in a central place. What used to be data exclusively stored at state authorities, is now done so much butter by big companies causing these agencies to rely on data by Facebook, Google, Apple, and others. We should redefine what privacy, personal data and consent is, says Maciej Cegłowski in “The new wilderness”.

Work & Life

• Roman Imankulov shares insights from Doist on Principles for decision making in a flat organization.
• As a society, we’re overworked, have too much belongings, yet crave for more and companies only exist to grow indefinitely. This is how we kick-started climate change in the past century and this is how we got more people than ever into burn-outs, depression, and various other health issues, including increased work-based suicides around the world. Philipp Frey has a bold theory that breaks with our current system: A research by Nässén and Larsson suggests that a 1% decrease in working hours could lead to a 0.8% decrease in GHG emissions. Taking it further, the paper suggests that working 12hrs a week would let us easily achieve climate goals, if we’re also changing the economy to not entirely focus on growth anymore. An interesting study to read as it explores new ways of work, living and consuming things.

Go beyond…

• People who live a “zero waste” life are often pointed out as extreme, but this is only one point of view. Here’s the other side where one of the ‘extreme’ persons shares why it used to be normal to go to a grocery market to buy stuff not in plastic bags, go on a bike, and drink water from a public fountain. Instead, our consumerism has become quite extreme and needs to change if we want to survive and stay healthy.
• Sweden wants to become climate neutral by 2045 and currently is not matching the goals yet. Now they got a quite interesting visualization of the plan, and it’s designed to help policymakers identifying and filling in gaps and ensure the success of the plan. The visualization is open to the public, so anyone can hold the government accountable.

If you like what I write, please contribute with your money.

—Anselm