John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters. It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them. John was understandably vexed about this situation, and he has every right to be, because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.

So, you’ve been invited to an unconference! Maybe you’re not entirely sure what that means (did the organizers misspell "conference"?), or maybe you’ve been to dozens of these before and you’re looking for some ideas for how to run an awesome session.

WebAuthn and FIDO2 promise a great future. Let's see if we can have it today.

It's possible!

Between July and October of this year, I did a lot of reading and writing about the role of Meta and Facebook—and the internet more broadly—in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. The posts below are what emerged from that work.

The format is a bit idiosyncratic, but what I’ve tried to produce here is ultimately a longform cultural-technical incident report. It’s written for people working on and thinking about (and using and wrestling with) new social networks and systems. I’m a big believer in each person contributing in ways that accord with their own skills. I’m a writer and researcher and community nerd, rather than a developer, so this is my contribution.

More than anything, I hope it helps.

A common question: “Is Python interpreted or compiled?” Usually, the asker has a simple model of the world in mind, and as is typical, the world is more complicated.

Today at 1651 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled "Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL" because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.

The title of this post is pretty specific. It relates to the meme on Twitter where users identify a trait or preference that they see as problematic, and identify it as a red flag. The emoji represents the red flag. For example: A stylized red flag Blaming Screen Readers 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩…

And here we see the usual pattern repeat itself. An inaccessible meme goes viral. After it is so tired that brands use it, someone relying on assistive technology points out how annoying this can be. Authors and developers jump up to blame assistive technology for being terrible at internetting.

Many companies have been trying to disrupt email by making it proprietary. So far, they have failed. Email keeps being an open protocol. Hurray?
No hurray. Email is not distributed anymore. You just cannot create another first-class node of this network.
Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.