Tags: cloud

Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click

This is a great move from Cloudflare. I may start using their service.

The Industrial Hammer Complex

Coincidentally, I was just talking about hammers and nails in another context.

Progressive enhancement used to be a standard approach. Then React came along and didn’t support that approach. So, folks stopped talking about that and focused entirely on JS-centric client solutions. A few years later and now folks are talking about progressive enhancement again, under the new name of “islands”.

What is going on here?

It turns out, it’s the same old thing. Vendors peddling their wares. When Facebook introduced React, that act transformed the font-end space into a hype-driven, cult-of-personality disaster zone where folks could profit from creating the right image and narrative. I observed that it particularly preyed on the massive influx of young web developers. Facebook had finally found the silver bullet of Web Development, or so they claimed! Just adopt our tech, no questions asked, and you too can be a rock star making six figures! We’ve been living through this mess for ten years now.

The cosmic ballet goes on.

Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

Cloudfare’s alternative to Google Analytics is now available—for free—regardless of whether your a Cloudflare customer or not:

Being privacy-first means we don’t track individual users for the purposes of serving analytics. We don’t use any client-side state (like cookies or localStorage) for analytics purposes. Cloudflare also doesn’t track users over time via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other immutable attributes for the purposes of displaying analytics — we consider “fingerprinting” even more intrusive than cookies, because users have no way to opt out.

BBC Radio 4 - Under the Cloud

James made a radio programme about “the cloud”:

It’s the central metaphor of the internet - ethereal and benign, a fluffy icon on screens and smartphones, the digital cloud has become so naturalised in our everyday life we look right through it. But clouds can also obscure and conceal – what is it hiding? Author and technologist James Bridle navigates the history and politics of the cloud, explores the power of its metaphor and guides us back down to earth.

To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution | Technology | The Guardian

Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people.

Making QR codes with cloud functions • tommorris.org

Tom makes an endpoint for generating QR codes so you don’t have to rely on the Google Charts API.

He also provides a good definition of “serverless”:

Now, serverless is a very silly buzzword dreamed up by someone from the consultant class who love coming up with terrible names, so I promise I won’t use it any further. Your code obviously run on a server. It just means it runs on a server someone else manages.

Amazon call it a ‘Lambda Function’. Google call it a ‘Cloud Function’. Microsoft Azure call it simply a ‘Function’. But none of those are very descriptive, because, well, anyone who writes any kind of programming language generally writes functions pretty much all the time in much the same way as anyone who writes English writes paragraphs, and we don’t call our blogging software “Cloud Paragraphs”. (Someone will now, I’m guessing.)

Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape - IEEE Spectrum

It turns out that a whole lot of The So-Called Cloud is relying on magnetic tape for its backups.

Jupiter Perijove 09 | Flickr

Gorgeous images from Juno’s closest approach to Jupiter.

A Progressive Roadmap for your Progressive Web App - Cloud Four

Jason lists the stages of gradually turning the Cloud Four site into a progressive web app:

• Jul 13: Our redesign launches
• Oct 3: Service worker added
• Oct 18: More offline functionality and faster performance
• Nov 22: Web notifications
• Dec 7: Small tweaks and “launch”

And you can just keep incrementally adding and tweaking:

You don’t have to wait to bundle up a binary, submit it to an app store, and wait for approval before your customers benefit.

The People’s Cloud

A documentary by Matt Parker (brother of Andy) that follows in the footsteps of people like Andrew Blum, James Bridle, and Ingrid Burrington, going in search of the physical locations of the internet, and talking to the people who maintain it. Steven Pemberton makes an appearance in the first and last of five episodes:

1. What is the Cloud vs What Existed Before?
2. Working out the Internet: it’s a volume game
3. The Submarine Cable Network
4. How Much Data Is There?
5. Convergence

The music makes it feel quite sinister.

Hey, Hey, Cloud Four is a PWA! - Cloud Four

Jason talks through the service worker strategy for his company website.

Setting up CloudFront and TLS (HTTPS) with Jekyll – olivermak.es

Remember when I mentioned that you can get free certificates from Amazon now? Well, Oliver has written an in-depth step-by-step description of how he got his static site all set up with HTTPS.

More of this please! Share your experiences with moving to TLS—the more, the better.

Chipmunks on 16 speed

This sounds genuinely good—Alvin and the Chipmunks slowed down to reveal their true ’90s post-punk goth-grunge nature.

Where Did the Internet Begin? - The Atlantic

Ingrid begins her tour into the internet and into the past with a visit to room 3240 at UCLA, home to the first node on the ARPAnet.

In a strikingly accurate replica of the original IMP log (crafted by UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History) on one of the room’s period desks is a note taken at 10:30 p.m., 29 October, 1969—“talked to SRI, host to host.” In the note, there is no sense of wonder at this event—which marks the first message sent across the ARPANET, and the primary reason the room is now deemed hallowed ground.

Responsive Day Out 3 by adactio on SoundCloud

If you were at Responsive Day Out on Friday and you liked the music that was playing during the breaks, here’s the track listing. Creative Commons licensed.

Matt wrote a great article called Ten Years of Podcasting: Fighting Human Nature (although I’m not entirely sure why he put it on Ev’s site instead of—or in addition to—his own). It’s a look back at the history of podcasting, and how it has grown out of its nerdy origins to become more of a mainstream activity. In it, he kindly gives a shout-out to Huffduffer:

…a way to make piecemeal meta-podcasts on the fly built up from random shows (here’s my feed).

Matt has written about how he uses Huffduffer before: a quick introduction to adding your Huffduffer feed to Instacast. It’s equally straightforward with Overcast, and most other iOS podcast apps.

If you use the iOS app Workflow, there’s a nifty tutorial for extracting the audio from YouTube videos, posting the audio to Dropbox, and subscribing in Huffduffer. I’m letting the side down somewhat though: Huffduffer’s API is currently read-only, but it would so much more powerful if you could post from other apps. I need to wrap my head around OAuth to do this. I was hoping to do OwnYourGram-style API with IndieAuth and micropub (once your Huffduffer profile has your website URL, and that URL has rel="me" links to OAuth providers like Twitter, Flickr, or Github, all the pieces should be in place), but alas IndieAuth only works on a domain or subdomain basis so /username URLs are out.

Anyway, back to Matt’s article about podcasting. He writes:

Personally, I like it when new podcasts use Soundcloud for their hosting, because on a desktop computer it means I can easily dip into their archives and play random episodes, scrub to certain segments and get a feel for the show before I subscribe.

It’s true that if you’re sitting in front of a desktop computer, Soundcloud is a great way to listen to an audio file there and then. But it’s a lousy way to host a podcast.

The whole point of podcasting is that it’s time-shifted. You get to listen to the audio you want, when you want. The whole point of Soundcloud is that you listen to audio then and there. That’s great if you’re a musician, looking to make sure that people can’t make copies of your music, but it’s terrible if you’re a podcaster.

To be fair, Soundcloud’s primary audience is still musicians, rather than podcasters, so it makes sense for them to prioritise that use-case. But still, they really go out of their way to obfuscate the actual audio file. Even if the publisher has checked the right box to allow users to download the audio file, the result is a very literal interpretation of that: you can download the file, but you can’t copy the URL and paste it into, say, an app for listening later (and you certainly can’t huffduff it).

Case in point: Matt finishes his article with:

If you don’t have time to read the above, it’s available as a 14min audio file…

That audio file is hosted on Soundcloud. You can listen to it there, or you can listen to it through the embedded player on the article itself. But that’s it. You can’t take it with you. You can’t listen to it later. You can’t, for example, listen to it in your car, even though as Matt says:

…for most Americans, killing time listening to podcasts in a car is a great place.

If you can figure out a way to get at Matt’s audio file (and maybe even huffduff it), I’d be much obliged.

Like Merlin says:

If the episode page for your podcast doesn’t have a clear link to a downloadable audio file? That ain’t no podcast. [mic drop]

— Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) December 23, 2014

NASA Study Proposes Airships, Cloud Cities for Venus Exploration - IEEE Spectrum

Airships in the atmosphere of Venus. More plausible than it might sound at first.

Introducing Universal SSL

Great news from Cloudflare—https endpoints by default!

This means that if you’re planning on switching on TLS for your site, but you’re using Cloudflare as a CDN, you’ve got one less thing to change (and goodness knows you’re going to have enough to do already).

I really like their reasoning for doing this, despite the fact that it might mean that they take a financial hit:

Having cutting-edge encryption may not seem important to a small blog, but it is critical to advancing the encrypted-by-default future of the Internet. Every byte, however seemingly mundane, that flows encrypted across the Internet makes it more difficult for those who wish to intercept, throttle, or censor the web. In other words, ensuring your personal blog is available over HTTPS makes it more likely that a human rights organization or social media service or independent journalist will be accessible around the world. Together we can do great things.

How to secure your site in an afternoon - Josh Emerson

Josh walks through the process he took to enabling SSL on his site (with particular attention to securing assets on CloudFront).

Responsive Day Out 2 by adactio on SoundCloud

Here’s the Creative Commons licensed music that was playing during the breaks at Responsive Day Out 2.