One Man's Notes

Ah, my weekend reading is here.

An insanely large Facebook data breach:

The Mexican media company Cultura Colectiva and an app called “At the Pool” used their access to their users Facebook data to make local copies of it, then left that data exposed, in the clear, without a password, on the public internet – 540 million records in all, stored in publicly accessible Amazon S3 buckets.

It looks like the data has been there for five years. And, yet again, it’s via a third party who had access.

Fascinating talk about personal responsibility and social media on the State of the net podcast.

Woe betide any pony that fails to perform to the expectations of Iris.

Weird flex for a CMS company, but OK:

”Today Automattic is announcing Happy Tools, a suite of products for the future of work. Each product in Happy Tools has been used internally at Automattic to grow our company.”

Revenue play, at the expense of focus? Hmm.

This is how hyper-partisan sites die: Inside the spectacular fall of WorldNetDaily, the granddaddy of right-wing conspiracy sites

May not have thought relative mug and scanner positioning through properly…

My wife:

”My lifelong career love affair has only ever been with bioscience but what a huge, fascinating, awesome world that is. I am so grateful to be able to potter about in my corner of it and marvel at the rest.”

Glad the word “career” is in there!

One of the interesting things about the current MacBook Pro keyboard problems is that it’s proving to me that a five year old machine is pretty adequate for my needs still, as I avoid buying a new one until it is solved.

I can hang on to Apple kit for longer than I have been.

AirDrop is such a handy feature of Apple devices. It doesn’t get enough kudos.

It looks like I last wrote about Google+ nearly five years ago — and only to declare it not dead.

Never a good sign.

So, here’s a video from a defunct satire site, about a defunct social network, found via a defunct VC-backed news site, which concludes with the fact that social networks lead inevitably to nazis.

This must be the most 2019 thing ever.

Wow. Early 2010s-era One Man & His Blog. In many ways, the “classic” era of the site…

Wow - Google+ integration in search. I had completely forgotten about that.

Something my daughters will never do…

Wow.

The current batch of negatives I’m scanning right now really capture a moment in time. They must be from 1999, one of the more significant years in my life - and 20 years ago, almost exactly.

The first few photographs are of the woman who was soon to be my ex-girlfriend in the flat we shared (and, honestly, the coming storm was written all over her face in those images), while the next batch were of a party at the flat of the woman who is now my wife.

Those really were a few months that changed my life forever, and in ways that were only good.

However, the deep sadness is that one person in those images is no longer with us, passing too, too young.

Plenty of pain in those images and the memories they evoke - but also joy. I wouldn’t surrender either.

Just preordered The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media by Nathan Jurgenson, because it looks fascinating.

I like this distinction a great deal:

Jurgenson told me that he draws a distinction between the traditional photograph as a permanent documentary object and the social photograph, which tends toward “ephemerality, playfulness, and expressiveness. When images are easy to make and easy to share, they come to be less about permanence.”

It comes from an interesting piece about the intersection of digital photography and memory.

Serious photographers have always distinguished between the “snap” and the “serious photo”. That distinction has taken on a much deeper meaning in the digital age. The social photograph is clearly a “snap”. But that doesn’t negate the role of the traditional photo.

I bought a new mirrorless camera last month, and I’ve really been enjoying disconnected photography for a while. It is a distinctly different experience to shooting with my iPhone.

On the ERG:

”Nobody deserves the ERG, though, which is to politics what food poisoning is to dinner parties.”

Fabulously precise.

Spring appears to have arrived in our garden.

10 Mothers’ Day without you, Mum. Still missing you.

Thought for the day:

Literally the most CoE thing ever: Brexit Crisis: Church of England to host Emergency Tea Parties

Apple cancels AirPower:

“After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project.”

That’s an almost unprecedented hardware screwup for the company.

This is an unusually good idea from Twitter:

“Twitter is exploring how it can annotate offensive tweets that break its rules but remain in the public interest, said Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of legal, policy, and trust and safety.”

Will it scale, though?