In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. Call it the “evil billionaire attack” if you’d like. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won’t have enough of it to make a difference. The call is coming from inside the house.

The reason this strategy works is that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, and then whenever possible they string them together into a network with the specific intent of making the gravity inescapable. Founders and investors and excitable technology writers like myself frequently use the term “platform” to describe technical systems with granular components that can be used to compose new functionality, and the power sources propelling the technology industry find platforms particularly appealing when the bits can be monetized each time they are used.

A platform is better than an app, or so the theory goes, because you can use a platform to build multiple apps, or enable other developers and companies to build apps from which you might take a 30 percent cut. Whatever its advantages, the Twitter debacle should spell the end of the proprietary platform as a serious technical undertaking, a high profile illustration that they are too risky to trust no matter how strong the code might be.

My first gadget review! I previewed the specs of the new iPhone 12 for Wired.

The iPhone 12 comes with a new ProMotion OLED display, which Apple is calling the “Super Retina XDR” screen. It’s the biggest visual upgrade since the original Retina screens a decade ago, and it’s crafted out of a new material called ceramic shield, which is vastly stronger than regular glass—one-fourth as likely to crack when you angrily throw it across the room. Whether you’re watching news anchors debunk political misinformation or trying to catch up with the incomprehensible meme cycle, this brilliant display is the tool for the moment, your perfect window for the end of the world.

A new Chrome extension which stops the HTML “ping” attribute from tracking your browsing activity.

Just kidding! Ha ha!

But I did write about the problems with aggressive link redirecting for New York Magazine.

This is both dangerous and ridiculous. Pages load more slowly, and the extra useless links are much more likely to break, and it’s impossible to know where you’re actually heading until after you’ve already clicked. One of the reasons users must so awkwardly tumble through a useless proprietary server that performs customized URL-redirecting behaviors is because this sort of thing is not actually included in any of our technical standards for building computer networks, and it is not part of any standard because it is a terrible idea. Bouncing internet users around between obfuscating servers in a game of internet pinball is a patently absurd way to run any sort of address system. It is a terrible distributed collective architecture that comes at the expense of the real internet.

For Wired, a meandering essay that uses the Meltdown and Spectre exploits to point out problems with how we think about the future:

Anything that seeks to reshape the infrastructure built by our past selves should deserve our most aggressive scrutiny, regulation, and suspicion. If backtracking overeager technology is already proving so catastrophic for the cheap chips in our laptops and phones, then we certainly have no hope of reversing its changes to our homes, cities, and oceans.

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The biggest flaw is simply that it can’t reasonably be called version two of email. That isn’t Google’s fault — version two of email doesn’t exist anywhere else either. We aren’t even trying. That is such a profound moral failure that maybe technical failure was also inevitable. And so a lukewarm quasi-open standard pushed by a monopoly interest punts our indefensible collective apathy right into the next generation, deeply broken and silly and misguided but also, embarrassingly enough, still the best we say we can do.

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This is in many ways the spiritual successor to a previous article I wrote about the continued stagnancy of email.

Networks are made of computers, and computers take instruction. They do as they are told reliably until they break, and for decades now, what we have told them to do is move information around as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is for two reasons: practical, because at the dawn of the internet it was important to squeeze bits over the limited bandwidth of dial-up modems; but also elemental, because designing any technology with intentionally suboptimal performance is self-evidently idiotic, so nobody does it — aside from the current FCC, apparently. Nonetheless, for the most part, the internet’s underlying application-layer protocols try to run as quickly as possible. This will remain true unless the internet is completely rebuilt atop a different foundation.

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Here’s a quick-and-dirty alternative for JavaScript on the web: lit-web.js. It lets you load Markdown files as script tags, like this:

<script type="text/markdown" src="//path/to/literate/programming.md"></script>

If lit-web.js is loaded on the page, it will find these “Markdown scripts,” fetch their content, parse the Markdown to remove everything but the code blocks, and execute the resulting code string in JavaScript. My goal with this was to create a tool that presents the lowest possible barrier to entry into literate programming. Here’s an example I’ve written for the D3.js demo site bl.ocks in which the data visualization uses its own README.md documentation as the source code.

1. It can now preserve correct line numbers for debugging, which is the killer feature I’ve been trying to figure out; this is the only reason I haven’t written all my source code in this format for the past couple years.
2. You can pipe the processed content over stdin/stdout instead of just writing files to disk, which should enable any shenanigans you want to wire up that I have not anticipated.
3. Best of all, thanks to some logging tricks it also lets you actually execute Markdown documents. Usage would be something like this:

   
   # use Python to execute the fenced code blocks inside script.py.md
   $ python $(./lit.sh --input "script.py.md" --before "#")
   

In addition, I’ve reimplemented the same core logic as a Rollup plugin. This is optimized for JavaScript, supports sourcemaps for debugging, and can be delivered via npm with semantic versioning for dependency management.

A new project with Rich Harris and Aliza Aufrichtig: Augmentad Reality is a custom hardware heads-up display which overlays ads on whatever you were looking at anyway. This is a real device which actually works, built and coded within about six hours at the Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon and subsequently covered by Gizmodo. Welcome to the future!

Twitter has always performed text analysis of the tweet content to detect elements and extract them as distinct entities to discrete data fields. Now the separation is fixed and formal: They’re auxiliary data points, not part of the message content, and as such they will need to be specifically interpreted by any program, site, or service that integrates with Twitter. This means that tweets are no longer just text; they are turning into something entirely new.