OLDaily

What we talk about when we're talking about "Webmentions"
Marty McGuire, 2022/06/07

Way back in 2002 I built something called the Referrer System that found links to your web page and listed them. All you had to do is put a little Javascript snippit on your page. It became really popular and broke my server and also attracted a lot of spam. WebMentions performs essentially the same function, but isn't centralized, and offers more control over what appears on your page. But it's also harder to implement, though in recent years it has gotten easier. I really think something like Webmention is the alternative to social media, but we have to get to that point where everyone has their own easy-to-use website (which, ultimately, is what social media provided). Image: CSS-Tricks.

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The Digital Divide in How We Use the Internet
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2022/06/07

We're familiar with the digital divide defined in terms of access, but Irving Wladawsky-Berger, citing Esteban Moro, argues that there's a second digital divide, this one defined by how we use the internet. In a nutshell, for higher income and education demographics, information-seeking traffic predominates, while for lower income & education demographics, entertainment traffic predominates. According to the paper, "The digital usage gap is so profound between low- and high-income or low- or high-education areas that it can be used to clearly distinguish between them or even identify the relative composition of these groups in a given area." I would be wary of deducing economic status and demographics from something as variable as internet use.

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Met police profiling children ‘on a large scale’, documents show
Wil Crisp, Vikram Dodd, The Guardian, 2022/06/07

According to this report, the Metropolitan police "has been collecting 'children's personal data' from social media sites as part of a project to carry out 'profiling on a large scale'." I assume these are police in London, England, though the story does not say. It's known as Project Alpha, and is argued to help "fight serious violence, with the intelligence gathered identifying offenders and securing the removal of videos." If the method actually worked, there might be less objection, however as critics note, "Young people use social media to magnify their lived experience. It is a tool for projection, you can't rely on it for detection. It is racially motivated, racially driven and involves racial stereotypes." Used not only in the UK but around the world, police profiling is a lot like China's social credit system, but without the openness, social awareness, and public input.

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USask Moving to Poll Everywhere for Student Response System
Heather Ross, Educatus, 2022/06/07

I know, it's not the most ground-shaking event in the world, but I wanted to take note of this, if only to reaffirm that student response systems exist and that Poll Everywhere is one. It makes me wonder about wider applications of the technology - suppose everybody in the country had an app they could use to answer questions put to it by the government and opposition parties. Forget about public opinion sampling, just measure public opinion directly. Related: the best free alternatives to Poll Everywhere.

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Firefox Can Now Translate Pages Without Sacrificing Privacy
Corbin Davenport, How-To Geek, 2022/06/07

This is the sort of AI service that we should be looking for. "Firefox can translate pages on your computer without telling Google, Microsoft, or any other translation company what you're looking at." This is important because it preserves user privacy. The set of languages is limited (and doesn't include French!) but my quick test (illustrated) suggests it performs quite well. Translation is just one of the AI-supported functions we will want to use in the future, and the challenge will be to enable them on personal computers, rather that entrust the function to data-collection and advertising companies.

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