SitePoint Weekly #19
Centralized Station

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The Loop
Just published on SitePoint

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The Rundown
Top technology stories this week

The future of Section 230 remains one of tech's top stories — as it should be while changes are up in the air. It is, after all, the open web's imperfect but primary pillar of defense in the homeland of Big Tech.

The latest developments come with a proposed Democrat bill, the SAFE TECH Act, that offers Section 230 changes that are first-glance palatable. It purports to leave 230 in place while exempting a range of content from its protections — ads or posts that violate civil or human rights, antitrust law, or constitute online harassment and cyberstalking. But that's far from all.

From TechCrunch's Taylor Hatmaker:

First, it would fundamentally alter the core language of Section 230 — and given how concise that snippet of language is to begin with, any change is a big change. Under the new language, Section 230 would no longer offer protections in situations where payments are involved.

[...]

That might not sound like much, but it could be a massive change. In a tweet promoting the bill, Sen. Warner called online ads a “a key vector for all manner of frauds and scams” so homing in on platform abuses in advertising is the ostensible goal here. But under the current language, it’s possible that many other kinds of paid services could be affected, from Substack, Patreon and other kinds of premium online content to web hosting.

One of Section 230's authors, Senator Ron Wyden, may not constitute the most impartial source but is not hedging his opinion on this one.

“Unfortunately, as written, it would devastate every part of the open internet, and cause massive collateral damage to online speech,” Wyden told TechCrunch, likening the bill to a full repeal of the law with added confusion from a cluster of new exceptions.

And that's not wrong. There's no functional difference between exempting such a broad and ill-defined swathe of content from protection and repealing 230 altogether. The end result is that all content that exists online and depends on any liable entity to remain online will require direct moderation. This is the very least that is certain to occur, and the consequences of that will reach across the web and across the decades.

We don't need to depend on the word of Ron Wyden speaking in defense of his own legacy. Mike Masnick of Techdirt is incisive, the experts in Gizmodo's story are countered only by single-interest groups, and the EFF — an entity you'd hardly mix up with a QAnon cult — has what is essentially a shrine to 230 on its site.

The internet is a complex beast, partly an amalgam of technologies and partly another world together, complete with alliances of cultures that themselves already divide into subcultures and regularly do vicious war with one another. What really makes the open web tick is not easy to intuit and grasp, especially not without a background immersed in modern open source culture, or that extends to early web hacking or the primordial hacker culture of microprocessor enthusiasts and phreaks beforehand.

As this second world eclipses the first world and brings with it an ever-changing influx of people working for the new media Overton inputs, we have developed few compelling ways of transmitting this essential understanding on beyond the subculture that remains of a once-dominant online worldview. That is not to say that all of our once-dominant online worldview is worth keeping — there is a lot to be said about where that rosy-eyed optimism got it wrong. But on the technical architecture and legal protections that together support the open web, there's a lot of solid ground. And the keys to understanding why old-world policy carrots and sticks of this kind offer a tempting but all-too-simple salve for current problems is bound up in a few corners of the modern online world.

As we see in Protocol, which sees itself as a sort of premium and thoughtful source of tech news and analysis (and often meets this mark), the reception to this news among a certain set of the commentariat is near-rapturous. The authors describe the proposed modifications as creating "narrow carve-outs for a range of online harms." If you are steeped in the world of political compromise and progress through consensus, I am sure that these seem like narrow carve-outs indeed. To those who understand the open web and its underlying components and drivers, it's hard to see it as anything but a sledgehammer of Asgardian proportions.

This article, one of many more like it, goes on to say that:

"Tech giants including Facebook and Twitter have recently signaled openness to some Section 230 changes. Facebook has even gone so far as to place ads saying it welcomes regulation."

Nobody seems to question the fact that Facebook, otherwise all too ready to almost literally raze the world for another shred of ad revenue, is practically begging for this regulation. For now and for as long as it suits this narrative, Facebook's interest will be interpreted as the human element behind a shareholder-beholden giant begging for its worst elements to be tempered.

But as countless experts with deep technical and intellectual property law understanding convincingly argue, changes to Section 230 of the sort being pursued will entrench these companies through the cost of compliance — a cost only they can bear. Facebook, feeling the dissonance of record quarters against a bloated slot-machine experience everyone hates and a growing inability to break an addiction to perpetuating it, must sense upstart vulnerability in the air.

Upstarts with the appeal to disrupt Facebook from left field provide the user with a lot more power — whether they're the centralized but wild corners of Telegram or the neon-green utopia of the Fediverse, Web3, and decentralization in general, the latter group a dark horse with products maturing at a faster rate than most realize.

Facebook's unblinking engagement in the broad variety of anticompetitive behavior it's under fire for in other news cycles suggests we should not be surprised that it is willing to tear up the bulwarks and defensive moats of the open web itself to prolong its reign. And given where the most credible threats to its dominance come from, it seems prudent for Facebook to embrace a policy that will unravel the economic equation for nascent centralized alternatives while sidelining the uncontrollable, decentralized wave of services as an underbog for hardcore copyleft hackers and criminals.

These developments are disappointing, but not unsurprising. Months ago the Democrats in the House surprised us all with an antitrust proposal that showed surprising insight into the problems and offered plausible solutions. It was a refreshing contrast against the unhinged proposals of its opposition, even if they both ostensibly came from the same anti-oligopolistic position. Here, on a different but intrinsically intertwined matter, we've seen old political battlelines re-assumed, and the chance of policy driven by informed problem-solving shattered.

It's a shame, but those hardcore copyleft hackers will tell you that we should have expected it all along and planned accordingly. They're right, of course. And so we should proceed to plan B, which is to build a web with openness built into and enshrined in its very infrastructure.

• The TikTok-Oracle deal is on life support under Biden: The arrangement has been ‘shelved indefinitely.'
• Google has been promising updated iOS apps with privacy nutrition labels since the December 8 deadline, with none in sight. This week, Google's own apps were warning users that the apps are dangerously out of date — despite the lack of anything to update to.
• Not just Facebook: Snap, Unity warn Apple’s tracking change threatens business. Snap shares fell even as company assured investors it will weather the change.
• Apple’s App Store is hosting multimillion-dollar scams, says this iOS developer: Developer Kosta Eleftheriou says the App Store is fundamentally broken.
• Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ to Avoid Being Live-Streamed? Police officers in Beverly Hills have been playing music while being filmed, seemingly in an effort to trigger Instagram’s copyright filters.
• Some say Tesla's Bitcoin investment is at odds with its environmental mission, while others say Bitcoin forces miners to find stranded or more efficient energy to maintain profitability and offers an inherent waste-eliminating incentive relative to existing financial systems.
• Twitter Considers Subscription Fee for Tweetdeck, Unique Content: Internal groups are researching options users might pay for, social network says ‘revenue durability’ is now top priority.

• They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them: Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data. Not the most sympathetic cast of characters, but another compelling picture of how the trail of data we generate can be connected across contexts with ease.

• The Bull Case For Twitter Spaces: Why Twitter’s Clubhouse clone is poised to give the hottest app on the planet a run for its money. Facebook is working on its own clone.
• Twitter’s Jack Dorsey wants to build an app store for social media algorithms: Dorsey expands on Twitter’s vision for a decentralized network.
• WordPress VIP is acquiring Parse.ly, relied upon by a large number of digital media sites for real-time content analytics. This is Automattic's first large enterprise software acquisition, and one of only a handful of platforms in a niche with theoretically plenty of customers, but with a revenue ceiling tied to the difficult economics of digital media.
• Hacker Tried to Poison Florida City's Water Supply, Police Say: The hacker tried to drastically increase sodium hydroxide levels in the water, Pinellas County, Florida, officials said on Monday.
• Elon Musk’s Dogecoin Tweeting Has Believers Barking for More:
  Cryptocurrency that started in 2013 as a joke is suddenly worth a total of more than $6 billion.
• Epic’s new MetaHuman tool lets you craft realistic faces inside a browser: The new software tool is powered by Epic’s Unreal Engine.

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Versioning
Web development, design, and tooling

• The Rust Core team has announced the Rust Foundation, which aims to secure Rust's future by reducing its dependency on Mozilla and opening up new avenues for funding.
• Check out Remotion, a tool that enables you to create motion graphics in React.
• htop's original author talks about his design philosophy of user power vs. power users.
• Build a static site generator using Deno and TypeScript.
• Kevin Sahin of ScrapingBee has published a thorough beginner's guide to web scraping with Python.
• Minko Gechev over on Twitter has pointed out that Angular, which we sometimes overlook a touch here, has been on a streak — with 11.1 introducing native hybrid rendering, critical CSS inlining, trusted types, and more.
• Christian Heilmann looks at sharing data between CSS and JavaScript using custom properties.
• SitePoint author and developer of Polypane, Kilian Valkhof, explains why he thinks CSS Media Queries Level 5's prefers-contrast: forced is a mistake.
• Steven Frieson in Smashing Magazine looks at solutions to managing CSS z-index in large projects.
• Stork is a tool that promises impossibly fast web search for the Jamstack.
• Futures Explained in 200 Lines of Rust is a free online book that provides a deep dive into how futures and async/await work in Rust.
• Apply color schemes in seconds with Figma plugin Color Spark.

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The Roadmap
Product, strategy, execution, and work

• We can all agree that there are real costs associated with a free plan, and this mini-site encourages makers to reconsider the common SaaS plank.
• Want to stump your interviewer — and get some useful decision-making info in the process? Consider these reverse tech interview questions.
• In Why People Share, founder and investor James Currier looks at the psychology of going viral.
• One Redditor asks: How do I tell my partners I need to step away from our start up? The top comment is very Reddit. The rest may help you.
• Beacons offers a way for you to monetize your TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram bio links.

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Logic Flow
Computing, automation, productivity​, and tools for thought

• Adam Bertram offers a guide to Markdown from the sysadmin's perspective.
• Insight bills itself as the first extensible iOS browser, enabling you to use no-code tools to define new functionality.
• Whether you went through a bunch of Windows CE devices yourself ahead of the Great Smartphone Revolution or you're a fan of computing history, this piece takes a close look at the rise and fall of the operating system — and the threat it came to be perceived as within Microsoft to Windows itself. 
• Here's everything you need to know about ls, one of the most useful command line tools in Linux.
• Superpowered is a macOS menubar app that offers to show you your day at a glance, without all the noise of your calendar. The $10/month pricing seems like an ask, but most interesting is the app's approach to notifications that free your mind to focus on deep work without worrying about missing appointments.
• Need a cheat sheet for getting unstuck on common time management problems? Anastasia on Dev.to has broken down 20 of them along with solutions.
• Modeled after the early Korean software that gave new folders bird names by default, this macOS extension will do just that.

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The Shutdown
That's all folks — but One More Thing...

I'm not a cat, and I'm ready to proceed: If you somehow didn't catch the lawyer-as-cat video earlier this week, or if you're generally confused by the internet's obsession with cats like me and have made a habit of ignoring these things, you are doing yourself a grave disservice.

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Bling Daddy
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Connect with the community

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Until next time,

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Joel Falconer
Managing Editor