Today I’m headed to Boston to see a talk about a guide to evading surveillance written by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum. The book is called Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest and was recently reviewed in the Guardian, where Nissenbaum is quoted:

Our effort, both with TrackMeNot and AdNauseam, has been targeted at the former. I don’t love advertising but I can tolerate it. When supporters of the current structures of behavioural advertising say this will be the end of all the innovation and free stuff on the web, our response is: no. Although this might happen if advertising itself goes away, it does not require the back-end tracking for survival.

The design for the AdNauseam website is so wonderful, and was created by none other than Mushon Zer-Aviv.

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Aaron Boodman on the inevitability of software complexity:

So why is software so complicated? Because we want to build complicated things. Things with lots of features and options. Things that require thousands of computers spread across multiple continents. Things that can go to Mars and back. Things that drive themselves on the freeway. These things that we want to build are inherently complicated. Software is just the distillation of that complexity. Software is complexity.

See also: The Rise of “Worse is Better”

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I’ve been working with online maps since before the first Google Maps API was released, and I haven’t seen anything quite like this before. Kudos to Mapzen and Peter Richardson.

Web Mercator has been the default projection for the web since Google Maps first popularized it in 2005.

Though it is ubiquitous online (and historically useful to navigators), Mercator doesn’t get much love from the modern cartographer. And in general, Mercators are unsuited for cases when you want to compare the size or shape of anything that isn’t near the equator. So while Web Mercator is useful, we’ve been using Tangram to explore other options.

Tangram draws maps in real-time in your web browser, using a hotline to your graphics card called OpenGL.

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Ellie on why killing weeds is counterproductive:

Is it really worth raging against the geographical pedigree of a plant introduced 200 years ago if it’s functioning to stabilize soil, feed late season pollinators, generate oxygen, cool the ground, and improve human mental health? Sure, there are villainous weeds out there (think Kudzu), but it’s all context-based, and plant communities that suffer from being overrun by a weedy villain are often not in the best shape to begin with.

Make sure you scroll all the way down to see all the lovely weed portraits.

See also: Next Epoch Seed Library on Ellie’s website.

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I am 100% in favor of “flesh tones” reflecting a broader range than the usual “pasty white.”

On August 25th, Slack unveiled a new way for developers to connect to Slack, the “Add to Slack” button. It was the culmination of a great deal of work from many Slack employees, and just the beginning of what we have in store for Slack in the near future. Today, though, I want to talk about a seemingly small detail that has been more important to me than I would have expected: the skin color of the hand in the launch graphics.

I’m also 100% in favor of writing up the thinking behind these kinds of choices.

Diógenes, Brown Person: This hand should totally be brown. I’m brown.
Diogenes, Person: I’m trying to get good design work done and get this project out, not become an activist and start a movement or something.
Diógenes, Brown Person: It’s not a big deal, you’re the designer, you get to make it brown.
Diogenes, Person: Yea but, I’m going to ask Matt to do it, that’s like, making a thing of it.

More of us should make a thing of it. Especially us pasty folk.

Link via Belong.io

Zeynep Tufekci on the broader little-u “uber for ____“ economy.

What if the reason Uber raises so much ire and anxiety is not about whether Uber, the company, fails its drivers better or worse than medallion owners fail their own drivers, but because the “uber for …” economy is threatening to make the lousy conditions for taxi drivers, once seen as a temporary job for first generation immigrants, into the jobs of the future?

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A former employee has digitized and uploaded 56 cassette tapes from K-Mart’s in-store sound system.

Mark Davis worked behind the Service Desk at the Naperville, IL Kmart in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Every month, corporate office issued a cassette to be played over the store speaker system — canned elevator-type music with advertisements seeded every few tracks. Around 1991, the muzak was replaced with mainstream hits, and the following year, new tapes began arriving weekly. The cassettes were supposed to be thrown away, but Davis dutifully slipped each tape into his apron pocket to save for posterity. He collected this strange discount department store ephemera until 1993, when background music began being piped in via satellite service.

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A weekly internet radio show designed to help you focus. Streamed each Wednesday at noon, Pacific Time. Hosted by none other than Patrick Ewing (the game developer Patrick Ewing).

Each week we attempt to induce a two-hour state of Flow in the listener: the sense that your work is carrying you along effortlessly like a log in a stream. Long, uninterrupted sets of instrumental music carefully selected as a background for doing creative work. I aim to energize and focus the mind without ever feeling distracting or alienating.

Link via Robin Sloan

Somebody must have downloaded this, right? Anybody got a copy?

Many of the never-before-published documents and photographs Vaughan unearthed became key components of the web series, appearing only online and not in printed versions of the series. These weren’t just extras, but key chapters of the story, told digitally. And when the website disintegrated after the Rocky’s closure, these stories weren’t relegated to an old box on an unreachable shelf; they were gone.

If a sprawling Pulitzer Prize-nominated feature in one of the nation’s oldest newspapers can disappear from the web, anything can.

Link via Rose Eveleth

Bloomberg on some promising trends in U.S. energy production.

For the first time, widespread adoption of renewables is effectively lowering the capacity factor for fossil fuels. That’s because once a solar or wind project is built, the marginal cost of the electricity it produces is pretty much zero—free electricity—while coal and gas plants require more fuel for every new watt produced. If you’re a power company with a choice, you choose the free stuff every time.

It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. As more renewables are installed, coal and natural gas plants are used less. As coal and gas are used less, the cost of using them to generate electricity goes up. As the cost of coal and gas power rises, more renewables will be installed.

See also: a wonky financial analysis of the residential solar market.

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