Aral Balkan @aral@mastodon.ar.al

Small is Beautiful – live in 30 minutes (5PM UTC) with Paul Frazee talking about CTZN, the new distributed social network he’s building on the Hypercore Protocol.

(If you want to join the stream and ask a question or add your thoughts, have your webcam and headphones ready and we will give the studio link during the stream.)

https://small-tech.org/small-is-beautiful

👆

Watch us live, today at 5PM Cork (UTC +0) / 12PM New York (UTC -5) / 9AM San Francisco (UTC -8)

(Also, if you want to take part in the stream, grab your webcam and headphones and look out for the studio URL during the stream.) :)

Direct link to the exact time where I find out live that a company will rather remove the word “ethical“ from how they describe themselves on their site than stop enabling Facebook and Google to track and profile you:

https://vimeo.com/511231879#t=8m42s

So this happened: https://twitter.com/aral/status/1362062144003596293

And you can watch it unfold live on the recording of today’s S’update :)

https://ar.al

S’update – live stream – starting in a few minutes

Watch live at: https://ar.al

A small update on the small web.

PS. If you want to join in the studio (I have space for 9), grab your webcam and headphones and head to https://ar.al/studio

#SmallWeb #SmallTech #LiveStream

And now I understand what Place is – it’s a Small Web Protocol Server. Build your clients using whatever tools you like as long as they output a static SPA that conforms to the (work-in-progress) small web protocols. This just also happens to be the right technical decision and resolves the complexity that was blocking me and making my life hell in the past two weeks. Feels good to be making progress again :)

Yesterday’s little “political debate” on birdsite (where I was told by a certain framework developer to “chill dude“ when I pointed out that they had Facebook/Google tracking components showcased on their community site) was apparently exactly the push I needed to make progress :)

This commit brought to you by politics ;)

https://github.com/small-tech/place/commit/3c42105e99f2a388bd8450d1fa203b7cc326cd35

Also updated the sign-in spike (still uses Snowpack+Svelte but you can now use anything for your clients.)

https://source.small-tech.org/small-web/sandbox/sign-in.small-web.org

I think I’ve finally understood what it is I’m building. Might sound silly but it’s actually one of the most important steps in making something.

A fine that takes you 42 minutes of being in business to pay is not a fine, it’s an incentive. It’s a legitimisation of your business model.

#DataProtection #GDPR #regulation #farce

“Italian watchdog fines Facebook 7 million euros over improper data use”

It took Facebook a little over 42 minutes to make that much money in 2020.

Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/revenue

https://inkl.com/a/aZPQxEsAxrA

#SurveillanceCapitalism #regulation #DataProtection #farce

Just released @small-tech/https version 2.1.1

(Replace Node’s https package with @small-tech/https and get automatically-provisioned Let’s Encrypt certificates in production and automatically-provisioned mkcert certificates during development.)

npm i @small-tech/https

https://github.com/small-tech/https

#https #TLS #SmallTech #SmallWeb #JS #NodeJS

Just released Auto Encrypt version 2.0.6

(Auto Encrypt provides automatic Let’s Encrypt certificate provisioning for Node.js)

- Fixes an assignment to constant that would have crashed when a `Retry-After` header was received from Let’s Encrypt.

- Also improves developer documentation.

npm i @small-tech/auto-encrypt

https://github.com/small-tech/auto-encrypt

#AutoEncrypt #SmallTech #NodeJS #js

How to log in to npm to using a token

1. Generate a token from the Access Tokens section of your npm account

2. On your dev machine:

npm set //registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken <YOUR AUTH TOKEN>

Can’t believe this isn’t documented in the official docs.

1. Keep the only planet we have in as pristine a condition as we can

2. Find another planet to halve our risk of extinction

Capitalists: Fuck #1, but #2 sounds like fun.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeBdfv2QTqo

At least the Deno folks seem to be discussing and working on it: https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/200

Looking into jspm and, like Skypack, I can‘t find anything on subresource integrity support. Unless I’m missing something, these new crop of ESM-based CDNs – while they sound great otherwise – are basically backdoors waiting to happen.

Thoughts?

See: https://ar.al/2020/12/30/skypack-backdoor-as-a-service/

Skypack issue: https://github.com/skypackjs/skypack-cdn/issues/135
jspm issue: https://github.com/jspm/project/issues/92

Small Is Beautiful

Live, this Thursday, Feb 18, 2021, at 5PM UTC. Paul Frazee (Beaker browser) will join us talk about his new decentralised social network project, CTZN.

https://small-tech.org/small-is-beautiful/

#SmallIsBeautiful #SmallTech