Month: May 2023

Sponsor: A Letterpress-Printed Book About Printing History by Tech Journalist Glenn Fleishman ⇥ glog.glennf.com

If you’re interested in the history of how books and other printed materials were made told through technological improvements, Six Centuries of Type & Printing by Glenn Fleishman lays out the entire tale. Starting with what’s known about printing in China and Korea before it was introduced in Europe, the book takes a trip across nearly 600 years of continuous development that took us from a small shop in Mainz, Germany, to ink-jet printers in every home around the world.

Six Centuries of Type and Printing

For those not initiated in the old mysteries of how type was made of a lead alloy, laid out, inked, and pressed into paper, Glenn provides a solid grounding, told in a friendly tone with some key illustrations. Printing arose from a combination of historical confluences and spread like wildfire as soon as its principles were established. The story continues into the modern era, looking at the transition from metal type and relief or letterpress printing into phototypesetting, flat “offset” presses, and eventually digital typesetting and plate making.

The book’s production retraces history. Written and laid out on a computer, the book’s work shifted to a hot-metal typesetting firm in North Yorkshire, Effra Press, which relies on a computer interface to drive metal typesetting. Illustrations were etched onto magnesium plates in London. The resulting materials were combined at Hand & Eye in London, one of the few remaining commercial letterpress shops. The book’s printed sheets then headed to Germany, to Spinner Bookbinders near the Black Forest, for sewing, binding, slipcase manufacture, and foil stamping.

For a typophile or as a gift, Six Centuries of Type & Printing, printed in an edition of just over 400, is unique, informative, and an heirloom. For readers of this blog, use coupon code PIXELENVY for $10 off the $150 price of the letterpress/ebook bundle. (Price includes shipping within the U.S.)

Artificial Intelligence McKinsey ⇥ newyorker.com

Ted Chiang, the New Yorker:

Today, we find ourselves in a situation in which technology has become conflated with capitalism, which has in turn become conflated with the very notion of progress. If you try to criticize capitalism, you are accused of opposing both technology and progress. But what does progress even mean, if it doesn’t include better lives for people who work? What is the point of greater efficiency, if the money being saved isn’t going anywhere except into shareholders’ bank accounts? We should all strive to be Luddites, because we should all be more concerned with economic justice than with increasing the private accumulation of capital. We need to be able to criticize harmful uses of technology — and those include uses that benefit shareholders over workers — without being described as opponents of technology.

The whole article is terrific — as the headline alludes to, an imagining of artificial intelligence technologies performing a sort of McKinsey-like role in executing the worst impulses of our economic system — but this paragraph is damn near perfect.

Not too long ago, in the era of gadget blogs and technology enthusiasm gone mainstream, there was a specific kind of optimism where every new product or service was imagined as beneficial. Tides turned, and criticism is the current default position. I think that is a healthier and more realistic way of viewing this market, even as it feels more negative. What good is thinking about new technologies if they are not given adequate context? We have decades of personal computing to draw from, plus hundreds of years of efficiency gains. On the cusp of another vast transformation, we should put that knowledge to use.

Exploring Deceptive Design Patterns ⇥ pudding.cool

Caroline Sinders, the Pudding:

I wanted to explore the malicious, confusing, and deceitful things that occur after signing up for digital services, as well as how design can nudge us to forget about a free trial or accidentally sign up for things that we didn’t intend to.

Dark patterns are often most egregious with subscriptions and free trials, especially when attempting to cancel, so I focused on those.

I ran an experiment from August 2 to October 4, 2022, signing up for 16 different services and immediately tried to unsubscribe or cancel.

The New York Times is famously hostile, but it seems Vimeo is the newly crowned champion of awful design patterns. It seems to tick every item on a list of what not to do. I am not sure what is going on there — previously mentioned — but it sucks to see a once-likeable video host reduced to the kinds of scummy tactics that seem so commonplace in business- and enterprise-focused companies.

As is typical for a Pudding thing, this article is well-presented thanks to Tynesha Foreman and Matt Daniels. Even if all of this stuff is known to you, I recommend checking it out just for the way it looks and feels.

Canada Breaks the Internet ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Justin Ling, the Globe and Mail:

Individually, all these ideas are bad. Taken together, they’re worse.

Mr. Trudeau’s plans amount to a Rube Goldberg machine, shaking down Silicon Valley companies for cash while subjecting them to a gauntlet of Ottawa-based Star Chambers every time the platform’s users act badly. In trying to Canadianize the internet, it will destroy what makes it incredible: Its neutrality, its supranationality, its chaos.

Much as I agree with the premise, it is Ling’s conclusion that leaves me feeling hollow — that the two opposition parties should collaborate and vote against legislation like Bill C–18. Those three parties are the Conservatives, the Bloc Québécois, and the NDP. While members of the former overwhelmingly voted in opposition to C–18, the very concept of a link tax on media is part of their party platform. As for the latter two, they have more-or-less voted in agreement with the Liberal party.

These policies should absolutely be opposed. However, it is necessary for the Liberal party itself to recognize how damaging they will be to the open web and Canadians alike. We need principled internet policy which stands for an open web, and rejects attempts to compromise that. Canadian political parties may differ in the details, but they are aligned in internet outcomes.

Content Moderators in Kenya Form Labour Union ⇥ nation.africa

Odanga Madung, Nation:

At a meeting held in Nairobi on Monday, 200 content moderators from Sama and Majorel — the firms that serve Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Chat GPT — took a stand against tech giants’ mistreatment of their workers by coming together to lobby for their rights.

In a first-of-its-kind event, moderators covering 14 different African languages came together on Labour Day to vote for establishing a union to address issues including mistreatment of workers.

Majorel is based in Luxemborg; Teleperformance, based in France, recently offered to buy it. Sama is based in the United States and was, last year, sued by a former moderator. The vast distance between these companies, their employees in Kenya, and their clients mostly located in Silicon Valley is not only geographic. These are some of the people who remove the worst of the web and make artificial intelligence work better.

Good for them.

Inside the SolarWinds Breach ⇥ wired.com

Kim Zetter, Wired:

As summer turned to fall, behind closed doors, suspicions began to grow among people across government and the security industry that something major was afoot. But the government, which had spent years trying to improve its communication with outside security experts, suddenly wasn’t talking. Over the next few months, “people who normally were very chatty were hush-hush,” a former government worker says. There was a rising fear among select individuals that a devastating cyber operation was unfolding, he says, and no one had a handle on it.

In fact, the Justice Department and Volexity had stumbled onto one of the most sophisticated cyberespionage campaigns of the decade. The perpetrators had indeed hacked SolarWinds’ software. Using techniques that investigators had never seen before, the hackers gained access to thousands of the company’s customers. Among the infected were at least eight other federal agencies, including the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms, including Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks—though none of them knew it yet. Even Microsoft and Mandiant were on the victims list.

Zetter’s thorough investigation into the circumstances of the 2020 SolarWinds breach — including her previously reported story about the FBI’s foreknowledge — is worth your time. It is also a reminder to me that the circumstances of Bloomberg’s Supermicro story, another supposed supply chain compromise, remain mysteriously uncorroborated and without similar on-the-record journalism.

Apple and Google Propose Specification for Unwanted Tracking Devices ⇥ apple.com

From Apple’s Newsroom:

Today Apple and Google jointly submitted a proposed industry specification to help combat the misuse of Bluetooth location-tracking devices for unwanted tracking. The first-of-its-kind specification will allow Bluetooth location-tracking devices to be compatible with unauthorized tracking detection and alerts across iOS and Android platforms. Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security, and Pebblebee have expressed support for the draft specification, which offers best practices and instructions for manufacturers, should they choose to build these capabilities into their products.

I cannot claim to understand the spec, but it appears to me that it creates a way for unwanted trackers to communicate with a non-owner’s device, not necessarily a means of figuring out whether a tracker is present. In other words, this spec should prevent people from needing to install a bunch of proprietary detection apps. How a device differentiates between legitimate and creepy uses of trackers is something left to a platform’s “unwanted tracking algorithms”.

Look for a software update later this year which brings this tracking protection to Android and iOS. The Canadian version of this press release is inexplicably different and contains no such pledge.

Twitter Went Great ⇥ twitterisgoinggreat.com

The people behind Twitter is Going Great are shutting it down:

Deluded billionaire Elon Musk continues to spew stupid ideas that exhausted engineers are forced to rush through half baked, the company moves inexorably closer to bankruptcy, white supremacists increasingly dominate everyone’s feeds, the few remaining lawyers cave instantly to authoritarians, the platform’s reliability plummets ever downwards… and we need a break.

So while Twitter slowly sinks into quicksand of its own making, we’re sunsetting this site.

Twitter, for what it is worth, is currently logging users out and breaking their timelines. It is still going so, so great.

Thirty Years of the Web in the Public Domain ⇥ w3.org

Coralie Mercier, on the W3C’s blog:

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the World Wide Web into the public domain, for general use, and at no cost, on 30 April 1993 by CERN.

This quiet gesture, advocated by Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has had implications beyond what he or anyone imagined at that time: the Web, free for everyone, has changed our lives.

Can you imagine how different the world would be had the web been encumbered by patents owned by a litigious organization? It would have killed the very promise of the web. A small taste of that possibility contributed to the downfall of Gopher, according to Christopher Lee. The innovation of the past thirty years has been made possible because so much of its foundation was — and remains — open and free.

Sponsor: Type and Printing History Told in a Letterpress Volume by Tech Journalist Glenn Fleishman ⇥ glog.glennf.com

Glenn Fleishman here! I’m sponsoring Pixel Envy because Nick’s writing reminds me of the heyday of blogs: surfacing interesting fresh events with a personal and opinionated spin—sometimes just a link, sometimes an essay. As I’ve rediscovered RSS in the wake of Twitter’s implosion, Nick’s posts rise to the top.

I wanted to support Nick in his efforts by sponsoring, and I know that you fellow readers also would likely be interested in something I made a few years ago that tickles the typophile and technology bones: Six Centuries of Type & Printing, my letterpress-printed romp through the history of printing and type told through technological innovations.

Six Centuries of Type and Printing

If you only know Gutenberg’s but aren’t sure what his inventions were, and have heard that movable type printing—printing with letters and other characters that can be reused again and again—was invented in Asia, this book will fill you in. Gutenberg’s creation of a workable system in Mainz, Germany, around 1450 appears to be a separate discovery that grew out of a lifelong acquaintance with goldsmiths (and possibly training in the art itself), and a mechanical bent that led him to experiment over decades.

My book starts in Asia, shifts to Germany, and then spans 600 years of development in creating type, improving printing presses, and moving toward digital production. The book was printed by letterpress in London from type set in hot metal in North Yorkshire, England. It was bound in Germany, with a hardcover luxuriously wrapped in a foil-stamped green cloth. The book comes in a slipcase of the same material. I had an edition of just over 400 made.

For readers of this blog, use coupon code PIXELENVY for $10 off the $150 price of the letterpress/ebook bundle. (Price includes shipping within the U.S.)