Paul Lindner

In honor of the recently departed Google+ community/page here's a recent squirrel eating a strawberry from my neighbor in Montclair Oakland.

They expertly trolled the folks there with the subject "Who's stealing my strawberries!"

cc David Bresbis who I remember being a fan...

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At first I thought this was a menswear catalog and almost tossed it in the recycling bin....

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"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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I finally made it to the Allyship Fundamentals course. Recommended.

https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/allyship/home

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I think it's time for a Legal Deposit scheme for Games.

- Game publishers would put their games in Escrow when they publish.  
- Game Services could publish a spec on how to interpret the game contents.
- 'Orphan' games would actually be preserved.- Users that purchased the Game would then be entitled to a copy of the escrowed item, plus the design on how to run them.

This, combined with an export of user-generated data would allow for usability after Stadia or the Game Publisher sunsets the service/game.

And to be honest I'd love to see this extended to all Online "Stores" that don't let you export usable contents.

Barring that Game Services could enter a Ulysses Pact with users if they are serious about the long-haul.. 

 For each purchase a user makes put 10x in a locked escrow fund.  When the service cancels that money can be used to migrate the games to a new provider or payout back the user.

- If a Game Service gets few users it's not a lot of money to exit and actually would increase satisfaction.
- If a Game Service does get popular then there's an explicit feedback loop that reinforces the durability of the system and alignment of interests.

Evernote announced something like this, but never really followed through.   A small company called Forever actually does have a preservation fund that is purpose driven.

[crosspost from industryinfo..]

One thing we at Google could do is advocate for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit scheme for Games.

- Game publishers would put their games in Escrow when they publish.
- Google could publish a spec on how to interpret the game contents.
- 'Orphan' games would actually be preserved.
- Users that purchased the Game would then be entitled to a copy of the escrowed item, plus the design on how to run them.

This, combined with an export of user-generated data would allow for usability after Stadia or the Game Publisher sunsets the service/game.

And TBH I'd love to see this extended to all Online "Stores" that don't let you export usable contents.

Barring something like that Google could enter a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact with our users if we're serious about the long-haul.. For each purchase a user makes put 10x in a locked escrow fund. When the service cancels that money can be used to migrate the games to a new provider or payout back the user.

- If Stadia gets few users it's not a lot of money to exit and actually would increase satisfaction.
- If Stadia does get popular then there's an explicit feedback loop that reinforces the durability of the system and alignment of interests.

Evernote announced something like this, but never really followed through. A small company called https://www.forever.com/guarantee actually does have a preservation fund that is purpose driven.

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And yes some of these games are lost forever...

But one good idea is the magazine to build community.

https://twitter.com/retrohistories/status/1138020709320613888

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Happy to see this project. Looking into ways to support it, because they face a steep climb.

Inspired by the folk hero John Henry....Because, despite intelligence, physical strength and an incredible will, (1) he lacked a complete understanding of the system he was challenging, (2) he struggled alone, and (3) he struggled with outdated technology.

https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/project-john-henry/home

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https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136341801109843968

This is at least a graduated response, wonder what changed in the last 12 hours?

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Today I attended the "Designing for At Risk Users" course. I find it incredibly galling to hear what Youtube did today given the targeted harassment and doxing.

It flies in the face of what was taught and own standards about giving targets the means to "make it stop".

https://standards.google/guidelines/google-material/usability/at-risk-users.html#user-identities

While anyone can experience a privacy or security event, at-risk users face a variety of life circumstances that might put them at unusually greater risk:

.....

Who they are: Anyone could be targeted at some point in their lives simply based on a personal characteristic such as age, gender, ethnicity, reputation, financial stability, sexual orientation, or education.

.....

Active Event

Where possible, users should be able to quickly and easily access practical guidance as they experience a privacy or security event, such as cyberstalking, online impersonation, surveillance, spear-phishing, or account hijacking. Users will likely want to understand what is happening and take steps to respond. They are likely to feel high levels of stress in this state, so easy-to-use designs will be especially helpful.

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state of denial

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Updated to latest MacOS. Yay!

Repeated prompts to "unlock keychain". oh no!

I was determined to not reset my login keychain, because then you lose the TouchID gnubby and have to reimage the whole laptop. (May only apply to santa exceptions, maybe not..)

I finally got lucky and found a way to work around it. (and yes, I've let Techstop know about it)

1) Open Keychain app.
2) Click on login item in left pane.
3) Right click on login item, select 'Change settings for Keychain "login"'
4) In my case the Lock After setting was checked and had a large number
5) Change the timeout value and save.

You'll need to enter your keychain password a few times. But once you're done the keychain will possibly be updated and uncorrupted.

To verify you can run the gcert command in your terminal. You should not be prompted to unlock the keychain and touchid should be requested.

Theory: changing the expiration setting forces the keychain app to rewrite the keychain data structures fresh.

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BRB ... bringing Enron style accounting to the resource economy...

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Interesting:

https://wicg.github.io/ad-click-attribution/index.html

Of course you have to trust your User Agent (Browser) to keep your browsing secret..

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One of the better public Postmortems I've seen.

Keep those SSH keys safe!

https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediations-for-apr-11-security-incident/

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[actually it's the exploded wiring cabinet for my neighborhood that's transitioning to AT&T fiber...]

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Would be nice if all of our products supported Alt text as well as Mastodon does...

And if sharing with Louis Gray I'd say "Image of a rack mount server with long fsck times"

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Red Hat turns 20 so they asked former folks for their memories. Here's something I dug up that might be of interest to folks 'round these parts..

... I never got a response on this email; but that might be because Red Hat was always late paying Google Invoices..

Looks like Joan is still here. Ray does not show up in Epitaphs.

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"stories" from. "GitHub"

In the developer ecosystem, branch conflicts are considered especially heinous.

On Github, the dedicated developers who resolve these vicious conflicts are members of an elite squad known as the Special Merge Unit.

These are their stories.

Dun Dun

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https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/introducing-auto-awesome-photobombs.html

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""What we found was that the majority of news outlets had not given any thought to even basic strategies for preserving their digital content, and not one was properly saving a holistic record of what it produces.""

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/the-dire-state-of-news-archiving-in-the-digital-age.php

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Before we bury G+ it might be worthwhile to collect some memorabilia...

Marc Weber from the Computer History Museum asked if we wanted to contribute Google+ artifacts to CHM. They don't care about swag, but I could think of a few things that they might be interested in:

- The Obama + Dalai Lama framed print.
- The Buffalo? (Too big?)
- The Emerald Sea painting (did anyone save it?)

Open to suggestions....

[Too bad the Apiary whiteboard is long gone....]

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