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Dave Winer - Scripting.com

Scripting News - 2020-10-24T17:23:51Z

- 2020-10-24T14:44:05Z
Early voting started in New York State today.

- 2020-10-24T15:20:26Z
We may be, right now, as sure as we're ever going to be that Trump was removed by the people in the 2020 vote.

- 2020-10-24T15:31:59Z
I wanted to send an MP3 of the Trailblazers podcast about podcasting to a friend, but couldn't easily find it, and then realized I'd better download a copy and upload it to my server, because who knows how easy it'll be to find in a year or more. The web is pretty ephemeral.

- 2020-10-24T14:44:37Z
I posted a very short question on Facebook. Do you know anyone like Trump? I asked because I do. I grew up in Queens, a couple of miles from where Trump grew up, only ten years after. So there were lots of Trump-like people in my area. I'm constantly reminded, by something Trump does, of someone I knew in childhood. Anyway, after a dozen or so predictable responses, a former Apple exec, one who did a very good thing for my troubled company back in 1986, said yes he's had golfed with Trump, voted for him in 2016, and was going to vote for him in 2020. He lives in California, so his vote is symbolic, as is mine (I live in NY). It was jarring. No debate has followed, thankfully, and I hope it doesn't. I'm just going to leave it there.

- 2020-10-24T15:45:56Z
A couple of hours later, the thread is still peaceful. Thankfully. My friend from the past refers to Trump as a businessman, which causes me to write this screed, which I did not add to the thread. I was curious to know, how does this businessman see the retired people packed into his audience, no distancing, no masks. Are they his customers? His team? His employees? Competitors? Serfs? Prisoners? Slaves? What kind of animal do you treat the way Trump is treating these people? To Trump are they even people?

- 2020-10-24T14:46:27Z
I realized Trump has killed a lot more Americans than Osama bin Laden.

- 2020-10-24T17:23:51Z
𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵. 𝘍𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘴𝘪𝘹𝘵𝘺 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘵 𝘢 𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 𝘉𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘚𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘮.

Will we undo Trump? - 2020-10-24T15:16:34Z

I don't want to jinx things, but when Biden takes office I assume the FBI will fully investigate what really happened in the 2016 election, without any interference from political appointees.

The new Attorney General will release the reports Barr wouldn't let us see. I assume that's going to happen too.

What if we determine that the election was a crime. That the Trump campaign didn't just collude with Russia, it was Russia. Recent revelations about Manafort say that pretty clearly. Everyone was looking for collusion, but it was actually much worse.

We were an occupied country for four years. Should we allow everything Trump did in those four years to stand? Or do we remove the three Supreme Court justices he nominated, tear up all his executive orders, remove all the regulations passed by his agencies. Undo anything that can be reasonably undone.

- 2020-10-23T16:15:34Z
I added a note to my status outline with an update on my work on pork.io, which is getting a new name.

- 2020-10-23T16:54:40Z
I like promoting other people's products when they're good. I am unhappy when I see bad products promoted by people I respect. If I think a product is not good, unless I think people will be hurt by it, or if the badness can be fixed and the product would then be useful, I'll generally say nothing.

- 2020-10-23T15:55:07Z
When I was growing up, there was a purpose that even I, a kid, could understand. I think that's been missing ever since we got to the moon. Since then we haven't had a reason to be a country.

- 2020-10-23T14:11:49Z
Maybe there should be real debates on TV every week between leaders on issues that Congress is going to vote on. And a way of measuring public opinion. No personal attacks allowed. Strict control via Mute button. This week the debate would be about the merits of approving a new radical Supreme Court justice in the middle of an election when everyone's attention is focused elsewhere. Some actions are so important they deserve everyone's focus.

- 2020-10-23T13:39:19Z
New in Bingeworthy: Lovecraft Country and Queen's Gambit.

- 2020-10-23T13:40:51Z
I am so exhausted from US politics, this state going back to the summer of 2016. I made it through about 15 minutes of last night's debate before I couldn't stand it. All it took was one gaffe from Biden to shred all hope of a reprieve from this shitshow. Then I had a thought, what if Amazon released the new Borat movie a few hours early? Wouldn't that be great. So I looked. And they had! So I watched the first half, returned to the debate, which still was not over, and went back and watched a bit more, and returned to the debate just in time to hear the wrapup. Then I listened to Maddow's review of Trump's lies about Covid (the part I had heard) and I felt better so I went to bed. Only to wake up this morning and find that the feeling if utter misery was even worse. The election is 11 days from now.

- 2020-10-23T13:46:54Z
BTW, the new Borat movie is good. I laughed all the way. Out loud.

Re 2-factor-authentication - 2020-10-23T14:00:28Z

Has anyone ever thought what happens when you lose control of the phone that is your second factor?

So, how hard is it to hijack a phone?

A few years back I had a phone hijacked via AT&T.

I never got it back. But I was able to terminate the account.

- 2020-10-22T17:42:49Z
Tying. A big company uses a monopoly in one area to create a monopoly in another. It was the basis for the anti-trust case against Microsoft in the 90s. They were forcing PC manufacturers to bundle their web browser, which was not a monopoly with their operating system, which was, thus forcing the leading browser, Netscape, out of the market. This happens over and over in tech. Google does it by using their monopoly in search to crush competitors in other categories. It can't be allowed. Products must compete on merit, not because we are forced to use them.

- 2020-10-22T15:48:34Z
I think I will at least try to watch the debate tonight. Too much at stake, and too much Looney Tunes from El Orange the would-be dictator of the United States of America.

- 2020-10-22T15:41:43Z
I had way too much to eat and drink at dinner yesterday, but it was great. A local restaurant has a great patio, set up comfortably, and they serve excellent food. Woodstock is a small town, but it has the amenties of a town in the Bay Area (e.g. Berkeley, Palo Alto). But I did eat too much and I'm paying the price for it today. Oy!

- 2020-10-22T15:43:41Z
Glad that Andrew is reviewing PagePark now. There are all kinds of loose-ends. That's what happens when you're developing only for yourself. Looking forward to going back over it and cleaning things up a bit. It's a very fine piece of software imho. In many ways the web server I've always wanted.

- 2020-10-22T15:44:10Z
One outcome from our recent back and forth is that I'm re-recommending my.this.how. It's nice connection between LO2 and the FAQ-type pages I've been doing, like Google and HTTP and the trolling faq (and many others). Blogs aren't enough. You need a place to put long-lived docs that you're going to work on over time.

- 2020-10-22T16:58:31Z
Since Andrew is working on a new version of the rssCloud server now, he asked if it would make sense to support OPML in rssCloud. That would mean adding a <head> element that had all the info that's in the rssCloud element in an RSS feed. It's a good idea, but.. (sorry) -- OPML already has a realtime notification service, it came after rssCloud and is based on web sockects. It's the core tech behind the Instant Outliner, a protocol that LO2 implements.

- 2020-10-22T18:05:45Z
Andrew has a new version of the rssCloud server, a beta of v2.0.

- 2020-10-22T18:27:53Z
We count!

- 2020-10-21T16:43:28Z
Anyone who votes for Trump is suicidal and I can prove it. 1. The virus is real, doesn't matter what you believe, it is in fact killing people and destroying other people's lives. 2. We aren't doing anything to stop it, because the president doesn't want us to. He has that power. 3. If you re-elect him, you'll get more of the same; if you don't we'll start fighting it asap. If for no other reason than you want to live, you should vote for Biden/Harris.

- 2020-10-21T16:33:25Z
I will totally accept the result of the World Series -- if the Mets win.

- 2020-10-21T14:39:35Z
I'm doing a phone interview/podcast with Jason Calacanis later today. I often blog about these things before doing them, so I fill my head with ideas that might be worth discussing. He and I have some interests in common, notably how to include universities in the tech development process. I think there's more to it than what Y-combinator does. Anyway, I just spewed (not kidding) a bunch of ideas into a Twitter thread. Wanted to be sure it was linked into the blog.

- 2020-10-21T16:57:46Z

- 2020-10-20T14:53:31Z
Started a web and voice conversation with Andrew Shell about ideas for rethinking blogs and feeds. I found, as others have, that I need another kind of document to include in my personal CMS other than a story that's part of the blog. Everything about blogs are set up to be written, then lightly edited, and never touched again. Like a fresco painting. It's temporal writing. But there are other things that I want to develop over time, keep coming back to, revising. A few years back I started this.how to hold those docs. It's worked out really well. I wrote the Google and HTTP faq as a this.how doc. We also had this in Manila, right from the start. We wrote, published and maintained the docs for Frontier using the same CMS we used for blogging. In the end the data structures are the same, what was confusing is how we think about them. But once you make a decision to put non-temporal docs "over there" then things start working.

- 2020-10-20T15:01:55Z
BTW, about 20 years ago I was writing about timeless weblogs. I vaguely remember it. Some of the stuff I wrote is offline, but possibly in archive.org. But I'm pretty sure I have the right solution now. How can I tell? I use it. Why? Because I know when to use it. That's the trick to iterating this stuff. The tech is easy compared to the workflow.

- 2020-10-20T14:31:48Z
Hover is a great domain company, highly recommend them. I've even given them an award for a very clever no-brainer DNS feature that no one else does, as far as I know. On Sunday I registered a new domain and wasn't able to access it. So I contacted their support, they said they needed permission to go into my account to see how I had it configured. By then the problem had cleared on its own, but it was puzzling why they would need permission. The DNS setup is, by design, totally public info. Anyone could look to see how my domain is set up. I assumed they were doing that when there have been support issues in the past.

- 2020-10-20T18:14:53Z

- 2020-10-19T16:17:08Z
Craig Newmark is becoming the Andrew Carnegie of our era.

- 2020-10-19T16:29:47Z
Every university should be home to an open source development project.

- 2020-10-19T16:23:49Z
Here's a video that demos how I edit my blog. I created it last October, and thought it might be worth another look. The big deal is fluidity. The user interface hangs on a framework that's designed for writers. Most of what goes into a blog is writing, so it's worth setting it up this way.

- 2020-10-19T16:17:14Z
As a Roku user, HBO clearly doesn't want my money. I tried getting HBO as part of Hulu and it's awful. There was a program I wanted to watch, the West Wing reunion, but their search only showed the original series. I found it on my iPad, which HBO still has its own app for, so that worked. Later, I cancelled my HBO subscription. Subscriptions are madness. Every service has its own user interface. Three services are locked in for me. 1. Netflix, because it's Netflix. 2. Amazon, because I pay nothing extra for it, so why not. 3. YouTube TV so I can watch cable news and have learned its UI. There are plenty of other brands that have shows that I want to watch and would be willing to pay for, but there's a limit to how many packages I'm going to buy and how many UIs I can learn. Can the people who run these businesses not understand this? There's going to be a huge culling and one or two will remain. Probably Netflix and Amazon. If you don't think so, look around. How many product categories have more than one or two products with any market share?

- 2020-10-20T00:54:05Z
Dr Scott Atlas is even more scary than Attorney General William Barr. Now imagine if they got together, and figured out how to kill all the of the president's political enemies with the virus. That's why the virus is such a strong ally of Trump. If we lose the election, they won't need to build death camps. There's never been a situation anything like this. Just a week ago it seemed the president was doomed, due for a long recovery perhaps, certainly no longer a threat. I wish Fauci had left the government and was independent now, and had a strong communication channel of his own.

Correcting media errors - 2020-10-18T15:56:05Z

Mistakes heard recently (and repeatedly) on cable news.

1. Wearing a mask protects other people more than it protects the wearer. So if one person in a crowd of thousands wears a mask, unless it's certain that person has the virus, it's not doing much to protect anyone.
2. It has been said that if the Dems win the Senate and hold the House, it doesn't matter if Trump is re-elected, Congress will remove him. Not possible. It takes a 2/3 majority in the Senate, or 67 votes, to remove the president, and there aren't enough Republican seats at stake in the election to give the Dems that big a majority, even if they swept the Repubs. However there would be enough Democrats in the Senate to require a full trial, including testimony. Recall that the Senate not only didn't convict, they didn't allow an actual trial with witnesses and compelled testimony.
3. Repeating Russian misinfo, even to question it, is journalistic malpractice. It's the biggest mistake journalism keeps repeating. Journalism wields a lot of power, and that power is accountable to no one. It may be a bigger problem than Citizens United or court packing by either party.

- 2020-10-18T15:53:57Z

- 2020-10-18T02:20:30Z
Just watched Moneyball on Netflix. I’ve seen it before and read the book, but it’s good to get a refresher. Everything, not just baseball, needs a fresh look, because we’ve been doing so much the same way we always have, without thought, not questioning out-of-date assumptions.

- 2020-10-17T18:03:20Z
I am usually interested in the MLB and NBA playoffs, but this year I practically ignored them. The reason, in retrospect, is that sports is all about the ritual, the continutity, the historic connection. Novelty feels wrong. For example, I still haven't gotten over the Designated Hitter Rule, and the three-point shot in basketball still seems like an innovation. I like sports because they connect to the past. I went to games as a kid with ancestors who are now gone. "What did the Mets do?" was the beginning of every kitchen table conversation in the house I grew up in. It was the default. To this day my brain says those words when it's idle. This season was a heroic effort for both sports, esp the NBA with its bubble, but the only heroism that gets me to pay attention to sport is what happens on the court and on the field.

- 2020-10-18T02:25:59Z
I am far more angry with journalism now than I am with Trump. At least Trump doesn’t claim to be saving democracy.

- 2020-10-17T17:48:27Z
I voted for a libtard. I hope that makes nazi wingnuts cry.

- 2020-10-17T17:41:20Z
I don't know what happens with my Nightly Email app if there's nothing on the blog for a day. Not wanting to find out, I posted this. 😄

How Repubs get reporters to repeat their dirt - 2020-10-17T18:31:46Z

Repub says opponent X beats his wife.

Reporter asks X "Do you beat your wife?"

The viewer just remembers X beats his wife.

There is a science to this. Linguistics.

Shame so many reporters are either complicit, naive, ignorant, greedy, or Republican.

- 2020-10-17T17:53:10Z

- 2020-10-16T19:23:36Z
I've never seen Americans so turned on by voting.

- 2020-10-16T17:09:51Z
The ads are getting great. Each one is the best ever.

- 2020-10-16T17:40:32Z
The primary rule of trolls is the rage has to build. Immunity to outrage builds up over time. What pissed people off six months ago will barely show up as a blip today. That's the problem with Trump as a troll. He got stuck. He's trying to entertain with the same schtick he used four years ago. Yawn. Been there done that.

- 2020-10-16T18:06:52Z
Black Lives Matter is the meekest way to put it. And yet the reaction is as if a simple slogan is trying to take something from them. What? The right to kill black people? Take a step back and a deep breath and think.

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