Stephen Downes

The first thing I did as I started to read this item is to look up X.509 Certificates on Wikipedia, which made me gulp a little. It's a bit daunting to grasp from scratch. The assertion in this post is that "the abundance of X.509 certificate authorities who already perform identity proofing for businesses provides a rich resource that can be leveraged to boot the verifiable data ecosystem." There are still questions to ask, for example, can we trust these authorities, are they accountable, are the costs reasonable, are they available, and of course, are they technically feasible for the wider population? That said, the idea is new to me, and represents another step in the thinking toward distributed identity (DID).

According to this statement from Harvard, "Harvard Library will offer new sustainable and equitable open access publishing models to advance open access scholarly communication." That's a good thing, and I support it, though I will remind people that that the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) has been doing this for years. Decades, even. My worry, of course, is that years from now people will talk about this as the 'start' of the open journals movement, as is wont to happen when a top tier institution adopts a practice like this (which is why we read, even in this article, things like, "I hope that many research-heavy institutions adopt our approach. The first Harvard Open Access policy launched in 2008 has been adopted nationally and internationally, and it would be great to see similar reach."

Matthias Melcher considers the question I asked yesterday: "what do we want the outcome of an education to be, comparing a student, an intellectual, a billionaire, (or) small-town inhabitants." Of course, none of these is ideal - but each of these represents in some way the ideals our education system seems to aspire to. But more, these four points are so different it's hard to imagine basing a single system on them at all. P.S. I created the image for this using chatGPT 4 - it struck me how similar it was to working with a human designer (eg., I asked for four people, the first version had five people, etc).

The headline is that the United States may soon ban TikTok, a story remarkable in its own right. The underlying thread is that centralized social media services (TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, etc) have become too unstable for individuals and businesses to rely on. Buried deep is the main story: that the only way to reliably access an audience is to give up on platforms trying to control access to it. Hence, "Vox Media's technology news publication The Verge says it also has plans to federate its own site to have more ownership over its content and audience." Via Ben Werdmuller.

There are many ways to read this article. I'm here for the way the author criticizes billionaires, but that's not why I'm sharing it, that's just a bonus. No, what I ask readers to consider is what we want the outcome of an education to be by considering the four points of a pyramid: a young Marc Andreesen who as a student at a public university was able to develop the first commercial web browser; the second, the author of the piece, an apparent 'intellectual', familiar with the works of Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Julius Evola and Corey Robin; the aforementioned billionaire who believes people like him "should get to make decisions to reorder life as we know it without interference from anyone else"; or the people in small towns who value "the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations." Don't answer too quickly. Via Dan Gillmor.

Web bloat is something I take seriously because it impacts both cost and performance. If the reader is using a slower or less powerful device, accessing online services can be difficult or at times impossible (think about how unresponsive some shopping or airline sites are, for no good reason). This article looks not only at page size but also at how much of a load the page imposes on your computer once it has downloaded. For comparison with the web sites on the chart, my own home page comes in at about 140 kilobytes (0.14 mB). There's no Javascript on it and it doesn't have cookies. It should load easily just about everywhere (in my office it loads at 640 ms). The same can't be said of everything I build, though. But I don't stop trying. Via Molly White.