Four short links: 31 May 2019
Google Blocking Ad Blocking, Security Checklist, Maturity Model, and Software Engineering
- Google to Restrict Modern Ad Blocking Chrome Extensions to Enterprise Users (9 to 5 Google) — modern ad blockers, like uBlock Origin and Ghostery, use Chrome’s webRequest API to block ads before they’re even downloaded. With the Manifest V3 proposal, Google deprecates the webRequest API’s ability to block a particular request before it’s loaded. As you would expect, power users and extension developers alike criticized Google’s proposal for limiting the user’s ability to browse the web as they see fit. […] “Google’s primary business is incompatible with unimpeded content blocking. Now that Google Chrome product has achieve high market share, the content blocking concerns as stated in its 10K filing are being tackled.” See also Switch to Firefox.
- SaaS CTO Security Checklist — useful security tips, arranged by stage of your startup.
- Proposing a Maturity Model for Digital Services (David Eaves) — an interesting approach: describes the aspects of maturity (political environment, institutional capacity, delivery capability, skills and hiring, user centered design, cross-government platforms) and then has a rubric for the different aspects of each of them.
- Notes to Myself on Sofware Engineering (François Chollet) — Technology is never neutral. If your work has any impact on the world, then this impact has a moral direction. The seemingly innocuous technical choices we make in software products modulate the terms of access to technology, its usage incentives, who will benefit, and who will suffer. Technical choices are also ethical choices. Thus, always be deliberate and explicit about the values you want your choices to support. Design for ethics. Bake your values into your creations. Never think, I’m just building the capability; that in itself is neutral. It is not because the way you build it determines how it will get used. The whole list is great, and resonates strongly with my experience.
