It was a dismal year for readership, to tell the truth. I suspect this was in part largely due to the shutting down of Google Plus, which contributed maybe 10% of my usual hits. While the year started out reasonably well, readership went down after Chinese New Year, and hasn't picked up appreciably since.
Getting kinda lonely here, guys.
Luckily I'm not doing this for the attention, because that would suck.
Strangely, I think the quality of my work has gone up; though without readership stats to back up that assertion, it's an empty boast at best.
There were some things I could have written about. The year sure wasn't short on tech news. I could have written about Cloudflare and their decision to abandon 8Chan, the same way I wrote about a similar decision taken by their CEO Matthew Prince back in 2017. I even started ruminating over the new Code of Conduct at Linux and sabbatical of Linus Torvalds, before abandoning that train of thought altogether. The thing is, I'm sick to death of the USA and the never-ending online presence of their identity politics. Conservatives? Liberals? Fuck all of them. They should sort their shit out and I'm certainly not giving them any more air-time than I need to. My little pieces on Patreon and Twitter earlier this year was as far as I cared to go.
Sure, writing about stuff like that attracts the attention of even non-techies. But I shouldn't lose sight of what this blog is for.
The biggest hit of 2019...
One blogpost stood out among all the others when I did some investigation - the two-parter Women Can Code, Get Used To It! This had the second biggest number of hits in the entire history of TeochewThunder, almost matching the current record-holder, 2018's Ten Principles of Adult Learning Applied to Software Development. I suspect a huge part of its popularity was because I shared this with several female friends, not all of whom are from technical disciplines, and they pretty much did the rest by re-sharing.
Gorgeous geek girls?
Interestingly, the second part of Women Can Code, Get Used To It! was far more popular than the first. I guess people were more interested in my declaration that tech is not a gender-specific profession, rather than what I felt was more interesting - examples of pretty ladies that don't conform to the geek girl stereotype.
On further review
It appears that a web tutorial from 2017 has suddenly gotten a lot of attention - way more attention than I think it deserves. It was basically a BMI Calculator written in AngularJS, and the first ever AngularJS tutorial on this blog. Again, yes, don't look a gift horse in the mouth... but damn if it isn't suspicious.
Future Plans
The road map for this blog features a lot more reviews that I never had time to write - books, apps and my ongoing writeups about the TV series Silicon Valley, which, sadly, looks about to end its run soon.
I'm also trying to keep to the basics, because I've always been all about the basics. There's a lot to cover. Fun or boring, they all have a place on this blog. 2020 looks promising. There's so much to write about, and the list looks to be growing all the time.
There's a story that broke about last couple weeks, when Apple caused a certain amount of chaos in Facebook and Google offices.
Apple lays the smackdown.
How this came about
Apple has this policy that no apps hosted on their App Store will infringe on user privacy in any way. Facebook was running apps that, with the permission of their users, tracked their personal data to the tune of up to 20 USD per month. So was Google. Ever wonder how is it Google seems to always know exactly where you are? There's your answer.
To get around Apple's policy, Facebook ran those tracking apps through their membership in Apple's Developer Enterprise Program. For those who don't know what that is, that's a platform which allows subscribed corporations to bypass Apple's App Store when deploying apps that are meant for internal use. Like Facebook's lunch ordering app or campus bus booking app, for example.
Facebook, as mentioned earlier, was paying users for their data, but as Apple had a data privacy policy on their App Store, elected to run those apps on the Developer Enterprise Program instead, passing the users off as their own staff. Google did much the same thing. Essentially they were in violation of the policy and hoping to bypass scrutiny.
And when Apple found out, there was hell to pay.
Well, OK, not exactly. What Apple did was to pull the plug on Facebook's membership. They did the same thing to Google a day later. The main point was to invalidate the certificates to Apple's business software, which meant that the tracking apps for both Facebook and Google were no longer able to work. However, since Facebook's legitimate internal apps were also distributed via this license, this left Facebook employees scrambling as their access to internal apps was summarily cut off from their iOS phones and Macs.
Did Apple do the right thing?
There's no argument about it - they did. Look, I'm an Android user and not at all an Apple fanboy, but let's give credit where it's due.
Facebook and Google broke clearly defined rules, and even attempted to sneakily bypass those rules in Apple's own house. Purely from a selfish point of view, Apple couldn't let that stand. From an ethical point of view, even if Facebook had technically broken no rules, there are exceedingly few iPhone users (who aren't also Facebook employees) who would take Facebook's side where data privacy was concerned. Hell, there are very few smartphone users who would trust Facebook where their data privacy is concerned, period! (I personally don't give a monkey's left nut. I'm of the opinion that if something comes free, like Facebook, there's always a catch. That said, I don't use Facebook much anymore so...)
This isn't even similar to the Patreon case, where users were arbitrarily de-platformed. In this case, Apple had more than ample cause for action, and past precedent to back it up. It's telling that Facebook and Google did not argue the decision but instead issued public apologies.
Did Apple do it for the right reasons?
Now, this one's mighty contentious. While Apple said they did this to "protect user privacy", I'm of the opinion that this came at a very convenient time for Apple.
Just prior to this episode, the iPhone app FaceTime had a serious bug that enabled anyone to turn someone else's iPhone into a live mic. And just when Apple was dealing with the inevitable fallout, who else should screw up but Facebook and Google, right in their backyard. Talk about a fall guy (or guys) to distract users from Apple's own mess!
Also, it's no secret that Apple's CEO Tim Cook and Facebook head honcho Mark Zuckerberg aren't exactly enamored of each other... Cook might have done the right thing here, but I'd bet my last dollar he was experiencing no small amount of personal satisfaction while doing it.
Is it over?
Oh hell, no it ain't over. Apple might have shown Facebook and Google who's boss in this one instance, and there's no disputing that Apple accounts for a huge chunk of mobile web traffic in case any of them feel like pulling this stunt again in future, but Apple's dominance doesn't quite extend itself to desktop browsing, where Safari is currently languishing behind the likes of Chrome.
This is just the beginning, folks. The battle of the tech giants started a while back, but now shots have been fired. And some have landed. If nothing else, Facebook and Google have egg on their faces. Round One to Apple - now let's see how it goes.
What's this I've been hearing about Patreon? Since December last year, people have been leaving Patreon. Accounts have been closed, are being closed as I type this, and the rot does not appear to be stopping.
Patreon is a crowdfunding service that ties content creators and subscribers together to facilitate donations towards the content creators. And
lately, Patreon has been behaving more like the Moral Police instead of
the service it's purported to be.
Carl Benjamin, a content creator, got his account shut down just last month. The reason given? He was guilty of using some very offensive words... on YouTube. YouTube, not Patreon. On someone else's YouTube channel, not his own. In essence, he had supposedly violated the Community Guidelines on Hate Speech. An excerpt is below:
"Patreon connects creators to their patrons all over the world. We are a global platform built on promoting creativity, which makes us a very inclusive group. Therefore, there is no room on Patreon for hate speech such as calling for violence, exclusion, or segregation. Hate speech includes serious attacks, or even negative generalizations, of people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or serious medical conditions."
However. When you take context into account - he was trying to illustrate via negative example why it's not OK to use those words - and then do a search of those words on Patreon itself, you get a ton of results where those very same words are used... and in the original context!
What gives, Patreon? When you can't even enforce your own rules consistently and professionally, you lose the right to be taken seriously.
To me, this is a symptom of a larger problem. Tech service providers are using their power to shove their own subjective moral code down the collective throats of their users. That's not a good thing. That's never a good thing. Remember what happened with CloudFlare back in 2017? CEO Matthew Prince, by his own admission, arbitrarily banned The Daily Stormer because they pissed him off. I'm shedding no tears for The Stormers. What concerned me, at the time, was the concept of due process and a properly thought out set of guidelines for such cases.
Wherein lies the difference between Matthew Prince and Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon. Prince had the class to admit that it wasn't the right thing to do. Conte merely doubled down, and is still trying to worm his way out of any admission of wrongdoing for Carl Benjamin's banning. Check out his response to journalist Tim Pool below.
"...we examine behaviors on and off Patreon, and you are correct to point out that there is language that makes it seem like only content on Patreon is reviewed, which is not a constraint that we apply for all categories of the guidelines… we need to make that clearer."
This is basically double-talk for: we have rules, and you need to trust us to enforce them when or if we see the need to. News for you, Conte... trust has to be earned and Patreon, as of now, is a long, long way away from that. It's really friggin' hard to trust folks who establish rules and then enforce those very same rules selectively, sometimes using different interpretations for different people!
There's a hilarious video clip on YouTube that pretty much sums up what's happening here. Though portraying Jack Conte as Hitler, no matter how much of a weasel I think he's being at the moment, seems a bit much. Still, it's funny as all heck. Enjoy!
Who cares about Carl Benjamin anyway?
Not me. I barely knew who he was before this whole saga started. Then I went to watch one of his videos (he's known as Sargon of Akkad on YouTube) and almost got put to sleep. This dude is boring.
But there are people who think he's trash and are glad he was de-platformed. Because they find his opinions repulsive, or some crap like that.
Just gonna say this - it doesn't matter who the victim is. It's a matter of principle. We need to break out of this childish mentality that bad things are good when done to bad people. If we accept objectively bad things when they happen to people we don't care for, then we can't complain when they happen to people we do care about.
If there is no consistency to your principles, you have no principles, period.
More exits!
Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin have declared their intention to leave Patreon. Sam Harris has elected to take his business elsewhere. And these are just the big hitters. Who else has to leave before Patreon starts to wake up?
Let's be crystal-clear on something. Patreon is not a Free Speech platform, and therefore not obliged to avoid censorship. Patreon was completely within their legal rights in de-platforming whoever they wanted, with or without an explanation. Patreon can act as unprofessionally as they please as long as they don't break the law.
That does not make what Patreon did, either right or sensible. Tech service providers need to realize that they exist at the pleasure of their users, not the other way round. The moment they stop being credible, the moment people stop trusting them, they've lost. Patreon might have been one of the most popular and well-known crowdfunding services on the Internet. Well, they're still well-known now, albeit for the wrong reasons; one of them in a nutshell - they got too big for their goddamn britches.
The USA is engaged in a culture war right now, a war of clashing political ideologies. And that war has escalated. Now if somebody gets offended at your words, they don't just flame you online. They pressure people to take away your livelihood. That's intolerance taken to new, dangerous levels. What's the next logical step? Gunning people down because those people drew cartoons they didn't like?
In Conclusion
Tech service providers are supposed to provide a service within the boundaries of the law. They're not the enforcers of political ideology, nor should they ever aspire to be.
