Today's Daily podcast was about the terrorist attack in New Zealand. First they had interviews with victims, then quoted the prime minister about gun control and they ended with a broad trashing of the net, specifically YouTube and Facebook. But they omit a very salient fact about the economics of running an open content publishing platform. You can't review each video in advance, there are too many videos and employees are too expensive. There are shades of gray, but for the NYT it's always black and white. Further the reporters have a huge undisclosed conflict of interest, because the net is used for more than terrorism, it's sources going direct to interested readers. There's a new news system trying to boot up. The same features of the net that make it possible to bootstrap a terrorism network, also enable new channels of news. But of course this is never part of their discussion. They make it sound easy. Tech is bad. Tech is responsible. Implied but not said: shut it down. They are as scary as the terrorists. Think about it. #

Journalism used to vilify Craig Newmark, then he started giving millions to news think tanks, universities, and startup news orgs. The new demon is Facebook. A few hundred million should make the troubles go away.#

We need to talk about how we're going to reboot local news. The journalism industry isn't doing the job. #

This is our next big wakeup call. If a couple of hundred people die in an American plane crash due to the incompetence of the FAA we can't say we weren't warned.#

I decided to try Amazon Pantry, since I'm now living in a place where FreshDirect doesn't deliver. I just got a notice that "Progresso Soup" has shipped. I ordered five different kinds of Progresso soup, wanting to try them all. I prayed that the title of the order was just one of the items they were shipping. Nope. One can of Progresso soup will arrive in its own Amazon box on Wednesday. I can see this will be a short-lived experiment. #

My new Subaru Forester has a passive self-driving feature -- it sees the lines on the road, if you steer outside the lines, it nudges you back inside the lines through a gentle force it applies to the steering wheel. If you ease up on the grip, the car steers itself, even on winding mountain roads.#

I have some ideas for new architectures the RSS feed reader market, to better empower users and to create new opportunities for reading and writing tool developers.#

Fixed a bug in feedBase where if you upload an OPML file to a newly created account, it would lose track of its address. The View my OPML command in the Main menu would be disabled. It now works as it was supposed to. ✓#

I use Signal to communicate with any of my friends who will use it. I like that it's encrypted, and that it's open source. I'm not feeding Mark Zuckerberg. That's a plus. But today it's not working on my Mac desktop. When I launch the app it gets stuck in a loop saying it's optimizing the application. There is a thread on the GitHub project about this, but the fixes are expressed in terms of a beta, which I don't think I'm running. According to the About window I'm running v1.22.0.#

Ken Sedgwick from Berkeley: "Recently I became aware of keybase. It is also open source and end-to-end encrypted. It adds some really nice features authenticating your identity on twitter, github, reddit, http etc. It also has encrypted groups with file sharing etc."#

What could we do to prevent the kind of usurpation and abandonment of open formats and protocols so common among the big tech companies? I think there are some valid approaches. Including this from a thread on Twitter yesterday. "Let's talk about it. I think it involves patents and trademarks. And the equivalent of the GPL for intellectual property. Prevent open shared creations from being used in silos. You can't import what you won't export. Something like that."#

Yes, it's almost certainly a coincidence that Trump threatened his opposition (which includes a lot more than Democrats) with the force of the military, police and bike gangs the same day a massacre of Muslims was carried out in New Zealand, by a white terrorist, in Trump's name. Don't brush this aside. Trump's talk is more than a dog whistle. It's certain that fascists are present in the military and police. That's who he's talking to. #

It's just sinking in that Facebook announced a radical shift in what their product does, reorganized around their chat apps. Are they shutting down the discussion group functionality? What does this mean for the ability to post messages on your timeline and to follow other users? What about private groups? Is Facebook going to shut down those functions? If so, we're facing a hole in the net far bigger than what Google created when they withdrew Reader. I'd like some idea from Facebook what this means for the public writing function of Facebook? And if that's going to be phased out, will they work with open web developers to replace the functionality off Facebook's servers. Let's try to put back some of the life FB drew from the web. #

It's not surprising that a journalist, Karl Bode, wants to tax Facebook to pay him to write ads for journalism.#

I got my coffee and breakfast sandwich at a nearby Manhattan Starbucks today. On the way out I noticed a Michael Jackson song was playing on the store's sound system. Since this is NYC, people didn't seem to notice. I think we're going to continue to listen to him, and I think that's right. The music doesn't belong to him, even if it's his voice, because it was so important in its time, to all of us. We all remember where we were when Thriller and Billie Jean were top hits. I was CEO of a growing software company headquartered on Charleston Road in Mountain View. I was driving a white BMW 535i with a kickass sound system that was wonderful to listen to Jackson on. I was young, the world was mine, I was creating the best stuff in the world, and he wrote the theme music. These days I don't listen to his music very much, but I did just load up the Thriller album on my iPhone to listen to on the drive I'm taking today. I expect to enjoy the feelings it brings up. I'm enjoying writing about it now. #

John Robinson: "If I were still in newspapers, I ask @davewiner for help charting a new course." #

Pelosi is totally right. Impeachment isn't something a party does, or even Congress. It has to be demanded by the people. Without that, not only can't it happen, it shouldn't.#

Thread: He's a criminal. It's not in doubt. It's a proven fact. He confessed. On NBC.#

I dare say most Knicks fans will cheer the day James Dolan sells the Knicks. So the fan who urged Dolan, quite politely, to sell the team probably speaks for pretty much everyone in the Garden on any given night. He probably paid $1000 for his ticket to watch the Knicks get clobbered by the pathetic Sacramento Kings. For his advice to Dolan he's being banned from the Garden for life for being "rude." This is fucking NYC where people greet each other, with respect, by telling them to fuck off. I'm not kidding. I think it's long past time for Knicks fans to speak up. In the remaining nine home games this season, every game should be accompanied by universal chants of SELL THE TEAM, perhaps punctuated by ASSHOLE to give the punk (Dolan) a taste of non-trust-fund NY cultchuh. Then he can ban all 20K fans (Knicks games continue to sell out, amazingly) on the way out of the Garden. Repeat at the next game. #

Yesterday I bought a house to go with my new car. (Heh actually it's the other way around.) It's a beautiful house in upstate New York, in the Catskills. It's a place where old hippies go when they want to get an advance look at heaven. I was looking for six months, considered a lot of options, and went for a place that's a bit daring, not conservative, that's what I always seem to do. As you might imagine, I'll have much more to share in the coming weeks and months. 💥#

Poll: According to a survey, a majority of Americans think Trump is a criminal. If you think he is, when did you realize it?#

If you were going to design the ideal news reading environment, would it be a river of news like Twitter, or would you use the mailbox reader style of the now-defunct Google Reader? Or would you do something else entirely?#

One of these days a thinker-about-journalism is going to have an epiphany, like this. Hey the crisis in journalism isn't just about me and other journalists. The people need and want journalism too. Maybe we should include them in the discussion about what to do?#

I recommend watching this 9-minute presentation by Sarah Kendzior in 2015 about her experience as a journalist in NYC in 2000 and how things changed. At the beginning, she was paid enough to rent an apartment in Astoria for $900 a month. By 2015, the same apartment rented for $2500 and her former job at the Daily News was now an internship that paid nothing. It's the first time I've heard the story told by someone who is not going on to say how tech needs to pay for the salaries of reporters. Her story is simple, compelling, and gives the problem of what to do to the listener. From here we can begin the discussion about how we proceed. Do we bet everything on finding a business model that returns journalism to the model that worked before the web? And if we do that, is that all we do? Is there no Plan B? No way to hedge against that not working? The truth is we need journalism. My job, as I see it, is to work on Plan B. Always have seen it that way. I'm not Craig Newmark or the Knights. I have no vast pile of money to pay to journalists to keep them employed. And even if I did, I think that's the wrong answer. I believe we need journalism to work. We all do. And I think it has to work better than it has worked before the web. My answer is not popular with journalists. They have a lot of power to shape the discussion, but journalism does not exist to serve them. It's for all of us. #

This is how parents sent email to their kids in 1968.#

Mohammed Ali: "Looking at life from a different perspective makes you realize that it’s not the deer crossing the road, rather it’s the road that is crossing the forest."#

The Boston Celtics were so good last year, even though their two biggest stars were out for the playoffs, and this year they're struggling, even though they're both playing. More proof that teams are not arithmetic. There is such a thing as chemistry.#

I was asked how I feel about my new Subaru Forester. I love it. It's a sweet car all around, but the best thing about it is it fits me. For my whole life I've been driving cars that were too small. I'd have to contort myself to get in and out. Not the Forester.#

I am going to listen to the Gaslit Nation podcast. #

After watching Bohemian Rhapsody, I wanted to see the actual Queen performance at Live Aid.#

When I was a teen, buying tickets at Carnegie Hall, a nice old man said he lost his wallet. If I loaned him $20 he’d send me $50 when he got home to Connecticut. I gave him the money and my address. The old guy is Trump and his voters gave him the money.#

I saw an electric Citi Bike today in Manhattan.#

Adweek is a sneaky outfit. If you go there with an ad blocker on you get this scolding. So if you turn the ad blocker off, you still can't read the article. This is supposed to make you do what? Subscribe? Not really, I wonder if they user-tested this. #

Over on Twitter, a question -- "What do you do to feel more confident?" I have an answer, but it's sort of NSFW. So I'll post it here instead of there. Certain drugs in your bloodstream give you confidence. Not sure if this is true for women, but it is true for me, and I'd guess for other men. So when I'm feeling frail, or sad, or lacking direction, I stimulate my body to produce this drug. It's never failed. 💥#

Michael Calore: "Thanks, but I'll continue with my ad blocker turned on. No I don't want desktop notifications. No I don't want your newsletter. No I don't want to see this video. No I don't want to chat with the bot. <--- the first 10 seconds of every visit to your website."#

Cohen was such a compelling witness and had his tragic story so down, you could take a few excerpts of his testimony and turn it into a play. The best part was when he said the Repub inquisitor had no shame and how soon enough he would be in his Cohen's place.#

Yesterday's braintrust query has not yielded an answer. I've never seen such a thing where an HTTP request works over the net but doesn't work locally. This is a problem for an app like serverMonitor. It only seems to happen on Digital Ocean servers, which is where most of my servers are these days. I worked around the problem by putting serverMonitor on its own machine, a $5 per month minimal setup. It's a waste of money, amounting to $60 a year, it shouldn't be needed. But I can't keep my servers running without the serverMonitor app, so I'm paying the price until we figure out what the problem is. #

My new Subaru has the ability for me to control it remotely. I can start the engine, or make it flash its lights and honk its horn. This is worrisome of course, because if I can do it, so can a hacker. But it's also fun, since it's in a parking garage in Manhattan, I could just start the engine and freak out the people who work there. Not that I would be the first to do that. (Note: I'm not going to do it.)#

They also offer features that allow the owner to set up their own authoritarian state (aka family).#

Braintrust query: I'm having a problem with the Node.js request function. When making a request of a process running on the same server, I get an ECONNREFUSED. This has happened on two servers. The code used to work. Then I tried accessing the server through the CURL command line utility and it also failed. Yet if I access the same address from another computer, it works. I'm at a loss. #

Suggestion for AirBnB. Allow renters to bid. If I want to book a house for a week and would like a discount, let me make an offer. The owner can accept, reject or make a counter-offer. [Update: Apparently you can do it.]#

The best thing about Cohen's testimony is that finally the source is going direct. The story is much more compelling when told in the first person.#

Hmmm I wonder what the people of South Korea think about Trump’s idea that Vietnam could serve as a template for North Korea.#

Idea for people working on new identity services. Let's come up with a common API for them, so you can plug new services into apps that use identity. Sort of like jQuery but for identity. (Reminder: jQuery was created because browsers had incompatible APIs. jQuery flattened them all out. A very valuable piece of tech.)#

TFW the host of a news show likens his panel to people talking about a hurricane on TV days before it makes landfall. The worst part was he was knew it made him look like an idiot. (I switched to Bojack Horseman reruns. At least there I might have forgotten the plot.)#

I am a first generation American. 🇺🇸 #

Rami Malek's Oscar speech was nice, wish he would have mentioned Freddie Mercury, but his (earlier) Emmy speech was the best award acceptance speech ever, but it only made sense if you had seen Mr Robot.#

The best speeches in last night's Oscars were the actors, which should not be a surprise. This is what they do. They're playing a role, they've probably been coached by experts. Look at the boost Malik and Colman got. They go from being small-time stars, to big stars overnight. #

With all the high stakes drama in the world the news should at least be interesting. But it isn't. Another sign something isn't working. #

I've come to think of Twitter and YouTube as integral parts of my blog. I am able to include tweets and YT videos as expandable elements under a blog item. If either system were to go down, the posts would still be readable, I try to write them so they'll still make sense. But there's no question at least these two systems have become integral to the web as I see and use it. #

News is supposed to save democracy, but news itself is not democratic. The people are relegated to paying to read. Seems like a pretty basic flaw. And they want taxpayer funding. Hmmm. Didn’t we fight a revolution over just that?#

We’ve been working on news on the web for 25 years, and given the bandwidth of the network, the power and capacity of servers, and the incredible devices we carry with us, that news on the net is such a miserable experience. Clearly something is very wrong.#

Podcast: Coverage of the Democratic candidates for 2020 has to be tempered by this reality: The Republican candidate is not capable of doing the job. If an issue doesn't cripple the Dem candidate to the level the Repub candidate, then don't report it. 12 minutes.#

Proposed criteria for reporting a scandal in a presidential candidate. If it's something a foreign government could blackmail them for, and thereby take control of the government, then report it. Under this criteria, if "ate salad with a comb" is the worst you could find, keep looking.#

Behind a paywall, Adam Schiff writes a supposedly “open” letter to his Republican colleagues. This is wrong. As a US government employee, a member of Congress, his writing should be accessible to every American. Putting it behind a paywall is not open. They must stop using private websites to communicate publicly. The US government should provide a well-archived public website for them to post their thoughts on. A place of record. This is not rocket science in 2019. I cc'd this to my friend Jeremy Zilar who works for the US at Digital.gov, which is responsible for these kinds of projects. #

I don't usually have truly sexy dreams, but last night I did. I know, too much information. I was chasing a woman who stole my heart 20-plus years ago and as then, I got her. It was truly delicious, and the memories are vivid. She's long gone but the dream is still there. #

Facebook has a new feature where you can ask questions like what was your first computer. I was about to ask people what their first car was, but then realized this is often a "security" question. And then I thought geez these Facebook people are either stupid or assholes. #