Alexa responds to things you say when you didn't say "Alexa," which contradicts everything Amazon says about privacy. If it doesn't listen, then how does it wake up exactly? BTW, Google does this too. Sometimes I'm recording a voicemail or a podcast using my iPhone and my Pixel 6 starts responding to what I am saying. It's funny, even cute, until you realize it wasn't supposed to hear any of that. #
Coming back from deep in the innards of FeedLand and Drummer, where both are learning HTTPS. Under development, not yet ready for users. But here's something cute. If FeedLand supports HTTPS in all its functionality, it will end up demanding that people with feeds support HTTPS too, and will fail for those who don't. If we continue down this path, I will be doing Google's work, helping them take ownership of the web. Here's the deal. Suppose you're displaying an item from a feed that includes an image. Suppose that image is served from an HTTP website, but your reader is running HTTPS. You won't see the image. The browser will refuse to load it. This came up when Scott Hanson tried to look at an item from Scripting News that contained a painting from René Magritte. Here's a screen shot. I'm trying to think of a way I could not give aid and comfort to the enemy. There might be a way. I don't want to betray the open web. I might be willing to do a lot of work so I don't force the owner of that site to support HTTPS (which I know he won't do because he is me). The old moral of the story -- give an inch, they'll take a mile.#
I did a quick review of Twitter's new API pricing, I can't spend a lot of time on it given that I'm paddling as fast as I can to get a new Drummer online that doesn't depend on Twitter logins. But the first problem I see is that they think (apparently) that each dev has a single app. Which for me is far from the truth. Heroku made the same mistake, they came up with what they felt was a fair price, assuming the developer made one big app. The problem is with a free product running for so many years, we made lots of really small apps. Why build something huge if the idea is small. The cost of staying with Heroku would have been totally diseconomic when full servers could run all my apps for $10 a month. Why should I pay Heroku $500 for the same thing, even though I had to do a lot of work to dig out of the hole. Now with Twitter, I think I'll just bow out, and let other people find out if this is workable or not. I'll leave my servers running, and if they stop working, we'll figure out what if anything to do then. None of the apps I've made that depend on Twitter are worth $100 a month to keep running. That's another story, because the Twitter ecosystem for cool utilities was practically non-existent. All that energy from now on clearly is going to Mastodon where there is no vendor who can turn the cart over, at least not yet (don't rule it out, it could happen).#
