FeedCity

Dave Winer:

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it’s human, with a level of intimacy that you really don’t want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there’s a pseudo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it’s just a computer. I think AI’s should give up the pretense that they’re human, and this one should be first.

Amen.

Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic: X’s decision to show where accounts are based is, theoretically, a positive step in the direction of transparency for the platform, which has let troll and spam accounts proliferate since Musk’s purchase, in late 2022. And yet th...

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The New York Times: Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, began a new campaign on Wednesday that he called “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You,” complete with a 1960s-style public service announcement that spliced together scenes of the country’s first air t...

Dave Nanian and Bruce Lacey, at Shirt Pocket:

Mistakes are a part of life.

They’re not a great part, but when viewed “correctly”, they’re an opportunity.

Well, we have three opportunities, brought to our attention by a security researcher. They’re security vulnerabilities that have been in SuperDuper! since the very first version, released almost 22 years ago.

Today, we’re releasing fixes for the current release (the SuperDuper! v3.20 Beta is already fixed), a discussion of the problems, and the steps users can take to mitigate the issues if they cannot install the update.

We don’t know of any bad actors making use of these exploits as of this post.

Another good postmortem, with technical details and an apology.

Oregon, November 2025. From the video I wasn't ready to leave.

Hello this is just a test. I'm creating a new post which will then be cross-posted to Daveverse site. Both Scripting News and daveverse should show up in the blogroll on scripting.com.

Yesterday I put up a form asking for the addresses of people who have WordPress sites that have the ActivityPub feature turned on. Only got four responses so far. But it's good to see what people are doing. For example Evan Prodroumou is using it, and his Mastodon posts are blog posts. I smiled when I saw this. Nicely done. Loop closed.

I've been using the term of the web, starting in a piece I wrote last Monday. Now it's time to explain more about what it means because I used the term in the context of Pocket Casts in an earlier post. For a piece of software, being of the web means that it is built to sh...

The feed validator operated by the W3C is kind of frozen in time, and imho has a very odd perspective on things. So I tried using ChatGPT as a feed validator, and it was totally up to the job.

Pocket Casts has come up with a new feature called Playlists. I was able to figure out how to use it in a few minutes using their web app. Is there an open format behind this feature? Can I create a playlist outside of Pocket Casts? Can I use a PC playlist in another app? Pocket Casts comes from Automattic so I would expect the answers to be yes and yes, given how committed they are to the web, and how podcasting is of the web. The most logical open format to use here would be imho RSS 2.0.

The bottom line is that users setting up new Apple Watches in the EU will now get a somewhat slightly worse experience in the name of parity with accessories made by third-party companies. It remains to be seen whether users of third-party iPhone accessories and peripherals in the EU will see any benefit at all.

I have a hard time leaving the PNW. The days are beautiful and moody, very different from what's waiting for me further east. So even though I was supposed to be gone by now, I decide to give the Oregon Coast a couple more days.

Oregon, November 2025.

From the video I wasn't ready to leave.

I like it when people send me thoughtful responsive notes about things I've written. I think it's possible to set up a social network so that most of what you get follows that pattern. It has to do with incentives.

I'm looking for WordPress sites that are set up to cross-post to ActivityPub.

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Say someone is working on an open source project, no matter what role they play, they don't own the project. They can't sell it, or profit from ownership. That goes for whatever role a person is playing, if they're the project leader, or just helping out, or even not helping out. Now that's not to say the founder or show runner couldn't start a business based on the open source software, but so could you. We all own all open source projects and open formats and protocols equally, and that means we don't own it.

Next FeedLand release, has the option of keeping items around for a certain number of days. Running on two servers for burn-in. I don't recommend turning this on now unless you're helping test.

This week I had lunch with a developer who had been at WordCamp Canada last month. He apologized for not being at my session, but I waved it off. I didn't go to many sessions myself, too many great discussions in the hallway, out on the patio or in the coffee room. I rememb...