miniblog.

A remarkable new scam: buy a smartphone app, record user interactions, and replay them with bots to fraudulently increase ad clicks and therefore revenue! https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-a-massive-ad-fraud-scheme-exploited-android-phones-to Seems very hard to detect, as it's using real user data to make bots appear human.

This is a nice idea: explicitly reserving issues for first time contributors, to ensure there are ways new people can get started easily!

I'm finding myself increasingly using "C-c LETTER" keybindings for my favourite Emacs commands. They're easy to type and work everywhere (any desktop environment, even inside a shell over SSH).

The design/ambition of the semantic web didn't really gain traction, but content is way more annotated these days. Webdevs are incentivised to use open graph tags so summaries show up on search engines and social media. This in turn helps crawlers!

Overall I've been impressed by @digitalocean's #Hacktoberfest to encourage people to contribute to open source. It doesn't have any perverse incentives (you can 'cheat' with PRs on your own projects) but it celebrates developers who collaborate.

On the different properties of programming languages that might make us argue it's Object Oriented:

@mdhughes@cybre.space Awesome! I bet the author is pretty good at building packages to help their workflow too. This kind of project is a great way to start with your own editor plugins.

How to take a screenshot in the 80s: https://www.kmjn.org/snippets/wilson85_screenshot.html How things have changed! That process is hilariously complex compared with today's screenshot facilities.

Operating systems, smartphone platforms, they're all rather oriented around isolated programs/apps. Is this Conway's Law in action? Does a more integrated system require a more integrated developer community?

Great to see the Python community converging on packaging, dependency management, and even project structure!

The Opus sound codec had released 1.3, and there's a noticeable quality improvement! 9kb/s voice quality is really impressive. https://people.xiph.org/~jm/opus/opus-1.3/ It does make you wonder where the limit is. These are significant improvement in an already efficient codec.

Woah, Slack has bought Hipchat and Stride from Atlassian! https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/26/slack-acquires-hipchat-and-stride-from-atlassian/ Whilst they were niche players, Hipchat was one of the few on-premises commercial group chat products available.

Superb article on building a real time rich text editor: https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-rich-text-editor-with-real-time-collaboration/ Discusses operational transforms with hierarchical text (e.g. you edit text whilst the other user makes part of it a link) and markers (persistent regions that automatically move when you edit).

How reliable should we consider Google search results to be? From

Contrasting Bing with Google, and whether search engines should be portals: https://www.wired.com/story/tried-bing-search-google-microsoft/