There has been ample debate in some tech circles as to just how much of a privacy war is really being waged. My personal sense is that it's not so much of a war as it is a reality check. It has become very painfully obvious that the same old simple solutions don't work — and some people are up in arms that reality is being inconvenient to them.

The Global Privacy Control is making steady progress towards adoption. As a global signal supported by browsers, it's a natural question to ask what it means under regimes such as the GDPR. Here's my personal take.

Working behind the scenes in the news media sector, it has become increasingly clear to me that tech and the internet as they operate today are causing structural damage to our collective institutions that runs deeper than seems to be understood. But these changes can be hard to characterise. If you take advertising revenue from high-quality contexts and use it to subsidise conspiracy theories, it's pretty obvious that nothing good will happen — but we barely have an understanding of the data economy sufficient to put a critique of this transfer on solid footing. If you move editorial decisions about what information people get to see first from tens of thousands of career editors working with methods that are highly diversified in biases, culture, skill, or politics the world around to a tiny number of algorithms that are everywhere uniform, what effect can you expect? Reputational and market-driven accountability will be removed, which is evidently bad, but the massive simplification of this ecosystem seems very likely to have deep-running consequences of its own — but how do you begin proving that? A new paper in PNAS leads the way forward.

The British competition regulator (the CMA) just released a draft agreement with Google relating to the "Privacy Sandbox". I take a quick look at it through the lens of enabling better standards and stronger cooperation between the world of standards and policy.

It's time to lift the coronavirus travel ban — ideally entirely but failing that at least for vaccinated non-immigrant visas.

After having looked at the issues involved in not using a namespace, we look at those that stem from overdoing them. This article is part of a series based the paper on "Designing XML/Web Languages: A Review of Common Mistakes" which I presented at the XML Prague 2009 conference.

XML namespaces are one of the most hated aspects of the XML family. Not even XML Schema has received as much contempt, and it needed a lot more work and far longer specifications in order to get there. Maybe there will be a second version of the XML stack some day, and when that day comes we can hopefully address namespaces in a way that will cause less acrimony. In the meantime, whether you like or dislike them they are what we have. This article is part of a series based the paper on "Designing XML/Web Languages: A Review of Common Mistakes" which I presented at the XML Prague 2009 conference.

1520 CEST. 3kg. 51cm. A perfect baby.

There's a lot going on these days around ways to provide a better offline web experience. Two of those efforts are HTML5 Application Cache (aka AppCache) and Widgets. Having heard several questions about how these two relate, I decided to experiment around bridging them with a quick hack, and check that the use cases for bridging them could work.

Robin Berjon is an expert in Web technology with almost two decades’ worth of experience in both Web development and driving standardisation efforts, notably within W3C. He is in charge of data governance at The New York Times.