Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Chrome is looking at adding support for RFC5861’s stale-while-revalidate, which is really cool. I wrote about the details of SwR when it first became an RFC, but its application to browsers is something that’s a new. Seems like a good time to answer a few potential questions. What’s stale-while-revalidate For? I originally designed SwR when…
Harry Roberts recently wrote a piece about how third parties can cripple your performance. In this article, I want to show you how it isn’t all doom and gloom: there are a number of strategies can be employed to deliver 3rd party scripts in a manner which limits their negative effects on performance.Running a site…
The “simple” act of initiating an HTTP request can incur many roundtrips before the actual request bytes are routed to the server: the browser may have to resolve the DNS name, perform the TCP handshake, and negotiate the TLS tunnel if a secure socket is required. All accounted for, that’s anywhere from one to three…
Over ten thousand people watched the second day of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress today on The Washington Post’s Twitch channel. Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it was discovered that the political data firm hired by President Trump gained access to private information of 50 million Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg testified…
We’ve known for some time now that Americans are increasingly dying younger, but the scale and nature of the problem has been a little bit murky. There was speculation that the downturn in American life expectancy was all thanks to “deaths of despair,” but some experts have said that might not be the full story,…
“Why don’t you just fire [Robert] Mueller?” a reporter called out to President Trump in the Cabinet Room at the White House Monday afternoon, according to a transcript of the event. From the video, one can see that the president—flanked by his military advisers—selected this inquiry from a number of other indistinct questions that were being…
YouTube has a porn problem on some of its popular videos, and it seems to be coming from the same mysterious source. Twitter users and YouTubers have been complaining about an ad that has shown up before videos on popular YouTube pages, including Pewdiepie, Markiplier, and Dude Perfect. The ad shows a woman gyrating (not…
A state lawmaker in Oklahoma refused to meet with Muslim constituents unless they replied to a questionnaire asking if they beat their wives. A Nebraska state senator suggested that any Muslim wanting to enter the United States be forced to eat pork first. And a Rhode Island legislator advocated herding Syrian refugees into a camp,…
Our nation’s present uproar over the deleterious effects of social media on society and fretting about the decline of trusted news outlets is nothing new. What’s new is the fact that the straightforward ways to prop up the Real Journalism industry have never been more obvious. For two decades, professional thinkers—most of them employed in…
Graphic: Getty The vast majority of Facebook user data that was harvested by Cambridge Analytica came from Americans. But smaller countries are actually better at demonstrating just how big the problem got. Access to just 53 users in Australia reportedly allowed data firms to potentially capture information on over 310,000 people. According to data obtained…