The Weekly Squeak — Mobile engagement, use Brave, ditch Discord and what is a URL?
In this episode I speak with Nick Millward of mGage about the past present and future of mobile engagement, especially RCS. I also cover the history of the URL, teaching an AI to play D&D, how to work from home, why Discord is bad, Brave is good, and so much more.
Stay healthy, xx Chinch
Podcast version
Listen to the audio version of this newsletter including my interview with Nick below.
Open source licenses: What, which, and why — arstechnica.com
Most people have at least heard of open source software by now — and even have a fairly good idea of what it is.
Discord Is Not An Acceptable Choice For Free Software Projects
sneak.berlin
It’s simple: free software projects should not use Discord. (This goes equally for any sort of public interest group.) Here’s why. Discord’s communication is not end to end (e2e) encrypted. It is encrypted only between the individual user and the servers operated by Discord Inc.
Brave deemed most private browser in terms of ‘phoning home’ — www.zdnet.com
New academic research published last month looked at the phone-home features of six of today’s most popular browsers and found that the Brave browser sent the smallest amount of data about its users back to the browser maker’s servers. The research, conducted by Douglas J.
The History of the URL — blog.cloudflare.com
On the twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email). Attendees included the guy who would create Sun Microsystems, the guy who made Zork, the NTP guy, and the guy who convinced the government to pay for Unix.
Roberta Williams Is the World’s First Graphic Computer Game Designer — But She’s Famous for All the Wrong Reasons — eyeondesign.aiga.org
YOU ARE IN THE FRONT YARD OF A LARGE ABANDONED VICTORIAN HOUSE. STONE STEPS LEAD UP TO A WIDE PORCH. If you’re a computer programmer or digital designer over the age of 40, this is probably how the future began for you.
Forget Chess — the Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D — www.wired.com
Fans of games like Dungeons & Dragons know that the fun comes, in part, from a creative Dungeon Master — an all-powerful narrator who follows a storyline but has free rein to improvise in response to players’ actions and the fate of the dice.
How to work from home: don’t accept your neighbours’ Amazon packages
www.theguardian.com
There’s a way of answering the phone that sounds as though you weren’t just asleep, and after nearly eight years of working from home, I’ve mastered it. The affected tone in question is one imbued with a sort of casual brightness. Timing is key.
The Mysterious Origins of Mastermind, the Codebreaking Board Game — www.vice.com
Fallout 3 was full of computer terminals, and if a player wanted to hack one, they’d have to beat some minigame abstractly representing the hacking process.
