Ben Savage

Software Engineer at the company formerly known as Facebook. Opinions my own.

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

@Carnage4Life I was so impressed the first year I filed taxes in Singapore. No need for an accountant as it’s simple enough to do it yourself. You submit an online form with what you *think* you owe, and get a response from the government letting you know if you got it right! Then you pay.

[Intent To Ship @intenttoship]

Blink: Intent to Deprecate & Remove: Third-Party Cookies https://t.co/MAwLwxz6UB

[Open Web Advocacy @OpenWebAdvocacy]

Hilariously, Apple tried to claim with a straight face to the EU, that it offers not one, but three distinct web browsers all coincidentally named Safari.

[Paul Bannister @pbannist]

"I'll take Present-Day Monopolies for $1000, Alex"

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

@ratko That’s such an awesome clip.

[privacytests.org @privacytests]

Exciting Web Privacy News

The Web is undergoing a significant advance in privacy at the moment. In recent weeks, the Chrome browser enabled cross-site storage partitioning. That is: many features in Chrome that used to leak data between websites, no longer leak.

In Chrome 117, our "State Partitioning test" results (see the table) indicate that 11 browser features no longer leak across sites!

Because several popular browsers are based on Chromium, including Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi, I expect this protection will shortly be enabled in those browsers as well. And because other browsers (including Brave, Firefox, Safari and Tor) have previously fixed these leaks, these protections will soon be universal for all Web users. (Current results for a range of browsers are at https://t.co/idG6bBISDR)

What features are left that still need to be partitioned? In Chrome, it's the Blob API, the HSTS cache, and most important of all, third-party cookies. Chrome should fix these leaks as quickly as possible.

Congratulations to the Chrome team for making this major step forward! Here's hoping that browser teams will continue to make major progress in fixing other privacy flaws, including by expanding protections against fingerprinting, query parameter tracking, and IP address logging. We'll be watching. ✅❌

[Kevin Gee @kevg1412]

62/ So, in closing, the reason I picked this title is Silicon Valley's 2,851 miles away from Washington. And as these people put their eyes towards this, I would state the following: The reason Silicon Valley has been so successful is because it's so fucking far away from Washington DC. Thank you.

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

Every day we get one step closer to the day when the AdTech industry starts using PET-based platform provided APIs to measure advertising…
…because there is no alternative…

These clickIDs are only removed in Safari private browsing… for now…

https://t.co/fzivoHtECY

[Mark Nelson @energybants]

Poland is starting to build a fleet of large reactors TODAY, immediately after signing contracts.

They have this one great chance to bury Germany economically.

Germany's economy was based on large and middle-sized industrial companies running on cheap energy.

Where did that energy come from?

It came from three places: brown coal under German soil; insecure Russian pipeline natural gas; and its outstanding nuclear reactors, the world's most prolific.

Germany urged Europe to tax its own brown coal so severely that it multiplies the cost by more than four times.

So its own coal isn't cheap any more.

Russia always meant its gas to be a weapon of control. They simply turned off the flow at a time of their choosing in order to assist with launching a war. Only after the flow was stopped did the Nord Stream pipelines get blown up, locking the loss into place.

Now Germany has to buy liquefied gas from ships, including from Russia. It's much more expensive than the Russian pipeline gas used to be.

So the cheap gas is gone.

That left only nuclear for cheap energy. Germany just months ago in late 2021 had enough ultra-cheap clean nuclear electricity to power a third of its industrial sector at extremely competitive rates. Those plants would last for 50 more years at least.

But Germany shut down nuclear anyway.

Now there is nowhere for German companies to turn to get cheap industrial (read: steady, long-term contract) electricity.

German factories can't buy cheap power just from wind and solar because those energy sources can't guarantee they'll be available. And once you stabilize their power not with cheap nuclear but with expensive coal and gas, it's not cheap enough to be competitive.

Meanwhile Poland opened a new natural gas pipeline from Norway and is launching their nuclear program construction today.

This means if you're a German industrial manager looking to locate the next multi-billion investment that must purchase power for the next few decades, you can't justify placing it in Germany. But you might justify placing it in Poland to coincide with the arrival of its nuclear power.

And if you're a German small business owner, you can't get the cheap electricity that your French competitors get from their giant nuclear fleet. Might as well move over the river to France if possible, or close down if not.

Germany can still turn its nuclear fleet back on within a few years but may destroy it instead at the behest of a tiny number of ideology-poisoned politicians.

I predict that this colossal energy system shift will reverberate through the rest of this century.

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

Installing an app shouldn’t cost you your life savings. Android - please fix your permissions system. https://t.co/FJPcDhqtUq

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

But I found the idea of banning default search engines, sold to the highest bidder very convincing. This seems exceptionally hard to argue against. Clearly Apple isn’t going to turn down $20 Billion a year to make Google Search the default in Safari. That will require new laws.

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

I recommend this piece from Robin on the broken search engine marketplace.
As usual with Robin’s writing:
1. I really enjoyed it
2. Some bits felt too extreme or like they underplay the value Google creates
3. But overall, it felt rather convincing
https://t.co/afZKeA6YLv

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

Specifically, I disagreed with the implication that all the Google products that provide answers directly to users (rather than directing people to publisher websites) are bad. Sure, they result in less traffic to publishers, but I find they provide me with value.

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

@aripap @eric_seufert I do not think the word “tracking” is an accurate characterization of these APIs. Colloquially “tracking” means someone can reconstruct your browsing history. These APIs have been carefully designed precisely to ensure that’s not possible.

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

This is an interesting about-face from Apple. Personally, I think it’s really commendable that they’ve:
(1) responded publicly and in a clear fashion
(2) were willing to change their stance in light of new information and experience

[Meredith Whittaker @mer__edith]

Apple's statement is the death knell for the idea that it's possible to scan everyone's comms AND preserve privacy.

Apple has many of the best cryptographers + software eng on earth + infinite $.

If they can't, no one can. (They can't. No one can.)

https://t.co/HgT4QG2xJo

[Adam Singer @AdamSinger]

Honestly every single climate change story needs to end with "so anyway, stop screwing around with paper straws and slightly better fans & just roll more nuclear everywhere." We have the technology to have abundant, green elemental energy. Enough monkey business let's build

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

@PicturesFoIder Cello Suite #1

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

What a terrible experience. Discovering new and interesting content is the best part of Reels. The EU only seems to know how to write dumb laws. No more excellence in anything else… except maybe luxury brands.

[Martin Husovec @hutko]

"on Facebook and Instagram, users will have the option to view Stories and Reels only from people they follow, ranked in chronological order, newest to oldest" #DSA

[Martin Husovec @hutko]

"on Facebook and Instagram, users will have the option to view Stories and Reels only from people they follow, ranked in chronological order, newest to oldest" #DSA

[Ben Savage @btsavage]

@AlecStapp That is so awful. Incredibly misleading.