Terence Eden’s Blog / is on Nostr

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2024-02-05 12:34:10

Safelinks are a fragile foundation for publishing
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/02/safelinks-are-a-fragile-foundation-for-publishing/
Microsoft loves you and wants to protect you. So every time you receive an email with a link in it, Microsoft Outlook helpfully rewrites it so that it goes through their "safelinks" system.
Safelinks allow your administrator, or someone at Microsoft, to stop you visiting a link which is malicious or suspicious. Rather than going to example.com, your link now goes to safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=example.com.
Hurrah! If you accidentally click on a naughty link you won't cause chaos and ructions.
Except, there's a tiny problem. People like to copy and paste links that they receive. Someone sends an email which says "here's the link to that report you asked for" which then gets copied into a document or a web page.
For example, I was reading this official document from the UK's Department of Health and Social Care. Slap bang in the middle is a link to another report:
That forces everyone who visits that link to go through Microsoft's proxy. That might protect users if a link later becomes suspicious. But, more likely, it will be used in analytics to further profile users who click on links. It also undermines a user's ability to see the final destination of a link unless they can manually URl-decode content in their head.
It appears that every large organisation which uses Microsoft is prone to this failure. Lots of UK Government departments publish content with safelinks:
The US Military too:
It's all over Twitter:
And there are hundreds of academic works infested:
Look, I get why people do this. They copy a link from an email, paste it in, click it, and it works. No one writes raw HTML by hand, nor should they have to. Our WYSIWYG tools work really well and hide all the mumbo-jumbo. Copy editors look at text; not hypertext. It's only nerds like me who hover over a link before clicking on it.
Perhaps I should stop worrying? Perhaps it is OK that Microsoft intercepts the clicks from people all around the world? Perhaps they can competently run a proxy which detects and blocks inappropriate content? Perhaps they won't ever abuse that facility?
Here's my prediction. In the next five or so years, Microsoft is going to accidentally shut off *.safelinks.protection.outlook.com and a million copy-and-pasted links across the web are going to break.
Think I'm over-reacting? A decade ago, Microsoft got rid of their MS Tag product and, shortly after, all their proxy links were shut off. Similarly, other proxies like McAfee have shut down with little warning.
Or maybe Microsoft's sub-domains will be hijacked?
Either way, if you work in digital publishing, please make sure that your links point directly to the content that you want; not to Microsoft's safelinks service.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/02/safelinks-are-a-fragile-foundation-for-publishing/
#microsoft #privacy #web

2024-02-05 12:34:10

2023-12-25 12:34:59

Electricity That's Too Cheap To Meter
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/electricity-thats-too-cheap-to-meter/
Nuclear power was sold to the world as a safe, clean, and economically viable source of electricity. We were told that it would be "too cheap to meter"1. Even the most ardent proponent of nuclear power will have to admit that hasn't come to pass. Construction costs for nuclear power stations are dwarfed only by their decommissioning costs. Yes, politics and regulation conspire to increase the price - but nuclear hasn't made electricity particularly cheap. Indeed, we mostly seem to be paying more than ever for our power.
Well, not quite.
On Christmas Eve, my electricity company emailed me to say that I would have several hours of free electricity. They would charge me £0.00 per kWh. More than that, at a few specific times they would pay me for my electricity use!
Here's the graph of my half-hourly prices:
Most factories and heavy industrial plants weren't running the day before Christmas. UK power usage spikes when everyone boils a kettle at the end of a football match or other similar event - but there was nothing so momentous happening at 3AM. So supply outstripped demand.
Anyone with a smart-meter could have been paid to charge their car, run their tumble dryer, or stay up until the wee hours playing on their console.
And was it nuclear power which did this? No.
As shown on the live grid tracker about two-thirds of the day's electricity came from renewables. It was pretty overcast, and our solar panels barely made 1kWh.
It wasn't mined uranium which gave us power which literally had to be given away; about 62% of the electricity came from wind.
At this point, the nuclear lobby will start whinging about subsidies (both nukes and renewables are generously subsidised) and how wind can't provide a base load (which is fair). But although sticking a bunch of turbines in costal waters is an engineering marvel - it's pretty cheap compared to building and maintaining a nuclear power station.
Wind - and other renewables - have done what nuclear couldn't. They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it.History and the Future
It's worth looking at the original quote from 1954 about electricity becoming too cheap to meter:
As well as nuclear, he talks about "photosynthesis". Well, the UK now has 15.6 GW of solar capacity across 1,430,994 installations. A small part of that is my solar panels!
The UK also has around 27GW of wind capcity installed.
It is entirely possible that the UK will have generated the majority of 2023's electricity from renewables.
Because home appliances are increasingly efficient, domestic energy use is falling - it's down 19% since 2010. Electricity use by domestic properties was about 96.2 TWh in 2022 and 135 TWh was generated by renewables.
Yes, electricity is fungible, but you can convincingly make the case that every home in the UK was powered by renewables.
Solar panels don't work at night, and wind-turbines don't work when there's no wind. We'll always need something to be able to provide a base-load of electricity. That might be nuclear, or fossil fuels, or it might be storage from the excess power from renewables.
Sadly, the world is still filled with war, famine, and disease. But, for a few moments on a winter's evening, wind power genuinely became too cheap to meter.Shameless Plug
If you want to move to a time-of-day electricity tariff, you can join Octopus Energy - if you use that link, we both get £50 bill credit.
There is a lot of contention about that phrase. It was (probably) about the future prospects of nuclear fusion - but it became attached to nuclear fission. You can read more at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission ↩
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/electricity-thats-too-cheap-to-meter/
#electricity #environment #solar

2023-10-01 11:34:42

The minimal-div minimal-span philosophy of this blog
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/10/the-minimal-div-minimal-span-philosophy-of-this-blog/
If you've ever leaned Mandarin Chinese, you'll know about "measure words". They're the sort of thing that trip up all new learners of the language. While 个 (gè) can be used as a generic measure word, using it everywhere makes you sound like an idiot (according to my old teacher). So you learn to use 个 for people, 包 for packets, and 根 for things which are long and thin.
English has a similar construct. You might say "one bunch of flowers" or "two glasses of wine" or "three bowls of soup".
You could say "one thing of flowers" or "two things of wines" or "three things of soups" but the measure words give much needed context and semantics.
If you get it wrong and said to a publican "four mugs of beer please" they'd probably know what you meant but it could be a bit confusing.
And isn't that very much like HTML?
The language of the web gives us semantic elements for our markup. When you use <button> to draw a button on screen, the browser knows exactly what to expect, how to display the content, and what it should do. A search engine can extract meaning from the page. Users of assistive technology can be told that they're on a button. Everything is lovely!
You don't have to do that, of course. You could use <div class="button" onclick="something()"> - with enough CSS and JS you'll have something which looks and acts more-or-less like a button. But you'll lose all the semantics which make life easier for browsers, search engines, assistive technologies, and anything else that a user uses to interact with your site.
HTML has dozens of semantic elements. There's <address> for contact details, <time> for dates and times, <nav> for navigation elements.
There are two main "generic" elements. <div> for blocks of stuff, and <span> for a short run of text. I find that most modern websites over-use these elements. I want to reiterate, there's nothing illegal or immoral about doing so; the web police aren't going to take you to gaol. I personally think that writing semantic HTML is easier to maintain, easier to understand, easier for accessibility, and easier for automatically extracting meaning.
So, for a while now, I've been slowly working on my blog's theme in order to remove as many <div>s and <span>s as possible. I started out with a couple of hundred of each. I'm now down to about 35 of each - depending on which page you're on.
Here are some of the problems I found.
Semantic wrapping is complicated
I use Schema.org microdata in my HTML. For example, when a user has left a comment, I might indicate their name by using <span itemprop="name">Juliet Capulet</span>
Or, in the heading of a post I might useThis post has<span itemprop="https://schema.org/commentCount">3</span> comments and is<span itemprop="https://schema.org/wordCount">400</span> words long
Because there's no HTML element like <commentcount> or <wordcount>, I have to wrap those numbers in something if I want to indicate the semantic content behind them. I could "cheat" and use something like <var> or <output> but they're as semantically irrelevant as <span>.
Similarly, it's hard to do semantic comments for WordPress.
Some things are just things
I have a large calendar at the bottom of every page showing my archives. Each calendar is its own "thing" and so is wrapped in a <div> which controls its style and layout. That group of calendars is also its own thing - because <details> elements are weird.
They're inside a widget - which itself is inside of an <aside>.
I was using a <table> layout for them, but it wasn't flexible and it ballooned the size of the DOM. Perhaps I should treat them as lists? At least then they'd be easier to skip?
WordPress defaults
All built in widgets in WordPress take the following form:<h2 class="widget-title">...</h2><div> ...</div>
I don't think they need that extra <div>, although I can see why it might be necessary for styling.
Similarly, wp_nav_menu() is encased in a <div> by default - although that can be removed.
What's Next?
I'm going to continue hacking away out of a sense of masochism. Perhaps the only person who will notice (other than me) is someone accidentally viewing the source of this page.
But I think it's worth it. There's that story about how the original Mac circuit board was laid out so that, despite never being seen by normal people, it was part of the overall æsthetic. And I think that's what I'm going for - something that I can be satisfied with.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/10/the-minimal-div-minimal-span-philosophy-of-this-blog/
#blogging #HTML

2013-12-27 14:15:33

How Do You Pronounce Your Domain Name?
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/12/how-do-you-pronounce-your-domain-name/
I was listening to a podcast recently which was kind enough to mention one of my blog posts. The presenter said:
...and you should Google for this, because I'm really not sure how to pronounce this. Is it shu-huk-spur? dot mobby?
Le sigh! It's a conversation I have most weeks when I'm on the phone to someone - usually a call centre - and they ask for my email address.
"Sierra Hotel Kilo Sierra Papa Romeo Dot Mike Oscar Bravo India"
Whereupon I am inevitably asked:
Is that dot com or dot co dot UK at the end, sir?
Yes! I have chosen an almost unpronounceable domain on an obscure TLD. Woe is me!
Originally, I thought this wouldn't be a problem. Typing in the domain is quick and easy. But a surprising number of organisations still insist on taking personal data over the phone. Which means more reading out the phonetic spelling.
Frustratingly, a large number of websites refuse to accept .mobi as a valid TLD for email addresses. The geniuses who coded them appeared to think that every email address must end with a 3 character (.com, .org, .net) or 2 character (.uk, .de, .io) sequence. Despite the fact that there are dozens of domains which don't fit in this restriction.Doubling Down
Being the belligerent sod that I am, I refuse to give in to the tyranny of the spoken word! We live in an digital world and digital data should be communicated by digital means. I want to impart information like my email address over the wire - not over the phone.
Regular readers will know that I was thwarted in my quest to buy a .中国 domain - but I did manage to grab http://莎士比亚.org/.
I think I'm going to move my primary email to that domain. When I get some call-centre who won't let me fill in a form online to give them my details, I shall very politely say my email address is:
Eden - yes, like the garden - at Shāshìbǐyà... Oh, of course, the stroke order is... Well, no, it's a Mandarin Chinese domain... No... No... Fine, would you like the punycode representation? Hello?
I'll also refuse to do business when any organisation which doesn't recognise IDN email addresses. That'll show 'em!
Perhaps I'll also move this blog over to that domain as well. I wonder what impact speakability has on SEO?
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/12/how-do-you-pronounce-your-domain-name/
#chinese #domains #email #rant