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Gary Edwards

Pugpig: iPhone, iPad HTML Reader That Feels Like a Native App - 0 views

www.cmswire.com/...s-like-a-native-app-011590.php

pugpig visually-immersive html5-reader

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Jun 11
     
    Open Source framework for building visually-immersive mobile ready magazines in HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript. excerpt:  Pugpig is an open source framework that enables you to publish HTML5 content in the form of a magazine, book or newspaper to iPhone and iPad devices. It's slick and feels like you are using a native app (we tested the it on the iPad) Pugpig is an HTML reader for iOS. It's basically a hybrid - part native application, part web app, designed to prove that you can have an HTML-based app that feels like it's native. Your app sits on top of the Pugpig framework. It can be customized and extended. For example, you can link to your own data source, change the navigation and look and feel. It can also be multi-lingual - for example, the sample app I tested leverages the AJAX API for the Microsoft Translator. Additional Pugpig benefits are its low memory footprint and ability to store a lot magazine/newspaper editions within the device, for easy offline viewing. You can offer your app in either the App Store or the new iOS 5 Newsstand (integration with the framework is in progress now).
Gary Edwards

Gray Matter : Open XML and the SharePoint Conference - 0 views

blogs.technet.com/...the-sharepoint-conference.aspx

Open-Web MSOffice ge

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Oct 09
     
    excerpt: The trend in Office development is the migration of solutions away from in-application scripted processing toward more data-centric development. Of course this is a primary purpose of Open XML, and it is great to see the amount of activity in this area. We've seen customers scripting Word in a server environment to batch process / print documents or for other automation tasks. In reality Word isn't built to do that on a large scale, it is better to work directly against the document rather than via the application whenever possible. The Open XML SDK unlocks a "whole nuther" environment for document processing, and gets you out of the business of scripting client apps on servers to do the work of a true server application (not to mention the licensing problems created by installing Office on a server). comment:  Gray makes a very important point here.  The dominance of the desktop based MSOffice Productivity Environment was largely based the embedded logic driving "in-process" documents that was application and platform (Win32 API) specific.  Tear open any of these workgroup-workflow oriented compound documents and you find application specific scripts, macros, OLE, data bindings, security settings and other application specific settings.  These internal components are certain to break whenever these highly interactive and "live" compound documents are converted to another format, or application use.  This is how MSOffice documents and the business processes they represent become "bound" to the MSOffice Productivity Environment. What Gray is pointing to here is that Microsoft is moving the legacy Productivity Environment to an MSWeb based center where OpenXML, Silverlight, CAML, XAML and a number of other .NET-WPF technologies become the workgroup drivers.  The key applications for the MS WebStack are Exchange/SharePoint/SQL Server.  To make this move, documents had to be separated from the legacy desktop Productivity Environment settings. Note th
Paul Merrell

First working draft of W3C HTML5 - 0 views

dev.w3.org/spec

html5 W3C working draft

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jun 10 - Cached
  • HTML5 A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML
  • This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability.
  • The W3C HTML Working Group is the W3C working group responsible for this specification's progress along the W3C Recommendation track. This specification is the 24 June 2010 Working Draft snapshot. Work on this specification is also done at the WHATWG. The W3C HTML working group actively pursues convergence with the WHATWG, as required by the W3C HTML working group charter.
Gary Edwards

Memeo Connect's Take on the GDrive - 0 views

technologizer.com/...memeo-connect

memeo-connect trellis OTXML gDrive gDocs gApps syncing document-conversion box.net SugarSync

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 10
     
    Memeo Connect, which my colleague David Worthington tried and liked a few weeks ago, is an app that lets Google Apps users sync their documents and other files to a PC or Mac so they can get access to them even when they're offline. And as of today, it's available in a beta of version 2.0, which lets you get at synced files not only in Memeo's app but in Windows Explorer or the OS X finder, as well as in file open/save dialog boxes. The sync is two-way, so anything you drag or save into this repository gets moved back to Google Apps' storage once you're back online. And as before, Connect can handle files of all sorts and do conversions between Google Docs files and PDF and Microsoft Office formats. This virtual drive shows up in Explorer or Finder labeled as "GDrive"-a playful reference to a Google product that people have been expecting to arrive any day now for at least half a decade. (Don't tell anyone, but I've seen something called Google Web Drive in use at Google's offices; I assume it's undergoing internal testing and will get rolled out to the rest of us someday.) All in all, the new Connect competes more closely with Box.net (which launched its own syncing feature recently) and sync-focused services such as SugarSync. Memeo Connect 2.0′s other major feature is full-text search of the files in your Google Docs collection: Previous versions could only search file names. The Memeo Connect 2.0 beta is free, but the final version will cost $9 per user per year. It requires a $50/year Google Apps Premier account. (I think plenty of users of Google Apps' free version would pay for it, but Google only lets third-party apps and services that access the Apps API work with the paid edition.)
Gary Edwards

How Sir Tim Berners-Lee cut the Gordian Knot of HTML5 | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...rners-lee-html5-adobe-argument

w3c html5 flash adobe apple google

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Feb 10
     
    Good article with excellent URL references.  Bottom line is that the W3C will support the advance of HTML5 and controversial components such as "canvas", HTML + RDFa, and HTML microdata. excerpt: The key question is: who's going to get their way with HTML5? The companies who want to keep the kitchen sink in? Or those which want it to be a more flexible format which might also be able to displace some rather comfortable organisations that are doing fine with things as they are? Adobe, it turned out, seemed to be trying to slow things down a little. It was accused of trying to put HTML5 "on hold". It strongly denied it. Others said it was using "procedural bullshit". Then Berners-Lee weighed in with a post on the W3 mailing list. First he noted the history: "Some in the community have raised questions recently about whether some work products of the HTML Working Group are within the scope of the Group's charter. Specifically in question were the HTML Canvas 2D API, and the HTML Microdata and HTML+RDFa Working Drafts." (Translation: Adobe seems to have been trying to slow things down on at least one of these points.) And then he pushes: "I agree with the WG [working group] chairs that these items -- data and canvas - are reasonable areas of work for the group. It is appropriate for the group to publish documents in this area." Chop! And that's it. There goes the Gordian Knot. With that simple message, Berners-Lee has probably created a fresh set of headaches for Adobe - but it means that we can also look forward to a web with open standards, rather than proprietary ones, and where commercial interests don't get to push it around.
Gary Edwards

AtomPub, beyond blogs | Presentation by Mohanaraj Gopala Krishnan - 0 views

www.slideshare.net/...atompub-beyond-blogs

AtomPub OpenWeb HTML HTTP Restfull-computing Cloud-Computing

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 09
     
    Excellent presentation discussing the AtomPub protocol as a key Open Web API . 52 slides, and everyone worth some study.
Maluvia Haseltine

Apatar - Open Source Data Integration & ETL - 0 views

www.apatar.com

OpenSource Mashups OpenWeb

shared by Maluvia Haseltine on 17 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Maluvia Haseltine on 17 Jul 09
     
    Join your on-premises data sources with the web without coding. Feed data from/to APIs, mashups, and mashup building tools.
Gary Edwards

HTML 5: The Markup Language - 0 views

dev.w3.org/spec.html

html5 html

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Sep 09
     
    The stripped down "HTML Author" version of the 900 page HTML5 specification.   The bulk of the spec targets "implementers" such as browsers and editors.  It's very exacting and should provide for an unprecedented universal interoperability. Introduction:  This specification provides the details necessary for producers of HTML content to create conformant documents, and for others to wcheck the conformance of existing documents. It is designed: to describe the syntax and structure of the HTML language to describe the semantics of HTML elements and their attributes (that is, to describe what the elements and attributes represent) to be clear and unambiguous to be as concise and readable as possible Certain purposes are intentionally out of scope for this specification; in particular, it: does not provide any conformance criteria for HTML consumers; in particular, it does not attempt to define how Web browsers and other user agents process documents does not define any APIs related to processing of HTML content by HTML consumers. does not attempt to be a tutorial or "how to" authoring guide
Paul Merrell

Microsoft Pitches Technology That Can Read Facial Expressions at Political Rallies - 0 views

theintercept.com/...pressions-at-political-rallies

facial-recognition emotion-recognition cloud computing Microsoft

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • On the 21st floor of a high-rise hotel in Cleveland, in a room full of political operatives, Microsoft’s Research Division was advertising a technology that could read each facial expression in a massive crowd, analyze the emotions, and report back in real time. “You could use this at a Trump rally,” a sales representative told me. At both the Republican and Democratic conventions, Microsoft sponsored event spaces for the news outlet Politico. Politico, in turn, hosted a series of Microsoft-sponsored discussions about the use of data technology in political campaigns. And throughout Politico’s spaces in both Philadelphia and Cleveland, Microsoft advertised an array of products from “Microsoft Cognitive Services,” its artificial intelligence and cloud computing division. At one exhibit, titled “Realtime Crowd Insights,” a small camera scanned the room, while a monitor displayed the captured image. Every five seconds, a new image would appear with data annotated for each face — an assigned serial number, gender, estimated age, and any emotions detected in the facial expression. When I approached, the machine labeled me “b2ff” and correctly identified me as a 23-year-old male.
  • “Realtime Crowd Insights” is an Application Programming Interface (API), or a software tool that connects web applications to Microsoft’s cloud computing services. Through Microsoft’s emotional analysis API — a component of Realtime Crowd Insights — applications send an image to Microsoft’s servers. Microsoft’s servers then analyze the faces and return emotional profiles for each one. In a November blog post, Microsoft said that the emotional analysis could detect “anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness or surprise.” Microsoft’s sales representatives told me that political campaigns could use the technology to measure the emotional impact of different talking points — and political scientists could use it to study crowd response at rallies.
  • Facial recognition technology — the identification of faces by name — is already widely used in secret by law enforcement, sports stadiums, retail stores, and even churches, despite being of questionable legality. As early as 2002, facial recognition technology was used at the Super Bowl to cross-reference the 100,000 attendees to a database of the faces of known criminals. The technology is controversial enough that in 2013, Google tried to ban the use of facial recognition apps in its Google glass system. But “Realtime Crowd Insights” is not true facial recognition — it could not identify me by name, only as “b2ff.” It did, however, store enough data on each face that it could continuously identify it with the same serial number, even hours later. The display demonstrated that capability by distinguishing between the number of total faces it had seen, and the number of unique serial numbers. Photo: Alex Emmons
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Instead, “Realtime Crowd Insights” is an example of facial characterization technology — where computers analyze faces without necessarily identifying them. Facial characterization has many positive applications — it has been tested in the classroom, as a tool for spotting struggling students, and Microsoft has boasted that the tool will even help blind people read the faces around them. But facial characterization can also be used to assemble and store large profiles of information on individuals, even anonymously.
  • Alvaro Bedoya, a professor at Georgetown Law School and expert on privacy and facial recognition, has hailed that code of conduct as evidence that Microsoft is trying to do the right thing. But he pointed out that it leaves a number of questions unanswered — as illustrated in Cleveland and Philadelphia. “It’s interesting that the app being shown at the convention ‘remembered’ the faces of the people who walked by. That would seem to suggest that their faces were being stored and processed without the consent that Microsoft’s policy requires,” Bedoya said. “You have to wonder: What happened to the face templates of the people who walked by that booth? Were they deleted? Or are they still in the system?” Microsoft officials declined to comment on exactly what information is collected on each face and what data is retained or stored, instead referring me to their privacy policy, which does not address the question. Bedoya also pointed out that Microsoft’s marketing did not seem to match the consent policy. “It’s difficult to envision how companies will obtain consent from people in large crowds or rallies.”
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Aug 16
     
    But nobody is saying that the output of this technology can't be combined with the output of facial recognition technology to let them monitor you individually AND track your emotions. Fortunately, others are fighting back with knowledge and tech to block facial recognition. http://goo.gl/JMQM2W
Paul Merrell

Red Hat's CEO: Clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld - 0 views

www.infoworld.com/...me-the-mother-all-lock-ins-812

cloud computing interoperability Red Hat

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Cloud architecture has to be defined in a way that allows applications to move around, or clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins, warned Red Hat's CEO James Whitehurst. Once users get stuck in something, it's hard for them to move, Whitehurst said in an interview. The industry has to get in front of the cloud computing wave and make sure this next generation infrastructure is defined in a way that's friendly to customers, rather than to IT vendors, according to Whitehurst.
  • The cloud certification program was announced last year, and Amazon Web Services was the first cloud provider to get certified. Since then, NTT and IBM have been added to the list of certified partners and more are on the way, according to Whitehurst.
  • To be able to move a workload from a data center to a cloud or between two clouds, a connecting API (application programming interface) is needed, and there are a plethora of different ones being developed. Fewer would be better, according to Whitehurst. However, the real challenge isn't the API, but ensuring that the application will run with the same performance when it has been moved.
Paul Merrell

First official HTML5 tests topped by...Microsoft * The Register - 0 views

www.theregister.co.uk/...w3c_html5_conformance_tests

html5 standards W3C browsers conformance statistics

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to this initial rundown, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is...Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. Yes, the HTML5 spec has yet to be finalised. And yes, these tests cover only a portion of the spec. But we can still marvel at just how much Microsoft's browser philosophy has changed in recent months. The W3C tests — available here — put IE9 beta release 6 at the top of the HTML5 conformance table, followed by the Firefox 4 beta 6, Google Chrome 7, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0. The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes", "audio", "video", "canvas", "getElementsByClassName", "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5":
  • The tests do not yet cover web workers, the file API, local storage, or other aspects of the spec.
Paul Merrell

Mozilla partners with Panasonic to bring Firefox OS to the TV, details progress on tabl... - 0 views

thenextweb.com/...s-work-tablet-desktop-versions

Firefox-OS

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • At CES 2014 in Las Vegas today, Mozilla announced its plans for Firefox OS this year. Having launched Firefox OS for smartphones in 2013, the company has now partnered with Panasonic to bring its operating system to TVs, and also detailed the progress that has been made around the tablet and desktop versions.
  • Mereby elaborated that current options are controlled by either Google or Apple, two major corporations that “hold all the strings.” As such, Android and iOS are not viable options for Panasonic, as the ecosystem is tightly controlled. With Firefox OS, however, Mereby argues that “anyone can compete”, as you can operate your own marketplace. Not only can Panasonic open up its own marketplace for apps and content, but those who want to build apps and sell content can bypass marketplaces and make their offerings directly to Firefox OS users.
  • While the partnership is not exclusive, Panasonic will be the first to release next-generation smart TVs powered by Firefox OS. Mozilla and Panasonic will work together to promote Firefox OS and its open ecosystem on the big screen. The plan is to leverage existing HTML5 and Web technologies used on PCs, smartphones, and tablets, to provide TVs with more personalized and optimized access to content and services through the Internet. Mozilla’s Web APIs for hardware control and operation will allow TVs to monitor and operate devices, such as emerging smart home appliances, inside and outside of the home. Basic functions such as menus and programming guides, which are currently written as embedded programs, will be written in HTML5, letting developers easily create applications for smartphones or tablets to remotely access and operate TVs. Mozilla also envisions personalized user interfaces with users’ favorites and new functions for multiple users sharing the same screen.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Last but not least, Mozilla wanted to underline how Firefox OS was coming to the desktop. Since the operating system is open source, anyone can modify it. VIA is doing just that: it’s making its own changes to create a more suitable version for the desktop, and Mozilla is bringing those commits back to its own repository. Furthermore, VIA today announced the availability of APC Paper and Rock, two new devices that offer a preview of Firefox OS running in a desktop environment. Rock is a motherboard which can be inserted into any barebone PC chassis while Paper is a standalone computer with its own case. Both are targeted at early adopters and developers wanting to help find, file, and fix bugs for VIA’s desktop version of Firefox OS. Paper and Rock are available with the same buildable source codes currently available on GitHub.
Paul Merrell

Inside Google Desktop: Google Desktop Update - 0 views

googledesktop.blogspot.com/...google-desktop-update.html

Google Google Desktop search desktop search

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • In 2004, Google launched Google Desktop, a program designed to make it easy for users to search their own PCs for emails, files, music, photos, Web pages and more. Desktop has been used by tens of millions of people and we’ve been humbled by its usage and great user feedback. However, over the past seven years we’ve also witnessed some big changes in how users store and access their own data, with many moving to web-based applications. There has been a significant shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as integration of Google Desktop functionality (like local search) into most modern operating systems. This is a positive development for users and we’re excited that most people now have instant access to their personal information. As such, we’ll be discontinuing support for Google Desktop, including all of the associated APIs, services, plugins and gadgets. As of September 14, Google Desktop will no longer be available for download, and existing installations will not be updated to include new features or fixes.
  • n 2004, Google launched Google Desktop, a program designed to make it easy for users to search their own PCs
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 11
     
    Google throws in the towel on desktop search, just as Microsoft somehow reached into my WinXP Pro (which never runs with automatic updates turned on) and killed the file search functionality, replaced by a message that file search is no longer supported in Explorer 6, with an invitation to upgrade MSIE or use Bing. As though I would ever let MSIE outside my firewall! 
Gary Edwards

Constructing A SharePoint History: Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog - 0 views

blogs.msdn.com/...sharepoint-history.aspx

sharepoint msoffice moss msoffice-2010

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Oct 09 - Cached
Rechal Morin liked it
  • it was clear customers wanted a more integrated and comprehensive solution from us. As just one example, they told us like they liked the WYSWIG HTML editing of SharePoint Team Services and the Web Part declarative and reusable editing of SharePoint Portal but wanted to use both models on the same site?
  • On the application side, we were hearing customers wanted Office to go beyond personal productivity to organizational productivity and we had to decide whether Microsoft would invest in content management, portals, unified communications, business intelligence and many other new scenarios.
  • we made sure SharePoint was an open platform and worked with vendors across the industry on a variety of integration approaches including published APIs and protocols.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • to enable customers to build business process integration and business intelligence portals, we added Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services. Besides being exciting features, we gained invaluable learning for the team how to have an architecture that worked in the rich Office client and on the server with web access with high fidelity, round tripping, etc.
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Oct 09
     
    Wow.  Why fight over the editing of Wikiword when you can make up your own history?  The Microsoft Office - SharePoint Blog team is busy trying to reshape history from the inside out.   This bookmark is going to require a ton of highlights and comments.
Paul Merrell

The Social Media Exodus Has Begun. Here's Where Everybody's Going. : The Corbett Report - 0 views

www.corbettreport.com/n-heres-where-everybodys-going

web trends alternative-social-media

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • 10 years ago, everybody was on MySpace. 10 years from now, the Twitters and Facebooks and YouTubes of today will be dinosaurs, abandoned by users sick of censorship and centralized control. Thankfully, the alternatives to these social media dinosaurs are already here, and they’re blockchain-based, torrent friendly, decentralized and censorship resistant.
  • SHOW NOTES Leaked Twitter API data shows the number of tweets is in serious decline Yep, science confirms that quitting Facebook makes people happier Facebook ‘made China censorship tool’ Facebook is censoring posts in Thailand that the government has deemed unsuitable The Corbett Report on Steemit The Corbett Report on Minds.com The Corbett Report on BitChute Ray Vahey on Twitter
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 17
     
    Secure alternatives to current social media giants.
Paul Merrell

Exploring HTML 5's Audio/Video Multimedia Support - 0 views

www.devx.com/43324

HTML 5 audio video multimedia

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Because HTML 4.0 essentially was a "frozen" version, the specific mechanism for displaying content has been very much format dependent (e.g., Apple QuickTime Movies and Flash video) and usually relies upon tags with varying parameters for passing the relevant information to the server. As a result, video and audio embedding on web pages has become something of a black art . Its perhaps not surprising then that the <audio> and <video> tags were among the first features to be added to the HTML 5 specification, and these seem to be the first elements of the HTML 5 specification that browser vendors implemented. These particular elements are intended to enable the browser to work with both types of media in an easy-to-use manner. An included support API gives users finer-grained control.
  • Theoretically, the <video> and <audio> elements should be able to handle most of the codecs currently in use. In practice, however, the browsers that do currently support these elements do so only for the open source Ogg Vorbis and Theora standards.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Nov 09
     
    Kurt Cagle digs into audio and video support in HTML 5. As always, his view is revealing.
Paul Merrell

Transparency Toolkit - 0 views

transparencytoolkit.org/about.html

transparency transparency-tools research-resources

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 14 - No Cached
  • About Transparency Toolkit We need information about governments, companies, and other institutions to uncover corruption, human rights abuses, and civil liberties violations. Unfortunately, the information provided by most transparency initiatives today is difficult to understand and incomplete. Transparency Toolkit is an open source web application where journalists, activists, or anyone can chain together tools to rapidly collect, combine, visualize, and analyze documents and data. For example, Transparency Toolkit can be used to get data on all of a legislator’s actions in congress (votes, bills sponsored, etc.), get data on the fundraising parties a legislator attends, combine that data, and show it on a timeline to find correlations between actions in congress and parties attended. It could also be used to extract all locations from a document and plot them on a map where each point is linked to where the location was mentioned in the document.
  • Analysis Platform On the analysis platform, users can add steps to the analysis process. These steps chain together the tools, so someone could scrape data, upload a document, crossreference that with the scraped data, and then visualize the result all in less than a minute with little technical knowledge. Some of the tools allow users to specify input, but when this is not the case the output of the last step is the input of the next. Tools Existing and planned Transparency Toolkit tools include include scrapers and APIs for accessing data, format converters, extraction tools (for dates, names, locations, numbers), tools for crossreferencing and merging data, visualizations (maps, timelines, network graphs, maps), and pattern and trend detecting tools. These tools are designed to work in many cases rather than a single specific situation. The tools can be linked together on Transparency Toolkit, but they are also available individually. Where possible, we build our tools off of existing open source software. Road Map You can see the plans for future development of Transparency Toolkit here.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 May 14
     
    If you think this isn't a tool for some very serious research, check the short descriptions of the modules here. https://github.com/transparencytoolkit I'll be installing this and doing some test-driving soon. From the source files, the glue for the tools seems to be Ruby on Rails. The development roadmap linked from the last word on this About page is also highly instructive. It ranks among the most detailed dev roadmaps I have ever seen. Notice that it is classified by milestones with scheduled work periods, giving specific date ranges for achievement. Even given the inevitable need to alter the schedule for unforeseen problems, this is a very aggressive (not quite the word I want) development plan and schedule. And the planned changes look to be super-useful, including a lot of "make it easier for the user" changes.   
Paul Merrell

Do Not Track Implementation Guide Launched | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

www.eff.org/...-implementation-guide-launched

open web do-not-track guidelines

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Today we are releasing the implementation guide for EFF’s Do Not Track (DNT) policy. For years users have been able to set a Do Not Track signal in their browser, but there has been little guidance for websites as to how to honor that request. EFF’s DNT policy sets out a meaningful response for servers to follow, and this guide provides details about how to apply it in practice. At its core, DNT protects user privacy by excluding the use of unique identifiers for cross-site tracking, and by limiting the retention period of log data to ten days. This short retention period gives sites the time they need for debugging and security purposes, and to generate aggregate statistical data. From this baseline, the policy then allows exceptions when the user's interactions with the site—e.g., to post comments, make a purchase, or click on an ad—necessitates collecting more information. The site is then free to retain any data necessary to complete the transaction. We believe this approach balances users’ privacy expectations with the ability of websites to deliver the functionality users want. Websites often integrate third-party content and rely on third-party services (like content delivery networks or analytics), and this creates the potential for user data to be leaked despite the best intentions of the site operator. The guide identifies potential pitfalls and catalogs providers of compliant services. It is common, for example, to embed media from platforms like You Tube, Sound Cloud, and Twitter, all of which track users whenever their widgets are loaded. Fortunately, Embedly, which offers control over the appearance of embeds, also supports DNT via its API, displaying a poster instead and loading the widget only if the user clicks on it knowingly.
  • Knowledge makes the difference between willing tracking and non-consensual tracking. Users should be able to choose whether they want to give up their privacy in exchange for using a site or a  particular feature. This means sites need to be transparent about their practices. A great example of this is our biggest adopter, Medium, which does not track DNT users who browse the site and gives clear information about tracking to users when they choose to log in. This is their previous log-in panel, the DNT language is currently being added to their new interface.
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