I’ve been waiting for a feature to compensate for poor lighting for a while. This and many more features now available in Zoom.

Feel even more video-ready with granular control over the intensity of your touch-ups and lighting adjustment, so you’re well-lit in any lighting. Change the brightness of your panel and amount of skin smoothing to put your best video frame forward!

These controls will never make up for having good lighting In the first place. I made a little image grid to show what a difference a simple light makes.

I wish the Mac had better built-in camera controls to adjust exposure, brightness and other factors that can affect the quality of the video. I currently use the app iGlasses to make these adjustments for my webinars but for security reasons this never worked in Zoom. I’m so pleased they added these extra features.

Worry about not making your ideas happen in the first place.

Seth on his blog

When I was a book packager, we ended up publishing about 120 books and pitching another 1,000 that were never published. In all of that time, I can only remember one of our ideas (it was a big one) being stolen from us and published without our participation. That code of ethics created a feeling of intellectual safety. But, at the same time, it was our successful books that were copied the most–and that copying was not just a symptom but often a cause of their success.

If there is one person worth copying, it’s Seth.

Relatedly there’s a good book I listened to called Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free by Cory Doctorow. He argues that by protecting your idea with wrappers of digital copy protection you’re stopping your work spreading and being bought by more people than if you didn’t have any copy protection at all.

Announced in Apple’s developer conference keynote a couple of weeks ago was an interesting feature for new apps that enables a small functional portion of your app to be downloaded when triggered by a QR code or NFC tag. Apple’s developer guidelines explain more.

‘Consider creating an app clip if your app provides an in-the-moment experience that helps people perform a task over a finite amount of time. For example:

– A rental bike could come with an NFC tag that people scan to launch an app clip that lets them rent the bike.

– A coffee shop could offer an app clip for fast advance orders that customers launch from a Smart App Banner on the coffee shop’s website. Customers could share a link to the website from the Messages app, which recipients then tap to launch the app clip from within Messages.

– A restaurant could let diners launch an app clip from the Maps app or a suggestion from Siri Suggestions, or scan an NFC tag at their table to pay for a meal.

– A museum could have visitors scan visual codes on labels next to displayed works to launch an app clip that reveals augmented reality content or provides audio commentary.’

This is perfect for all those parking meter apps that require far too much information to signup when all you want to do is pay and run.

Lily Hay Newman at Wired

‘In macOS Big Sur, Safari will include a specific “Privacy Report” to break down what specifically Safari is blocking and give you more insight into which trackers are cropping up in your daily browsing.’

This means that any tracking pixels and code, including Google Analytics, will be clearly listed for all Safari users when they upgrade to macOS Big Sur later this year.

Shaming websites into reducing or removing all trackers on their site is the best way to improve the tracking and data leeching situation. Cookie policies and popups do nothing but confuse the situation and, like many agreements and terms of service online, people quickly click through to get to the information they want.

Using Ghostery in Chrome to test on our site for trackers, it shows we have two trackers. Google Analytics and DoubleClick. The Double click tracker is used by YouTube when we have embedded videos and can be removed by making sure you embed the videos with ‘Privacy-enhanced mode‘, I must admit I thought all our videos were set to use this, it appears a few weren’t. I’ve added a script to fix all videos on our site

Google Analytics will stay for now but I am looking at a way of compiling basic tracking reports locally on the server and not sending this data to Google.

This afternoon a registration form for an upcoming webinar of mine was spammed with over 4100 email addresses from a spam bot. If you were one of that number then I’m really sorry that you just got an unsolicited email from Demio, the webinar software we use, booking you onto a webinar. Your email and details have been removed and Demio is working on a fix to prevent this in the very near future.

Here’s what I know

The first I knew about this was from an email at 14:11 from an ‘attendee’ asking, quite rightly, why they had been registered for this event and where had I got their details from – I didn’t immediately have an answer for them.

I jumped straight into Demio and confirmed that we did indeed have spam registrations. My first thought was to stop further registrations but there was no obvious way to do this except to reduce the number of attendees down to 1.

I then spoke to Demio to find out what was going on and to make sure that this wasn’t a data breach. They confirmed it was from a social media spam bot NOT a security breach or hacking, and removed all false registrations in 20 minutes. They are also set to release fixes to prevent this soon have also released fixes to stop this happening again*.

I even received our first ever negative feedback through SayHola. Rightly so, this person was pissed off.

The GDPR reference is from the signup form enabling me to communicate with the registrant outside of any marketing for the event.

To everyone effected, I’m sorry that our event spammed you. I hate spam and I hate that you got this.

*Update from Demio

We were able to put in a fix to prevent any of those bots from registering to any Demio event again, and we’ve also removed any bot registrations from your Event. You’re good to go for this event!

Also, in the next few days we have an update that will create more restrictions for registration (checking emails etc) that will further prevent bots!

Paul D McGarrity step by step observation of a bot on twitter sowing the seeds for social division.

‘4) The trap is set. The tweet gets attention, a few retweets. Most are quote tweets with outraged reactions which do two things- they allow people to say ‘look at what THEY all think’ and it removes the casual viewer from the original account by one click. It ends here, unless…’

Look out for these bot accounts. There aren’t always easy to spot but if they have very strong views, low or no followers, check out their profile and see if makes any sense. If in doubt, don’t just retweet it.

I spent at least 15 minutes reading through Paul’s thread replies and checking out his profile before I was happy sharing this. Gosh, I hope he isn’t a bot!